Gwen Bristow (1903–1980)

A very creepy but also very wordy sort of proto-"And Then There Were None." How does a novella with so much bonkers plot to get through still manage to be so verbose?
Eight people gather for a mysterious dinner party where no one appears as host. That is, until a weird voice starts speaking to them over the radio, inviting them to play a game of wits with death as the penalty. They will all, the voice predicts, be dead by morning.
It's somewhat of an interesting period piece... May be worth visiting if you're interested in fiction trends from the 1930s. But trying to read it for its own merits, I found it over-strained itself and didn't always play fair. The voice on the radio promises no tricks, but there are tricks all over the place.… (mere)

I have read this as a prelude to re-reading AND THEN THERE WERE NONE with my U3A Agatha Christie Discussion group. THE INVISIBLE HOST pre-dates the publication of AND THEN THERE WERE NONE by 9 years.

In New Orleans in 1930, 8 guest, all well-heeled and well known in society are invited to a surprise party in their honour. All think they know who the host organising the party is, and all think they know the reason why the party is being given. When they arrive at the party, each of them sees there the person whom they think is the host, but amongst the guest each sees at least one person that they hate.

They are met by a butler who says he does not know who the host is, that he has his instructions, and among those is to turn on the radio, and that their host will communicate with them via it during the evening. Through the radio the host tells them they are all scheduled to die before morning, and that they are taking part in a competition in which he will outwit each one of them. And so the plot proceeds.

I didn't actually know of the existence of this book, nor of the possibility that Agatha Christie plagiarised the main plot. We don't know now, and can't ask, if Agatha Christie had read the book, but to me, if she had, there is no surprise in the possibility that she said something like "What an interesting plot - but I can do better than that". That is actually a situation that we come across quite often in crime fiction - where an author seems to have taken a plot that someone else has used, and seemingly tried to do better or produce a variation.

There are many differences between THE INVISIBLE HOST and AND THEN THERE WERE NONE but I will let you discover them for yourself. I'm not sure that I agree that in the former the guests were in a competition with the host - if they were, the rules were never made clear.… (mere)

My love for Celia Garth extends almost thirty years (!) to when I pulled it off the shelf in my middle school library; even then it was thirty years old. I loved learning about the South during the American revolution as it never seemed to be covered in history.

Celia grows so immensely during this novel that it’s more than a coming of age, but we get to see her become a woman. I always liked that she didn’t have all the answers and was ok with that, and she was the first one I’d heard about living in the present from. This is definitely a nostalgia read for me as it also was the first time I saw it spelled out that there was a difference between being in love with someone and loving someone.… (mere)