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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!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (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 Bobby Jones discovers a man who has fallen from a cliff and who asks Why didn’t they ask Evans? before he promptly dies; a tragic accident perhaps, but when someone tries to poison Jones and he almost dies, he reckons there’s more to this than meets the eye. Together with his friend Lady Frances Derwent – better known as Frankie – they uncover the real identity of the dead man, and why he might have been killed – and – eventually – who is Evans! And if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to divulge any of its extraordinary secrets!

The book is dedicated to “Christopher Mallock in memory of Hinds”. Apparently, the Mallock family were friends of Christie’s from the years before her first marriage, although they aren’t mentioned by her in her autobiography. And no one seems to know a thing about what Hinds might have been. Maybe they had a liaison in the local jewellers! The book was published in the United States under the title The Boomerang Clue – which is a bit odd, as I can’t remember a boomerang featuring in it!

This is a rip-roaring, jolly old read, featuring two splendid young things in the best Christie Tommy and Tuppence/ Secret of Chimneys tradition, although with just perhaps a hint more decent characterisation. You really do get to know Bobby and Frankie very well during the course of the book, and understand their motivations, their strengths and their weaknesses in a way that’s hardly suggested at all in the earlier books. It’s as though Christie is maturing in her writing ability but unwilling to let go of a previously winning formula. So I see this as a distinct turning point away from the flippancy of the earlier novels as she launches a run of some big hitters very soon. Three Act Tragedy, Death in the Clouds, The ABC Murders, Murder in Mesopotamia, Cards on the Table, and Death on the Nile would all be hitting the bookshops in the next three years. In fact, the best part of the next decade would be dominated by the egg-shaped head of M. Hercule Poirot.

It’s written in the third person, and Christie employs the tactic of writing very short chapters to help it be the fast-paced page-turner that it is. 35 chapters cover just 184 pages, which averages out at just 5.25 pages per chapter. With those constantly changing scenes, protagonists, story threads and what have yous, it’s no wonder that it bounds along at a breathless pace. About halfway through the book the reader realises that so many of the elements of the book have come together and that you’re racing through the plot at a thoroughly enjoyable rate of knots. On the downside, the element of chance in this book is enormous. There are so many lucky coincidences and some extraordinarily far-fetched events that it is almost impossible to take it seriously, even as a Christie yarn. This is very much a light-relief book, and not one to get your sharp detective brain working hard.

There’s a rather sloppy piece of repetition early in the book – so we can’t blame that on Christie getting carried away with its pace. It’s when Bobby is reflecting on what an old fuddy-duddy his father is: “nobody over fifty has got any sense – they worry themselves to death about tuppenny-ha’penny things that don’t matter.” Now that’s a perfectly credible thing for Bobby to have said to himself. But only two pages later, when Bobby is explaining to his father about how he has found the body by the cliffs, and his father criticises him for being too light-hearted about it, he says again to himself: “but what could you expect? Nobody over fifty understood anything at all. They had the most extraordinary ideas.” Either Christie was trying to over-emphasise this “over fifty” problem or she’d forgotten that she’d already used it. Either way, it’s a bit unimaginative. As if to make up for it, she allows Frankie to have the most elegant observation in the book: “isn’t it odd? […] We seem, somehow, to have got in between the covers of a book. We’re in the middle of someone else’s story. It’s a frightfully queer feeling.” They’re like innocents abroad, in a way; caught up investigating something that has no specific link to themselves, apart from the fact that someone tried to poison Bobby (which does make it rather personal.)

In order for the narrative to work, Christie has to cheat a bit. I can’t be too explicit here, lest I give the game away. But she does ascribe some actions and speeches to one person when in fact they are delivered by another. By concealing the true identity of the person speaking, she leads her readers – and indeed her characters – up the garden path a little more before giving in and finally telling us the truth. Whilst it is an effective device at stringing out the denouement, I did feel a little cheated by Christie here; she actually tells us lies which we believe for ten minutes or so, before retracting. I can’t help but think that’s not a good narrative trait.

I see that Christie gives a mention to an ABC guide in this book – it’s left by the window in the house from where the Caymans have fled. Frankie dutifully takes note of what’s on the pages on display. This does look forward to one of her masterpieces – The ABC Murders – which would appear a couple of years later. In fact this book is littered with contemporary references, many of which I had to research in order to understand. Let’s take the title character first! Bobby Jones is first seen, on the golf course, making a total mess of his shot. For Christie, a keen golfer, this is a nice moment of irony. Bobby Jones was an American golfing hero, who helped design the Augusta National Golf Club, and co-founded the Masters Tournament. He won the US Open four times, in fact he is the only player ever to have won the (pre-Masters) Grand Slam, or all four major championships, in the same calendar year (1930). That was the year he chose to retire from the game, at the grand old age of 28. By the time Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? was published, he had already been retired four years.

When we first meet Frankie, she’s getting fed up with society parties: dinner at the Savoy at 8.30, followed by going to the Marionette and then on to the Bullring before fizzling out after breakfast. Bobby is wowed by the thought of such places but I can’t find any reference to them in real life – maybe they were just inventions of Christie. When Frankie’s just chatting with Bobby and understanding his reaction to finding the body, she commiserates: “I get you, Steve” – which is a fairly meaningless turn of phrase popular at the time – but with no particular Steve in mind. I thought perhaps it might refer to Mrs Paul Temple, but Francis Durbridge hadn’t created her by that stage.

One of the novels that Bobby toys with in hospital was written by Ouida – a name with which I was not familiar, but she was a writer of what were described as “racy and swashbuckling” novels in the late Victorian era. Here’s a conversation between Frankie and Bobby: “”Oh! But murderers are always frightfully rash. The more murders they do, the more murders they want to do.” “Like The Third Bloodstain,” said Bobby, remembering one of his favourite works of fiction. “Yes, and in real life too – Smith and his wives and Armstrong and people.”” As you might expect, Bobby’s favourite ghoulish work of fiction is precisely that – an invention of Christie. Or at least it was at the time; Kel Richards published a crime novel with that name in 1995. But Smith and his wives? Are they referring to the founder of the Mormon Church? He was murdered, but I’m not sure about his wives. The Armstrong mentioned could be Herbert Rowse Armstrong, also known as The Hay Poisoner, hanged for murder in 1922.

In a later conversation, Frankie and Bobby are discussing whether everyone has a double, and cited the case of Adolf Beck “referring lightly to the Lyons Mail.” I can do no better than to quote directly from Wikipedia: “The Adolf Beck case was a notorious incidence of wrongful conviction by mistaken identity, brought about by unreliable methods of identification, erroneous (though probably sincere) eyewitness testimony, and a rush to convict the accused. As one of the most famous causes célèbres of its time, the case led to the creation of the English Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.” The Lyons Mail, on the other hand, refers to a 1916 film, based on the 1854 play The Courier of Lyons by Charles Reade, a very popular stage work of the Victorian era, where a respectable French gentleman is mistaken for his doppelganger, a notorious highwayman.

“My dear,” says Frankie to Bobby, “don’t drone on as though you were recommending a case to the Girls’ Friendly Society”. I’d never heard of them before, so I researched and discovered they were established in 1875 to address, through Christian values, the problems of working-class out-of-wedlock pregnancies. They didn’t support female emancipation but they’re still going to this day. Another society I had never heard of – The Dorcas Society – appears on the final page of the book. A Dorcas society is a local group of people, usually based in a church, with a mission of providing clothing to the poor. Their heyday was in the 19th century, but there are still a few around today.

There are also plenty of place names in this book to try and identify in real life. Marchbolt, where Bobby comes from, is said to be in Denbighshire, which of course exists, or at least did until 1974’s Local Government changes swallowed it up into Clwyd. There is no such place as Marchbolt, but the Denbighshire coast runs from Llandudno to just before Rhyl, so we can place it somewhere in that area. The local train station is at Sileham, which also doesn’t exist. Staveley, home of the Bassington-ffrenches, is described as being in Hampshire, just off the main road to Andover. Although there are several Staveleys in the UK, none of them is down in that part of the world. Ambledever is said to be ten miles away; that doesn’t exist but it does fit the location of real-life Micheldever. There isn’t a Chipping Somerton either, but both Chipping Norton and Somerton are situated within a few miles of each other in Oxfordshire. It’s also close to Christie’s Medeshot Aerodrome; in real life, I’ll bet my bottom dollar that’s based on Upper Heyford. The other location mentioned a few times in the book is 17 St Leonard’s Gardens, Paddington, home of the Caymans. There are lots of Gardens in Paddington, but none of them is St Leonard’s.

As you probably 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. Firstly, the amount that Bobby is offered to uproot himself and start a new life in Buenos Aires: £1,000 a year. In today’s figure, that’s an annual salary of £50,000. Yes, that’s pretty good for a starting salary for someone with absolutely no hope! However, that’s a pinprick in comparison to the amount left by Mr Savage to Mrs Templeton in his will – £700,000 – which today would be worth a staggering £35m or more. Worth committing murder for, maybe? The tenner that Frankie pays Badger for a beaten up old car would today be worth £500. Quite a lot, considering what a wreck it is!

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?:

Publication Details: 1934. Fontana paperback, 6th impression, published in November 1972, priced 30p. Tom Adams’ cover illustration of a man falling into the sea, with a suspicious looking seagull looking after a golf ball in its nest, doesn’t really do the book justice as none of those actually represent what happens in the book.

How many pages until the first death: 4. That’s the quickest death so far in the Christie oeuvre of novels.

Funny lines out of context: Again, like Murder on the Orient Express, this book is very disappointing as far as accidentally funny lines are concerned. I will continue to keep a look out in future books!

