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The Agatha Christie Challenge – Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which Hercule Poirot’s plans for a cosy Christmas Eve as guest of Colonel Johnson, Chief Constable of Middleshire, go awry when local bigwig Simeon Lee is found murdered in his locked bedroom that evening (that’s Lee’s bedroom, not Johnson’s – that would have been a very different tale). Poirot joins Johnson and local Superintendent Sugden to work out which of the Lee family Christmas visitors did the heinous deed. As usual, if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to tell you whodunit!

The book is prefaced by a letter in the form of a dedication: “My dear James, you have always been one of the most faithful and kindly of my readers, and I was therefore seriously perturbed when I received from you a word of criticism. You complained that my murders were getting too refined – anaemic, in fact. You yearned for a “good violent murder with lots of blood.” A murder where there was no doubt about its being murder! So this is your special story – written for you. I hope it may please. Your affectionate sister-in-law, Agatha”. The James in question was James Watts, who had married Agatha’s sister Madge in 1902. He owned Abney Hall, in Cheshire, where Christie would later write The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and After the Funeral, and which she had already used as the inspiration for Chimneys in The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery. The book also starts with a quotation from Macbeth, that reappears later in the story too: “Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?” Of course, Shakespeare was referring to the murder of King Duncan, but it applies just as well to Simeon Lee.

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas had quite a torturous route to the bookshelves. It was first serialised in the US in Collier’s Weekly from November 1938 to January 1939, under the title Murder for Christmas. In the UK it was serialised in the Daily Express in twenty parts in November and December 1938, under the slightly different title Murder at Christmas. The full book was first published in the UK on 19th December 1938 by Collins Crime Club as Hercule Poirot’s Christmas; and then subsequently in the US by Dodd, Mead & Co in February 1939, again as Murder for Christmas. A 1947 US paperback edition by Avon Books changed the title again to A Holiday for Murder, and it seems to me that both these latter titles are now equally used in America.

This is an exciting, well-structured book, taking place over the seven days of a Christmas week, split into seven parts (one per day) and with several smaller sections in each part. The structure gives it extra pace and also an inevitability – you know in advance, just by looking at the chapter breakdown, that everything will be solved by December 28th. What is lacking, however, for the most part, is any sense of Christmas. It’s as though Christie has taken the festive season simply as an excuse to get a warring family together, but nothing happens that would be thought of as “Christmassy”. There isn’t a big meal. There is no talk of presents. The valet goes out on Christmas Eve to the pictures like he does every Friday night, he doesn’t do anything special. Similarly, and oddly, there’s no mention of any Christmas plans by any of the police or the other staff – it’s all just like any other day, or week. Odd.

Christie employs simple, third party narration throughout the whole book apart from a few paragraphs shortly before the body of Simeon Lee is discovered, where Tressilian, the butler, takes over and gives us his thoughts. It’s a very interesting device, to change the perspective and see it all through his eyes, and it breaks up the standard narration technique. But the early part of the book is very heavy with exposition, listening in to conversations between the various Lee sons and their wives, where they appear to be talking about the family structure and relationship difficulties for the first time ever – which is highly unlikely – all for the benefit of filling in some useful facts for the reader before the action really gets underway. I thought that was rather heavy-handed of Christie; she can do better!

Another slightly disappointing element to the story is that we see very little of Poirot’s fun and games that he normally can’t resist in his previous cases. There are no conversations where you get a closer understanding of his personality; there’s little humour in his language; there’s none of his usual vanity. The only thing he does that is true to form is to create a truly exciting denouement, where your suspicions hop from suspect to suspect before he finally reveals the truth. You feel that Poirot misses Hastings in this book; he doesn’t really have another person to spark off. Colonel Johnson is a nice enough chap, but the two men don’t have that special understanding that encourages Poirot to be outspoken and candid. Superintendent Sugden is a rather bombastic bruiser of a man with none of the lightness of touch that Poirot would normally admire. So Poirot ends up being quite isolated in this story; and for the most part he could be just any old detective who was good at solving crime. Interestingly, Christie took a break from Poirot for a few years after this book; his next appearance would be in Sad Cypress in 1941. Let’s hope he comes back to form next time out.

By late 1938, Franco’s hold on Spain, through the Spanish Civil War, was getting progressively tighter. It would only be a few months later that Barcelona, and then Madrid, would fall and he would assume complete control of the country. There had been massive amounts of bloodshed for over two years; and, of course, the Second World War would start the following year too. It was a fascinating choice on the part of Christie to have her Spanish character, Pilar, so prominent in this book. She is the second character that we meet, and a lot of time is given over to her experiences, her motivations and her personality. She talks about how back in Spain the mayor is pro-government and the priest is pro-Franco. She has seen bombs destroy houses and kill car drivers. Colonel Johnson’s comment: “can’t be very pleasant being in Spain just at present” is the epitome of English understatement. When the family are deciding whether to make a financial allowance for Pilar, Alfred isn’t keen; “he is so British”, says his wife Lydia, “he doesn’t really like Lee money going to a Spanish subject.” Whether that’s typical Christie distrust of foreigners, or a specific reaction to the war, isn’t clear. But Spain was clearly at the forefront of people’s minds at the time. Even the film that Horbury, the valet, goes to see on Christmas Eve is entitled Love in Old Seville. It’s a Christie invention, by the way, no such film exists.

There aren’t many references to follow up in this book. All the place names (apart from Madrid, obviously) are made up by Christie: the Lee family home is Gorston Hall, Longdale, Addlesfield, which bears no similarity to any real place I can find – there is a Long Dale in the Derbyshire Dales (and also a place in Oklahoma with the same name) but that’s about it. Mr Lee was said to have been in contact with the vice consul in Aliquara, trying to locate Pilar; there’s no such place in Spain. Colonel Johnson is the Chief Constable of Middleshire; I suppose at a push one might think that represents Middlesex. Superintendent Sugden says he comes from the nearby county of Reeveshire, which I think is no more than a play on words; reverse the two parts of the name and you get Shire Reeve, which is the derivation of Sheriff, which basically describes Sugden’s role.

Much notice is taken of David Lee’s quote when his father dies: “the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.” I’d never heard this phrase before; apparently it suggests the certainty of eventual divine retribution. It’s a direct quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and his translation of a 17th-century poem, Retribution, by Friedrich von Logau. But it seems to be from an original concept by Plutarch. Unusual to find such a cultured family and police force! Colonel Johnson knows of Poirot because of his superb sleuthing in the case of Sir Bartholomew Strange, better known as Three Act Tragedy; but if you can’t remember him from that tale, that’s because actually he doesn’t appear in it.

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I like to research the present-day value of any significant sums of money mentioned in Christie’s books, just to get a more realistic feel for the amounts in question. In her last book, Appointment with Death, there were no significant sums of money mentioned in this book – so that eliminated the need for that paragraph! However, this time round there are a couple of interesting sums. Just how rich is Simeon Lee? He is described as a millionaire twice over. So if we convert £2 million in 1938, in today’s value that works out as £94 million, give or take a few hundred thousand. So even if his sons all had to share in that inheritance, it’s still an extraordinary amount of money. His diamonds, said to be valued at between £9 – £10,000, today would be worth between £420,000 and £470,000. Definitely worth stealing.

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Hercule Poirot’s Christmas:

Publication Details: 1938. Fontana paperback, 14th impression, published in March 1977, price 65p. The cover illustration by Tom Adams shows a miserable old man surrounded by grotesquely ornate candlesticks and what appears to be the front two legs of a prancing horse – don’t quite understand that. Embellishing the picture are some red-berried sprigs of holly dripping with blood. The blood works well in the picture – not sure about the rest, not certain this one of Tom Adams’ best illustrations!

How many pages until the first death: 48. By that stage in the book – Christmas Eve – all the family members have arrived at the house and no further characters are introduced apart from Horbury’s cinema date, although we never actually meet her. As far as the reader is concerned, the death comes along just at the right time.

Funny lines out of context: None that I could discern. It isn’t a particularly funny book, to be fair.

Memorable characters:

In the same way that Mrs Boynton stands out in Appointment with Death, as being the tyrannical ruler of a subjugated family, Simeon Lee takes precisely the same role in this book. To my mind he’s not quite so striking a character because his cruelty is less psychological and more real, as a grumpy shouter of instructions and insulter of sons. But there’s no doubt that, like Mrs Boynton, he deserves everything coming his way.

Pilar is also a strong character; Christie imbues her with the exotic mystery of passionate Spain, and she has none of the English reserve that characterises so many members of the Lee family. She openly talks about how handsome Sugden is, much to his embarrassment. She makes no concession to the delicate subject of money and speaks openly about her desire for an inheritance from Simeon, which is an area where the other characters would fear to tread.

Christie the Poison expert:

Poison doesn’t play a part in this book, apart from Johnson’s recollection of the Three Act Tragedy case. This gives rise to a brief conversation about the pros and cons of solving a case where poisoning is the method. But it has no bearing on this crime.

Class/social issues of the time:

Usually one can find something in a Christie book where she propounds what she feels is the natural British (or English) distrust of foreigners. But there are very few instances of it in this book. In the conversation about poison referred to above, Poirot notes that murder by poison might be thought of as “unEnglish” – “a device of foreigners! Unsportsmanlike!” Elsewhere there’s the strangely ironic conversation between Stephen and Pilar where he says “it’s just a little bit more than tiresome, my dear. Then there’s that lunatic foreigner prowling about. I don’t suppose he’s any good but he makes me feel jumpy”. So let’s just get this straight: here we have a South African man whingeing about a “lunatic foreigner” to a Spanish woman. Funny how when you have a prejudice against someone you never question its reasonableness.

One other thread that is developed here, that you find in some other Christie books of this time, is the role of women in society. In the past Christie has shown herself to be no feminist. But in this book she changes tack halfway through. Consider the motivations of Simeon Lee’s late wife, the mother whose death the character of David can’t quite get over, often comes into question in conversations between the family members.

David remembers her in conversation with his wife Hilda. “”She was so sweet, Hilda, and so patient. Lying there, often in pain, but bearing it – enduring everything. And when I think of my father” – his face darkened – “bringing all that misery into her life – humiliating her – boasting of his love affairs – constantly unfaithful to her and never troubling to conceal it.” Hilda Lee said: “She should not have put up with it. She should have left him.” He said with a touch of reproof: “She was too good for that. She thought is was her duty to remain. Besides, it was her home – where else should she go?” “She could have made a life of her own.” David said fretfully: “Not in those days! You don’t understand. Women didn’t behave like that. They put up with things. They endured patiently. She had us to consider. Even if she divorced my father, what would have happened? He would probably have married again. There might have been a second family. Our interests might have gone to the wall. She had to think of all those considerations. […] No, she did right. She was a saint! She endured to the end – uncomplainingly.””

Sorry about the long quotation. But the detail into which David goes to express his appreciation of his mother’s selflessness suggests (to me) that this is a continuation of Christie’s usual anti-feminist stance. However, there’s an interesting comparison with (who else?) Pilar, who justifies what Stephen calls her “gold-digging”, when he confronts her over her attitude to Simeon’s will. (Slight spoiler alert, although it still doesn’t tell you whodunit) She tells Stephen: ““If that old man had lived, he would have made another will. He would have left money to me – a lot of money! Perhaps in time he would have left me all the money!” Stephen said smiling: “That wouldn’t have been very fair either, would it?” “Why not? He would have liked me best, that is all. […] The world is very cruel to women. They must do what they can for themselves – while they are young. When they are old and ugly no one will help them.”” This approach to a design for life doesn’t really sit comfortably with Christie’s usual moral tone but it does suggest a change in her philosophy about the role of women. For (I believe) the first time in a Christie novel, you might say sisters are doing it for themselves.

One small observation: it’s certainly a different era from today when a Superintendent of Police could be believed to be usefully spending his time visiting houses collecting for the Police Orphanage.

Classic denouement: Yes! All the suspects are present, Poirot goes through a long rigmarole explaining why everyone could have done it, only then to explain how one-by-one they didn’t do it, whilst the reader turns the pages with bated breath not knowing what to believe. It’s an extremely exciting ending, with a classic “J’accuse” moment, and an unrepentant murderer.

Happy ending? Yes. One whirlwind romance culminates in the promise of a marriage, and there’s a general sense that the majority of the family members will be able to put their problems behind them and move on.

Did the story ring true? Chance meetings and coincidences obscure the truth of the case but yes, on the whole, this is one of Christie’s more believable stories.

Overall satisfaction rating: On the plus side, it’s an exciting read, with an excellent denouement and a suitably surprising solution to the crime. On the negative side, Poirot isn’t himself; there are no references to little grey cells, no moments of breathtaking vanity. And the whole idea of the amount of blood involved playing a significant part in the story doesn’t really hold water. So for me this averages out as an 8/10.

Thanks for reading my blog of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge is Murder is Easy; my memories of this book are of reading it on holiday in Spain as a teenager and really enjoying it. I think we may be in for lots of murders! And I don’t think I can remember whodunit, which is always a bonus. As usual, I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Appointment with Death (1938)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which an American family suffer under the malign and cruel tyranny of their matriarch and it comes as no surprise that one afternoon the wretched woman is found dead as a dodo. Hercule Poirot, still continuing his travels in the Middle East (as we saw in Christie’s previous book, Death on the Nile), promises the local military chief in charge of police, Colonel Carbury, that he will solve the crime in a mere twenty-four hours, simply by interviewing the suspects and employing the little grey cells. It’s a big ask, but if anyone can do it, Poirot can. As usual, if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to tell you whodunit!

The book is dedicated “To Richard and Myra Mallock to remind them of their journey to Petra”. Christie makes no mention of the Mallocks in her autobiography, but a little sleuthing has uncovered that a Richard Mallock married a Myra Tiarks at the Brompton Oratory in 1936. So maybe they went to Petra for their honeymoon? Someone by the name of Richard Mallock (maybe his father, or grandfather) was also the MP for Torquay from 1886 to 1895, so this could be how Christie knew the family, with all her Devon connections. Appointment with Death was first serialised in the US in Colllier’s Weekly from August to October 1937, and in the UK in twenty-eight parts in a very slightly abridged version in the Daily Mail in January and February 1938, under the title A Date with Death. The full book was first published in the UK on 2nd May 1938 by Collins Crime Club; and then subsequently in the US by Dodd, Mead & Co later the same year.

Out of curiosity, I note that it’s one of Christie’s shortest books – coming in at just 155 pages of paperback-sized text, about the same length as The Big Four. As another aside, it’s a bit of a lame title, I feel. It doesn’t really mean anything; to an extent, any death could be referred to as an appointment with death. It’s not as though the story is littered with medics, or recruitment consultants, with whom you might make a risky appointment which results in your death! I thought I’d check out its title in some other languages; most of them translate literally as “Appointment with Death” but three are a little more expressive: “Der Tod Wartet” (Death Waits) in German; “La Domatrice” (The Tamer) in Italian, and my favourite, “Hänet täytyy tappaa” (She Must be Killed) in Finnish.

I’ve always enjoyed this book, for perhaps a rather alarming reason – there were some similarities between the grotesque Mrs Boynton and my own dear late mother! I certainly didn’t identify them when I first read this as a teenager, but as I grew up, got married and went my own way, I did see some Boyntonesque tendencies in her attempts to control what I did. So did my wife! Don’t get me wrong – my mother was not a cruel harridan. But I bet I’m not the only person who has read this book and has felt some personal twang of sympathy with the plight of the wider Boynton family. However, whilst the situation and atmosphere are memorable, I’ve always found it difficult to recall the details of the story. It wasn’t until I read a vital clue a good two-thirds into the book that I suddenly remembered whodunit. Of course, I wished that I hadn’t remembered, but that’s the problem of re-reading detective fiction!

There’s not a lot of action in this book – in fact, all the Boynton family seem to do is to sit around and obey the mother – and I think that gives the book a sense of claustrophobia. There’s a whole world of Middle Eastern excitement out there, and all Mrs Boynton does is sit in a cave, whilst her family stay inside tents reading. All the activity in the book takes place in the mind; truly Christie is delivering us a psychological thriller just as much as a whodunit. Poirot takes us through the characteristics and thought processes of all the suspects just as much as their actual movements, and, come the denouement, it’s by eliminating people because of their psychological profiles that he narrows the field to determine the guilty party. There’s also a sense of isolation in the book, caused by having characters from America, England, France and Belgium all in Jordan, but with little back-knowledge of their origins. It’s like they’ve been transplanted there, everyone far from home, with no particular reason. The only character (apart from Poirot) who has any kind of backstory is Lady Westholme, because we know she has recently been an MP. But we have no home-towns, previous colleagues, college backgrounds, etc, to look into and consider. It’s all very much in the here and now.

As psychology is to the fore, Poirot is absolutely in his element. His promise to Carbury that he will solve the crime before “tomorrow night” speaks to his supreme self-confidence and Christie’s continued exposure of his vanity. Jinny asks him if he is a well-known detective, and he simply replies “the best detective in the world” without a hint of embarrassment. “I know that M. Poirot has great powers” says Dr Gerard at one point. Poirot’s immodest reply? “I am gifted – yes.” When Sarah King queries Poirot’s priorities for solving the case, he has no time for her suggestion. “”Poirot waved a grandiloquent hand. “This is the method of Hercule Poirot”, he announced.” Grandiloquent is a perfect adjective for Poirot. Even Carbury remarks, as Poirot is preparing for his denouement, “funny feller aren’t you Poirot? […] like to dramatise things.”

There are no other great insights into Poirot’s character in this book, but Christie concentrates on making certain conversations, confrontations and descriptions come alive to make up for the lack of physical action. There’s a really strong scene between Poirot and Nadine Boynton where it’s so clear that she’s hiding something but she refuses to tell him, pleading with him instead to let well alone. But Poirot is never prepared to turn a blind eye to a murder; no matter how beneficial it is to society as a whole, he will never participate in suppressing the truth. Once the truth is out there, it is up to the authorities to act on it in the best way they see fit; that is not Poirot’s concern. Mrs Boynton is a universally disliked character, her family are mere cruelty fodder with the heart beaten out of them; and the world is a better place for her departure. But Poirot will not look the other way.

