First, this is not even finished so it shouldn't be judged too harshly. To me this was more than enough, the main character annoyed me too much.

Last November I went to see an amateur theatre production of The Mousetrap (Kaarina-Teatteri is situated in an old wooden house, and it has a cozy café and a lovely older gentleman as the usher). It was my first experience of amateur theatre, and I was pleasantly surprised how focused all the actors were and how they breathed life and personality into their specific characters. The set design was also great. Properly cozy, like you'd expect to see in a Christie production. The stage and room were both small, so when things started getting exciting, you felt like you were in the same room with the characters. When the lights were turned off, one of them was strangled right before my eyes! And that whistling... Creepy.

Anyway, I've been to London twice now, but I still haven't seen the original production. The lovely atmospheric building was beautiful, though, and because of my temporary fit of insanity which made me not check what was going on in the London theatre scene last August, and therefore made me miss The Elephant Man, I'm determined to make a proper theatre trip to London someday (theatre, bookstores, good food, and maybe a few cocktails with relatives and friends who live there - what else do you need?).

So, to lick my wounds I hunted The Mousetrap from the library and read it during a warm summer day in the countryside while lounging on a deck chair. Obviously, because the story was already familiar to me and I had an overall great experience watching the events unfold right in front of me, reading the play was occasionally a little dull and felt two-dimensional. That's natural, though, because in plays the dialogue is rarely changed for a production, so reading the same stuff word for word after you've seen the play on stage can't be that special anymore.

But.

I know quality when I see it, and The Mousetrap is comparable to the better Christie novels. On top of that, it's a locked-room mystery, which makes it even better. A locked room that is a cozy guest house surrounded by snow, but which soon turns into the location of murder mayhem. The cat and mouse game gnaws at everyone's psyche and turns them against each other. Unlike in the detective novels, you can't trust anyone here. Anyone could be the killer.