Memorable characters:
Sadly again, there’s not a lot on offer. Whilst Frankie and Bobby are reasonably well fleshed out, the frantic pace of the book doesn’t allow for too much dwelling on the characterisations. I suppose Dr Nicholson is quite creepy; but the Bassington-ffrenches are all rather bland. Badger is quite a character, although I expect there’s more to him than just his stutter, on which Christie relies too much for humorous purposes.

Christie the Poison expert:
Bobby is poisoned with enough morphia to sink a battleship – 8 grains, which is the equivalent of 520mg, more than double the minimum lethal dose. John Savage is said to have taken a large overdose of chloral, which is responsible for deaths in The Seven Dials Mystery and The Secret Adversary. Please feel free to read that blog to find out more about it.

Class/social issues of the time:

There are some light references in this book, but again this is too flippant a book to dwell on serious subjects. However, it is class that first alerts Bobby to the possibility that the Caymans are not who they say they are: “”You don’t believe he could really have been her brother?” “Not for a moment! You know, it puzzled me all along. The Caymans were a different class altogether. The dead man was – well, it sounds a most awful thing to say and just like some deadly old retired Anglo-Indian, but the dead man was a pukka sahib.” “And the Caymans most emphatically weren’t?” “Most emphatically””. On a funnier note, Badger has his own observations about class. After Frankie pays him £10 for the Standard car, he observes: “f-f-f-first time I ever knew anyone with a t-t-t-title who c-c-could pay cash”.

This leads us on to another social issue of the time – the whole world of second-hand cars. Clearly there was no regulation in those days and you really took your life in your hands if you were to pay a few pounds for a beaten-up pile of junk! Badger’s a decent guy but even he has no compunction about selling something that’ll barely get to the end of the street. And there’s another thing – women drivers! “”Her ladyship takes some killing,” said Bobby. “Had many accidents, has she?” “She’s been lucky,” said Bobby, “but I assure you, Mr Askew, that when her ladyship’s taken over the wheel from me as she sometimes does – well, I’ve made sure my last hour has come.” Several persons present shook their heads wisely and said they didn’t wonder and it’s just what they would have thought.” No doubt women drivers have been the object of ridicule ever since cars were invented.

There’s an amusing sequence where Bobby, in order to get a doctor to stop examining Frankie, has to pretend that she’s a Christian Scientist. At the time of publication, Christian Science was really at its heyday, and it’s more or less been in decline since the 1930s. It would quite possibly have been something that trendy young things of Frankie and Bobby’s generation may have considered as a serious faith. It was an interesting time; it was now over fifteen years since the end of the First World War, and only five years before the Second, and there was still a feeling that Britain’s young men weren’t quite on top of things as they should be. When Frankie suggests using Bobby as a decoy in a ruse she’s planning, he’s not keen. “”No thank you, Frankie,” said Bobby with feeling. “I’ve been very lucky this time, but I mightn’t be so lucky again if they changed the attack to a blunt instrument. I was thinking taking a great deal of care of myself in the future. The decoy idea can be washed out.” “I was afraid you’d say that,” said Frankie with a sigh. “Young men are sadly degenerate nowadays. Father says so. They don’t enjoy being uncomfortable and doing dangerous and unpleasant things any longer. It’s a pity.” What we would today call being a snowflake.

Possibly still a hangover from the war days is the slightly racist comment from Mrs Rivington: “He’s a Canadian, you know, and I often think that Canadians are so touchy.” There’s also the unfortunate use of the word “loonies” to describe Dr Nicholson’s patients.

And there’s one more fascinating element to the story – the suggestion that Frankie and Bobby take an air taxi from Medeshot Aerodrome to Marchbolt. Today this would be a very expensive undertaking and would probably require loads of planning. Back in 1934, it seems like it was the equivalent of thumbing a lift!

Classic denouement: Not really. At first we’re all led to believe the murderer is A because Christie tells us so. Then she admits she was lying and that it’s B. Whilst the reader is confused, B manages to make an escape and confesses the crime afterwards by letter. Yes indeed, gentle reader, this is one of those occasions where the murderer gets away with it! Well not entirely, as they’re not operating solo all the time, but if I tell you more, I’ll give the game away.

Happy ending? Yes of course, you wouldn’t expect any other outcome than Frankie and Bobby getting it together romantically. It’s tinged with the sadness that justice isn’t seen to be done though, so there are shades of grey with your emotional response at the end.

Did the story ring true? Absolutely not! It’s riddled with ridiculous coincidences and far-fetched occurrences that are both amusing on the one hand and try your patience on the other! The morphia that doesn’t kill Bobby, the deus-ex-machina appearance of Badger to save their lives, and the real identity of Evans all make it very hard to believe. Even the last words of the dying man that form the title of the book are, in a sense, pointless. I simply don’t believe that that’s what he would have said!

Overall satisfaction rating: 7/10. It’s fun but it’s foolish; it’s pacey but it’s problematic.

Thanks for reading my blog of Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? 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, it’s back to the short story format with Parker Pyne Investigates; I’ve not read this for a very long time and I can’t remember anything about it, so I’m looking forward to revisiting it! 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 – The Listerdale Mystery (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!

Like The Hound of Death, it’s back to the world of the short story with nary a mention of a Marple or a Poirot. Here we have twelve short tales of intrigue, a comparatively light confection of fun rather than a big detective work-out. Maybe the highlight of this collection is Philomel Cottage, as it has given birth to many other works over the years. Never fear, you can read this little analysis of the book without finding out any of the dark secrets of any of its stories!

The collection was published by Christie’s regular publishers, William Collins & Sons, but it was never available in the United States. However, Christie’s American fans didn’t miss out as all the stories in this volume were published as part of other collections over there: The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories and The Golden Ball and Other Stories, although the latter was not published until 1971. All the stories had been previously published in either The Grand Magazine, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, Sunday Dispatch, Daily Mail, Red Magazine, and The Novel Magazine between 1924 and 1929.

The Listerdale Mystery

The first, eponymous, story, is a charming, sweet little tale of Mrs St Vincent, a genteel widow fallen on hard times, living in rented rooms that she can’t afford. One day she discovers a fantastic house in Westmister available at a peppercorn rent. Apparently this house belonged to Lord Listerdale, who went missing – presumed dead by many – eighteen months previously, but who has turned up in Africa. The servants, including the butler, Quentin, remain in post and the St Vincent family live in relative luxury – surely it’s all too good to be true?

Originally appearing in 1925, it offers some typical early Christie social issues. The reality of renting in London is: “Frowsy landladies, dirty children on the stairs, fellow-lodgers who always seem to be half-castes”. Even in the country you’re faced with the prospect of a “Crown Derby tea service that you wash up yourself”. How the mighty are fallen. After Mrs St Vincent has met Quentin, and she suspects he will feed back who is and who isn’t a suitable tenant, she thinks: “he’s sorry for me. He’s one of the old lot too. He’d like me to have it – not a Labour Member of a button manufacturer”. Genteel she may be, but she’s a right snob too. Living in the elegant house even cures her son Rupert of mixing with the wrong sort: “he was also less enthusiastic on the subject of the tobacconist’s daughter. Atmosphere tells”. In amongst that drawing-room snobbery there’s a brief mention of selling teeth in the classified ads – that tells you that times were indeed hard for some people. There are more such advertisements in the story Jane in Search of a Job to be found later in this collection.

The address of the Westminster property is 7 Cheviot Place; in real life there is no such street. The rental was set at no more than 3 guineas a week – at today’s value that equates to a little over £130 per week – not bad at all. Nor is there a town, village or estate by the name of Listerdale – so his lordship wouldn’t have had much land!

I was quite taken with this little story – it’s very nicely constructed, all highly believable and even has a happy ending! It did remind me heavily of a story from Poirot Investigates – The Adventure of the Cheap Flat. It’s almost as though Christie has taken the same background situation for both stories and created one sinister, criminal tale and one rather heartwarming one.

Philomel Cottage

Alix has married Gerald within a few days of knowing him despite a lengthy on-off friendship/romance with her ex-colleague Dick. Now living in an isolated cottage Alix starts to wonder about the real Gerald – does she really know him? Overwhelmed by curiosity she finds some hidden papers that suggest that Gerald is not necessarily all that he seems…

Again, referring to the book Poirot Investigates, this time the story “The Adventure of the Western Star”, Poirot solves that crime with the observation: “never does a woman destroy a letter”. However, in Philomel Cottage, Alix considers “men do sometimes keep the most damning piece of evidence through an exaggerated sentimentality”. So, which is it, Mrs Christie? A boy trait or a girl trait?! Christie the Poison Expert comes into play in this story with her knowledge of hyoscine. I’d never heard of it. And the “few thousand pounds” that Alix inherits (let’s say it’s £3000) would be the equivalent of roughly £125,000.

Before the Second World War, this was Christie’s most successful short story in terms of its subsequent adaptations. Frank Vosper turned it into the play Love from a Stranger, which in turn was filmed, twice, and then had three or four radio adaptations too. The real strength of this excellent short story is the slow build-up of suspense and tension, as Alix starts to get more and more anxious about Gerald; and it has a really surprise ending – a twist among twists for such a short piece of writing.

So far, so good – two excellent stories. The Listerdale Mystery collection is shaping up to be a very good book!

The Girl in the Train

George Rowland gets up late, goes to work and gets sacked (by his uncle, no less) for useless timekeeping and other follies. It’s time for an adventure; and as he’s taking the train down to Rowland’s Castle – assuming he will find his fortune there – a damsel in distress enters his carriage, asks him to hide her from an enemy, then gives him the task of following a suspicious man and looking after a package. Clearly head over heels with the young lady, George throws himself into the adventure and finds out much more than he bargained for…

This story reminds me hugely of the bright young things who inhabit Bundle’s world – you remember Bundle, from The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery – George would fit into that clique absolutely toppingly. It’s bright and breezy, funny and exciting. Because it’s a short story you don’t have time for the idiosyncrasies of the lead character to start to get wearing, so it really works. Originally written in 1924, it has Christie’s usual xenophobia of the age: “George had the true-born Briton’s prejudice against foreigners – and an especial distaste for German-looking foreigners.”