Just as in Death on the Nile, Christie litters the book with real-life Middle Eastern locations to increase a sense of the exotic. The opening scene takes place in the Solomon Hotel in Jerusalem, still a landmark hotel of the city. The characters’ Jerusalem travels take them to Solomon’s Stables, an underground vaulted space, converted in 1996 to a Muslim prayer hall; the Mosque of Omar, situated opposite the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the Haram esh-Sharif, also known as the Temple Mount in the Old City; and the Wailing Wall, still today probably the most visited sight in Jerusalem. The story moves on to the rose city of Petra, via Ma’an and Ain Musa, traditionally the site of Moses’ water spring, from where the Nabateans built channels to irrigate Petra. In 1929, a four-person team, consisting of British archaeologists Agnes Conway and George Horsfield, Palestinian physician and folklore expert Dr Tawfiq Canaan and Dr Ditlef Nielsen, a Danish scholar, excavated and surveyed Petra, which would surely have been of immense fascination to Christie, and may well have determined her to set a book here.

Some other references of interest: the book starts with Poirot reflecting over a story concerning the novelist Anthony Trollope, where he takes the advice of overheard criticism. Is this a true story? Apparently so! It relates to the character of Mrs Proudie in The Last Chronicles of Barset, a character of with whom Trollope was actually very pleased; but he overheard a conversation by people criticising her, and wishing she would be killed off. In Trollope’s own words: “It was impossible for me not to hear their words, and almost impossible to hear them and be quiet. I got up, and standing between them, I acknowledged myself to be the culprit. “As to Mrs. Proudie,’ I said, `I will go home and kill her before the week is over.” And so I did. The two gentlemen were utterly confounded, and one of them begged me not to forget his frivolous observations.” By all accounts, Trollope regretted the action immediately.

In another literary allusion, when Jefferson Cope is talking to Dr Gerard about his affection for Nadine, and says that if she wants to leave her husband for a better life, he would be there waiting for her, Dr Gerard calls him “the parfait gentil knight”. This refers to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the description of the Knight as “a verray parfit, gentil knyght” – the epitome of courtly love.

In the world of politics, Christie writes of Lady Westholme’s current standing, “it was highly possible that she would be given an under-secretaryship when her party returned to power. At the moment a Liberal Government (owing to a split in the National Government between Labour and Conservatives) was somewhat unexpectedly in power.” In real life, there was a National Government between 1937 – 1939, formed by Neville Chamberlain, with MPs from the Conservative, National Labour and National Liberal parties. And we think our politics are complex today! Looking at how the votes had fallen in the most recent election, a Liberal Government would have been a huge surprise. Lady Westholme also entraps Sarah in a conversation about the Litvania boundary dispute, which doubtless would have referred to the constantly changing boundaries of what is today Lithuania, with the USSR and Poland involved in eating into the territory. Today there is no dispute over Lithuania’s boundaries.

Sarah King asks Poirot if his investigation into the death is “a case of Roman Holiday”. The famous Audrey Hepburn film hadn’t been made yet, but the phrase comes from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and relates to the fate of a gladiator in ancient Rome, who expected to be “butchered to make a Roman holiday” while the audience would take pleasure from watching his suffering. So it’s the equivalent to modern day Schadenfreude.

As is often the case, there are a few references to Christie’s other books – or rather, Poirot’s previous cases. Colonel Carbury presents himself to Poirot with a letter of introduction from Colonel Race, whom we first met in The Man in the Brown Suit, then in Cards on the Table and most recently in Death on the Nile. We will also meet him one more time in Sparkling Cyanide. Race describes Poirot’s solution to the Shaitana case as “as neat a bit of psychological deduction as you’ll ever find” – referring to the murder in Cards on the Table. Elsewhere, Nadine refers Poirot to the Murder on the Orient Express when asking him to drop the case, and Miss Pierce remembers all about the ABC Murders as she was living near Doncaster at the time – that’s where Murder D was to be committed.

This may be a peculiarly anti-fiscal book, but there are no significant sums of money mentioned in this book – so I can’t do my usual trick of converting them into present-day values. Maybe that’s a sign of the psychological element of this book – it’s not a question of who inherits what or who stole which necklace for a change!

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Appointment with Death:

Publication Details: 1938. Fontana paperback, 8th impression, published in July 1975, price 50p. The cover illustration by Tom Adams shows the grim figure of Mrs Boynton sitting in the front of a cave with the red rocks of Petra all around her; and in the foreground, a lethal looking syringe. Absolutely in keeping with the story.

How many pages until the first death: 63. Christie allows an appropriate length to depicting the Boynton family at large before removing the main character from the scene. Given that it’s a short book, it’s 40% of the way in before the crime, and 60% for the solution.

Funny lines out of context: These seem to be getting fewer and fewer as we slowly progress through the 20th century. The only mildly amusing line (out of context) that I could find was Carol asking Raymond “shan’t we always be queer and different?”

Memorable characters:

Mrs Boynton stands out, as the arch-bully. In the first scenes we see her controlling her daughter Jinny, telling her that she will be ill, and telling her what she wants to do (even though she wants to do the opposite). Jinny buckles to her mother’s satisfaction. Mrs Boynton manipulates her son Raymond so that he refuses to speak to Sarah, even though he desperately wants to. She does the same to her daughter Carol. A side aspect of Mrs Boynton’s monstrous personality is that Christie slightly under-portrays the rest of the family; it’s almost as though they don’t matter by comparison.

There are also the strong and determined Lady Westholme, who Christie says “entered the room with the assurance of a transatlantic liner coming into dock” and her timid and suggestible friend Miss Pierce. One feels the characters of Sarah King and Dr Gerard ought to stand out, but I’m not certain they do. Sarah King, indeed, ought to follow the fine tradition of jolly, upstanding, go-getting Christie girls like Bundle, Tuppence or Katherine Grey; maybe it’s because she comes into some conflict with Poirot that she doesn’t quite sit at the heart of this book as you might expect her to. And Dr Gerard is, frankly, a boring pontificator. I found it very hard not to skip some of his speeches.

Christie the Poison expert:

Digitoxin is missing from the doctor’s medicine case; and Christie goes into some detail to describe the difference between it and the three other active principles of the foxglove: digitalin, digitonin and digitalein. There’s no question she knows her foxglove poisons! Mention is also made of phenacetin, a very common painkiller up until 1983 when it was largely discontinued worldwide due to its carcinogenic and kidney-damaging effects. It’s now mainly used in research and as a cutting agent in the preparation of cocaine.

Class/social issues of the time:

Distrust of foreigners as usual tops the charts as far as themes of the day are concerned, but there are also exchanges on the role of women in society to consider – if you remember, Mrs Christie is no feminist. After her first meeting with Raymond, Sarah King assumes that he is like all Americans: “merely a rude, stuck up, boorish young American!” Sarah also has little time for the French – thinking of Dr Gerard and his psychological theories, she reflects “Frenchmen were all alike […] obsessed by sex”. Lady Westholme, too, has little time for foreigners; of Mrs Boynton she says “her manner had been fairly normal – for an American of that type”.

Miss Pierce says of the “native servants”, “all these Arabs look alike to me”. But Miss Pierce isn’t the most balanced of characters, believing that political agitators are everywhere: “I suppose Mr Mah Mood – I cannot remember his name – but the dragoman, I mean – I suppose he could not be a Bolshevik agent? Or even, perhaps, Miss King? I believe many quite well-brought-up girls of good family belong to these dreadful Communists!” Miss Pierce is a Reds under the Bed kinda woman.

Perhaps a more meaningful exchange is that between Dr Gerard and Jefferson Cope when discussing how Elmer Boynton arranged it so that his wife had absolute control over the family finances. ““In my country” says Gerard, “it is impossible by law to do such a thing”. Mr Cope rose. “In America”, he said, “we’re great believers in absolute freedoms.” Dr Gerard rose also. He was unimpressed by the remark. He had heard it made before by people of many different nationalities. The illusion that freedom is the prerogative of one’s own particular race is fairly widespread. Dr Gerard was wiser. He knew that no race, no country and no individual could be described as free. But he also knew that there were different degrees of bondage.””

These fascinating few lines not only show Dr Gerard’s possibly anti-American bias, but also look further ahead, maybe to the political tensions that would bring about Second World War the year after publication. As Dr Gerard is critical of Mrs Boynton holding all the purse strings, this also reflects Christie’s own personal form of misogyny that she has shown in previous books. Another telling phrase from Gerard, that supports Christie’s view of women, comes in his first conversation with Sarah: “”To have too much power is bad for women,” Gerard agreed with sudden gravity. He shook his head. “It is difficult for a woman not to abuse power.””

Classic denouement: The denouement (and accompanying epilogue) go on for a good 27 pages, and contain surprise after surprise after surprise. You keep thinking that Poirot has identified the killer and then he goes on to explain why they didn’t do it! So it’s a very exciting read. It’s not quite a classic because you don’t have that amazing moment when Poirot points accusingly at a suspect and they wither in front of him. There’s also a twist, not dissimilar from that in Death on the Nile, which means you may not get the sense of justice being seen to be done. However, psychologically speaking, I’m sure Poirot and Gerard would agree that it’s an entirely appropriate ending.

Happy ending? Without question. In fact, the happy ending starts the moment that Mrs Boynton dies! One marriage that was on the rocks is now back on course, and there are three new marriages to appreciate as well as the birth of a glitteringly unexpected career. It’s almost like a Shakespearean comedy.

Did the story ring true? For the most part, yes, absolutely. As I said at the beginning, I found that I could really relate to the family setup, and that sense of control from the matriarchal character that meant the rest of the family had to struggle to survive. However, I’ve never believed that Lennox would have the strength and ability to break free of Mrs Boynton’s reins sufficiently to marry Nadine, given the pressure that his mother must have put on him. Apart from that, the manner of the crime and the detection all seem perfectly feasible to me.

Overall satisfaction rating: Despite its being an old favourite, I think the lack of activity might make this not quite Classic Christie, so I’m awarding it an 8/10.

Thanks for reading my blog of Appointment with Death and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge is Hercule Poirot’s Christmas; a story of which I remember very little, except that it features an exotic character called Pilar and spans one week over a very fateful Christmas. As always, I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Death on the Nile (1937)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which wealthy socialite Linnet Ridgeway marries Simon Doyle, the fiancé of her best friend Jacqueline de Bellefort, much to the latter’s fury. Miss de Bellefort stalks the newly married couple all round Egypt on holiday just so that she can be a thorn in their flesh. Hercule Poirot, the great Belgian detective is also on holiday in Egypt, where he refuses a commission from the new Mrs Doyle to “do something about it”. However, when one member of the love triangle is found murdered, it is up to Poirot to solve the case, assisted by his friend Colonel Race (whom we met in Cards on the Table). Intrigue piles upon intrigue, and there are many elements to the crime that Poirot identifies and clarifies before finally unveiling the killer. As usual, if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to tell you whodunit!

The book is dedicated “To Sybil Burnett, who also loves wandering about the world”. Sybil Burnett was the wife of Air Vice-Marshal Sir Charles Burnett, and she and Mrs Christie met on a boat trip from Rome to Beirut in 1929. Although they took an instant dislike to one another, they soon became firm friends. As Christie describes her, in her autobiography: “she was a woman of great originality, who said exactly what came into her head, loved travelling and foreign places, had a beautiful house in Algiers, four daughters and two sons by a previous marriage, and an inexhaustible enjoyment of life.” No wonder she merited one of Christie’s dedications. Unlike the majority of Christie’s previous books, Death on the Nile wasn’t originally published in magazine instalments, but was first published in the UK on 1st November 1937 by Collins Crime Club; and then subsequently in the US by Dodd, Mead & Co in 1938.

I have a slight problem with this book – but it’s a good one; it’s that I cannot put out of my mind the superb film adaptation starring Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot that was made in 1978. As a result, I can remember large sections of the story in good detail, including all the machinations regarding whodunit. So, unfortunately, there was little sense of surprise in my re-reading this book; but the snippets from the film that I could see in my mind’s eye were very rewarding to remember. If you haven’t seen the film, I’d definitely recommend it.

It’s a highly action-packed book, with an intricate plot and several sub-plots that, whilst appearing to be relevant to the main murder story, are surprisingly tangential. Even though they have no bearing on identifying the murderer, they are fully explained and make perfect sense and are a vital part of the book as a whole. Without giving too much of the game away, there are also several deaths for the reader to enjoy – if that’s your thing – including a couple of surprises.

Poirot is on sparkling form, as you would expect; he continues that behaviour of being shockingly nosey that was very noticeable in Dumb Witness, such as when he’s given the opportunity to rifle through private documents or overhear private conversations. In fact, this book would be rather lost Poirot doing some injudicious earwigging. Tim Allerton gives us a memorable brief description of Poirot: “that old mountebank? He won’t find out anything. He’s all talk and moustaches.” Captain Hastings is presumably back in Argentina, but Poirot has learned enough from his old friend when to recognise unexpected behaviour from an Old Etonian, which helps him understand one of the sub-plots. Assisting him in the investigation we welcome back Colonel Race, although, again, Race is not quite so interested in the murder as he is in discovering the identity of a political agitator who’s been causing the government some problems over recent years.

Perhaps the most interesting new insight this book gives us into Poirot’s modus operandi is a fascinating comparison between investigating a crime and working on an archaeological dig. Christie had been on a number of digs by this stage, both with and without her husband, and she must have been thrilled when she saw the similarity between the two, which she used to excellent effect in this book. “Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition” says Poirot, “and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do – clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth – the naked shining truth.” It’s particularly appropriate to this book, not only because of the Egyptian setting, but because there’s an awful lot of extraneous matter that clouds understanding and perception of the crime in question.

Christie’s knowledge of the digs frequently added local colour to her more exotically located books and there are many references to real locations in Death on the Nile which set the scene. Linnet and Simon spend a week at the Mena House Hotel, just outside Cairo, where I also spent a few days when we went to Egypt – I’ll never forget the fantastic views of the Pyramids from our balcony. The scene then shifts to the Cataract Hotel in Assuan (modern day Aswan), still today a fantastic residence currently run as a Sofitel. The book takes in the legendary locations of Abu Simnel, Wadi Halfa (over the border in Sudan), Philae (an island in the reservoir of the Aswan Low Dam), Shellal and Ez-Sebua. There is no attempt by Christie (unusually!) to mask the locations of where the action of the book takes place.

By contrast, outside of Egypt and the Nile region, there are some invented locations. There is no such place as Malton-under-Wode, home of Lord Windlesham – at one stage prospected husband of Linnet – although there is a Malton in North Yorkshire. Fanthorp is said to live in Market Donnington, Northants, which I suspect is a conglomeration of Market Harborough and Castle Donington, both of which, interestingly, are in Leicestershire. Nor is there a Bellfield in Connecticut, allegedly the home of Miss van Schuyler. The desirable and trendy bistro Chez Ma Tante doesn’t exist – at least not in London, but there’s a well-respected place of the same name in Brooklyn.

As Captain Hastings is absent, the book doesn’t have a narrator; or at least, not until Mrs Otterbourne describes the decision as to whether to go to Egypt or not as “not a matter of life or death”. Christie then writes: “But there she was quite wrong – for a matter of life and death was exactly what it was.” So Christie herself is the narrator, largely story-telling simply through facts, occasionally casting out a few minor asides. The style works well for this book, which has so much content; there isn’t a lot of room for comment too. The first chapter, which is divided into twelve sub-sections, is a good example of how Christie can give you a series of snapshots, all roughly happening at the same time, to act as a first draft of and introduction to almost all of the main players in the story. Rather like Murder on the Orient Express, she gives us a murder that takes place in an enclosed environment – here a Nile cruiser, there on the luxury train. The murderer must come from within, which gives the story an added excitement, and a sense of slight claustrophobia and imminent danger. Also like Orient Express, Poirot conducts interviews with all the passengers on a one-by-one basis, throwing up clues and red herrings as he goes. This structure drives the reader on to read it with an excitable frenzy.

There are a few references to Christie’s other books; apart from the reappearance of Colonel Race, Miss van Schuyler is a friend of Rufus van Aldin, who featured in The Mystery of the Blue Train, and Poirot refers to the discovery of a scarlet kimono in his luggage, which was an occurrence on board the Orient Express. Other quotes include a passage from Frankie and Johnny (he was her man and he did her wrong) and La Vie est Vaine, by Leon Montenaeken, after quoting which Poirot confirms he knows whodunit.

Tim Allerton uses a term of – not quite abuse but definitely disapproval – horse coper – to describe Sir George Wode. I’ve never heard it before, but it’s the same as a horse-dealer or maybe today we would say horse-trader as a patronising insult. And Mrs Otterbourne is said to wear black draperies made from ninon – another term I hadn’t heard. It’s a lightweight French fabric made from silk of nylon. I thought it sounded more like when a police car drives past.

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I like to research the present-day value of any significant sums of money mentioned in Christie’s books, just to get a more realistic feel for the amounts in question. There are only a few mentioned, but they’re quite relevant in understanding the difference in wealth between Linnet and Jackie. Simon believes that Jackie lives on less than £200 per year. In today’s values that equates to about £9500. She wouldn’t be paying tax, then. By contrast, Mrs Allerton estimates that Linnet’s white dress for dinner alone will have cost 80 guineas, which today would be £4000. Financially the two are miles apart. Linnet’s pearls, which she carelessly just leaves around the house are valued at £50,000. That’s a whopping £2.4m at today’s values.

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Death on the Nile:

Publication Details: 1937. Fontana paperback, 8th impression, published in 1972, price 30p. The cover illustration by Tom Adams depicts a pearl-handled pistol in front of a Tutankhamun style mask. Simple, effective, and true to the story.

How many pages until the first death: One of the longest waits for a murder so far – 98 pages. Of the blogs I have already written, only The Secret Adversary and At Bertram’s Hotel make you wait longer. It’s important for the plot development and for the slant that Christie wants the reader to believe, that a particular picture is slowly painted.

Funny lines out of context: Not a lot really. Christie does tend to have Poirot “ejaculating” a few times in this book, but that’s all.

Memorable characters: This is one aspect in which this book really stands out. You have Mrs Otterbourne, the over-the-top, sex-mad novelist; Miss van Schuyler, the domineering, class-obsessed old harridan; Tim Allerton, the rather effeminate and affected young man (who surprises you by not being gay); Ferguson, the outspoken and aggressive communist; and of course, Jackie, the obsessive and controlling lover.

Christie the Poison expert:

No trace of poison here. Deaths are caused by gunshot or stabbing.

Class/social issues of the time:

A number of Christie’s usual themes get an airing in this book. In a description of Tim’s attitude to Poirot, Christie puts thoughts in his mother’s mind: “Tim was usually so easy-going and good-tempered. This outburst was quite unlike him. It wasn’t as though he had the ordinary Britisher’s dislike – and mistrust – of foreigners.” We’re not all like that, Mrs Allerton. But she is. “Do you think one of those little black wretches rolled it over for fun?” she asks, when trying to understand why the boulder was sent crashing down the hill.