Unusually for Christie, she has set this story in the here and now (or here and then). Rowland’s Castle does exist, it’s a village near Havant, in Hampshire, and on the London-Portsmouth railway line – to give this story extra credibility. Sadly, this is the only appearance in Christie’s works of Detective Inspector Jarrold, which is a pity – I think he could have contributed nicely to her future works!

Three down, and each one a terrific little read! What’s up next?

Sing a Song of Sixpence

What happens when someone you fell in love with, briefly, comes back into your life needing a very big favour – you help them out, don’t you? That’s what retired barrister Sir Edward Palliser does for a sweet young thing to whom he “made love” nine years previously (I think that means something different nowadays from what it did in 1929). The sweet young thing, Magdalen, finds herself in a fix as her aunt was recently murdered and it appears that the murderer must be a member of her household – and they’re all looking at each other asking “is it you?” If Sir Edward could come and ask some questions, I’m sure he’d get to the bottom of it all. He does – and he does. Curiously though he finds the experience dismaying, and in a frankly cruel twist at the end he’d rather not do the family any more favours. I don’t think I like Sir Edward very much!

That uncomfortable feeling that one of your family must be the murderer, but no one knows who, creates a very claustrophobic atmosphere that must in real life be terrifying. The set-up certainly reminded me of one of Christie’s finest books, And Then There Were None, which I am looking forward to re-reading sometime soon. However, that’s where the similarities end, as a neat observation by Sir Edward gives him the clue about what must have happened. The title Sing a Song of Sixpence also brings to mind Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye, but there are no other crossovers between the two stories.

There are a few references to chase up; neither of the addresses of Queen Anne’s Close in Westminster nor Palatine Walk in Chelsea actually exist, and there never was a ship called the Siluric. I’d never heard of Joanna Southcott – if you haven’t either you should read about her because it’s fascinating – and it would appear that her box still hasn’t been opened, nor is likely to. The reference book that Sir Edward is reading at the beginning of the story is by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist who died in 1909 and who believed that criminality was inherited, and that someone “born criminal” could be identified by physical (congenital) defects, which confirmed a criminal as savage or atavistic. Christie leaves us in no doubt as to her opinion of that: “such ingenious theories and so completely out of date.”

That £80,000 inheritance that Magdalen will unexpectedly share with the other three members of the family is worth around £3.5million – that’s a tidy £875,000 each.

This story starts out well but then the end comes very suddenly and the leap of imagination that Sir Edward has to make in order to solve the crime is pretty extraordinary. I don’t quite believe this one; it’s not a bad story by any means, but it’s not up to the standard of the previous three.

The Manhood of Edward Robinson

Edward’s something of a hen-pecked fiancé. He loves his Maud, and all that; but she’s a bit bossy and controlling, and after all, it’s he who won the £500 competition prize and he who really wants to buy that super new car… but he knows she’d disapprove of such a waste of money. Maybe he deserves some kind of adventure, like the one in the trashy romantic novel he was reading; and that’s just what he gets!

It’s a return to the derring-do types of Bundle’s crowd – although with their criminal recklessness maybe it’s more aligned to the Partners in Crime world of Tommy and Tuppence – it was written back in 1924. It’s an agreeable little tale but altogether less substantial than the others in the book so far – much more of a soufflé than a sticky toffee pudding. What this story does give you, and it’s something that we today can have no idea about – is the genuine thrill of those early days of driving, when you didn’t have to pass a test, and you drove at night with your heart in your mouth because you could barely see anything. This story does take you back to that era, where you could easily drive off in the wrong car because they didn’t have individual ignition keys. So that aspect of the story is indeed fun.

A couple of references: if you spend hours checking the atlas for the village of Greane, you won’t find it; nor will you get an invitation to the swanky Ritson’s nightclub, as I can see no trace of it nor anything like it. The relative values of today’s prices against those of 1924 are very relevant to this story. Maud wears four and elevenpenny blouses – which value today would equal about £10.50, so yes that is very cheap. The £500 he wins today would be worth over £21,000; his chosen car is £465, which equates to about £19,750, so he’s still bringing back £1,250 as a little cash bonus.

Accident

Ex-Inspector Evans confides in his friend Haydock that he has recognised a local villager, Mrs Merrowdene, as being the suspect in a murder trial nine years ago. Evans still has nagging doubts that she was acquitted in error, and begins to suspect she might attempt murder again, believing the theory that murderers are seldom content with one crime. But can he subtly intercede and prevent another murder in time? It’s a nice little tale but its twist-ending is hugely telegraphed and I could see it coming a mile off. Evans’ theory that murderers usually commit murder more than once was also propounded by Poirot somewhere but I’m blowed if I can remember where.

Christie the poisons expert is definitely on hand with the detailed description of the chemistry tests required to ascertain the presence of chlorates. Mrs Merrowdene’s first husband was an arsenic-eater, which sounds totally bizarre today – but it’s only because the medical benefits of eating arsenic have now been replaced by the use of antibiotics.

The other interesting reference in this story is to how Evans used to have “issues” with fortune-tellers, which used to be an illegal practice. Funny how times change.

Jane in Search of a Job

Yet another tale of a feisty young girl who’s got a bit of nous but no money and wouldn’t mind a spot of adventure. Jane Cleveland answers a newspaper advert, gets the job with some rather extraordinary responsibilities and risks – but for £3000, you’d do it. She certainly does, but it doesn’t quite all work out as she expected though…

Not a bad story by any means, and Jane is a typical Christie-land adventurous gel, so the character’s well drawn. Elements of The Big Four here – which is hardly in its favour. My main quibble with it is that the account of how Jane gets the job simply lasts too long, so it gets a little boring – very nearly half the length of the story as a whole. I didn’t see the plot twists coming though, and it has a rather charming ending.

Jane was to earn £3000 for a fortnight’s work. That’s about £125,000, my kind of salary! In other references – two hotels are mentioned: the Blitz (which appears in The Secret of Chimneys) and Harridge’s, which I assume is a cross between Harrod’s and Claridge’s. There is no Endersleigh Street in London, where the initial interviews take place, although there is an Endsleigh Place near King’s Cross. There are no Earls of Anchester and although there are plenty of Orion Houses around and about, none of them is a stately home.

A Fruitful Sunday

Housemaid Dorothy and her young man Ted are out for a drive when they buy some fruit. They’ve read in the papers about the theft of a ruby necklace worth £50,000; and when they get to the bottom of the bag of cherries – there’s a necklace identical to the one in the news! Will they be honest citizens and report it to the police, or will they keep their accidentally ill-gotten gains?

A moral little tale – or at least, one that questions individuals’ moral compasses; but in effect the tale is a bit of a damp squib, I was a bit unimpressed with this one. To be honest, I didn’t foresee the ending – but then I’m surprised Christie created something as dull as that!

Some interesting comparative values – stolen jewels at £50,000 would have a value today of £2.2m – they’d be the real deal then. A £20 Baby Austin (an Austin 7) would be maybe £900 today. And a two shilling bag of cherries = about £4.50. That’s a lot!! In a typical moment of light Christie xenophobia, Ted blames the French postal system for the theft of the jewels; and there’s a nicely humorous line when Ted tells Dorothy he hasn’t a clue how to find a “fence”; “Men ought to know everything,” said Dorothy. “That’s what they’re for”.

Four stories left – I’m hoping Mrs Christie can turn this around and give us some proper intrigue and suspense!

Mr Eastwood’s Adventure

Anthony Eastwood is trying to write his latest detective story – The Mystery of the Second Cucumber – when he receives a wrong number from a foreign lady with a sexy accent begging him to come to her aid. As with many of the central characters of these stories, Mr Eastwood is up for an adventure, so goes out to the pre-arranged meeting place – and then the police arrive…

A mildly amusing story that goes on a little too long and about halfway through I pretty much saw through it and guessed where the wrongdoing lay. Unlike most of these stories you have to feel rather sorry for the central character because he does come out of it awfully badly. (OK perhaps not as badly as in Accident…)

I enjoyed Christie’s evident enjoyment of explaining the writing process in the opening couple of pages in this story – very tongue in cheek. In retrospect it’s also amusing that Eastwood suspects his editor will change the title of the story to Murder Most Foul, or something similar. Back in 1924 when this story was written, that would only have referred to the quotation from Hamlet. Forty years later it would become the title of a film featuring Miss Marple!

The assignation took place at 320 Kirk Street, known for its antique shops. There is a Kirk Street in London, not far actually from Endsleigh Place of Jane in Search of a Job. But it’s not an antique dealing street. 18 guineas for a pair of old Waterford glasses? That’s £800 at today’s value. They must have been something spectacular!

The Golden Ball

George is sacked by his uncle (a virtually identical start to The Girl in the Train) and goes off for a drive with his society friend Mary Montresor. During the journey she appears to ask him to marry her – which he is only too delighted to do – so they go looking for a house together. Mary finds one that she is instantly attracted to, and encourages George to accompany her to peek through the window – and then the butler spots them….

I found this story really irritating! It’s clever, for sure, but the main characters are both so pig-headed and stubborn that they deserve everything they get! I didn’t enjoy it. Christie obviously went through a stage of appreciating the surname Montresor (see Jane in Search of a Job). George thinks they might have to go to the Doctor’s Commons for a marriage licence; I’d never heard of that – it was a society of lawyers practising civil law in London.

The Rajah’s Emerald

James Bond (yes really) isn’t being treated very well by Grace – he’s trying to court her but she’s of a superior background and financial status so looks down on him. On holiday he’s staying in a distant guesthouse whilst she and her glamorous friends are staying at the posh Esplanade Hotel. He’s not allowed to use the hotel’s changing rooms so has to queue for the changing tents on the beach – and therefore misses out on Grace and the others jumping into the sea. He nips into a private villa to change but this decision will have far reaching effects when he comes back to get dressed…

A nicely written little story that makes us aware of the social awkwardness at the time of changing for beach swimming. Queueing for changing tents seems very anachronistic nowadays, when we’re used to just turning up beach ready with your togs underneath your clothes, or simply doing some indecorous wriggling inside a big towel. Christie goes overboard with the posh young things, including nicknames like Pug and Woggle, and Grace and her friends do behave appallingly snobbishly in respect to James. The crime aspect of this story is not terribly exciting and has similarities to others in this volume, most notably Mr Eastwood’s Adventure – and there are some very far-fetched elements; I mean, who accidentally puts on someone else’s trousers and doesn’t realise it?

There’s a passing reference to “native rulers” – with regard to the Rajah of Maraputna – which today comes across as mildly offensive. James Bond, of course, is a well-known name, but Fleming’s creation didn’t appear in print until 1953, so Christie’s was the forerunner. The story takes place at the exclusive seaside resort of Kimpton on Sea – no idea where that was based on, but there is a village called Kimpton near Welwyn in Hertfordshire. James orders fried plaice and chipped potatoes. The late Dowager Mrs Chrisparkle always used to call chips “chipped potatoes” and I always thought it was a posh affectation – turns out that was the original 19th century name for them.

The smallest furnished bungalow in Kimpton on Sea costs 25 guineas a week to rent – that’s the equivalent of £1100 today. That is pretty expensive.

One story to go!

Swan Song

Spoilt opera diva Paula Nazorkoff is in London for a Covent Garden season and the opera loving Lady Rustonbury wants to book her for a private performance of Madame Butterfly. When la Nazorkoff realises where Rustonbury is, she agrees but only if she can perform Tosca. Assenting to this wish, all goes well until the baritone singing the role of Scarpia falls ill on the day of performance…

Part inspired story, part load of old tosh, this tale treads a delicate balance between detective fiction and wayward self-indulgence. The twist at the end is easily seen through, the character of Nazorkoff is particularly irritating, and on the whole I think this is a disappointing end to the book. It does make one think, though, how popular Puccini must have instantly been in those days. This story was written in 1926, only two years after he died. Maybe he was the Andrew Lloyd-Webber of his era!

However, it does give rise to one of the best lines in Christie that come under the heading that I usually discuss in her full-length novels as “Funny lines out of context”. Consider this: “Cowan hurried after her as she led the way to the stricken Italian’s bedroom. The little man was lying on his bed, or rather jerking himself all over it in a series of contortions that would have been humorous had they been less grave.”

So, I think it’s fair to give The Listerdale Mystery an overall satisfaction rating of 7/10. Three excellent stories and another three that aren’t half bad; that’s not a bad hit rate for a selection of Christie short stories. It’s a quick and easy read, and not remotely challenging, which is sometimes all you want from a Christie.

With the next book in the Agatha Christie Challenge, it’s back to the novel format; and one of those books that feature none of Christie’s famous sleuths. It’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? and if I remember rightly, once you’ve worked out who Evans is, you’ve dashed nearly solved it! 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!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Murder on the Orient Express (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 Hercule Poirot travels on the Simplon-Orient Express from Istanbul to Paris but the train is caught in a snowdrift near Vincovci, and when Poirot wakes the next morning, he discovers that one of his fellow passengers has been murdered. With the aid of his friend M. Bouc, a director of the Wagon-lits company, and the Greek Dr Constantine, he sets about questioning the surviving passengers whilst waiting for the Yugoslavian police to arrive. And he works out the whos and hows of the crime before they get there! And if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to give the game away as to whodunit – although I think the identity of the murderer is very well known in folk mythology!

The book is dedicated to “M.E.L.M, Arpachya, 1933”. Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan, Christie’s second husband, the famous archaeologist worked on the dig at Arpachya, four miles from Nineveh in present day Iraq, and Christie accompanied him there for a few weeks, keeping records, and re-assembling and cleaning pottery fragments. She wrote some of the book there, but also, famously, at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul.

It’s one of Christie’s best known and best loved novels, and for a very good reason – it’s a wonderful read. The intrigue of the Middle East, the curiosity of Eastern Europe, the glamorous environment on board an exclusive train, an extraordinary crime and a cast of many varied memorable characters from all across the globe, this book has it all. And it’s written from experience; Christie travelled by the Orient Express many times, delayed by adverse weather conditions, meeting grand passengers of many nationalities. The book begins, almost in travelogue mode, at Aleppo station, boarding the Taurus Express, bound for Stamboul, via Konya and the Cilician Gates. It’s the stuff that dreams are made on.

The Taurus Express operated from Istanbul to Baghdad and only ceased operation in 2003 due to the war. Even today it runs part of the journey, from Eskişehir to Adana, with expectation to extend back to Istanbul once track work is complete, and, who knows, to Baghdad again if there is no war. Christie’s autobiography contains passages of her taking in the view of the Cilician Gates, a pass through the Taurus Mountains connecting the low plains of Cilicia to the Anatolian Plateau in southern Turkey. Poirot stays at the Tokatlian Hotel, as did Christie herself, a hotel that even today is still partly in use.

The Orient Express, of course, that fine old name in grand railway travel, was very well known, covering a few routes through Europe; the Simplon-Orient Express that features in this book started (or ended, depending on your direction) in Istanbul and journeyed via Sofia, Belgrade, Venice, Milan, Lausanne, and ended up in Paris. Alas this itinerary ceased in 1977, with the journey shortening to Bucharest, and then Vienna, until it finally ceased operating in 2009. Today, other passenger trains may adopt the Orient Express name, but they are not associated with the original company. Seems a pity.

The book is nevertheless scattered with exciting-sounding places that conjure up a forbidden time and place. The last stop before the train crawls to a halt because of snow is at Vincovci, (Vinkovci) now in the easternmost part of modern day Croatia. Colonel Arbuthnot and Miss Debenham first meet during the journey from Kirkuk in northern Iraq to Nissibin in Turkey. Mr Ratchett might have turned his clock back an hour at Tzaribrod (modern day Dimitrovgrad) as 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). All names of excitement, or romance, or danger, that really imbue this book with atmosphere.

I won’t be giving anything away by stating that at the heart of the book is the Armstrong Kidnapping Case, where three-year-old heiress Daisy Armstrong was kidnapped for a fabulous ransom sum – but nevertheless, once the sum was paid, the child was still murdered. This was based on the true life, 1932, Lindbergh kidnapping case, where the twenty-month-old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh was abducted and later found dead.

What makes this book stand out from all the other Poirots that had gone before is the emphasis on the process of detection. Those little grey cells had never been so exercised. The very factual, totally chronological third-party narration of the story (not by Hastings, who presumably was not around at the time) is designed to present the evidence to the reader at exactly the same time as Poirot receives it, and encourages the reader to work hard to solve the case before the detective does. Christie gives us all the information we require, with the floor plan of the Pullman coach, the sequential conversations in full with all the suspects, and above all, full access to Poirot’s thought processes, with his reactions to M Bouc’s and Dr Constantine’s suggestions and observations. Possibly because of that, you couldn’t call this an action-packed book, like The Secret of Chimneys, for example, where so much activity is poured into the pages that you barely have a chance to think. This is the opposite; there is no activity, everyone is just waiting around for something to happen. It also means that his cast of exciting and glamorous characters each have an opportunity to shine, as each has their own chapter where they give their evidence. It also suggests that an equal weight is given to each response they make, which, at the end of the day, is a good call.

As a result, Poirot’s own characteristics and personality take something of a backseat with this book, as it is the suspects who are primarily under the glare. Of course there are, as always, a few interesting comments concerning Poirot. It’s Miss Debenham who first notices him, at Aleppo: “what an egg-shaped head he had […] A ridiculous-looking little man. The sort of little man one could never take seriously.” Not a great judge of character, then, Miss Debenham. Mr MacQueen is also wrong-footed by his initial appraisal of Poirot: ““I am a detective. My name is Hercule Poirot […] You know the name, perhaps?” “Why, it does seem kind of familiar – only I always thought it was a woman’s dressmaker.” Hercule Poirot looked at him with distaste. “It is incredible!” he said.”

However, in this book I rather like the character of M. Bouc, who to an extent plays the role that Hastings sometimes plays – that of coming up with bright but totally inaccurate ideas off which Poirot can bounce – except that sometimes Hastings just says the right thing. And Bouc says the right thing in this book too, very early on: “It was not till they were eating a delicate cream cheese that M. Bouc allowed his attention to wander to matters other than nourishment. He was at the stage of a meal when one becomes philosophic. “Ah!” he sighed. “If I had but the pen of a Balzac! I would depict this scene. […] All around us are people, of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages. For three days these people, these strangers to one another, are brought together. They sleep and eat under one roof, they cannot get away from each other. At the end of three days they part, they go their several ways, never, perhaps, to see each other again.” “And yet,” said Poirot, “suppose an accident – […] nevertheless let us just for one moment suppose it. Then, perhaps, all these here are linked together – by death.” “Some more wine,” said M. Bouc, hastily pouring it out. “You are morbid, mon cher. It is, perhaps, the digestion.”

I also like how M. Bouc has, what can only be described as, a Lady Macbeth moment; when Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth hears the news that Duncan has been murdered, she exclaims, “what, in our house?” which many commentators have considered to be a psychological slip on her part, accidentally giving away her own guilt. When M. Bouc realises that a murder has been committed on the Orient Express, and that the victim is an evil criminal himself, he exclaims: ““I cannot regret that he is dead – not at all! […] Tout de même, it is not necessary that he should be killed on the Orient Express. There are other places.” Poirot smiled a little. He realised that M. Bouc was biased in the matter.” Does this give away some Bouc guilty secret? You’ll have to read it to find out.