There are mentions of a “negro orchestra” and the fact that, in ancient times, “negroes must pay customs duties” on entering Egypt; but these are just examples of how acceptable language changes over time. However, the word Christie (as narrator) chooses to use to describe the street vendors and bakshish hunters on the river bank at Aswan is “riff-raff”; a very snobbish and patronising term indeed.

There is a character whom Poirot suspects is a blackmailer. His description of this person’s behaviour: “the murderer comes to her cabin, gives her the money, and then […] she counts it. Oh yes, I know that class. She would count the money and while she counted it she was completely off her guard.” Poirot explains the blackmail activity by believing it is typical of “a class”.

Cornelia, who is portrayed as a sympathetic character, has strong views on equality of the sexes – or, rather, inequality. “Of course people aren’t equal. It doesn’t make sense. I know I’m kind of homely-looking, and I used to feel mortified about it sometimes, but I’ve got over that. I’d like to have been born elegant and beautiful like Mrs Doyle, but I wasn’t, so I guess it’s no use worrying.” Christie has often written characters and plot lines where she clearly disapproves of anything approaching feminism. Cornelia’s attitude infuriates Ferguson, but he’s the kind of person Christie will have disapproved of, so she delights in thwarting his romantic interest in the book.

Simon, too, has strong views about relationships between the sexes: “”You see, a man doesn’t want to feel that a woman cares more for him than he does for her.” His voice grew warm as he went on. “He doesn’t want to feel owned, body and soul. It’s that damned possessive attitude! This man is mine – he belongs to me! That’s the sort of thing I can’t stick – no man could stick! He wants to get away – to be free. He wants to own his woman; he doesn’t want her to own him.”” Those are very much the kind of antifeminist sentiments of which Christie would approve.

Classic denouement: Whilst the denouement is without question exciting, I wouldn’t describe it as a classic. There are a number of loose ends and red herrings that need to get cleared up first, and every time you think Poirot is about to start the j’accuse procedure, he ends up going off on another tangent. It also lacks a certain something in that the murderer isn’t present at the time – and all you have is their follow-up reaction, or indeed the reaction related by a third party. Poirot – or Christie – is also extremely naughty with their reader, for holding back a vital piece of evidence that really gives the game away; Poirot only mentions it at the denouement, and I think the reader can be rightly peeved not to have had access to that information in advance.

Happy ending? Somewhat mixed. Although there are clearly two weddings on the way – both of them rather unexpected – another person who did not win the lady’s affections is left out of the love stakes. And a surprise twist at the end means that you don’t really get the sense of justice being seen to be done.

Did the story ring true? In part. But how did Jackie afford to travel to Egypt and stalk Linnet and Simon when she only earns £200 a year? And the manner of two of the three murders are a blend of far-fetched and extraordinary luck. Despite that, and perhaps due to Christie’s use of real life Nile locations, you can really picture the action taking place with surprisingly realistic effectiveness.

Overall satisfaction rating: It’s not quite a 10/10 for me, with the slightly less than classic denouement, and Christie cheating by withholding evidence from the reader; but it’s definitely worth a 9/10.

Thanks for reading my blog of Death on the Nile and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge is Appointment with Death; a story that features an appalling old woman who, if I remember rightly, gets what’s coming to her. More details than that, I cannot recall. As always, I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Dumb Witness (1937)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which the great Hercule Poirot receives a commission from a Miss Emily Arundell, only to discover she had died a couple of months earlier. Together with his faithful Captain Hastings, he examines the circumstances of her death and concludes it was not as natural as the doctor had presumed. Miss Arundell had recently changed her will but had her scheming relatives known this, and did any of them decide to help her on her way to the next world? Poirot sees through the falseness and deceptions, but is he able to prevent a second death? As usual, if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to tell you whodunit!

The book is dedicated “To Dear Peter, most fruitful of friends and dearest of companions, a dog in a thousand”. I’m not certain how many other books have been dedicated to animals, but it’s not inappropriate for this book. The Dumb Witness of the title is Miss Arundell’s wire-haired terrier, Bob, a playful chap with a penchant for leaving his ball at the top of the stairs, where an old lady could trip and take a tumble, with serious consequences. I can assure you, gentle reader, that Bob is not the murderer. The book was originally published in the US in The Saturday Evening Post, in seven instalments in November and December 1936 under the title Poirot Loses a Client. In the UK, it first appeared in an abridged format in the Women’s Pictorial magazine in seven instalments from February to April 1937 under the title Mystery of Littlegreen House. In book format, it first appeared in July 1937 in the UK and a little later that year in the US, still using its American title of Poirot Loses a Client.

I remember this book as being one of my mother’s favourites; I think she really enjoyed the fact that the dog plays such an important role. To be fair, I think the title misleads the reader somewhat. This is one of those books that I’ve read countless times but can never remember whodunit; and I think part of the reason for that is that I expect the dog to feature even more in Poirot’s grey cells procedure than he does. The title “Dumb Witness” implies that the dog actually sees the murder take place and somehow betrays the identity of the murderer by some kind of animal instinct. Well, neither is true, as far as I can make out. It’s still an enjoyable read, and Christie lays some false trails that we follow hook line and sinker; once you realise the psychological game that one of the suspects is playing, the logic of the case all falls into place quite comfortably.

We don’t learn much about Poirot that we didn’t already know. He is perhaps a little more disgraceful than usual in the way that he tells so many lies in order to obtain information from the suspects, much to Captain Hastings’ embarrassment; that does lead to some amusing exchanges as he is often rumbled as the book progresses. Unusually, he is very indiscreet about some of his previous cases, and reveals the names of the murderers in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Mystery of the Blue Train and Death in the Clouds, so I would really recommend that you don’t read this book until you have read those. I can’t think why Christie would have decided to spoil so much of her own work.

There are a few humorous episodes; when he is interrogating Theresa Arundell (even though she doesn’t realise it) she decides to call him Hercule, which I don’t think anyone else in his books so far has dared to be so personal. You sense he doesn’t like it, by the way he quickly moves the conversation on. Later, Poirot becomes the butt of Miss Peabody’s humour, when she (with such impertinence!) mocks his moustache. In another scene, where Poirot (lying again) is pretending to be interested in buying a house, he encounters two estate agents of varying abilities of salesmanship, Mr Gabler and Miss Jenkins. Given the way she ridicules them, I think it’s fair to say that Mrs Christie doesn’t hold the practitioners of that profession in very high esteem.

As is so often the case in these early books, the story is narrated by Captain Hastings, but this will be the last time his faithful friend sets down Poirot’s sleuthing in writing until Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, published posthumously in 1975, but written at the height of Christie’s powers. But to keep some continuity, we are reintroduced briefly to Poirot’s manservant George, whom he had first met in The Mystery of the Blue Train.

One interesting aspect of how Christie characterises Emily Arundell is to show how, in the Victorian era when Miss Arundell was growing up, men were socially far more important than women, both in their achievements and in their general significance. Even though Charles Arundell is portrayed as a fairly amoral chap, Miss Emily still insists that he has the best of the spare rooms, because it’s correct to treat men more positively than women. Theresa can have the old nursery, she’ll be grand. It’s also fascinating to read how the pharmacy service was a very different kettle of fish in those days. Today, we go to the doctor, he gives us a prescription and the pharmacist provides the drugs. We might be involved in the decision to prescribe, but on the whole the patient has the most insignificant role in the whole administration of drugs. In Dumb Witness, Dr Tanios asks for his own “mixture” to be made up. “A very interesting mixture it was” says the pharmacist, “”one I’ve not previously become acquainted with.” The man spoke as of a rare botanical trophy. “It makes a change, sir, when you get something new. Very interesting combination of drugs, I remember….”” Can you imagine wandering into Boots and just suggesting an odd concoction to the pharmacist today? I don’t think you’d get very far.

As usual, there are a few references to check out. The book is set in the town of Market Basing, in Berkshire; it’s not hard to imagine that the inspiration for this name comes from Basingstoke, although that’s in Hampshire. Market Basing recurs in a number of Christie’s works, including the short story The Market Basing Mystery, which was not published in the UK until 1974’s collection, Poirot’s Early Cases, but was the forerunner for the title story in Murder in the Mews. Market Basing is also said to be close to St Mary Mead, the village where Miss Marple lives, although I always think of that as being in Kent. There’s a lot of vagueness in the Christie village environment.

The Tanios family are said to have come back to the UK from living in Smyrna. That was the contemporary name for Izmir, Turkey, and during the 1930s was a hive of archaeological industry, with which Mrs Christie would doubtless have been familiar. The Tanioses are now living at the Durham Hotel, in Bloomsbury, but there’s no currently hotel with that name in London. Theresa and Donaldson enjoy a drive out to Worthem Abbey, described as one of the local beauty spots. Again, no such place exists, but with a slight letter change to Wortham Abbey, then you have such a place in Devon and also in Suffolk. Miss Lawson has now moved to 17 Clanroyden Mansions, W2. There’s no such address, but in the vicinity there is a Clanricarde Gardens, which might be the inspiration. In a moment of fury, Theresa insists that Poirot goes away… “and take St Leonards with you”. It took me ages to work out that her joke is a play on the town of St Leonards that adjoins Hastings in Sussex. Poirot thinks it’s funny. Hastings isn’t so impressed.

Miss Emily Arundell was in the habit of taking Dr Loughbarrow’s Liver Capsules. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are an invention of Christie’s – if they really had existed in real life, sales would have plummeted. And in one of the seances that Miss Lawson liked to attend, the planchette revealed that there was a mystery regarding the key to the Boule cabinet. Nothing to do with the French ball game, but rather a cabinet designed by André-Charles Boulle, cabinet maker to the King of France.

As you possibly know, I like to research the present-day value of any significant sums of money mentioned in Christie’s books, just to get a more realistic feel for the amounts in question. There are quite a few large sums bandied around in this book that I think bear some investigation. Theresa Arundell says she originally inherited £30,000 from her father, which would have been enough to provide a regular income of £1200 per year; but she’s spent it all and has just £221 left. As at 1937, £30,000 was the equivalent of a good £1.4m, and that regular income of £1200 would have provided at today’s rate an annual allowance of £57,000. Not bad, but not enough for Theresa. Her pathetic £221 today would be worth £10,500. No wonder she was worried. Littlegreen House is on the market for £2,850, which today would be a modest £135,000. Haven’t property prices have soared over the last 80 years? And the value of Emily Arundell’s estate? £375,000. Today that would have been a handy £18m. Worth killing for?

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Dumb Witness:

Publication Details: 1937. Pan Books paperback, 9th printing, published in 1971, price 25p. The cover illustration depicts the Tarot card of Death, which I think is a little misleading as I can’t recall tarot cards playing a part in the story at all. There’s a dog’s collar – maybe a little large for Bob, hard to say – a few pills and a nail with some thread attached – that’s more significant. It’s quite an evocative image but I’m not sure to what extent it really reflects the story.

How many pages until the first death: 1. Miss Arundell’s death is reported in the first sentence of the first page of the book. However, we then go back in time and see her conversations with her family and acquaintances, and the first four chapters of the book are written so that we almost feel she’s still alive.

Funny lines out of context: Slim pickings, I’m sorry to say. Nothing to report.

Memorable characters: Emily Arundell is a well-drawn, fully believable character; you feel you understand her motivations and her old-fashioned ways very well – even though she dies in the first sentence! The amoral Charles and Theresa are also very vivid. And I was very entertained by the mischievous Miss Peabody, ridiculing Poirot’s moustache and not believing his story about writing a biography of General Arundell.

Christie the Poison expert:
Christie employs her knowledge of and interest in poisons to very good effect in this book. We discover that the gardener uses arsenic and is surprised by how much of the bottle has been used. Dr Tanios is known to buy a bottle of chloral from the pharmacist; this has been the cause of death in Christie’s previous books, The Secret Adversary, The Seven Dials Mystery and Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? But it’s what Miss Lawson believes was the ectoplasm leaving Miss Arundell’s body during the final séance that really nails Christie’s poison credentials; I won’t give the game away by explaining it, but suffice to say, it’s NOT ectoplasm!

Class/social issues of the time:

There’s really only one of Christie’s betes noir that gets a hammering in the book – and it really does get a hammering – and that’s the xenophobic distrust and dislike of foreigners. It’s everywhere. The Greek Dr Tanios comes in for most of the prejudice:

“Emily Arundell’s people, who were what is known as “service people”, simply did not marry Greeks”.

“Bella had married a foreigner – and not only a foreigner, but a Greek. In Miss Arundell’s prejudiced mind a Greek was almost as bad as an Argentine or a Turk. The fact that Dr Tanios had a charming manner and was said to be extremely able in his profession only prejudiced the old lady slightly more against him. She distrusted charm and easy compliments. For this reason, too, she found it difficult to be fond of the two children. They had both taken after their father in looks – there was really nothing English about them.” I believe this is the first instance of Christie recognising that her characters’ racism is in fact true prejudice and not just a nice middle-class trait.

In the words of Isabel Tripp: “Not that I’ve anything to say against Mrs Tanios – she’s quite a nice woman, but absolutely stupid and completely under her husband’s thumb. Of course, he’s really a Turk, I believe – rather dreadful for an English girl to marry a Turk, I think, don’t you? It shows a certain lack of fastidiousness.”
And in the words of Miss Lawson (ironically in conversation with the Belgian Poirot): “Of course, Dr Tanios pretends to be very fond of his wife and he’s quite charming to her. His manners are really delightful. But I don’t trust foreigners. They’re so artful!”

Miss Lawson doesn’t care who she recklessly offends with her blanket racism. “If he’d been an Englishman, I would have advised her – but there, he isn’t an Englishman… And she looks so peculiar, poor thing, so – well, so scared. What can he have been doing to her? I believe Turks are frightfully cruel sometimes.” “Dr Tanios is a Greek.” “Yes of course, that’s the other way about – I mean, they’re usually the ones who get massacred by the Turks – or an I thinking of Armenians?”

Poirot also receives some prejudice; consider this conversation between Miss Peabody and the great detective: “”Goin’ to write a book, eh?” “Yes.” “In English?” “Certainly – in English.” “But you’re a foreigner. Eh? Come now, you’re a foreigner, aren’t you?” “That is true.” She transferred her gaze to me. “You are his secretary, I suppose?” “Er – yes,” I said doubtfully. “Can you write decent English?” “I hope so.””

Classic denouement: In a sense. There’s an important person missing, which slightly detracts from the full drama, but it can’t really be avoided!

Happy ending? You don’t really get a sense of natural justice, tying up the loose ends, so it’s not really that happy an ending, and a few of the characters have a rather mournful future to look forward to. Nevertheless, two other characters appear to be happy in their new lives. And Bob gets a surprise ending too.

Did the story ring true? Not especially. The manner in which Emily Arundell’s first accident took place is, I feel, highly unbelievable. The characters are very believable though.

Overall satisfaction rating: It’s an enjoyable story but I think it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, so I’m giving it 7/10.

Thanks for reading my blog of Dumb Witness and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge is another big one – Death on the Nile. I can’t remember too much about the book but I’m very familiar with the Peter Ustinov film, so I can remember whodunit even before starting to re-read. So that will be an interesting experience! As always, I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Murder in the Mews (1937)

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In which Hercule Poirot takes us on four cases, novella length, where he solves a range of crimes from an apparent suicide to a deathly love triangle. Of course, the usual rules apply; if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I shan’t spoil the surprise of any of the four revelations!

The book was first published in the UK in March 1937, and in the US in June 1937, but under the title Dead Man’s Mirror. The stories had all been individually published previously in magazine format. Christie dedicated the collection “to my old friend Sybil Heeley, with affection.” Sybil was the daughter of Wilfred Lucas Heeley, at Cambridge with William Morris, and friend of Rudyard Kipling’s sister Alice. “Ruddy” and Sybil would keep up a correspondence until his death in 1936. Sybil was also the author of Ellie and the China Lady, “A Tibetan Fairy Tale”, published in 1895.

Murder in the Mews

Murder in the Mews, the first story, was first published in the UK in Woman’s Journal in December 1936. It had previously been published in the US in Redbook magazine in September and October 1936. Poirot and Japp are heading back to Poirot’s flat on Guy Fawkes Night, remarking that, with all the sounds of fireworks all around them, it would be a perfect night on which to commit murder with a pistol. Sure enough, next morning, Mrs Allen is found dead in her flat in the very mews where Poirot and Japp had that conversation. It appears to be a suicide, but the most minor of investigations reveal that it couldn’t possibly be; so Japp and Poirot set about finding the murderer.

It’s a very entertaining and enjoyable read, very much with the feel of a mini-novel, with ten, progressing chapters covering 49 pages. With only a few suspects mentioned and questioned, there’s only a limited number of murder options for the reader to imagine, but even so Christie surprises us with Poirot’s denouement.

We have the usual badinage between Japp and Poirot, with Japp’s colleague Inspector Jameson implying that Poirot is going “gaga”. Poirot’s sense of superiority and vanity comes out with his assertion that, if he were to commit a murder, Japp would never find out about it. Jameson is also seen as a figure of stuffy British superiority as he clearly disapproves of Poirot’s involvement in the case. There is some curious use of language, with one character described as a “stuffed fish and a boiled owl”; another is called “a bright kind of shaver” – which sounds like a compliment. Indeed, my OED confirms that “shaver” was a colloquial word for “humorous chap”.

There’s an ironic line when Major Eustace is being interviewed, and asked whether he was smoking during a certain conversation: “yes, and smoked. Anything damaging in that?” I expect in 1937 people weren’t aware of the dangers all that smoking was causing.

There are a few locations to check out: the death takes place in Bardsley Gardens Mews; there is a Bardsley Gardens in Sydney, Australia, but I don’t suppose it’s that one. Jane Plenderleith spent the weekend at Laidells Hall, Laidells, Essex, and Laverton-West lives in Little Ledbury, Hampshire; both totally fictitious. His London address is in Onslow Square though, and that’s a real enough part of South Ken.

Major Eustace drives a Standard Swallow saloon, which means (according to Wikipedia, so it must be right) that it was one of only 148 cars to be built by the Swallow Coachbuilding Company (later Jaguar) between 1932 and 1936. Very swish and exclusive. Mrs Allen died by means of an automatic pistol – a Webley .25. I know nothing about guns, but Webley and Scott were, and still are, noted manufacturers of air rifles and pistols; the .25, according to Wikipedia again, had a 3-inch barrel and a 6-round magazine. Manufacture was discontinued in 1940.

That £200 that Mrs Allen withdrew that may (or may not) have been to pay a blackmailer, is the equivalent of about £9,500 today. Not chickenfeed by any means.