Unlike nearly all the other Christie books, we don’t get to see many of Christie’s usual themes or recurrent issues. This book is so totally plot and evidence driven, there is little time for social commentary. There are however a number of references and moments of “is this true or is Christie making it up” that I’ve been doing some research. Poirot’s luck is in when the gentleman who has reserved the final second-class compartment on the Orient Express appears to be too late to check in: “”An Englishman,” the conductor consulted his list. “A M. Harris.” “A name of good omen,” said Poirot, “I read my Dickens. M. Harris, he will not arrive.” Mrs Harris was a figment of Sarah Gamp’s imagination in Martin Chuzzlewit. Masterman gives his home address as 21, Friar Street, Clerkenwell. Does this address exist? Well, there is a Friar Street near Ludgate Hill, which I suppose at a pinch you could describe as Clerkenwell but it’s a little bit south. Let’s give Christie the benefit of the doubt – she probably wasn’t that au fait with seedier addresses in London. At the other end of the scale, the Princess Dragomiroff says she lives in the avenue Kleber, in Paris. I bet she does.

Masterman says he spent the evening of the murder reading his current favourite book, Love’s Captive by Mrs Arabella Richardson. Ring any bells with anyone? No, why would it, it’s a Christie invention. It really doesn’t sound like the kind of thing Masterman would enjoy though, does it? In the same conversation: “By the way, are you a pipe smoker?” “No sir, I only smoke cigarettes – gaspers.” We don’t use that word “gaspers” any more. It was a slang term for a high tar cigarette – so given because, when you smoked them, you inevitably had to gasp for breath. You might have guessed that, but what are Glauber’s Salts, such as were found in Mrs Hubbard’s handbag? Here’s a definition straight off the Internet: “A crystalline hydrated form of sodium sulfate, used chiefly as a laxative.” So now you know. And what on earth is a Fallal handkerchief, which is how Mrs Hubbard describes the hanky with the letter H that Poirot is desperate to find an owner for? If you didn’t know – and I certainly didn’t – fallal is a very old-fashioned word (early 18th century) best translated today as bling.

And finally, whilst M. Bouc is trying to rationalise and imagine which of the train guests might have worn the Wagon Lit uniform – and coming up with no real options – Poirot references “our old friend Euclid”. As you may well know, Euclid was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the “father of geometry”. Now it may well be that Euclid had a theory that Poirot recollected, but I’m far too much of a maths moron to even try to work out what that might be. I’ll leave it up to your imaginations.

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 two important sums mentioned in this book – the $20,000 offered by Ratchett to Poirot if he would work for him, and the (gasp) $200,000, which was the ransom demanded for the return of Daisy Armstrong. In today’s figures these would be approximately £18.3m and £183m. I’m more astonished at the former than the latter – if Poirot passed up the opportunity to earn that kind of money merely on principle, then he’s one helluva principled guy.

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Murder on the Orient Express:

Publication Details: 1934. Fontana paperback, 8th impression, published in May 1972, priced 25p. The thrillingly evocative cover illustration by Tom Adams of an Eastern European map covered with the multitude of clues that Poirot has to sift through, always made me feel strangely excited as a child.

How many pages until the first death: 29. That’s when the death is reported although it probably happens six pages earlier. Enough time to lay the groundwork, and plenty of time to exercise the little grey cells.

Funny lines out of context: Most unusually, I’ve scoured the book and actually found very little, whereas usually there are plenty of these to enjoy. Sorry to disappoint you this time round.

Memorable characters:
Here’s where it excels. It positively drips with them. You have the grand, slightly scary Princess Dragomiroff; the aggressive-assertive Colonel Arbuthnot; the verbose Mrs Hubbard; the stereotypically loud Italian Foscarelli. I also enjoyed the blundering but well-meaning M. Bouc, and I think it’s a shame that he doesn’t reappear anywhere else in Christie’s works. And of course you have Ratchett, one of the most deserving victims in literature.

Christie the Poison expert:
Not in this book. Death is administered by fatal stabbing.

Class/social issues of the time:

As I suggested earlier, there isn’t much in the way of social issue debate in this book because it would get in the way of the pure facts on which Poirot and his team are purely concentrating. There are some good examples of xenophobia though, many of which feel very contemporary in today’s world of unfortunate distrust between the United Kingdom, the USA and mainland Europe.

The character of Ratchett is blown up to be a really unappealing character and his American-ness, if I can call it that, is very strongly conveyed. When Masterman is asked if he liked his employer, he hesitates to tell the complete truth: “Shall we put it that I don’t care very much for Americans, sir.” Mrs Hubbard too, with her interminably dramatic and self-indulgent speeches also conveys many of the aspects of an American which, dare I suggest, a European might find discourteous: “there isn’t anybody knows a thing on this train. And nobody’s trying to do anything. Just a pack of useless foreigners.” Mr Hardman, too, when asked about the girl in the Armstrong case who threw herself out of the window, remarks: “she was a foreigner of some kind. Maybe she had some wop relations.” Charming. Colonel Arbuthnot is another perpetrator. When interviewing him, “Poirot proceeded: “It is that you come home from India on what is called the leave – what we call en permission?” Colonel Arbuthnot, uninterested in what a pack of foreigners called anything, replied with true British brevity: “Yes.””

But there are a couple of instances when this xenophobia gets turned on its head, with rather enjoyable effects. When Masterman is caught lying, he suddenly gets very protective of his Italian colleague: “I hope, sir, that you’re not suspecting Tonio in any way. Old Tonio, sir, wouldn’t hurt a fly. And I can swear positively that he never left the carriage all last night. So, you see, sir, he couldn’t have done it. Tonio may be a foreigner, sir but he’s a very gentle creature – not like those nasty murdering Italians one reads about.” And, given that this book was published five years before the start of the Second World War, consider this brief conversation between Poirot and Frau Schmidt: “You have heard, perhaps, of who this man who was killed really was – that he was responsible for the death of a little child.” “Yes, I have heard, Monsieur. It was abominable – wicked. The good God should not allow such things. We are not so wicked as that in Germany.”

Classic denouement: Absolutely. All the suspects are there, all the representatives of the law are there, and Poirot propounds two theories. One – the truth. Another – one that fits exactly with the sequence of events and cannot be disproved. He hands both ideas over to M. Bouc and Dr Constantine for their recommendation.

Happy ending? Extremely. There may well be wedding bells between two of the characters, but that is of lesser importance than the suggestion that justice has been done. It’s the justice that really makes this a happy ending.

Did the story ring true? It’s far-fetched, of course, but actually it rings completely true. I’m surprised that crimes like this don’t happen more frequently – maybe they do!

Overall satisfaction rating: 10/10. An absolute gem of a classic!

Thanks for reading my blog of Murder on the Orient Express 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, it’s back to the short story format with The Listerdale Mystery; it’s been a long time since I’ve read this and I can’t remember anything about it, so I’m looking forward to getting tucked in to it! 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 – The Hound of Death (1933)

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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 discover something totally different! Twelve short stories, all apparently unrelated, that aren’t murder mysteries but tales of the supernatural. No Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot here, so it feels like a total departure from anything Christie had written so far. It is notable for the fact that it contains one of Christie’s best known short stories, Witness for the Prosecution, which has since been adapted into just about every media you could imagine.

The collection was not published by Christie’s regular publishers, William Collins & Sons, but by Odhams Press, and was not available to purchase in shops. If that sounds bizarre, it’s because it was part of a promotional deal where you collected coupons from The Passing Show, a weekly magazine published by Odhams, during October 1933. This was just one of six books that you could exchange the coupons for (plus a cost of seven shillings too). That’s why the book was never available in the United States; the short stories within it were published as part of other volumes in the US, variously between 1948 and 1971. Apart from that, some of the stories were published in The Grand Magazine, The Sovereign Magazine and Sunday Chronicle Annual between 1924 and 1927. Others do not appear to have been published before the book itself. One story, The Call of Wings, appears to be one of Christie’s earliest written pieces, probably shortly after the First World War, but it was rejected by all the magazine publishers to which it was sent. Read on, and you’ll realise why!

The Hound of Death

The first story, whose name lends itself to the entire volume, concerns a refugee nun who left Belgium following the 1914 invasion by Germany. Her convent was destroyed, not by explosives, but by a lightning bolt that the nun had somehow created through her own faith and belief in other powers. All the soldiers there were killed, and on one of the two surviving walls there was an unexplained mark, in the shape of a giant hound. Now living in Cornwall, she is visited by Anstruther, whose sister had given refuge to the nun, by name Marie Angelique. A young doctor, Dr Rose, wishes to write a monograph on her, fascinated by her continued hallucinations; but it soon becomes clear that Rose’s motivations and involvement with the case are not all as they might seem…

It’s an intriguing and intricate little story, delicately written, that sets a high standard for the rest of the book. For a short story, the characters are engrossing and well-shaped, and the outcome of the story is unexpected. It’s set in the town of Folbridge in Cornwall – there is no such place, of course, but perhaps it is inspired by Falmouth. The only other thing I had to look up was – during the explanation that the convent was destroyed – was the mention of Uhlans; they were one of four cavalry regiments – German, Russian, Polish and Austrian. You live and learn.

The Red Signal

Having said these stories are not whodunits, this one almost comes close. It’s a really meaty tale that centres on that feeling we sometimes have when we sense that danger is lurking, even though there’s no real reason to be concerned – that’s the red signal. Dermot West tells a story about how he narrowly avoided being murdered in Mesopotamia and it was only because he recognised the red signal that he survived. What he doesn’t say is that he’s feeling the red signal again at this very moment. There is a séance, at which one unspecified person is told it would not be safe to go home tonight; and what follows is the discovery of a death and a very intriguing revelation of who killed them and how it was done. To give further detail would be to give the game away, and I don’t want to ruin the story for you. Suffice to say, what appears to be supernatural isn’t exactly all it’s thought to be.