A good start to the book! What’s next?

The Incredible Theft

This story is a reworking of The Submarine Plans, originally published in The Sketch magazine in November 1923 – fourteen years earlier than the publication of Murder in the Mews (the book). That version was eventually published in Poirot’s Early Cases in 1974. In the US, The Submarine Plans was first published in the Blue Book Magazine in July 1925. In the UK, the revised The Incredible Theft first appeared in serialised form in the Daily Express in April 1937. There was no US magazine edition prior to its publication as part of Dead Man’s Mirror.

Not a murder mystery this time, but the theft of some highly sensitive security documents from a politician; and there’s a known spy who’s a guest in the household, so did she take them, and if so, where are they? It’s a pacey story that takes place over no more than about 18 hours by my estimate, with some colourful characters and an intriguing resolution. But there’s some distinctly misogynistic conversations between some of the men in this story, that rather stand out as being at best pompous, at worst pretty unpleasant.

We get an insight into a little more of Poirot’s personality – he doesn’t like being beaten at all. When it looks as though the spy character is going to get away with it, Poirot is not amused: “You wish me success, do you? Ah, but you are very sure I am not going to meet with success! Yes, you are very sure indeed. That, it annoys me very much.” Mind you, Lord Mayfield, whose documents have been stolen, is equally fuming; and not just at the theft. George Carrington gets him to admit that he suspects the spy: “”You don’t doubt, do you, that she’s at the bottom of this?” “No, I don’t. She’s turned the tables on me with a vengeance. I don’t like admitting, George, that a woman’s been too clever for us. It goes against the grain. But it’s true.”” Previously, he’d already commented on her fragrance: “it’s not a cheap scent. One of the most expensive brands in the market, I should say […] I think a woman smothered in cheap scent is one of the greatest abominations known to mankind.” I think Mayfield needs to get out a bit more. Not only are these men sexist, but also xenophobic. At the suggestion that Poirot might be able to solve the case, Mayfield replies “”by the Lord, George, I thought you were too much of an old John Bull to put your trust in a Frenchman, however clever.” “He’s not even a Frenchman, he’s a Belgian,” said Sir George in a rather shamefaced manner.”

Poirot’s conversation with the maid Leonie is decidedly creepy too. “Do you know […] I find you very good to look at […] I demand of M. Carlile whether you are or are not good-looking and he replies that he does not know […] I do not believe he has ever looked at a girl in his life, that one”. He is, in fact, testing an alibi, but it’s not one of Poirot’s most eloquent exchanges. Earlier, Poirot had questioned Carlile on this subject, and he had steadfastly refused to pass comment on Leonie’s looks. “Sir George Carrington gave a sudden chuckle. “M. Poirot seems determined to make you out a gay dog, Carlile”, he remarked.” Funny how the change of meaning of the word gay gives that sentence an entirely different inference today.

I was interested to note that a typical office working week is considered cover 48 hours. That’s very different from today’s 35 to 37 hours. The Prime Minister is referred to as Hunberly – of course, in 1937 it was Baldwin, then Chamberlain.

A good story, that holds the interest. Next up:

Dead Man’s Mirror

This tale is an expanded version of the story The Second Gong which appeared in the Strand Magazine in July 1932 (and in the USA, in Ladies Home Journal in June 1932). It was eventually published in the UK in the book Problem at Pollensa Bay, which wasn’t published until 1991.

Sir Gervase Chevenix-Gore writes to Hercule Poirot to invite him to stay; but when he arrives, his host is already dead. Everything points to his having committed suicide, except Poirot doesn’t believe a word of it. The story develops into a full-blown and thoroughly intriguing mystery, another perfect little whodunit in miniature, with a proper denouement and bags of suspects. It also keeps back a very charming twist right up till the final line. It’s this story that Tom Adams’ cover illustration depicts; the shattered mirror with dripping blood.

We welcome back Mr Satterthwaite, of The Mysterious Mr Quin fame, whom we also met in Three Act Tragedy. As there was a social gathering at the Chevenix-Gores, it’s not surprising to discover Mr Satterthwaite had an invitation too. Satterthwaite immediately becomes the recipient of some of Poirot’s famous egoism: “It did not seem to occur to this Sir Gervase that I, Hercule Poirot, am a man of importance, a man of infinite affairs! That it was extremely unlikely that I should be able to fling everything aside and come hastening like an obedient dog – like a mere nobody, gratified to receive a commission!” Later, when Poirot bumps into Susan Cardwell as he was checking the footprints in the flower bed, he remarks: “you now behold a detective – a great detective, I may say – in the art of detecting!”

There are a few possibly interesting references; the grandeur of the Chevenix-Gores’ address (Hamborough Close, Hamborough St Mary, Westshire) couldn’t be more imaginary if it tried. Sir Gervase’s chef was formerly employed by the Emperor of Moravia. This land, which is currently the eastern end of the Czech Republic, was up until 1918 part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So even though the Emperor of Moravia sounds at worst a made-up title and at best a pub, there really would have been an Emperor with that title.

Godfrey Burrows is described as being “slightly hairy at the heel”. I’ve never heard that phrase before, but in many ways it’s rather splendidly descriptive. It means they’re an unmitigated bounder – ill-bred, like a race horse in need of refinement. Another phrase, this time one I have heard before, is spoken by Lady Chevenix-Gore when she sees the broken mirror – “the mirror crack’d from side to side, the curse is come upon me cried, the Lady of Shalott” – taken from Tennyson’s poem of the same name. Twenty-six years later Christie would be using the phrase as the title of a Miss Marple novel.

Sir Gervase’s will left £5000 to his nephew, Hugo, and £6000 to his widow. At today’s value, that would be the equivalent of legacies of £250,000 and £300,000. That’s not that much, given the grandeur of their lifestyle.

Triangle at Rhodes

Triangle at Rhodes was first published in the UK in the Strand Magazine in May 1936 under the slightly longer title of Poirot and the Triangle at Rhodes, and in the US in the 2 February 1936 issue of the weekly newspaper supplement This Week magazine. Critics have pointed out that there are some similarities with Evil Under the Sun, which Christie would write five years later.

Poirot’s on holiday in Rhodes where he observes a self-consciously beautiful woman stealing another woman’s husband right from under her nose, but she seems powerless to prevent it. The first woman’s husband is also extremely affronted at their behaviour. Poirot warns the wronged wife that she must “leave this place […] if you value your life”. She doesn’t; and there are catastrophic consequences. But what and how and why? The story includes two of Poirot’s often-found wise old sayings. He maintains that one never does something outside one’s character; this was the basis of his solution to the crime in Cards on the Table. He also uses to his advantage what he calls a criminal’s chief vice: “Conceit. A criminal never believes that his crime can fail.” Using these two guidelines Poirot sees through the play-acting and gets to the truth. It’s an extremely clever and surprising little story.

For the one and only time in this collection, we see Christie the Poisons Expert at work. A murder is committed, by using Strophanthin, which is a fairly unusual compound. It was used by African tribes as an arrow poison. Strophanthin is derived from Acokanthera plants native to east Africa and has similarities to digitalis. It’s exceptionally lethal!

In another of Poirot’s less enlightened moments, he seems to be condoning brutish behaviour towards women. “”It is possible,” said Poirot. “Yes, it is quite possible. But les femmes, they like brutes, remember that!” Douglas muttered: “I shoudn’t be surprised if he ill-treats her!” “She probably likes that too.””

An interesting reference point: a character hums the tune “here we go gathering nuts and may”. Nuts and may? Not nuts in May? No. Originally it was nuts and may, with “may” being the hawthorn or its blossom. Believed to be a corruption of “knots of may”. Things get confusing when you dig deep.

This is a bumper pack of four excellent stories and I can’t see why it shouldn’t merit a 10/10. Each of them is excellently written, full of characterisation, with surprising storylines and unguessable denouements. Highly recommended!

With the next book in the Agatha Christie Challenge, it’s back to the novel format; and continuing with that vain but brilliant detective, Hercule Poirot, it’s Dumb Witness. I can’t remember that much about it but I know it’s a page turner and that I really enjoyed it in the past. If you’d like to read it too, I’ll blog about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meanwhile, happy sleuthing!

 

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Cards on the Table (1936)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which four detectives (professional and amateur) including Hercule Poirot play bridge in one room of Mr Shaitana’s house whilst four other guests play bridge in another, where Mr Shaitana sits by the fire and watches; and when they get up to go home at the end of the evening, one of the four has murdered their host. No one else is implicated in the crime; if you make a guess at whodunit, you have a 25% chance of being correct! Poirot, of course, identifies the murderer through psychological examination of the characters involved – as well as checking through their dubious pasts to see if they have any murderous skeletons in their cupboard. And of course, if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to tell you whodunit!

This book has no dedication; instead Christie has written a foreword assuring the reader that the murderer is indeed one of the four people present in the room and that there’s no need to go hunting for the “least likely person”. The book was originally published in the US in magazine format in the Saturday Evening Post during May and June 1936; in the UK, it appeared in book format in November 1936, and in the US early in 1937.

After a slight drop in quality with Murder in Mesopotamia, this book heralds a real return to form with Christie creating a truly intriguing crime and suspenseful investigations by Poirot and his friends. There’s no separate narrator, apart from Christie herself, and every so often she adds a little aside, giving it a personal touch, as though she’s become our friend and she’s confiding in us. Whilst Superintendent Battle is conducting his first interview with Dr Roberts, for example, she just gives us that little extra insight that wouldn’t be there in a straightforward third-person narration: “”..we’ve interviewed Mr. Shaitana’s solicitor. We know the terms of his will. Nothing of interest there. He had relatives in Syria, it seems. And then, of course, we’ve been through all his private papers.” Was it fancy or did that broad, clean-shaven countenance look a little strained – a little wooden? “And?” said Dr Roberts. “Nothing,” said Superintendent Battle, watching him. There wasn’t a sigh of relief. Nothing so blatant as that. But the doctor’s figure seemed to relax just a shade more comfortably in his chair.”

Christie doesn’t restrict her suspicions just to Dr Roberts. When Rhoda tells Anne Meredith that she has been to see Mrs Oliver: “”You’d gone off on your own ploys with the boy friend. I thought at least he’d give you tea.” Anne was silent for a minute – a voice ringing in her ears. “Can’t we pick up your friend somewhere and all have tea together?” And her own answer – hurried, without taking time to think: “Thanks awfully, but we’ve got to go out to tea together with some people.” A lie – and such a silly lie. The stupid way one said the first thing that came into one’s head instead of just taking a minute or two to think.” At the end of Miss Meredith’s first interview with Battle, Rhoda turns on the wireless to hear the announcer say: “You have just heard the Black Nubians play “Why do you tell me lies, Baby?”” That’s a smart way of implying that Miss Meredith isn’t telling the truth.

Poirot builds much of his initial questioning around the bridge game, using the scoresheets that he collected from the scene of the crime. Just as Amy Leatheran had appended the plan of the dig house in Murder in Mesopotamia, and as Hastings was often wont to attach pertinent documents to his narrations, Christie gives us a facsimile of the bridge rubbers. This way we have precisely the same evidence that she/Poirot has – very similar to providing the full list of items in the luggage in Death in the Clouds – the reader and Poirot have precisely the same information. Poirot’s very attached to the bridge rubbers: “They are illuminating, do you not think? What do we want in this case? A clue to character. And a clue not to one character, but to four characters. And this is where we are most likely to find it – in these scribbled figures.”

Poirot is highly analytical in this book, concentrating on the psychology of the four suspects: “we know the kind of murder that has been committed, the way it was committed. If we have a person who from the psychological point of view could not have committed that particular type of murder, then we can dismiss that person from our calculations.” He holds firmly to this belief right through the book, even when he is driven to agonies of self-doubt just before his final denouement. One of the suspects confesses that they have committed the crime; but it goes against everything that Poirot believed for certain. “”The question is,” he said, can Hercule Poirot possibly be wrong?” “No one can always be right,” said XXX coldly. “I am,” said Poirot. “Always I am right. It is so invariable that it startles me. But now it looks, it very much looks, as though I am wrong. And that upsets me […] Decidedly, I am mad. No – sacré nom d’un petit bonhomme – I am not mad! I am right. I must be right. I am willing to believe that you killed Mr Shaitana – but you cannot have killed him in the way you said you did. No one can do a thing that is not dans son caractère!!”” And of course, he’s right.

Among other insights into Poirot’s brain, he describes himself as “bourgeois”, as Christie does of him in Three Act Tragedy. Shaitana appreciates and values the artistry of a decently planned, immaculately executed murder, and is very surprised that Poirot doesn’t share this view. While Poirot admits that a murderer can be an artist, “he is still a murderer! […] I can admire the perfect murderer – I can also admire a tiger – that splendid tawny-striped beast. But I will admire him from outside his cage. I will not go inside. That is to say, not unless it is my duty to do so.” Shaitana beckons the tiger into his dinner party, and doesn’t survive the experience.

Poirot also finds the thought of the “celebrity” nature of the guests at Shaitana’s party rather exciting. Miss Meredith is intimidated by them, but Poirot has no truck with that idea: “Mademoiselle, you should not be intimidated – you should be thrilled! You should have all ready your autograph book and your fountain pen […] what would I not give at this minute to be even the most minor of film stars!” That may seem surprising – but remember back to those early cases in Poirot Investigates – he and Hastings were always leafing through the gossip magazines to source salacious titbits about celebs.

Poirot isn’t, however, the most well-drawn character in this book, nor are any of the four suspects. Christie devotes most attention to Mrs Oliver, whom we first saw as one of Parker Pyne’s backroom boys in Parker Pyne Investigates. Now she is given much greater prominence. She’s depicted as distinctly batty, obsessed with apples, eccentric of costume, and unkempt of appearance. On one hand she’s devoted to her Finnish detective, and on the other hand she despises him. As a successful writer (currently on her 32nd, whereas this was Christie’s 20th), she knows what her readership likes, even if she doesn’t always agree with them; as a result, she doesn’t care if she’s inaccurate with her legal procedures, but she is upset to discover that French beans are over by Michaelmas (it ruined a plot detail). She’s meddling, instinctive, and constantly self-contradictory. Christie invests Mrs Oliver with so much description and so many characteristics and eccentricities; it’s clear that she has the confidence to do this because she is based on herself. She can’t wait to be let loose on the criminal investigation world in real life, but she’s determined to enjoy it as though it were detective fiction. This might be a realistic description of the enthused amateur, but it was never really going to endear her to Superintendent Battle. They say if you don’t know what to write about, write about something you know; Christie clearly writes about someone she knows very well – herself.

Mrs Oliver always favours women over men, whether it be in positions of power or in social engagement. She’s convinced a woman will always be the better person for the job, whatever it is. Almost to prove it, there’s an unexpected amount of very sexist talk in this book – but not anti-men, perhaps surprisingly. Battle confides in Miss Burgess “I don’t want to say anything against your sex but there’s no doubt that a woman, when she’s rattled, is apt to lash out with her tongue a bit”. Working out who should make enquiries about whom, he notes of Mrs Oliver, “she’s a sport. And women get to know things about other women that men can’t get at.” When Mrs Luxmore is recollecting her time spent with Major Despard, she says he ““never said anything. He was the soul of honour.” “But a woman always knows,” prompted Poirot. “How right you are… Yes, a woman knows…”” What tosh!

As usual, there are a few references to check out. First: locations. The book opens with Poirot meeting Shaitana at an Exhibition of Snuff-Boxes at Wessex House. It’s a convincing name for an exhibition hall, but in reality it’s a medical institution in Somerset. Mrs Lorrimer advises that she first met Shaitana at the Winter Palace in Luxor. Not a tourist site, as such, but a grand hotel, still very much in existence and currently run as a Sofitel. According to their website, Christie was to write Death on the Nile whilst staying there.

We’re given the suspects’ addresses. Dr Roberts lives at 200 Gloucester Terrace, London W2 – which exists, a suitably solid London address; Mrs Lorrimer’s address is 111 Cheyne Lane, Chelsea – this doesn’t exist but of course there is Cheyne Walk; Miss Meredith’s home is Wendon Cottage, Wallingford – Wallingford of course exists, in Oxfordshire, but there’s no Wendon Cottage as far as I can see. Her London club is the Ladies’ Naval and Military, whose address is in St James’s Square. We never learn Despard’s address, curiously. Other locations of possible interest include a branch of the London and Wessex Bank in Lancaster Gate (it never existed as a bank); the late Mrs Craddock lived at 117 North Audley Street (North Audley Street exists, but there isn’t a No 117); Combeacre, in Devon, where Mrs Benson lived, also doesn’t exist; but Miss Meredith’s birth town of Quetta most certainly exists – at the time it was in India, now it is in Pakistan, the largest city of the province of Baluchistan.

Some other references that occurred to me whilst I was reading: Dr Roberts is described as having a tendency to embonpoint, which was a new one on me. It means heavy, but not unattractive, girth. Two of Christie’s other books receive a nod; Poirot proudly displays the murder weapon from Murder on the Orient Express, and rather carelessly tells the reader whodunit; I guess Christie thought she’d already sold enough copies. Amusingly, Mrs Oliver is recognised by Miss Meredith as the writer of The Body in the Library, which Christie must have thought was such a great title that she herself wrote a book with the same title six years later.

After an awkward moment of silence, Mrs Oliver remarks, “is it twenty-to or twenty-past? An angel passing… My feet aren’t crossed – it must be a black angel!” I’d absolutely no idea what she was going on about here, it sounds like a series of intertwined superstitions that have passed me by. Apparently there’s a whole folklore out there that conversations die out at twenty past the hour. It’s also meant to represent an angel passing; and as Mrs Oliver’s feet aren’t crossed (like you cross fingers for good luck), the implication is that it’s a bad luck sign. Who knew?

Dr Roberts describes himself as a “St. Christopher’s man” – presumably the same medical institution where Amy Leatheran trained in Murder in Mesopotamia. Also in conversation with the good doctor, Poirot recollects Sherlock Holmes: “the curious incident of the dog in the night. The dog did not howl in the night. That is the curious thing”. Christie couldn’t have known about Mark Haddon’s book or Simon Stephens’ play. I had no idea this title referred to the Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze. You live and learn.

Those Black Nubians who were on the wireless in Anne and Rhoda’s house, weren’t a real group. Rowland Ward’s – from where Despard thinks Shaitana would have sourced his eland head – was a major taxidermist, and founder of Rowland Ward Ltd; the company is still going and publishes the authoritative Records of Big Game series of books. And the poem that Poirot misquotes to Mrs Luxmore, “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more” is a quote from Richard Lovelace’s To Lucasta, Going to the Wars.

Regular readers will know I like to research the present-day value of any significant sums of money mentioned in Christie’s books, just to get a more realistic feel for the amounts in question. There aren’t many in this book, and those there are, are quite low value. But I thought it would be interesting to see how much the entrance fee to that Snuffbox exhibition would be today; it cost Poirot one guinea in 1936, which today would be worth almost £52. I can’t see anyone paying that!! And the nineteen pairs of top quality stockings that Poirot buys; they’re 37/6 each (£1.82 if you’re too young to convert). Approximately £35.65 worth of stockings in 1936. That’s an astronomical £1,760 in today’s value. 90 quid for a pair of stockings!

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Cards on the Table:

Publication Details: 1936. Fontana paperback, 4th impression, published in 1962, price 2/6. A bland, but informative cover illustration.

How many pages until the first death: 16. That’s not long to get acquainted with Mr. Shaitana, but then no one knew in advance there was going to be a murder at his party, not even the murderer.

Funny lines out of context: A few – and they’re not particularly funny really. Still, I’ll include them for completeness:

Of Mr Shaitana: “he gave wonderful parties – large parties, small parties, macabre parties, respectable parties and definitely “queer” parties.”

“A slightly stronger light shone over the bridge table, from whence the monotonous ejaculations continued.”

“He knows men, Colonel Race does.”

Memorable characters: As indicated earlier, the most memorable character in this book is Mrs Oliver. I’m not sure any of the four main suspects are that memorable; Shaitana, with his Mephistophelean tendencies, is probably the next most memorable.

Christie the Poison expert:

Christie slightly takes the mickey out of herself by having Mrs Oliver discuss untraceable poisons at Shaitana’s party with Major Despard and Dr Roberts. “Mrs Oliver was asking Major Despard if he knew of any unheard-of out-of-the-way poisons. “Well, there’s curare.” “My dear man, vieux jeu! That’s been done hundreds of times. I mean something new!””

Mr Craddock died of anthrax, from an infected shaving brush. This an extremely unlikely way to die in the present day, in western Europe, but remains comparatively common in Africa, with approximately 2,000 cases per year worldwide. There is a further death in the story – whose, I won’t say because it will ruin it for you if you know without having read the book – brought about by an injection of Evipan. This was a very early reference to this substance, as it didn’t come into regular use until the 1940s and 50s as a barbiturate anaesthetic. Rather gruesomely, it was also used as a murder weapon at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for women during the Nazi regime.

Class/social issues of the time:

It’s beginning to appear that Christie spends less and less time talking about the social issues of the day as her books become more and more involved with elaborate plot dexterity and casting suspicion on the innocent. There are, however, a few racial moments: Shaitana was not only called a dago, but also “the sort of Dago who needed kicking badly. He used to make the toe of my boot fairly itch”, said the intemperate and clearly racist Despard. Later on he boasts to Poirot, “I never forget a face – even a black one”. Whether it’s a military tendency or just a coincidence, but Colonel Race has a similar approach, expressed in an alternative way. He doesn’t suspect Despard and implores Battle to agree with him. “He’s a white man, Battle […] Despard’s a white man, and I don’t believe he’s ever been a murderer. That’s my opinion. And I know something of men.” Even Rhoda tries to build up Anne’s confidence by confirming that she agreed that she knew Anne couldn’t possibly murder anyone, “but horrible suspicious foreigners don’t know that.” That’s not a nice way to talk about Poirot.

The only other social issue that gets a couple of mentions in this book is, perhaps surprisingly, foxhunting. Miss Meredith is talking to Poirot when she says of Shaitana, “you never know what would strike him as amusing. It might – it might be something cruel.” “Such as fox-hunting, eh?” replies Poirot. Christie says that Miss Meredith threw him a reproachful glance, so probably not that. In later conversation with Battle and Mrs Oliver, Poirot admits: “I have always disapproved of murder.” “What a delightfully droll way of putting it,” said Mrs Oliver. “Rather as though it were foxhunting or killing ospreys for hats.”

Classic denouement: Yes, although for reasons that will become clear as you read the book, not all the four suspects are in attendance for the denouement. The whole atmosphere of the book has been a gradual building up of tension throughout the investigation and the questioning, and the denouement follows on as a natural development of that. The guilty party does a great bravado job of assuming innocence until the last possible moment, which is always a delicious way of Christie to build them up only for Poirot to whack them down at the conclusion.

Happy ending? Not especially. There’s an indication of possible happiness ahead for two people but it’s probably a long way off. Justice is a tough bedfellow in this book.

Did the story ring true? Intriguingly, yes. Once you accept that a murder could take place under the circumstances in this book, everything else follows on naturally.

Overall satisfaction rating: I think this is an excellent read and have no hesitation awarding it a 10/10!

Thanks for reading my blog of Cards on the Table and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge will be Murder in The Mews. This is a book of four short stories – comparatively long ones, almost novellas in their own right – and I have a distinct memory that it’s a really rather good selection! In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which Hercule Poirot encounters an archaeological dig in Iraq, only to discover that the wife of the leader of the dig has been murdered in a seemingly impossible manner. There’s a motley crew of archaeologists and assistants working there – and one of them must have done it! As you would expect, Hercule Poirot gets to the bottom of this case fairly quickly. If you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to tell you whodunit!

Christie dedicated the book to “my many archaeological friends in Iraq and Syria”. The story takes place in the wilds of ancient Babylonia and Assyria, where Christie had visited with her husband Max Mallowan; and it is largely accepted that the character of Louise Leidner is based on Katharine Woolley, stalwart of many archaeological digs, and the person to whom Christie had previously dedicated (along with her husband) The Thirteen Problems. The book was originally published in the US in magazine format in the Saturday Evening Post during November and December 1935; in the UK, an abridged version was published in eight instalments in Women’s Pictorial Magazine under the title No Other Love. This version provided some of the characters with different names: Dr and Mrs Leidner were originally Dr and Mrs Trevor, and Amy Leatheran was Amy Seymour. The full book of Murder in Mesopotamia was first published in the UK in July 1936, and in the US shortly after.

In this book, Christie returned to the first-person narrator style, the narrator in question being Nurse Amy Leatheran – Captain Hastings, presumably, still occupied in The Argentine. It’s a style that works very well because you get to know the intimate thoughts of another person directly involved in the case, and not just the amazing workings of the Poirot brain. The frontispiece and first chapter being written by Dr Reilly makes the opening structure to the book a little clunky, but by the time the story gets going you completely forget about how it is that Amy gets to write the story in the first place. She warns us that she’s not much of a writer and isn’t very learned in matters of grammar; but this only goes to make us warm to the character even more. In the best Hastings tradition, Amy appends a plan of the dig house so that we can see for ourselves how tight-knit a community it is, and how unlikely it is that the crime could be committed without anyone else knowing. When a second character makes it clear that they have made a great discovery about how the crime was committed, you just know that this character is also going to be murdered within a matter of hours. It’s an off-shoot of the slightly melodramatic style.

There were two particular aspects of this book which struck me as I was reading it. One is that it is just a short space of time from the moment Poirot arrives on the scene to when he delivers his denouement speech – approximately four days by my reckoning. The second is that, for once, for me, Poirot’s long interrogations of all the suspects got a little dull. It felt somewhat repetitive; even though the structure is not that different from Murder on the Orient Express, where Poirot and his team take the suspects one by one, but there you can see it is part of a rigid structure; in Murder in Mesopotamia there is no real sense of structure, it just feels rather ambling.

There are a few splendid moments of pure Poirotism, however, and the relationship between Amy and him is a fascinating one; usually it’s the typical Poirot-style respect for others, but occasionally he flies off the handle. When Amy believes she is in the firing line during the denouement, she stands up for herself – and Poirot doesn’t like it: “for the moment will you silence yourself. Impossible to proceed while you conduct this argument.” Amy sometimes implies that Poirot has a strong feminine side; on one occasion she says he shows kindness that even a woman couldn’t; on another she notes his interest in gossip: “”I like all the information there is,” was Poirot’s reply. And really, that described his methods very well. I found later that there wasn’t anything – no small scrap of insignificant gossip – in which he wasn’t interested. Men aren’t usually so gossipy.” She could also predict that Poirot would make a grand denouement scene – as his readers know he certainly will. He commences the denouement with what Christie calls “a most theatrical bow”. And when Captain Maitland is impatient for his conclusions, Amy notes “but that wasn’t the way Hercule Poirot did things. I saw perfectly well that he meant to make a song and dance of it.”

Amy herself is rather prim and proper, disapproving of some of the ancient pottery: “after that she showed me some queer little terra-cotta figurines – but most of them were just rude. Nasty minds those old people had, I say.” She is slightly amused and slightly repelled by Poirot’s overall foreignness: “Of course, I knew he was a foreigner, but I hadn’t expected him to be quite as foreign as he was, if you know what I mean.” She describes Mrs Mercado as “though she might have what my mother used to call “a touch of the tar brush””, which today comes across as a thoroughly unpleasant example of racism.

But it is Poirot who comes out with the most startling piece of sexism, in his advice to the thwarted Carl Reiter, who allowed Mrs Leidner to treat him like a doormat: “Mon ami, let this be a lesson to you. You are a man. Behave then, like a man! It is against Nature for a man to grovel. Women and Nature have almost exactly the same reactions! Remember it is better to take the largest plate within reach and fling it at a woman’s head than it is to wriggle like a worm whenever she looks at you!” I don’t know about you, but I had to read that twice. That’s an extraordinary thing for Poirot to have said. One can only assume that sometimes Christie liked a bit of rough. Later in the denouement, Poirot propounds: “there is no hatred so great as that of a man who has been made to love a woman against his will.” I can envisage the entire female sex rolling their combined eyeballs at that one.

The book is absolutely crammed with references – especially place names – that might benefit from a little exploration. It’s the University of Pittstown that organises the expedition to Iraq; there’s no such university, of course, although there are Pittstowns in both New York state and New Jersey. It’s much more likely that Christie wants us to think of the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When we first meet Amy Leatheran she is writing a letter from the Tigris Palace Hotel in Baghdad. This was a very fashionable hotel in the middle of the 20th century. She trained at St. Christopher’s Hospital; there is one such hospital in the UK, in Fareham; there’s also a St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia – take your choice.

Then there are all the exotic, Iraqi locations for the dig. The main site in the story is at Tell Yarimjah, a tell being an artificial hill created by many generations of people living and rebuilding on the same spot, a short distance from Kirkuk, in north-eastern Iraq. The area is rich in history and archaeological possibilities, although today, sadly, it is at the centre of the ISIS zone. Hassanieh is said to be a day and a half from Baghdad – there is a small village by that name in Syria, and I would guess that time-distance would be about correct. Mrs Kelsey, with whom Amy travels to Iraq, has a house at Alwiyah, which is a suburb of Baghdad – it’s also the name of a famous club that was frequented by ex-pats and locals as recently as the 1980s. Neighbouring frontier posts of Tell Kotchek and Abu Kemal are mentioned, together with Deir ez Zor; Tell Kotchek is on the border between Iraq and Syria, currently under the control of Kurdish forces, Abu Kemal is another border town, part of the Deir ez Zor region of south eastern Syria, currently under the control of ISIS.

We also have some books to research. Amy is reading Death in a Nursing Home which sounds like an alternative version of Ngaio Marsh’s The Nursing Home Murder, which had been published just one year earlier, in 1935. Mrs Leidner’s bookshelves include Linda Condon, a novel by the American Joseph Hergesheimer, first published in 1919, and Crewe Train, a 1926 novel by Rose Macaulay, both of which feature independent women at their core – hence Poirot’s assumptions about Mrs Leidner’s character. Another literary work that is mentioned in connection with Mrs Leidner is La Belle Dame Sans Merci; this is a romantic ballad by John Keats, dated 1819, featuring what the Wikipedia page calls a “destructively beautiful lady”. I need say no more.

One other cheeky reference is to a certain Mr Van Aldin; Dr Leidner tells Captain Maitland that he has heard of Hercule Poirot through a mutual acquaintance by name of Van Aldin. Could this be the same Van Aldin whose daughter is murdered in The Mystery of the Blue Train? I think so.

There are a few interesting turns of phrase that I’d also quickly like to look at: Amy says that Mrs Mercado’s attitude to Mrs Leidner’s first husband is “one way of calling a goose a swan”. It’s a phrase I hadn’t heard before and I think it’s rather amusing. Geese feature quite heavily in Amy’s vernacular as she also refers to “a goose walking over my grave”, which I also hadn’t heard before I came across it in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Similarly, Bill Coleman refers to cash as “oof”, which was also new to me until I read Partners in Crime. One last new word for me – electrotype. Some articles are described as electrotypes at the end of the book – this was a chemical method for forming metal parts that exactly reproduce a model, invented in 1838 by Moritz von Jacobi in Russia. It’s a useful way of reproducing an original, say for a museum or gallery, so that the art style can be observed without the original needing to be there – for security purposes.

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Murder in Mesopotamia:

Publication Details: 1936. Fontana paperback, 4th impression, published in 1967, price erased but maybe 3/6. Tom Adams’ cover illustration shows us some of the main clues in the story – the scary mask, the bloody rope, a valuable goblet, and one of the notes received by Mrs Leidner, that reads “you have got to die”. It’s an unsettling image, for sure.

How many pages until the first death: 53. There’s a lot of build-up which allows us to get a really good understanding of the character of Mrs Leidner. Poirot doesn’t have that benefit, and has to find out everything in retrospect.

Funny lines out of context: Just one or two, brought about by that funny old word that nowadays has a much more precise meaning than it did in 1936.

““Oh dear, dear”, I ejaculated.”

“Captain Maitland uttered an occasional ejaculation.”

Memorable characters: Christie goes to great lengths to paint as full a picture as possible of Louise Leidner, with many descriptions and many detailed conversations, but, even so, I’m not entirely sure that you could call her a “memorable” character. I think Amy Leatheran is much more memorable, through her role as the narrator; a well-meaning nurse but lacking in some finesse. Many of the men working on the dig aren’t particularly well drawn – it’s easy to mix up your Coleman with your Emmott, for example.

Christie the Poison expert:

There’s no poison element to the first death but the second is caused by drinking hydrochloric acid, one of Christie’s favourite poisons. She even describes its physical effect on the lips of the person who drinks it. Nasty!

Class/social issues of the time:

Because the action of this book doesn’t take place in England, it seems that the day to day issues of England don’t impact so much on this story as they do in others; even though it’s a largely English cast of characters.

As you might expect, there is talk of “dagos” and “coloured people” (which, of course, was extremely polite for 1936). But it’s still a world where it is acceptable to shout at Arabs: ”Arabs don’t understand anything said in an ordinary “English” voice”; and where it is acceptable to refer to someone as “only an Iraqi” – not as important as a white Caucasian person.

As in Death in the Clouds, Christie still doesn’t have much respect – in print at least – for archaeologists. Whereas in that book the Duponts could argue until teatime without noticing anything going on around them, in Murder in Mesopotamia, Mrs Leidner goes in for the killer observation: “Archaeologists only look at what lies beneath their feet. The sky and the heavens don’t exist for them […] oh, they’re very queer people”.

Classic denouement: Yes, and extremely lengthy! You could almost say that the denouement procedure starts within minutes of the second death, which means that it covers approximately 44 pages. Poirot engineers the classic situation of everyone being present whilst he laboriously goes through all the possibilities. Definitely the strongest part of the book, in my humble opinion.

Happy ending? In a sense, yes, but it’s not emphasised. There is a wedding – but it’s between two relatively minor characters so it doesn’t mean that much to the reader. Amy’s narrative ends on something of a low note.

Did the story ring true? Not entirely. There are two facts that the reader is asked to believe – including the method of the murder – that are fairly far-fetched.

Overall satisfaction rating: Whilst it’s interesting to see Poirot operating in a different environment this isn’t an overly successful book in my eyes. I’m going to be generous and give it a 7/10.

Thanks for reading my blog of Murder in Mesopotamia and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge will be Cards on the Table. This is the book where Christie tells us up front that there are just four suspects and one of them is the murderer – so don’t go considering the butler or someone’s second cousin once removed, because they definitely didn’t do it! I’m not sure if she lets Poirot into that secret mind you, I’ll have to re-read it first. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Death in the Clouds (1935)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which that famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot travels on board one of those new-fangled aeroplane things and one of his fellow passengers is murdered in plain sight of everyone else. With the help of Inspector Japp and contributions from fellow passengers Jane Grey and Norman Gale, Poirot uncovers the truth of this extremely bold murder. And if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to tell you whodunit!

Christie dedicated the book to Ormond Beadle. This is likely to be Ormond A. Beadle, 1903 – 1976, osteopathist and writer, but I can find no evidence of a friendship between him and Christie. The book was originally published in the US in magazine format in the Saturday Evening Post during February and March 1935 under the title Murder in the Air; in novel format, again in the US, it first appeared in March 1935, its publication coinciding with the final magazine instalment. In the UK, an abridged version was published at the same time in six instalments in Women’s Pictorial Magazine as Mystery in the Air; the full novel appeared in the UK in July 1935, this time as Death in the Clouds.

This is a terrifically exciting and entertaining read. Even though I was fairly sure all the way through that I could remember whodunit – and I was right – this didn’t impact on my enjoyment of the book. In fact, in many ways it enhanced it, as you realise what a clever cat-and-mouse game Poirot plays with the murderer on and off throughout the investigations. He tells us early on that he is certain he knows who the murderer is – it’s apparent to him as soon as he receives the list of the contents of everyone’s luggage – but he cannot fathom a motive. “Poirot gathered up the loose typewritten sheets and read them through once again. Then he laid them down with a sigh. “On the face of it,” he said, “it seems to point very plainly to one person as having committed the crime. And yet, I cannot see why, or even how.”” From that point of view, Christie is scrupulously fair with her reader, as she gives us all the same information that Poirot receives, alerting us to the fact that he has already virtually solved the crime under our noses, so it’s easy for us to go back and re-read the information that Poirot found so crucial. Which item(s) is/are so revealing to Poirot? Unless we make our own guess, we do not find out until the very end. And it’s not until he is satisfied with the motive that he calls for one of those exciting showdown denouements.