Sir Alington West is described as an alienist. If you’re not sure what that is, that was the contemporary term for a psychiatrist. Dr Thompson, in The ABC Murders, which would appear three years later, is also an alienist. By the time of publication, the term was already falling out of popularity.

I’m often struck how unforgiving Christie’s characters and her own language can be when it comes to matters of mental health. In those days, it wasn’t given the recognition it is today – although there’s plenty of scope for more, of course. Sir Alington and another guest, Mrs Eversleigh, approach the topic from different perspectives: “At what particular spot […] shall we erect a post and say “on this side sanity, on the other madness?” It can’t be done, you know. And I will tell you this, if the man suffering from a delusion happened to hold his tongue about it, in all probability we should never be able to distinguish him from a normal individual. The extraordinary sanity of the insane is a most interesting subject.” Sir Alington sipped his wine with appreciation and beamed upon the company. “I’ve always heard they are very cunning, “remarked Mrs, Eversleigh. “Loonies, I mean.”

I did like the observation by Claire Trent that “we go through life like a train rushing through the darkness to an unknown destination” – I’m sure we’ve all had that feeling at some point in our lives. Finally, the Grafton Galleries, which feature in the story, are a real location – an art gallery in Mayfair. Their heyday was in the Edwardian and early Georgian period when they mounted influential exhibitions of impressionist paintings. By the time this book was published, the Galleries were probably closed. 8 Grafton Street, which was the address, now houses a suite of managed offices. How the mighty are fallen.

The Fourth Man

Four men occupy a train compartment and three of them – a canon, a lawyer and a physician – begin to discuss delicate issues of mental health, including dual personality disorder and the suggestion that the body can be home to more than one soul. The doctor tells the story of one Felicie Bault, who was alleged to have had no fewer than four personalities, and whose life ended in strangulation, apparently at her own hand. But the fourth man in the compartment stirs at this tale and introduces himself as Raoul, brought up at the same orphanage as Felicie, and also tells them about Annette, another girl there, whose life was also inextricably linked with Felicie.

It’s a bit of a wayward tale, this. It starts very promisingly and with much intrigue but at the end rather falls apart without much of a punchline. Suffice to say, there might be another explanation for Felicie’s personality disorder – and on the other hand, there mightn’t. There aren’t any interesting references to look up – the only thing that stood out for me in the narrative was the intriguing concept of the body being a residence, that may pass through several different hands during the course of a life. Raoul turns that image on its end with his departing comment, which might give you pause for thought. But then again, it might not…

The Gipsy

Definitely the best story of the collection so far, this slightly unnerving tale of a man who had an illogical fear of gipsies, but who met and grew quite close to one – Mrs Haworth – who has a firm ability to see both into the future and into the past. She warns the young man against certain actions, but he doesn’t heed her warning and therefore has to face the consequences; his friend also meets her and is entranced by her charisma, and agrees to see her again – although she has a brief vision that the second meeting will not happen…

I really enjoyed this tale, with just the right amount of supernatural undercurrent mixed with one foot firmly placed in reality. Considering we only know her through the confines of a short story, just ten pages long, Mrs Haworth is a memorable character, well fleshed out through Christie’s descriptions and language. I did actually guess the twist at the end of the tale, but that doesn’t really matter – and unlike many of the other stories, it actually has a happy ending. By writing this story, Christie was able to exorcise a condition that she herself had – in her autobiography, she expressed an irrational fear, not about gipsies, but about a gunman who would often appear out of nowhere in her dreams and terrify her.

The first sentence: “Macfarlane had often noticed that his friend, Dickie Carpenter, had a strange aversion to gipsies” doesn’t fill the reader with much hope that Christie will avoid the pitfalls of latent racism – but she does. Even the description of Esther Lawes as “six foot one of Jewish perfection” merely gives you a visual impression of the character and no more. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the language of this tale is the fact that Mrs Howarth’s first name is Alistair. Today we associate that as being purely a man’s name – and the current Oxford Dictionary of First Names only has it as male. It seems that it can be used for a female too – although extremely rarely!

The Lamp

A rather traditional ghost story, full of gloom and doom. A family move into a cheap house whose rent is low because – it was said – it was haunted by the ghost of a child. No nonsense Mrs Lancaster isn’t scared of ghosts so she, her father and her son set up home there, and all was well until the son started reporting that there was another child there, alone and unhappy, with whom he wanted to play. Similarly, her father could hear the crying and footsteps of another child in the house. Would the four of them get on well as a household together?

It’s set in the cathedral town of Weyminster – well your guess is as good as mine as to where that might be. Winchester maybe? And the verse that Mr Winburn quotes in the story is from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, very popular in the early part of the 20th century.

It is quite an atmospheric and spooky story with an inevitability about the ending which, perhaps, isn’t quite as tragic as you might suspect. It’s very short and not very demanding, but rather gripping in its own way.

Wireless

An enjoyable story about an old lady, whose nephew, in order to keep her entertained and diverted in her old age, arranges for the installation of a wireless set, much to the lady’s fear at first, but when she discovers there’s nothing to be scared of about it, she really enjoys it. That is, until one day, the sound from the concert she’s listening to breaks up and she hears the voice of her dead husband, talking to her through the ether, promising her that he will shortly be returning for her. At first she ignores it, sensing it is a warning of some sort, but what could she do about it. But it happens again and again, making her more and more anxious each time…

A deeply moral tale that could have been written to illustrate the old proverb, cheats never prosper; Christie delivers it with a lightness of touch, and although you can second guess the outcome, it’s still a rewarding and satisfying little yarn. It’s another of those stories where it seems like a supernatural event is taking place – whereas in reality, it’s only man’s deviousness at work.

No particular themes at work here; I liked how the old lady is scared of the “waves” of the wireless set, rather in the same way that a number of people were scared of mobile phones when they first came out, that somehow the invisible waves were going to fry our brains, or worse if we kept the phone in our trouser pockets. There’s also the use of the word “josser”, which I’d never heard of before. It meant (indeed, means) chap or fellow, particularly a foolish one.

Elizabeth, the maid, was originally in line for a £50 inheritance. In a fit of generosity, the old lady increases it to £100. In today’s values, that’s the equivalent of doubling £2500 to £5000. In all seriousness, that’s not that generous.

The Witness for the Prosecution

This famous story has lost none of its power and ability to shock and surprise, even though it’s now over 90 years old. Leonard Vole stands accused of murdering rich widow Emily French, but he has an alibi – at the time he is alleged to have committed the murder, he is at home with his wife. Can the lawyer Mr Mayherne use his powers of persuasion to convince the jury that his alibi is watertight?

Much of its power comes from the courtroom settings and lawyer/client interview background – no cosy drawing rooms where middle class people sit and reminisce in this story. It also stands out in this collection because there is no pretence to anything supernatural about it – it is pure legal interview, detection and courtroom scene, and any misdemeanour that was committed, was done in cold blood. No wonder this went on to become one of Christie’s most successful individual pieces of writing, spawning plays, films, TV adaptations, and so on. Christie was unhappy at the immorality of the original story and changed its ending for the play, so that the guilty party does pay the ultimate price.

The £200 demanded by Mrs Morgan for vital evidence would be the equivalent of £10,000 today – no wonder Mr Mayherne was reticent to give that much. And her facial scarring was caused by vitriol – or as we know it today, sulphuric acid; the same fate that was to await Tommy (of Tommy and Tuppence fame) in The Adventure of the Sinister Stranger, part of Partners in Crime that had been published four years earlier.

The Mystery of the Blue Jar

An enjoyably written, inventive tale about a young man, living in a hotel, who appears to hear a delusional voice in his head crying out “Murder! Help! Murder!” at the same time every morning whilst playing golf – but when he tries to find out who is calling, he can find no one who either called it, or heard it. An eminent doctor also living at the hotel tries to reassure the young man that there is bound to be a natural – rather than supernatural – explanation for the voice, and the doctor tries to discover the secret behind it….

However, the more you think about this story the less it adds up. Christie doesn’t give you the comfort of a full explanation for how the young man hears the voice, nor why he in particular is singled out. Suffice to say there is subterfuge at play, but the perpetrator of the subterfuge was either incredibly lucky, or it was planned around information that is not shared with the reader. So my reaction to this story goes from an initial buzz of enjoyment to a rather disappointed low caused by a feeling of How Could They Have Known About That.

It is very nicely written though. I did enjoy the opening passage particularly, describing the young man’s dilemma: “it is hard when you are twenty-four years of age, and your one ambition in life is to reduce your handicap at golf, to be forced to give time and attention to the problem of earning your living.” The golf course is said to be located at Stourton Heath – Stourton is a village in Derbyshire but it doesn’t play host to a golf club.

There is a valuation of an antique in this story – £10,000 minimum. At today’s rates that would be a humungous half a million pounds.

The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael

Unhesitatingly I suggest that this is altogether one of the silliest stories I have ever read. I’m not going to say anything much more about it, in case you like it much more than me – and there’s not a lot I can say about it that doesn’t give the game away (although I think it’s pretty obvious as you’re reading it); but I couldn’t believe how fanciful, in a most ridiculous way, it is. Unsurprisingly, this is one of the stories where there are no traces of its having been published before.

A character (I think I can call it that) is killed using Prussic Acid, a sign that Christie the Poisons Expert is at work. Today we know it more as Hydrogen Cyanide.

The Call of Wings

This early story bears the hallmarks of a writer with a good imagination but still with a very heavy-handed style, as yet properly formed. It’s the story of a rich man who gains an awareness that some form of spirituality is the only way to feel “lifted” – as though on wings – and how he manages to achieve a kind of contentment. It’s actually quite a tedious story to read and if Christie had written it, say fifteen years later, it would have had a much greater lightness of touch. Consider the heaviness of this description: “a battered derelict of the human race rolled drunkenly off the pavement”.