Elements of the book examine the subject of the psychology of crime. Much is made of the boldness of the crime; how it was committed in an enclosed environment, and the fact that it must have been witnessed by a number of people who simply didn’t recognise or weren’t aware of what they were looking at. Christie had a similar enclosed environment in Murder on the Orient Express, but in that book, there was always the possibility that someone could have got on, or got off the train, whilst it was stuck in snowdrifts. No one can get off an aeroplane mid-flight! Furthermore, it was committed in front of the great Hercule Poirot, but I’m suspecting that the murderer wasn’t aware he would be on the plane. Fournier, of the Sûreté, is convinced there must have been a psychological moment – either a point in time when everyone was distracted by another event, or when everyone simply forgot to pay attention for whatever reason – when the murderer struck. They may, for example, have been distracted by the wasp. Poirot reflects on the fact that there was such a moment in Three Act Tragedy.

Another of Poirot’s observations on the psychology of crime addresses a major problem of his trade: “In every case of a criminal nature one comes across the same phenomena when questioning witnesses. Everyone keeps something back. Sometimes – often indeed – it is something quite harmless, something, perhaps, quite unconnected with the crime; but – I say it again – there is always something.” And Christie makes a further observation that I don’t believe had appeared in her books before, that of the societal implication of being associated with a crime. Rumour and gossip work in two directions. Jane Grey, for instance, suddenly becomes much more in demand at Antoine’s, the salon where she works, whereas Norman Gale’s patients at his dentists’ practice start leaving in droves. The same association with the same crime can have very different effects on an individual’s work, socialising, reputation and character. Poirot accepts that this wider effect is something one cannot overlook when trying to solve a crime.

Once again, there is no named narrator for this book; just Christie’s own voice telling us the story. But she creates a brilliant first chapter by interspersing the third person narration with the first-person thoughts of many of the passengers. We hear the commentaries of Jane Grey, Norman Gale, the Countess of Horbury, Venetia Kerr, Dr Bryant, Mr Ryder and indeed Poirot himself. It’s a quick and effective way for us to get inside the skins of the main characters and it gets the book off to a fast and furious start. Structurally, the book is typical of a number of Christie’s books where Poirot involves some of the younger people in assisting him to solve the murder – here he gets Jane and Norman to accompany him on meetings and act as his eyes and ears in different locations. It’s been a while since we last met Captain Hastings (that was in Lord Edgware Dies) but he would return for Christie’s next book, The ABC Murders, and Poirot seems to lack a degree of male companionship that helps him find the truth. However, in this book he does have Mr Clancy, writer of detective fiction, off whom he can bounce some ideas.

Clancy is possibly more like Ariadne Oliver, last seen as part of the Parker Pyne Investigates team, on whom Christie based herself to a large extent. There are a few tongue-in-cheek passages in the book about Clancy where Christie pokes fun at herself; Japp is not a fan, for example. “These detective story writers… always making the police out to be fools… and getting their procedure all wrong. Why, if I were to say the things to my super that their inspectors say to superintendents I should be thrown out of the Force tomorrow on my ear. Set of ignorant scribblers! This is just the sort of damn-fool murder that a scribbler of rubbish would think he could get away with.” Christie also employs her own personal knowledge of the world of archaeology to colour the characteristics of the Duponts, almost ridiculing them as they argue amongst themselves to the extent that they notice nothing else going on around them; a typical archaeologist’s trait, one expects she would argue.

Science and technology are wonderful things, are they not? is a question Poirot might have rhetorically asked during the course of this book. For Christie’s contemporary readers, the thought of travelling in an aeroplane would probably have been an exciting and innovative thing to do, and you can sense more than a little general wonderment at the whole air-travel experience here. “Jane caught her breath. It was only her second flight. She was still capable of being thrilled. It looked – it looked as though they must run into that fence thing – no, they were off the ground – rising – rising – sweeping round – there was Le Bourget beneath them.” For her readers today, it’s fascinating to see the differences between the 1930s and modern day air travel. There’s no obvious weight or baggage restrictions: “The maid passed along the gangway. At the extreme end of the car were some piled-up rugs and cases.” The Countess of Horbury and Venetia Kerr both assume they would be allowed to smoke during take-off, but the steward tells them off – no doubt they could smoke later on though. Seats don’t all face in the same direction, some of them face backwards as in a traditional railway configuration. Stewards provided food and drink to the passengers and expected to be tipped like any other waiter. This is a very different aviation experience from today!

But it’s not only air travel that makes a technological impact in this book. When the case causes him to interrogate someone in Canada, Fournier remarks “it is romantic, you know, the transatlantic telephone. To speak so easily to someone nearly halfway across the globe.” Poirot’s response: “the telegraphed photograph – that too is romantic. Science is the greatest romance there is.” Today we text each other photos without a second’s thought. But in the 1930s, this was a huge achievement; and the evidence it provides wraps up the case for Poirot: “a photograph of your transmitted by telephone has been recognised” is the killer line he uses to capture the killer.

There are many references in this book, that I couldn’t resist but research. The flight of the Prometheus was from Le Bourget to Croydon. Le Bourget airport opened in 1919 and was the only airport to service Paris until the arrival of Orly in 1932. It was at le Bourget that Nureyev defected to the West; and Hitler made his only tour of Paris from le Bourget airport. It closed its doors to international traffic in 1977, but it is still used for domestic and international business aviation. It is also the home of the Paris Air Show. Croydon Airport, on the other hand, opened in 1920 and was the main airport for London at the time. It was the commercial home for Imperial Airways who operated from 1924 to 1939, and it remained in use until 1959.

Several of the passengers on board had been to visit either Juan les Pins or Le Pinet. The former is a well-known resort on the French Riviera; the second a small town near Beziers, not far from the French coast. When Mr Clancy was being pestered by the wasp on the plane, he was working out a plot concerning the 19:55 train at Tzaribrod. Christie is playing a little game with us there, as Tzaribrod also featured in Murder on the Orient Express, and no doubt she too had to investigate its train timetables. Modern day Dimitrovgrad, it’s on the extreme edge of modern day Serbia near its border with Bulgaria (and would indeed be taken over by Bulgaria for three years during the second world war).

Christie gives us the home addresses of all on board the plane, so naturally I have checked to see how many of them are real places. Madame Giselle lived at 3 rue Joliette in Paris; there are two rue Joliettes in France but neither of them is in Paris. Dr Bryant lives at 329 Harley Street; the street of course exists, but in real life only goes up to number 125. Lady Horbury lives at Horbury Chase, Sussex; the village of Horbury exists, but it’s in Yorkshire, near Wakefield. She also has an address at 315 Grosvenor Square, but Grosvenor Square maxes out at number 50. Venetia Kerr is said also to live in Horbury Chase. Norman Gale lives at 14 Shepherd’s Avenue, Muswell Hill; there are plenty of avenues in Muswell Hill – Kings, Queens, Princes and Dukes but no Shepherds. Jane Grey lives at 10 Harrogate Street, NW5, and works at Antoine’s in Bruton Street, which is also the location for Mrs Dacres’ posh shop in Three Act Tragedy – Christie obviously liked the area. NW5 is the Tufnell Park area of London, but there’s no Harrogate Street. Mitchell lives at 11, Shoeblack Lane, Wandsworth (a good old working-class type name for that address) but sadly it doesn’t exist. Mr Clancy lives at 47 Cardington Square; success! This is a real address in Hounslow, just off the Staines Road.

Some other references to grapple with – the Duponts have been excavating in Persia (Iran) at a site not far from Susa. According to Wikipedia, so it must be right, this was an ancient city of the Proto-Elamite, Elamite, First Persian Empire, Seleucid, and Parthian empires of Iran, and one of the most important cities of the Ancient Near East. It is located in the lower Zagros Mountains about 250 km east of the Tigris River, between the Karkheh and Dez Rivers. Mr Clancy’s book that features a blowpipe is The Clue of the Scarlet Petal, but sadly such a book does not exist. In other book news, Mr Ryder possesses a copy of Bootless Cup, which Christie tells us is banned in this country. It also doesn’t exist, but it implies that Ryder is a bit of a lad. Miss Kerr has two Tauchnitz novels. Not a writer, but a publisher – Kipling, Galsworthy, Henry James, all published by Tauchnitz.

Jane won her holiday by entering the Irish Sweep. Properly known as the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake, this was a lottery game based in Ireland before the legalisation of lotteries in the UK, but many British people entered it anyway. Winning tickets were assigned to a horse expected to run in one of several horse races, including the Cambridgeshire Handicap, Derby and Grand National. The sweepstake raised money for hospitals and the health service all over Ireland, and the final sweepstake was held in January 1986. Fournier refers to the Stavisky business, when assessing the honesty or otherwise of the Duponts. Alexandre Stavisky was an embezzler whose death caused a political crisis in France in 1934. You can read all about it here.

Jane and Norman speculate on the kind of person that Lady Horbury and Venetia Kerr might be tempted to murder – and come up with an MFH. This didn’t mean anything to me, and it doesn’t really seem to fit in here either. The nearest I can come to understanding this is Master of Foxhounds. I suppose that might be correct…. Unless you know different!

As usual, I’ve converted any significant financial sums into what their equivalent would be today – just to get a better feel for the amounts involved. The sum of £100 is mentioned twice – it’s the amount that Jane won on the Irish Sweep, and also the amount she is offered by the hound at the Daily Howl for an interview. Today the equivalent would be a little under £5000. When Poirot gets Gale to pretend to be a blackmailer and call on Lady Horbury, he tells him to ask for £10,000. You can probably work out that that tidy sum is the equivalent of nearly half a million pounds. Madame Giselle’s estate is valued at between 8 and 9 million francs. Today this is an astronomical figure – somewhere in the region of £600 million. Worth committing murder for?

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Death in the Clouds:

Publication Details: 1935. Pan paperback, 7th impression, published in 1983, priced £1.25. The simple illustration on the front cover shows the wasp-like dart that Poirot finds on the floor. Quite a dull cover, really.

How many pages until the first death: 8. No messing around.

Funny lines out of context: I drew a blank here. Shame!

Memorable characters: Characterisations aren’t really this book’s strong points. However, Jane Grey and Norman Gale appear like the typical Christie sweet young things, and Jane, in particular, is a well-drawn character. Madame Giselle’s maid Elise is also fiery and solid in support.

Christie the Poison expert:
Christie takes the mickey out of herself for the suggestion that the death is caused by the “infamous arrow poison of the South American Indians”. Dr Bryant confirms that would be curare. The second death is caused by hydrocyanic acid, a solution of hydrogen cyanide in water; better known in the detective books as Prussic Acid.

Class/social issues of the time:

Plenty of examples of Christie’s usual bêtes noires; none more so than that strange xenophobia frequently expressed when it comes to characters from overseas. The coroner’s jury that considers the death of Madame Giselle decides to find Poirot guilty of the crime. “”Foreigners,” said the eyes of the square-faced man, ”you can’t trust foreigners, even if they are hand in glove with the police””. The verdict rather pleases Poirot: “”Mais oui! As I came out I heard one man say to the other, “that little foreigner – mark my words, he done it!” The jury thought the same.” Jane was uncertain whether to condole or laugh. She decided on the latter. Poirot laughed in sympathy.” Later, when Poirot is questioning Mitchell, his wife adds her twopenny worth. “I tell him not to bother his head so. Who’s to know what reason foreigners have for murdering each other; and if you ask me, I think it’s a dirty trick to have done it in a British aeroplane.” Christie adds – as if we couldn’t imagine it ourselves – “She finished her sentence with an indignant and patriotic snort.”

M. Zeropoulos, the antiques dealer, on the other hand, offers quite a low opinion of Americans. “An American – unmistakably an American. Not the best type of American either – the kind that knows nothing about anything and just wants a curio to take home. He is of the type that makes the fortune of bead sellers in Egypt – that buys the most preposterous scarabs ever made in Czecho-Slovakia […] He asks the price and I tell him. It is my American price, not quite as high as formerly (alas, they have had the depression over there). I wait for him to bargain but straightaway he pays my price. I am stupefied. It is a pity; I might have asked for more!”

In some more purely racist moments, at Antoine’s, Jane’s friend Gladys uses the pejorative slang term “Ikey” to refer to their Jewish boss. And when Norman and Jane are finding out about each other on an early date, they discover that they have a mutual dislike of “negroes” (along with loud voices and noisy restaurants) – and there’s no sense of embarrassment or discomfort at this revelation. That’s quite a hard one to take nowadays.

The French also come in for their fair share of the disapprobation. When Jane is engaged in conversation with Jean Dupont she tells herself “he’s French, though. You’ve got to look out with the French, they always say so.”

There are also observations about class; one is almost the reverse of the anti-French sentiment, where a character (Mr Clancy’s housekeeper) is belittled by Christie in a rather Dickensian way, poking fun of her language; she announces Hercule Poirot as “Mr Air Kule Prott”. On another occasion, Christie returns to a subject she’s tackled before, that certain members of the lower classes (that would be her terminology) are intimidated by the police. “Fournier was much excited, though distinctly irate with Elise. Poirot argued the point. “It is natural – very natural. The police? It is always a word frightening to that class. It embroils them in they know not what.””

The 1930s were not a time of great financial security. As Zeropoulos noted, “they have had the depression” in America. One of Christie’s more unusual observations on the world around her comes with Cicely Horbury’s conversation with Poirot about the family finances. “”You have a generous heart, Madame; and besides, you will be safe – oh, so safe – and your husband he will pay you an income.” “Not a very large one”. “Eh bien, once you are free you will marry a millionaire”. “There aren’t any nowadays.” “Ah, do not believe that, Madame. The man who had three millions perhaps now he has two millions – eh bien, it is still enough.””

One last and maybe surprising issue of the day: “Nowadays, we have discovered the beneficial action of the sun on the skin,” notes Poirot. “It is very convenient, that.” People were starting to cover up less in public, even if this was rather shocking to some older fuddy-duddies.

Classic denouement: Yes, although there are a limited number of people present, so unless the murderer is going to be unveiled in absentia – no reason why that can’t be done – Christie has done some narrowing down for us in advance. Once again, there is no indication as to the identity of the murderer in advance. It’s a beautifully written finale to the book and you want to savour every moment of it, as the murderer goes through various self-assured, then anxious phases before Poirot makes his final pronouncement.

Happy ending? Yes. There’s almost a Shakespearian getting together of couples; nothing certain though, Poirot is merely content to have created the possibilities that various people might hit it off. He’s distinctly playing the matchmaker.

Did the story ring true? Absolutely. I can easily imagine how the murder could have been achieved in the way Christie suggests, and the general plot progression all makes perfect sense. It’s a first-class book.

Overall satisfaction rating: Even allowing for a couple of unfortunate, non-PC, racist comments, I still can’t see a reason not to give this a 10/10. Christie achieves a truly fluid and entertaining writing style in this book, and Poirot has never been so manipulative.

Thanks for reading my blog of Death in the Clouds and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Sequentially, Christie’s next book is The ABC Murders but I’ve already read and written about that here, as it was one of the first three of her books that I read when I were a nipper. So next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge will be Murder in Mesopotamia, featuring Hercule Poirot in among the ruins of Christie’s beloved Middle East archaeological digs. As always, I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Three Act Tragedy (1935)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which we meet dashing actor Sir Charles Cartwright, who falls for the lovely young Miss Hermione Lytton Gore (known, bizarrely, as Egg) and together they amateur sleuth their way through a series of deaths, aided by the redoubtable Mr Satterthwaite and one Hercule Poirot. Whilst the amateur detectives make many useful discoveries it is of course Poirot who finally discovers the reason for the death of an apparently harmless old clergyman and identifies the killer of a respected doctor. And if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to tell you whodunit!

Christie dedicated the book to “My friends, Geoffrey and Violet Shipston”. Unfortunately she doesn’t mention the Shipstons in her autobiography so I can’t tell you anything else about them! The book was originally published in the US in magazine format in the Saturday Evening Post during June and July 1934 under the title Murder in Three Acts; in novel format, again in the US, it first appeared later in 1934 under the same name. Christie’s British audience had to wait until January 1935 for it to be published as Three Act Tragedy – I have kept with that year in my title, as I am British! Interestingly this is one of two Christie novels where there are some significant differences between the British and American editions; the American version ascribes a different motive for the killer from that in the British version.

When I came to re-read this book I couldn’t remember any details of it at all, but as it progressed, elements of it started to come back. For whatever reason, this isn’t a book that stays in your mind very long, even though it’s very enjoyable, amusingly written, with some interesting characters and a “three act” structure all of its own. Halfway through I made a stab at remembering whodunit – and it turned out, I was right. To be honest, I don’t think it’s that difficult to work out. Christie is, as usual, very cunning with this structure, in that some vital pieces of information are withheld from the reader, that would make it much more obvious to work out the identity of the criminal. If you’re sleuthing this one, have a think much more about what you’re not being told than what you are being told! She never lies to the reader – but she is economical with the truth.

Christie takes the opportunity to flesh out the characters of Poirot and Satterthwaite, so that we understand them a little more. This is only our second meeting with Satterthwaite (after The Mysterious Mr Quin five years earlier) – and we won’t get to meet him again until he appears in a short story, The Harlequin Tea Set, which wasn’t published in the UK until 1991 – so it’ll be a long time before I get around to reading that one.

My memory of Satterthwaite is that Christie implied from his great understanding of women that he was perhaps a little effeminate. That’s not the case in this book, where she describes him as “a manly man”. For the first time, we get to visit him at home: “Mr Satterthwaite’s house was on Chelsea Embankment. It was a large house, and contained many beautiful works of art. There were pictures, sculpture, Chinese porcelain, prehistoric pottery, ivories, miniatures and much genuine Chippendale and Hepplewhite furniture. It had an atmosphere about it of mellowness and understanding.” This very much emphasises his artistic and refined character and is exactly what we would expect.

In his conversation with Lady Mary, ostensibly to question her about her knowledge of the Babbingtons, he gets sidetracked with talk of love, being a hopeless old romantic. We discover a little more about his one love affair: “he told her about the Girl, and how pretty she was, and of how they had gone together to see the bluebells at Kew. He had meant to propose to her that day. He had imagined (so he put it) that she reciprocated his sentiments. And then, as they were standing looking at the bluebells, she had confided in him… He had discovered that she loved another. And he had hidden the thoughts surging in his breast and had taken up the role of the faithful Friend. It was not, perhaps, a very full-blooded romance, but it sounded well in the dim-faded chintz of Lady Mary’s drawing-room.”

There’s also an implication that Satterthwaite and Poirot are old acquaintances. When Satterthwaite spots Poirot at Sir Charles’ dinner party, “Mr Satterthwaite had recalled himself to M. Hercule Poirot’s memory. The little man had been very affable. Mr Satterthwaite suspected him of deliberately exaggerating his foreign mannerisms. His small twinkly eyes seemed to say, “You expect me to be the buffoon? To play the comedy for you? Bien – it shall be as you wish!”” But there is no reference in the earlier works to Satterthwaite and Poirot ever having met. Poirot is not mentioned in The Mysterious Mr Quin, for example.

But he’s right about Poirot’s speech mannerisms, that they are sometimes an affectation. At the end of the book he confronts Poirot on the subject: “I will explain. It is true that I can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But, my friend, to speak the broken English is an enormous asset. It leads people to despise you. They say – a foreigner – he can’t even speak English properly. It is not my policy to terrify people – instead I invite their gentle ridicule. Also I boast! An Englishman he says often, “A fellow who thinks as much of himself as that cannot be worth much.” That is the English point of view. It is not at all true. And so, you see, I put people off their guard. Besides,” he added, “it has become a habit.” So Poirot admits that many of his more bizarre affectations are assumed in order to play up to the traditional image of the little-Englander. The typical Brit would have a degree of xenophobia as part of his make up; Poirot uses it to his own advantage.

Although it had only been less than a year since Poirot’s previous appearance in a Christie novel (Murder on the Orient Express), we found out precious little extra about the Belgian detective in that book, and consequently are treated to a quick re-introduction to his back story, as we would call it today, and his attitudes and aspirations. Mr Satterthwaite gets him to reveal: “as a boy, I was poor. There were many of us. We had to get on in the world I entered the Police Force. I worked hard Slowly I rose in that Force. I began to make a name for myself. I made a name for myself. I began to acquire an international reputation. At last, I was due to retire. There came the War. I was injured. I came, a sad and weary refugee, to England. A kind lady gave me hospitality. She died – not naturally; no, she was killed. Eh bien, I set my wits to work. I employed my little grey cells. I discovered her murderer. I found that I was not yet finished. No, indeed, my powers were stronger than ever. Then began my second career, that of a private inquiry agent in England. I have solved many fascinating and baffling problems. Ah, monsieur, I have lived! The psychology of human nature, it is wonderful. I grew rich. Some day, I said to myself, I will have all the money I need, I will realise all my dreams […] My friend, beware of the day when your dreams come true.” This little piece of Poirot history is a potted version of The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

At one point, to highlight the difference between Poirot and Sir Charles, Christie refers to the detective as “the little bourgeois”; which I suppose is an accurate description, although I’m not sure if it would still have carried the same pejorative overtones that it does today. Sir Charles is a very well drawn character, but often comes across as self-indulgent and lacking grace. I doubt whether Poirot would have appreciated his calling him “Moustachios”; but then again, he might have taken it as a bizarre compliment. Sometimes it’s hard to see what Egg sees in Charles. There’s a moment where Satterthwaite was about to talk about a previous occasion where he was investigating crime: “once when my car broke down and I was staying at lonely inn –“ only to be interrupted by Sir Charles reminiscing in a high clear voice about when he was touring in 1921. Presumably Satterthwaite was going to tell the story of At the Bells and Motley. His story is left hanging in mid-air.

Poirot often has an interesting outlook on crime, or a philosophy that he likes to share. In this book, he has an observation on crime statistics between married couples. Egg is annoyed that Poirot could even contemplate that Mrs Babbington might have been involved in the murder of her husband: “”But they were devoted to each other,” cried Egg indignantly. “You don’t understand a bit.” Poirot smiled kindly at her. “No. That is valuable. You know, but I do not. I see the facts unbiased by any preconceived notions. And let me tell you something, mademoiselle – in the course of my experience I have known five cases of wives murdered by devoted husbands, and twenty-two of husbands murdered by devoted wives. Les femmes, they obviously keep up appearances better.” “I think you’re perfectly horrid,” said Egg.”

There are a few references to check out. The playwright Miss Wills had previously written One-Way Traffic, which brought her success and esteem. It’s a great name for a play but it doesn’t appear to exist in real life. However, her next play, that will star Miss Sutcliffe, is The Little Dog Laughed. This was to be the name of a play by Douglas Carter Beane that first appeared in the West End in 2006. When Mr Satterthwaite judges Sir Charles to be acting the role of detective, he sees him as Aristide Duval. As I was reading the book, I thought Duval was a genuine fictional detective from a contemporary writer – but no, he’s a creation of Christie’s. It would be a great name for a detective!

There’s a poetry quote: “Of more than twice her years, Seam’d with an ancient swordcut on the cheek, And bruised and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes And loved him, with that love which was her doom.” Its source? The clue is in the chapter title, “A Modern Elaine”. It’s from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and describes Elaine’s love for the older Lancelot. Satterthwaite is being ironic about Egg though: “Egg […] did not look at all likely to perish of love and drift about rivers on a barge. There was nothing of the lily maid of Astolat about her.”

Superintendent Crossfield is a little star-struck when he first meets Sir Charles, as he had seen him play Lord Aintree’s Dilemma at the Pall Mall Theatre. No such play – although it’s a perfect Wildean/Shavian title – and no such theatre either. Captain Dacres takes Egg to the Seventy-Two Club; again it’s an invention of Christie, although it sounds rather swish. At one stage Sir Charles is described as resembling Lord Eaglemount, scornfully looking at his solicitor. He was a character in The Hermit in London published 1819, so even when this book was written that strikes me as being a rather obscure allusion. However, the mongoose who likes to find out, to whom Miss Wills is likened, is clearly children’s favourite Rikki Tikki Tavi, written by Rudyard Kipling in 1893 as part of The Jungle Book.

Much of the action of the book takes place in Loomouth, in Cornwall (although I believe in Nemesis it’s situated just twelve miles from St Mary Mead, which would put it in Kent or Sussex). Loomouth, of course, doesn’t exist, but there is Looe in Cornwall, fifty miles from Falmouth, so the imagination sets that part of the story on the south Cornish coast. Melfort Abbey in Yorkshire is said to be site of Bartholomew Strange’s sanatorium, and is where the second dinner party is held; Melfort is a village in Argyll and Bute, so one can only presume this is another Christie invention. The Babbingtons originally lived in Gilling, in Kent, and Egg visits Mrs Milray there. In real life there are the villages of Gilling West and Gilling East in Yorkshire, but I am sure Christie’s Kentish Gilling is based on Gillingham, even if the directions she gives won’t take you there.

When Superintendent Crossman gives Sir Charles the names and addresses of the party guests, they all have their addresses provided. Lord and Lady Eden live at 187 Cadogan Square (in real life the numbers don’t go that high); Sir Jocelyn and Lady Campbell live at 1256 Harley Street (ditto); Angela Sutcliffe at 28 Cantrell Mansions (does not exist); Captain and Mrs Dacres at 3, St John’s House (ditto); and Miss Muriel Wills at 5 Upper Cathcart Road, Tooting (tritto). Mrs Dacres’ posh shop is located in Bruton Street, which does exist, and you could probably imagine a well-to-do couturier establishment in the locale.

Regular readers will know I like to convert any significant financial sums into what their equivalent would be today – just to get a better feel for the amounts involved. There are only a few mentioned in this book, and they’re all relatively small. The largest, £1,000, the amount that Ellis, the missing butler, is seeking as part of his blackmail scam, today would equal just under £50,000. The average price of a dress at Mrs Dacres’ posh shop (£50-60) would set Egg back £2500-£3000. That was never going to happen, especially as her entire wealth was assessed at £15 12/-, or in today’s language, about £775.

Oliver Manders arrives unexpectedly at Sir Bartholomew’s dinner party because he has a car accident outside his house. Flashback to Frankie having a car accident outside Bassington-ffrench’s house in Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Frankie’s accident was fake; Oliver’s probably was too. I hope Christie doesn’t play this accident card too often….

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Three Act Tragedy:

Publication Details: 1935. Fontana paperback, 8th impression, published in August 1971, priced 25p. Tom Adams’ deceptively attractive cover illustration takes a garden setting, with a yellow flower (I presume a dying nicotiana) propped up in a wine glass, with its thorns showing. It’s a picture that gets less and less bucolically romantic the longer you look at it.

How many pages until the first death: 13. It doesn’t take long for this enjoyable story to really get going.

Funny lines out of context: A little bit more luck here than in recent books.

“I like men to have affairs,” said Egg. “It shows they’re not queer or anything.”

When Poirot is building a house from a pack of cards: “Egg looked more closely at the erection on the table. She laughed.”

Memorable characters: Christie gives us a few smart one-liners that quickly paint a strong picture of a character.

Sir Charles, describing his secretary/housekeeper Miss Milray: “She says she’s got an invalid mother. Personally I don’t believe it. That kind of woman never had a mother at all. Spontaneously generated from a dynamo.”

Egg, with Mrs Dacres, discussing a suitable selection of dresses for her to buy: “”I simply adore dressing a young girl. It’s so important that girls shouldn’t look raw – if you know what I mean.” “Nothing raw about you,” thought Egg, ungratefully. “Cooked to a turn, you are.””

Sir Charles is very well described, with his pompous ways and his theatrical styles; Egg is a little like Christie’s other bright young things, except she’s not quite a bright nor as independent. She doesn’t have the derring-do of Tuppence, or Bundle, and she resents Poirot quite strikingly, primarily because she thinks he is going to get in the way of her and Sir Charles Getting it Together.

Christie is on record saying how much of a favourite character Mr Satterthwaite was; and it shows, by the strong part he plays in this story.

Christie the Poison expert:

Nicotine poisoning is the method of choice for this murderer, and there are few observations where people wonder if the victims might have been heavy smokers. But it’s also pointed out that it is used in sprays for roses – Mrs Babbington uses it – and it’s an odourless liquid. When Poirot is hosting his sherry party he points out that the glasses used by Sir Charles and Sir Bartholomew are heavy cut crystal, which means it is easier to hide a small amount of colourless liquid. Oddly, Tom Adams’ cover depicts a plain glass with no lead cut design.

There’s also a dramatic suggestion that someone might have jabbed Mr Babbington with a hypodermic containing the arrow poison of the South American Indians; but that’s just Mr Satterthwaite teasing Egg.

Class/social issues of the time:

There aren’t very many observations of this type in this book. Satterthwaite can’t quite put his finger on what it is about Oliver Manders that is “different”, until Egg describes him as a “slippery Shylock”; then “”of course,” thought Mr Satterthwaite, “that’s it – not foreign – Jew!”” But Manders is, on the whole, portrayed in a kindly light in this book, so, for its era, I would not say there’s any element of anti-Semitism in it. However, when Poirot contradicts Satterthwaite about Egg’s emotions and aspirations, he gets surprisingly annoyed, and a little xenophobia comes out. Poirot starts this conversation: “”I wonder now,” he said. “I do not quite understand – “ Mr. Satterthwaite interrupted. “You do not understand the modern English girl? Well, that is not surprising. I do not always understand them myself. A girl like Miss Lytton Gore – “ In his turn Poirot interrupted. “Pardon. You have misunderstood me. I understand Mss Lytton Gore very well. I have met such another – many such others. You call the type modern; but it is – how shall I say? – age-long.” Mr Satterthwaite was slightly annoyed. He felt that he – and only he – understood Egg. This preposterous foreigner knew nothing about young English womanhood.”

There’s an enjoyable scene where Beatrice, Sir Bartholomew’s Upper Housemaid, is questioned by Sir Charles and Mr Satterthwaite, which strongly brings out the class-consciousness of the servant. Beatrice talks fondly of Miss Sutcliffe, and particularly so of Lady Mary, and of Egg; less so of Mrs Dacres, and she visibly stiffens when asked about Miss Wills. When pressed, she admits: “”well, she wasn’t quite the “class” of the others, sir. She couldn’t help it, I know,” went on Beatrice kindly. “But she did things a real lady wouldn’t have done. She pried, if you know what I mean, sir, poked and pried about.””

There are a couple of impassioned speeches about the Church; first by Egg: “You see Mr Satterthwaite, I really believe in Christianity – not like Mother does, with little books and early service, and things – but intelligently and as a matter of history. The Church is all clotted up with the Pauline tradition – in fact the Church is a mess – but Christianity itself is all right. That’s why I can’t be a communist like Oliver. In practice our beliefs would work out much the same, things in common and ownership by all, but the difference – well, I needn’t go into that.” Later by Manders, as recounted by Lady Mary: “”Oliver made a rather ill-bred attack on Christianity. Mr Babbington was very patient and courteous with him. That only seemed to make Oliver worse. He said, “All you religious people look down your noses because my father and mother weren’t married. I suppose you’d call me the child of sin. Well, I admire people who have the courage of their convictions and don’t care what a lot of hypocrites and parsons think.” Mr Babbington didn’t answer, but Oliver went on: “You won’t answer that. It’s ecclesiasticism and superstition that’s got the whole world into the mess its’s in. I’d like to sweep away the churches all over the world.” Mr Babbington smiled and said, “And the clergy, too?” I think it was his smile that annoyed Oliver. He felt he was not being taken seriously. He said, “I hate everything the Church stands for. Smugness, security and hypocrisy. Get rid of the whole canting tribe, I say!” Manders’ feeling as though he is not being taken seriously is not that different from Bobby’s relationship with his vicar father in Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Manders’ self-consciousness about being the child of unmarried parents also reflects on the mores of the time.

Classic denouement: Yes indeed. Unusually, perhaps, there is no indication of who the murderer is before Poirot’s final chapter, so the surprise (if it is a surprise) comes even more compact and controlled than usual. But it’s a delightfully dramatic end to the story.

Happy ending? Surprisingly difficult to judge. On the one hand, justice is seen to be done. On the other, one person is left shocked by the actions of someone they thought they knew very well indeed. Any future relationship this person has – and the text implies that it is possible – will have a lot of problems to overcome.

Did the story ring true? On the whole, yes, but with some reservations. On a practical level, if Miss Sutcliffe is opening in Miss Wills’ new play in the next few days, it is very unlikely that they would have had the time to attend Poirot’s sherry party. Whilst one can accept the explanation of the whole Ellis the butler and his disappearance mystery, again on a practical level one wonders how realistic it really is. That aside, the book is relatively credible for Christie!

Overall satisfaction rating: 9/10. Even though I guessed whodunit and there are a few ragged edges to this book, I found it a very entertaining and exciting read, and found the second half of it un-put-downable. And you can’t ask for more than that.

Thanks for reading my blog of Three Act Tragedy and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge, we have another Hercule Poirot novel with Death in the Clouds. If I remember rightly, a lot of this takes place on an aeroplane, which I would imagine would have had its own charm and excitement back in 1935. I have a feeling I will quickly remember whodunit, although at the moment I can’t recall any other aspect of the story. As always, I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Parker Pyne Investigates (1934)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which we meet a new Christie creation, Parker Pyne, placer of advertisements in newspapers seeking clients who are unhappy, in the promise of making them happy again. In the first six stories we see him at work in London; in the second he’s on holiday in Europe and the Middle East but clients keep throwing themselves at him. As always, you can read this blog without discovering any of the whodunits in all the stories!

The publication of this collection is a little unusual in that the original magazine editions – or at least those that can be traced – were published in the US before they appeared in the UK. The first six were published in Cosmopolitan in America in August 1932 (UK – October/ November 1932) and the second six in America in April 1933 (UK – June/July 1933). No magazine printing of The Case of the Middle-aged Wife has yet been traced in either country. The collection was published by Collins in book form in the UK in November 1934, and in the US a few weeks later under the title Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective. As an aside, I notice it’s just the shortest book of Christie’s that I’ve re-read so far – 158 pages (just beating The Big Four, which has 159.)

The Case of the Middle-aged Wife

So welcome, James Parker Pyne. This is how Christie describes him in this first story: “he was large, not to say fat; he had a bald head of noble proportions, strong glasses and little twinkling eyes.” I instantly envisaged him as Dangermouse’s sidekick, Penfold, but they are very dissimilar characters. He brings happiness – in which light I also saw him as a kind of Harley Quin character, although he’s not remotely ethereal, he’s very real. He’s a statistician – he can’t resist relying on his previous work experience to analyse the likely outcome of any situation. This is his first case – or at least the first we know about, his practice is obviously very well established and he’s probably been doing this work for a few years now. In The Case of the Discontented Soldier he reveals that his house, Whitefriars, has been “the scene of eleven exciting dramas”, so that’s at least eleven previous cases.

In this first story, Mr Packington has been spending his time and his money on treating and looking after a sweet young thing from the office and has been ignoring Mrs Packington as a result. Mrs Packington, unsurprisingly miffed, consults Mr PP, who arranges her to be pampered and pandered to by a handsome gigolo so that she regains her youth and self-esteem, and Mr Packington begins to get jealous. You can guess how this ends. Mr PP only has one failure in this book – and it’s not this one! It’s a very enjoyable story, with Parker Pyne as a distant mastermind, almost playing chess with his cast of characters as the pieces, securing the marriage of the Packingtons as his prize, whilst no doubt enjoying a tidy profit.

There’s a number of references to be checked out. Parker Pyne’s office is at 17 Richmond Street. There is a Richmond Street in London; however, it’s a residential address in Plaistow and I just don’t get the feeling that this is where PP would operate! Claude, the gigolo, takes Mrs Packington to the Lesser Archangel and Red Admiral nightclubs – the Red Admiral features in The Case of the Distressed Lady too – but again I think they’re Christie inventions. There is an Archangel nightclub in Kensington – would probably be the right part of town too – but I doubt it’s the same. I loved the reference to “Mrs Hattie West, the Californian Cucumber King’s wife”, but sadly I don’t think she was real.

As we will see during the stories, Parker Pyne asks different fees from different people according to the job and their circumstance. In this case he asks for 200 guineas up front. That’s a lot of money – the equivalent of around £10,500 today.

I was surprised to read that Mr Packington takes the 8:45 train into London. That strikes me as being very late. I wonder if offices generally opened later in the morning than they do today? It’s true that when I worked at the Arts Council in 1983, work started at 9:30am. I remember getting there five minutes early one day – and it was like the Marie Celeste.

Amongst Parker Pyne’s staff there lurks one Miss Lemon! The very same secretary who would go on to work for Hercule Poirot. Here we see her in her younger days, “a forbidding-looking young woman with spectacles”. Christie has her working for Poirot as early as in 1935, in the short story How Does Your Garden Grow, which would not appear in book format in the UK until 1974’s Poirot’s Early Cases. As far as Christie’s UK novel-reading public were concerned, they would next meet her in The Labours of Hercules, published in 1947. She isn’t the only character that would appear in this book, only to crop up as part of Poirot’s world in later years.