Much is made of some music that reminds the narrator of the overture to Rienzi. This is an early opera by Wagner, rarely performed nowadays. And the main character offers a shilling to a busker. Was this generous? A late 1910s shilling today would be worth about £1.80. So I suppose that’s not an unreasonable sum, even for a millionaire.

The Last Seance

A rather thrilling and totally supernatural tale of Simone, the tired medium having to face one last séance with the demanding Madame Exe, who wants to be reunited with her child Amelie. Raoul, Simone’s intermediary (and lover) insists that Madame Exe must not touch the medium at any time because it could be dangerous for her. Just how dangerous? Well that’s the tale. An unexpected little nugget, with no hidden meaning, clarification or explanation – you just have to take it at face value. At one stage I thought the scene-setting for this story was really preparing the way for an obvious crime to be committed – but the story fools you and goes in a completely different direction.

The character of Raoul Daubreuil shares his surname with characters in The Murder on the Links; there doesn’t appear to be any additional connection between the two stories. There’s also a Raoul in the earlier story in this volume, The Fourth Man. It was obviously a Christie favourite.

SOS

The final tale of the book is an atmospheric story of an isolated house, a slightly weird family and the outsider who has to take shelter overnight as his car had two punctures in an eerie storm. Elements of both The Mousetrap and Rocky Horror come to mind. The house is believed to be haunted and that may account for the mysterious message written in the dust on the furniture in the spare bedroom… or it may not…

It’s actually quite a clever story that gives Christie the Poison Expert a chance to shine again; another of these seemingly supernatural tales that are explained by criminal reality. The sum of £60,000, that the outsider overhears the head of the household discussing would be worth approximately £3 million today.

All that remains is for me to give The Hound of Death an overall satisfaction rating of 5/10. Whilst there are a few excellent and memorable stories – for example Witness for the Prosecution and The Gipsy – there are also more than enough that really bring it down – like The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael and The Call of Wings. The disconnected nature of the stories also means that there is no particular impetus to keep reading. It never goes beyond being wryly entertaining. I doubt whether you’d find this book in anyone’s Top Ten favourites.

With the next book in the Agatha Christie Challenge, it’s back to the novel format; and it’s back to Hercule Poirot. Next in line is one of the Big Ones, Murder on the Orient Express, and 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!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Lord Edgware Dies (1933)

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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 talented, beautiful but spoilt actress Jane Wilkinson, aka Lady Edgware, challenges Poirot to help her “get rid of my husband”, shortly after which Lord Edgware Dies. Well, the title told you that anyway, so it’s no surprise. Poirot and Hastings investigate this, and other, deaths but it’s only a chance remark that Poirot overhears that alerts his little grey cells to what really happened that fateful night and brings the guilty party to book. Because of this, Poirot counts this case as one of his failures; but Hastings’ narrative shows us that Poirot is being unnecessarily and uncharacteristically modest! And if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to give the game away as to whodunit!

The book is dedicated to Dr. and Mrs. Campbell Thompson. Reginald Thompson, eminent British archaeologist, led an expedition to Nineveh in 1930 on which Max Mallowan worked and Agatha Christie was allowed to accompany him. It was during this dig that she wrote “Lord Edgware Dies”, and in fact, when they discovered a skeleton in a shallow grave they named him Lord Edgware in honour of the late, but fictitious, George Alfred St Vincent Marsh, fourth Baron Edgware.

My initial reaction to this book is that it is a brilliant read, full of great characters, an intriguing plot, a misleading denouement and it all hangs together beautifully. Red herrings abound, and, if you’re tempted to play along with Poirot and make your own guess as to whodunit, you won’t see the wood for the trees until the final few pages. Sadly, there are a few racist comments in the text that today hit you as being wholly inappropriate, but those were the times they lived in.

The title to the American edition is Thirteen at Dinner – which was also used as the name of the 1985 film starring Peter Ustinov and Faye Dunaway. Its relevance to the story comes from Donald Ross’ observation that there were thirteen guests at the dinner party, and there are all sorts of superstitions that arise from having thirteen at dinner – arising from the account of the Last Supper in the Bible. It does concentrate on one relatively small part of the story though, and I personally don’t rate it as a title!

Poirot is on top form with all his vanity and egocentric nature on constant display. It reveals itself from the very start with Lady Edgware’s attention – and of course, Hastings cannot help himself from encouraging his friend to look even more foolish: “”You have made a hit, Poirot. The fair Lady Edgware can hardly take her eyes off you.” “Doubtless she has been informed of my identity,“ said Poirot, trying to look modest and failing. “I think it is the famous moustaches,” I said. “She is carried away by their beauty.” Poirot caressed them surreptitiously. “It is true that they are unique,” he admitted.” On another occasion, all detective work comes to a sudden halt when Poirot discovers a tiny grease spot on his clothing and rushes to procure the cleaning materials to repair his appearance. That manicured look is so important to him, and there are occasions when he picks Hastings up on his dress sense and personal grooming, like a bickering old couple.

However, Poirot’s self-obsession does not mean he is not self-critical. Far from it; in this book he is devastated that it takes an overheard conversation to direct his thoughts on the right path. He precedes his denouement speech with a self-chastising preamble: “I am going to be humble […] I am going to show you every step of the way – I am going to reveal how I was hoodwinked, how I displayed the gross imbecility, how it needed the conversation of my friend Hastings and a chance remark by a total stranger to put me on the right track.” His anxiety at not being able to see through the crime clearly makes him behave rather peculiarly at times, which gives rise to Inspector Japp (back in Christie-land since we last saw him in Peril at End House) again suggesting that Poirot is losing it: “”When we got back here I started to question him. He waved his arms, seized his hat and rushed out again.” We looked at it each other. Japp tapped his forehead significantly. “Must be”, he said.”

Hastings is his usual self, loyal to his friend although not beyond teasing him either; talking about the attractiveness of the women at the party like a couple of (admittedly well-behaved) schoolboys, stunned by the beauty of Lady Edgware. There’s no auburn hair on offer for him to admire, just the effeminacy of Lord Edgware’s butler for him to despise in a lightly homophobic way, which comes across as rather tasteless. Together they continue to be a great team, with Poirot on one hand criticising Hastings for any number of failings (as he sees them) yet also being unusually kind to him: “as we sipped our coffee, Poirot smiled affectionately across the table at me. “My good friend,” he said. “I depend upon you more than you know.” I was confused and delighted by these unexpected words. He had never said anything of the kind to me before.” Working together, there are a number of excellently written passages where they both consider the evidence to hand, asking questions and formulating theories – or ideas, as Poirot would have it; these are the real nuts and bolts of the book that make it so satisfying.

As narrator, Hastings offers us a facsimile, as he has done in previous novels – this time of the torn letter that appears to incriminate one particular suspect; and Hastings’ style (as passed on to us by Christie) of having a number of relatively short chapters keeps the pace of the story going at a furious rate, making it a very exciting read. There are, however, a couple of words and phrases that Christie/Hastings overuse, so that they stand out detrimentally. On several occasions, Poirot is described as looking or speaking “dreamily”. The word doesn’t have much of a meaning or much of an impact, but it’s very noticeable through its repetition. Even more annoying, there are at least eight occasions where they phrase “at anyrate” appears. It’s particularly irritating due to the contemporary spelling of “anyrate” as one word – it doesn’t appear in my copy of the OED. However, Christie redeems herself with a nice little joke when the new Lord Edgware is giving his account to Poirot of how he approached his father to ask for money. “”And I went away without getting any. And that same evening – that very same evening – Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a bookstall.” He paused. Still Poirot said nothing.” As an aside, I was uncertain in the last book, Peril at End House, whether Captain and Mrs Hastings were back in England for good or if she was still a brave lonely outpost in The Argentine. With the knowledge that a couple of days after Poirot revealed the murderer, Hastings was recalled to The Argentine and therefore missed the trial, we know that he is still only here “on business”.

A couple of interesting philosophical questions are raised during the course of the book. The opening scene shows new stage star Carlotta Adams performing her act which includes an impersonation of Lady Edgware – because to most people she is the American actress Jane Wilkinson. Hastings muses on this point: “Watching Carlotta Adams’ clever but perhaps slightly malicious imitation, it occurred to me to wonder how such imitations were regarded by the subject selected. Where they pleased at the notoriety – at the advertisement it afforded? Or were they annoyed at what was, after all, a deliberate exposing of the tricks of their trade?” We get to discover Jane Wilkinson’s true reaction to the impersonation later in the book. But that’s certainly a question – in a world of celebrities – that is simply never going to go away. There’s also the question of a murderer’s mental state at the time they commit the crime. Can they possibly be fully sane to commit such an act? “”All murderers are mentally deficient – of that I am assured,” said Mrs Carroll. “Internal gland secretion.”” It’s a subject Christie’s raised in the past and no doubt will do again in the future.

There are a few references to Poirot’s earlier cases. When the redoubtable Duchess of Merton pays a call on Poirot, she informs him that it was Lady Yardly who had told her about him. If that name rings a bell, she featured in the short story The Adventure of “The Western Star” which appears in the book Poirot Investigates. Elsewhere Poirot reminisces on a case: ““I found a clue once,” said Poirot dreamily. “But since it was four feet long instead of four centimetres no one would believe in it.”” That is largely taken to refer to a piece of lead-piping that Poirot found in The Murder on the Links. Whilst Poirot is waiting for evidence to turn up, he helps out in a few other cases, including “the strange disappearance of an Ambassador’s boots”. This sounds very much like The Ambassador’s Boots from Partners in Crime, but it is Tommy and Tuppence who solve that little mystery. Some identity confusion, perhaps?