The Case of the Discontented Soldier

Major Charles Wilbraham has retired from serving the Empire in East Africa, and is now back in England and bored; desperate for an adventure. He consults Parker Pyne and adventure comes his way, although he never associates PP with what actually happens to him. It’s a very amusing set-up and works very well, with a few delightful turns of phrase, although there are a couple of unfortunate non-PC references to overcome, more of which shortly…

Parker Pyne’s original solution to the problem was to invite Wilbraham to take a gorgeous lady out for lunch, but she terrifies him, so that doesn’t work. However, the lady informs PP of the kind of girl the Major really goes for, and so can successfully introduce her to him by means of this extravagant adventure. But PP’s brain can’t quite create those stories, so he consults a novelist – enter Mrs Ariadne Oliver. Mrs Oliver is another character who reappears in the Poirot books, sporadically over many years; readers would next encounter her in Cards on the Table a couple of years later. Christie would admit, in a 1956 interview, that “the character of Ariadne Oliver does have a strong dash of myself.” In this story, she is said to have written “forty-six successful works of fiction, all best sellers in England and America, and freely translated into French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese and Abyssinian.” As far as published books are concerned, by that stage Christie had only written twenty-four such books, but no doubt she was ambitious! I admired the fact that Mrs Oliver responded to PP’s remit by including something translated into Swahili that only the Major would understand – an excellent example of how Parker Pyne tailors his solutions individually to his clients. And whereas today Mrs Oliver would have found her translation by using Google Translate, she actually used Delfridge’s Information Bureau. No doubt this was meant to suggest Selfridge’s. The only Delfridges I can find is a watch and clock manufacturer in Birmingham.

There’s a slightly laborious introduction to the story, where PP’s advert, his promotional spiel and Christie’s description of him are all repeated, verbatim, from the first story. However, this is the first of the stories known to have been originally published in a magazine; and without revision, these descriptions were simply repeated.

As for the non-PC elements, the adventure requires Wilbraham discovering (or he had hoped to) a cache of ivory: “elephants, you know. There’s a law about the number you’re allowed to shoot. Some hunter got away with breaking that law on a grand scale. They were on his trail and he cached the stuff. There’s a thundering lot of it – and this gives fairly clear directions how to find it […] quite a nice little fortune for you.” So our hero is celebrating making a lot of money from finding ivory that had been obtained illegally – that’s quite uncomfortable these days. Perhaps more predictably, the two thugs that are Wilbraham discovers attacking Freda are described as “two enormous Negroes”, and there’s a detailed description of the fight where Wilbraham sends them “reeling backwards” by “a violent punch on the jaw”. Later Mrs Oliver, when working out the expenses for the whole charade, describes them as “two darkies” who “wanted very little” for their effort. Yes, even then, they were putting a positive spin on discrimination by having the black characters earn less than the white ones.

Parker Pyne only asks Major Wilbraham for £50 payment for this job, that’s £2500 today. Given that he lives happily ever after as a result, that’s got to be a bargain.

The Case of the Distressed Lady

Mrs Daphne St John arrives at Parker Pyne’s office with a great problem – she has stolen an expensive diamond but needs to give it back but cannot find a way of doing so without making the situation worse, and losing friendships into the bargain. PP, of course, has a solution, involving presenting two members of his entourage as a pair of exhibition dancers at a party, where they would replace the diamond. But can you imagine an Agatha Christie story being as straightforward as that?

Not too much to examine in this story. Mrs St John talks about Parker Pyne’s advertisement as being “probably just a ramp”; I’d never come across that word in that context before, but it is early 19th century slang for a swindle or a fraudulent action. You live and learn! She also refers to a game played at the Le Touquet casino: “chemmy”, which perplexed me at first (as I pronounced it my mind with a hard “ch”) but of course is slang for chemin de fer, or baccarat. The last line of the book refers to a gentleman selling Dismal Desmonds. Never heard of those – but that was the name of a cartoon film series that first started in 1926, and so presumably the gentleman was selling Dismal Desmond toys – a lugubrious looking dog rather like the more famous Droopy but not so distinguished.

The stolen diamond was valued at £2000, which in today’s value would be £100,000. A pretty penny indeed.

That’s three stories in so far, each one keeping back a nice twist, and each a satisfying read. I must say I am very much enjoying this book!

The Case of the Discontented Husband

This story has the hallmarks of The Case of the Middle-Aged Wife, Mark II. A similar set up has Mr Wade, the discontented husband, coming to Parker Pyne for advice, and he suggests a dalliance with his very own Miss de Sara will make Mrs Wade jealous and come to her senses. However, Mr Wade ends up a little more attached to Miss de Sara than PP expected, with its own consequences…

There’s a lot of humour in this story, with some delightfully bitchy exchanges between Miss de Sara and Mrs Wade, and an almost farcical final scene when everything comes crashing down around everyone’s ears. The story also fills out further understanding of the character of Parker Pyne, who has become just a little one-dimensional over the course of the first three stories, enjoyable though they are. He can fail, after all.

Christie’s negative view of divorce, which we have seen in other works, is highlighted here with Mr Wade, self-esteem at an all-time low, nevertheless willing to allow his wife to divorce him if that will make her happy, rather than the other way around, because “a fellow’s so helpless […] one’s got to play the game […] I couldn’t let her be dragged through the divorce court.” Mr Wade’s doubts about entering into an affair, albeit a false one, probably also echo Christie’s own experience of her first husband Archie playing away from home.

An unexpected end, and a funny turn of phrase make this a very enjoyable story.

The Case of the City Clerk

If The Case of the Discontented Husband is The Case of the Middle-Aged Wife, Mark II, then The Case of the City Clerk is The Case of the Discontented Soldier, Mark II. Once again, Parker Pyne is approached by an older man in need of some adventure, just to prove to himself that he can do it and that there’s still life in the old dog yet. But this isn’t of a romantic nature, this is a full-on mystery and intrigue spy job in which PP lets Mr Roberts play his part. This story reminded me in part of the shenanigans involved in The Secret Adversary, and in part of the glamour of Murder on the Orient Express.

The scene setting of this story is very entertaining, if a little hard for the reader to appreciate fully at first. You ask yourself, what on earth is going on here, and then it all falls into place. There are some agreeable turns of phrase: “a pleasant thrill shot down his spine, slightly adulterated by a thrill that was not quite so pleasant”. At the end, Mr Roberts is awarded the Order of St Stanislaus – tenth class with laurels, which adorns the front cover of the book as part of Tom Adams’ illustration. And yes, there really is a St Stanislaus.

Mr Roberts can only afford to pay Parker Pyne £5 for his adventure, but he gets £50 back as a reward. In today’s money that’s £250 out to get £2500 back. Not a bad piece of work.

The Case of the Rich Woman

The rich Mrs Rymer seeks advice from Parker Pyne as to how to spend her money so that she can get the most entertainment out of it. A very strange request, but PP is always up for a challenge…

A strange request, and a strange story. This is the first story in the book that I didn’t enjoy. It has too much of a surreal air, and is just too weird to believe. Even though it still falls under the general heading of “Parker Pyne Makes People Happy”, it just doesn’t fit in. I also found the character of Mrs Rymer distinctly unappealing. Interestingly, this is the only story that was published in the American magazine Cosmopolitan that wasn’t subsequently published in Woman’s Pictorial in the UK.

The story contains a further reference to Mrs Oliver, where Parker Pyne describes her as “the most conventional of all of us”. No doubt that is indeed how Agatha Christie saw herself. When Mrs Rymer wakes up in the strange bedroom, Christie tells us the room had “a deal wash-stand with a jug and basin up on it […] there was a deal chest of drawers and a tin trunk.” I’d never heard of deal in this context. My OED defines it as “a piece of sawn timber (now always fir or pine wood) of standard size; a plank of board of fir or pine; timber in such planks or boards.” It’s a Middle English term; no wonder I hadn’t heard of it! And the £1000 that PP sees fit to charge the rich Mrs Rymer is the equivalent of £50,000 today.

There’s one minor instance of a funny line today that wasn’t a funny line at the time: “”Ah!” The ejaculation was fraught with meaning.”

Have You Got Everything You Want?

The scene changes now from 17 Richmond Street to a travelogue around Europe and the Middle East. At the Gare de Lyon Elsie Jeffries board a train to Stamboul, and encounters fellow traveller Parker Pyne, no doubt enjoying the financial fruit of his labours. Elsie’s husband is on business in Stamboul, but she deciphered some writing on a blotting paper that suggests something weird would happen just before Venice – and riven with curiosity, she asks PP to help in working out what it would be. This story marks a change from Mr Pyne’s usual remit of making people happy, as he starts solving crimes in a more generic, detectively manner.

There’s a very strong Murder on the Orient Express vibe in this story, whose original magazine appearance pre-dated Christie’s famous work. The story itself is quite a good one of the jewel thief genre, but with a nice twist. What is most interesting about it is what it says of the morals of the time. A male character is blackmailed because he spent an innocent night in the same hotel room as a woman as he was giving her shelter as she was trying to escape her abusive husband. Today you’d be praised and lauded for your kindness; at worst you’d be admired as a bit of a lad. In 1934 it was scandal and would have to be suppressed. It’s clear from Parker Pyne’s advice to Elsie that he approves of telling lies within a marriage; it strikes me that this little story has its own system of morality, set apart from the mainstream.

When the story reaches Stamboul, the characters use the Hotel Tokatlian as their base; this shouldn’t come as a surprise, as Christie herself stayed there, and Poirot uses it in Murder on the Orient Express. The Slav lady cries out: “scélérat!” as PP refuses to allow her to leave Elsie’s cabin; I’d never heard this insult before, but it means scoundrel, or villain.

The Gate of Baghdad

Parker Pyne finds himself as one of a small group of people traversing the Syrian Desert from Damascus to Baghdad in a Pullman Motor Coach. The newspapers are full of a story of a financial swindler, Samuel Long, who has escaped justice, and one of the party gradually becomes uncomfortable and talks about not wanting to “go back on a pal”. It turns out that Long is masquerading as one of the travelling party, but which one? Fortunately Mr PP is there to solve the case.

This book contains the first – but not the only – murder of the book, so if you’ve been waiting for one, your time has come! There’s also a bit of non-PC name calling – when one fellow buys some girls some drinks, he gets annoyed when they go off with “some dago”; and on another occasion, a foreign outsider is described as an “Armenian rat”. Christie the Poison expert is on hand, with one of the deaths in the story being caused by Prussic Acid – hydrogen cyanide to give it its modern name.

There are a few interesting references here; the story starts with a quotation from Gates of Damascus by James Elroy Flecker, including the Postern of Fate, which of course is the name Christie gave to the last book she was to write in 1973. Parker Pyne had been staying at the Oriental Hotel in Damascus, which was one of the city’s finest bijou character residences; hopefully one day it will be again. Smethurst offers Pyne some araq – a kind of Persian Pernod – I’ve seen some photos online and it looks lethal. When the coach gets going across the desert they head for Rutbah – a town in present day Iraq – which has had a colourful past and is currently being fought over by Isis and the Iraqi Army.

A very enjoyable little whodunit – but to my disappointment, I guessed who the perpetrator was! Always annoying when you’re right!

The House at Shiraz

Parker Pyne arrives in Kermanshah, where he hears the tale of a Lady Esther Carr and her companion Muriel King, told by the pilot Herr Schlagal. Muriel King died and Lady Carr started living as a recluse. PP decides to pay a visit to Lady Carr, and discovers all is not as it seems to be.

Christie revels in her own Middle East experiences in this story, with many far-flung romantic names bandied about: Tehran, Ispahan, Shiraz; Kermanshah, which I confess I hadn’t heard of, is a city of over 800,000 people in western Iran. PP is there during the Nan Ruz festival, which is the Iranian New Year, five days of public holiday between 20-24 March. Christie clearly doesn’t have a high opinion of the local police officials: “The German pilot had come up and was standing by smiling as Mr Parker Pyne finished answering a long interrogation which he had not understood. “What have I said?” he asked of the German. “That your father’s Christian name is Tourist, that your profession is Charles, that the maiden name of your mother is Baghdad, and that you have come from Harriet.” “Does it matter?” “Not the least in the world. Just answer something; that is all they need.””

When considering the life that Lady Esther leads, Parker Pyne refers to Lady Hester Stanhope. Shamelessly lifted from Wikipedia: “Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope (12 March 1776 – 23 June 1839) was a British socialite, adventurer and traveller. Her archaeological expedition to Ashkelon in 1815 is considered the first modern excavation in the history of Holy Land archaeology.” Doubtless she was a heroine of Christie’s.

An enjoyable little story, with a nice twist; Christie really does use the last-minute twist to its best advantage in this book!

The Pearl of Price

Parker Pyne has now moved on to Petra, in Jordan, along with a motley crew of fellow tourists including a rich American father and daughter, an archaeologist and a British MP, amongst others. The daughter’s priceless earrings have this unfortunate habit of falling off, and one day, one of them falls off for good – but a thorough search of all the suspects shows that no one has secreted it about their person. PP though applies his little grey cells and comes up with a solution.

I make the comparison with Poirot deliberately, because Parker Pyne is beginning to out-Poirot him! The speed with which he sees through the red herrings and applies logic to the puzzle is very rapid – I don’t think Poirot would have solved this crime this rapidly. It’s a good story, with an amusingly surprise ending, although there is one unfortunate non-PC moment, as you will read shortly.

This is one of those short stories where Christie devotes a few minutes to considering the psychology of crime. In this case, whether people are fundamentally honest or not, and whether sudden temptation could make anyone commit a crime – or only people with a generally dishonest behavioural pattern. Parker Pyne believes, under the right circumstances, virtually anyone is capable of a crime: “there’s the breaking point, for instance […] the brain is adjusted to carry so much weight. The thing that precipitates the crisis – that turns an honest man into a dishonest one – may be a mere trifle. That is why most crimes are absurd. The cause, nine times out of ten, is that trifle of overweight – the straw that breaks the camel’s back […] when you think that of ten people you meet, at least nine of them can be induced to act in any way you please by applying the right stimulus.” PP goes on to suggest bullying, and generally suggestible people can be easily manipulated. And he applies that thought when solving this crime.

There are a few geographical references to consider. Most people know Petra, the incredible home of stunning red rock formations in southern Jordan. There are references to the Nabatean people, a cultured people who inhabited Petra, and to Hammurabi, the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, who lived approximately from 1810 BC – 1750 BC. Doctor Carver mentions that he wants to work on a dig in Baluchistan, an ancient region whose land now falls within the countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

And now for that unfortunate, Christie-esque, mid 30s, moment. When the rich American calls on the group’s servants to move his belongings from a cave and into a tent, in order to escape mosquitoes, he calls out: “Say, you n***ers!” Of course, in those days, it was just a word. Nowadays, it’s just not acceptable.

Those priceless earrings of Miss Blundell cost her father $80,000. That’s a helluva lot of money. In today’s terms they’d probably be worth the best part of $1.5million. If that were the case, I really don’t think you’d wear them for a walk around the plateaus of Petra. I’m not one for blaming the victim, but, I mean, come on.

Death on the Nile

Not the famous novel – that would come three years later, but Christie obviously fancied it as a good title. Parker Pyne is taking a cruise on the Nile, on board the SS Fayoum, which, as far as I can ascertain, is purely an invention of Christie’s. The only other passengers on the vessel are Sir George and Lady Grayle, her niece, his secretary, and her nurse. Lady Grayle, a grumpy hypochondriac who makes everyone’s life a misery – maybe a first draft of Mrs Boynton in Appointment With Death – tells Parker Pyne she is convinced her husband is trying to poison her; and sure enough, in due course, she dies. But is her husband really to blame?

A fairly standard story – not at all bad, but nothing exceptional. Christie the Poison Expert comes to the fore with Lady Grayle’s dying with all the expected symptoms of strychnine poisoning, although the possibilities of arsenic and antimony are also discussed with her nurse. True enough, her husband is found to have quantities of strychnine on or about his person, so he must be guilty, right?

In a very nice turn of phrase, Christie sums up everything that’s wrong about the horrendous Lady Grayle: “she had suffered since she was sixteen from the complaint of having too much money.” A few pages later, her nurse Miss MacNaughton remarks: “when I left England with Lady Grayle, she was a straightforward case. In plain language, there was nothing the matter with her. That’s not quite true, perhaps. Too much leisure and too much money do produce a definite pathological condition. Having a few floors to scrub every day and five or six children to look after would have made Lady Grayle a perfectly healthy and a much happier woman.” Not only does she repeat Christie’s own observation of the character, she also gives us an insight into the kind of manual work most women would have had to do at the time – scrubbing floors, and looking after half a dozen children. There probably aren’t many people who have to deal with those two particular problems nowadays.

Parker Pyne initially refuses Lady Grayle’s invitation to consider her case but when she offers him £100 to do so, he can’t resist. Unsurprisingly, as that is the equivalent of £5000 today.

The Oracle at Delphi

Rich widow Mrs Peters and her intellectual son Willard are travelling through Greece – him lapping up the history, her enjoying his enjoyment but secretly hating every minute of it. She declines Willard’s invitation to accompany him on a trip to view some Byzantine mosaics, but is horrified later when he doesn’t come home as expected and she receives a hostage demand for him, in the sum of £10,000. Fortunately, Parker Pyne is also in the environs, as is a reserved British gentleman by name of Mr Thompson. In a really surprising and very cleverly written twist, Willard is returned without any ransom being paid; but you may have to re-read it, to appreciate entirely how this was done!

Whilst her son is being erudite, Mrs Peters settles down to read The River Launch Mystery, which, I am sure it will come as no surprise, is a complete fiction, if you’ll pardon the pun. The ransom demand is written by one Demetrius, the Black Browed, and refers to the Kyria – this means “Lord”. I don’t know whether this particular Demetrius was familiar with his Shakespeare – Demetrius is a character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and in it Puck talks of “black-browed night”. I don’t think there’s any particular further relevance to the ransomer’s pen-name.

That £10,000 Demetrius is demanding – that’s the equivalent of £500,000 today. No wonder Mrs Peters was worried.

And those are the twelve stories that make up Parker Pyne Investigates! It’s a very enjoyable read and I’m happy to give it an 8/10 which is a very good score for a book of short stories. It’s written so that you can almost take it as a novel, which certainly helps. We don’t meet Mr Pyne again, apart from in the two short stories, Problem at Pollensa Bay and The Regatta Mystery, neither of which were published in the UK in book form until 1991, so it will be a good while before I get around to writing about those!

With the next book in the Agatha Christie Challenge, it’s back to the novel format; and a welcome return to Hercule Poirot for the first of a series of nine books each featuring the famous Belgian detective. It’s Three Act Tragedy, and I can’t remember a thing about it, except that the book is divided into three parts, each one an “act” of the “tragedy”. If you’d like to read it too, I’ll blog about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meanwhile, happy sleuthing and keep on Christie-ing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!