Unusually this story takes place entirely within the confines of London. Only Inspector Japp takes a trip outside, to Paris, which he believes was a wasted journey. Apart from that, the locations of the story are at London theatres and restaurants, Poirot’s flat, Lord Edgware’s house in Regent Gate, Jenny Driver’s hat shop in Moffat Street and Jane Wilkinson’s suite at the Savoy. That magnificent building of course exists; there isn’t a Regent Gate in London as such but Prince Regent’s Gate would be about right for the Edgwares’ stately pile; again there is no Moffat Street near Bond Street; I’m not sure Ms Driver’s hats would sell that well in Moffat Road, Tooting.

A few references took my interest: the first, brash, appearance of young Ronald Marsh, later to become the fifth Baron Edgware, causes Mrs Widburn to declaim: “You mustn’t take any notice of him. Most brilliant as a boy in the O.U.D.S. You’d hardly think so now, would you?” I recognised that acronym instantly as I, dear reader, was also once a member of the Oxford University Drama Society. And Japp uses a delightful image which was prevalent in the 19th century but has really gone out of fashion: “Sorry M. Poirot […] But you did look for all the world like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.”

When the detectives are trying to work out how it could be that Jane Wilkinson was seen in more than one place at the same time, Japp recalls: “Reminds me of the Elizabeth Canning Case […] You remember? How at least a score of witnesses on either side swore they had seen the gipsy, Mary Squires, in two different parts of England. Good reputable witnesses, too. And she with such a hideous face there couldn’t be two like it. That mystery was never cleared up.” The Elizabeth Canning case was indeed real, and concerned a famous kidnapping case back in 1753 that you can read about here.

Jenny Driver recollects how Carlotta Adams would send a letter every week to her sister in Washington. But on this occasion she missed the post. “”Then it is here still?” “No sir, I posted it. She remembered last night just as she was getting into bed. And I said I’d run out with it. By putting an extra stamp on it and putting it in the late fee box it would be all right.” Extra stamp? Late fee box? Indeed, this was a common practice so that you could post a letter after the normal final collection time for an extra fee. The boxes were frequently placed in railway stations. I’m not sure when this practice died out – but it must have been jolly useful.

Also in the world of the hat shop Chez Genevieve, “Mrs. Lester’s coming in about that Rose Descartes model we’re making for her.” Rose Descartes? (Actually my copy reads “Rose Descrates” but I think that’s a misprint). There was an old style of rose called the Rene Descartes – a stunning orangey red. If it’s the same hue, I’m sure the hat will look fab. Anyone of my generation or older will just about remember the wonderful chain of London eateries that was the Lyons Corner House – Carlotta Adams was seen at the Strand branch at 11pm on the night Lord Edgware died. I fondly remember my dad ordering the Super Bingo meal at the branch on Coventry Street, which he enjoyed so much that he had another one for dessert! Apparently they ceased trading in 1977 – I didn’t realise it was that recent. And the evening newspaper that covers the story is called the Evening Shriek. That’s a jazzy title. The London evening papers at the time would have been the Star, News and Standard (as the paper vendors used to shout out). Maybe it’s that shouting that Christie is trying to recreate with this newspaper name.

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. The £100 cheque that Lord Edgware cashed the day before he died would today be worth about £5000. Moreover, the $10,000 that Carlotta refers to in her letter to her sister comes in at a whopping £146,000 at today’s rates.

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for Lord Edgware Dies:

Publication Details: 1933. Fontana paperback, 13th impression, published in July 1976, priced 60p. The rather creepy cover illustration by Tom Adams shows an ornate dagger with a claw finial plunged high into the neck of a grey haired male victim – presumably Lord Edgware.

How many pages until the first death: 31. A perfect length really; enough to lay some useful groundwork before getting into the meat, as it were. Of course, Lord Edgware’s death is referred to in the first paragraph, and, indeed, in the title. No one will ever be under the misapprehension that Lord Edgware survives unscathed in this book.

Funny lines out of context: as usual, words and ideas that seemed perfectly reasonably in the 1930s have acquired a different sense today:

“You don’t know my husband, M.Poirot […] He’s a queer man – he’s not like other people.”

“He seems to have taken a fancy to me[…] A man like that behind you means a lot.”

“Unfortunately, he has got a queer sort of prejudice against divorce. I tried to overcome it but it was no good, and I had to be careful, because he was a very kinky sort of person.”

“Finally, after various ejaculations, Poirot spoke.”

Memorable characters:

Jane Wilkinson/Lady Edgware is a very well drawn, very lively and very believable over-the-top character who brings the page to life whenever she appears. In his first description of her, Hastings points out her histrionic character; unusually, she even beats Poirot in the self-obsessed stakes. Mrs Widburn describes her as an egoist; Bryan Martin says she’s amoral. I see her as a real life and slightly more unhinged version of the Muppets’ Miss Piggy. Everything has to be about her or because of her. Hers is the only opinion that is to be counted, hers the only needs to be met.

Young Ronald March, the fifth Baron Edgware, is also a live wire; coming across as a leftover from a 1920s Christie novel of Bright Young Things – maybe his natural home would have been in The Secret of Chimneys. It’s a shame that a lot of what he says when you first meet him is considered so distasteful now. I think Christie intended for us to think of him as a rather charming Jack-the-Lad; however, times change (see below.)

The character of Carlotta Adams is based on the real life American dramatist Ruth Draper, who specialized in character-driven monologues and whom Christie saw give a performance that made her think “how clever she was and how good her impersonations were; the wonderful way she could transform herself from a nagging wife to a peasant girl kneeling in a cathedral” (from Christie’s Autobiography.)

Christie the Poison expert:
There is a noticeable similarity to the murder methods in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Ackroyd is killed by an antique silver dagger – Edgware by an ornate pin. In the first book, Mrs Ferrars dies through an overdose of veronal – and that is also the method used for a second murder in this book.

Class/social issues of the time:

Perhaps there are not quite so many references to the social issues in this book as in others, although there is unfortunately quite a lot of casual racism.

Lord Edgware’s housekeeper, Miss Carroll, has firm ideas about the kind of person who would and would not commit a murder. “”Had Lord Edgware any enemies?” asked Poirot suddenly. “Nonsense,” said Miss Carroll. “How do you mean – nonsense, Mademoiselle?” “Enemies! People in these days don’t have enemies. Not English people!” “Yet Lord Edgware was murdered.” “That was his wife,” said Miss Carroll. “A wife is not an enemy – no?” “I’m sure it was a most extraordinary thing to happen. I’ve never heard of such a thing happening – I mean to anyone in our class of life.” It was clearly Miss Carroll’s idea that murderers were only committed by drunken members of the lower classes.”

Interestingly, Poirot, who normally understands the British class system so well, gets it severely wrong with his interrogation of the Duke of Merton: “”I should like to ask you outright, your Grace. Are you shortly going to marry Miss Jane Wilkinson?” “When I am engaged to marry anyone the fact will be announced in the newspapers. I consider your question an impertinence.” He stood up. “Good-morning.” Poirot stood up also. He looked awkward. He hung his head. He stammered. “I did not mean…I…Je vous demande pardone..” “Good-morning,” repeated the Duke, a little louder.”

But it’s Hastings who shows the true British class spirit when he discovers Poirot was reading the Duke’s letter upside down at the same time as stammering. “”Poirot!” I cried, scandalised, stopping him […] I felt very upset, He was so naively pleased with his performance. “Poirot,” I cried. “You can’t do at thing like that. Overlook a private letter […] It’s not – not playing the game.”

Let’s turn to a few more unpleasant aspects of the book. There’s a lot of casual antisemitism running through it, from descriptions of Rachel Dortheimer’s “long Jewish nose”, through Sir Montagu’s “distinctly Jewish cast of countenance.” It is Poirot who points out to Hastings, about Carlotta, that: “”You observed without doubt that she is a Jewess?” I had not, But now that he mentioned it, I saw the faint traces of Semitic ancestry.” But Poirot instantly relates the fact that Carlotta is Jewish to her undoubtedly having ““love of money. Love of money might lead such a one from the prudent and cautious path.” “It might do that to all of us,” I said. “That is true, but at anyrate you or I would see the danger involved. We could weigh the pros and cons, If you care for money too much, it is only the money you see, everything else is in shadow.”” Christie takes that theme a step further with Carlotta’s excitement at the $10,000 offer.

In addition to the antisemitism, our first encounter with a rather drunk Captain March includes him referring to “Chinks” and a very unfortunate few lines: “He shook his head sadly, then cheered up suddenly and drank off some more champagne. “Anyway,” he said. “I’m not a damned n*****.” This reflection seemed to cause him such elation that he presently made several remarks of a hopeful character.” Because that language is simply no longer acceptable, it prevents today’s reader from having the sympathetic view of the character of March that I am sure Christie intended us to have.

Classic denouement: Very nearly – the only thing it lacks is the moment of accusation to the guilty party, who isn’t present. But it does lead you down a delightful garden path when you think at least two other people are going to be proved the murderer before Poirot lays his Straight Flush.

Happy ending? Happy enough I think. In what has become a typical Christie finish, two of the characters end up engaged, and there’s nothing particularly bad that happens to any of the other innocent participants.

Did the story ring true? Again, true enough. It relies on one character impersonating another over a prolonged period which is rather far-fetched. Apart from that, very believable characterisation of the main people in the story help to make it feel credible.

Overall satisfaction rating: 9/10. A strong exciting story, with fascinating characters, very nicely written and with a solution that ticks all the boxes. It would have been 10/10 if it hadn’t been for the racist comments!

Thanks for reading my blog of Lord Edgware Dies 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, it’s back to the short story format with The Hound of Death; but they’re not so much detective stories as tales of the supernatural – so that should be interesting! 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!