Appointment With Death - Agatha Christie [85]
Time: ‘First-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny.’
Charles Osborne on
Appointment with Death
POIROT (1938)
The Mallowans spent what was to be their final pre-war season in the Middle East in 1938, when they moved from Tell Brak ‘because of the blackmailing pressure of the Sheikhs of the Shammar tribe who were obviously bent on inducing our workmen to strike’,44 and set up camp more than a hundred miles to the west, in the Balikh Valley, remote marsh-like country but a paradise for the archaeologist. There they spent a profitable and enjoyable few months, until at the beginning of December it was time to pack up and return to England.
In Come, Tell Me How You Live, Agatha Christie described her mood of nostalgic regret as she and Max Mallowan left Beirut by ship. She stood looking over the rail at the lovely coastline ‘with the mountains of the Lebanon standing up dim and blue against the sky’, breathing in the romance of the scene. Then, suddenly, a cargo vessel crossed her line of vision, its crane accidentally dropped a load into the water, and a crate burst open. The surface of the sea before her was now dotted with lavatory seats. ‘Max comes up and asks what the row is about. I point, and explain that my mood of romantic farewell to Syria is now quite shattered!’
Two crime novels were published in 1938: Appointment with Death and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas.
The setting of Appointment with Death, a novel which begins in Jerusalem and moves to Petra, the ‘rose red city, half as old as time’, is one of Agatha Christie’s most exotic, and the 160 characters, the majority of whom are one large family of Americans touring the Holy Land, are among her most colourful. The Boynton family consists of old Mrs Boynton, fat, grotesque and a mental sadist, her four offspring, and the wife of one of them. The party of tourists who make the excursion to Petra also includes a French psychiatrist, a young English woman who is a medical student, and Lady Westholme, a formidable British Member of Parliament described as ‘a big, masterful woman with a rocking-horse face’. It also includes M. Hercule Poirot. Poirot is travelling for pleasure, like the others, but he also has an introduction from his old friend Colonel Race to Colonel Carbury, who is with the British Army in Transjordania. When Mrs Boynton is murdered at Petra, Poirot is asked to help with the investigation.
It was in 1938, the year in which Appointment with Death was published, that Agatha Christie said of Hercule Poirot in an interview she gave to the London Daily Mail,
There are moments when I have felt: ‘Why—why—why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature?…eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustache and tilting his egg-shaped head….’ Anyway, what is an egg-shaped head….? I am beholden to him financially…On the other hand, he owes his very existence to me. In moments of irritation, I point out that by a few strokes of the pen…I could destroy him utterly. He replies, grandiloquently: ‘Impossible to get rid of Poirot like that! He is much too clever.’45
Clearly, the author still had a very soft spot for her famous detective, however much she may have become exasperated with him, and her affection for the childishly arrogant but nonetheless endearing Poirot is evident throughout Appointment with Death. This is an especially well-plotted novel, and the atmosphere of the various places described, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Judean desert, the Dead Sea, the brooding, timeless beauty of Petra, is conveyed with an easy economy.
It was not often that Agatha Christie modeled a character 161 on a recognizable person in real life. However, you are tempted to identify Lady Westholme, the overbearing Member of Parliament in Appointment with Death who is ‘much respected and almost universally disliked’, with Lady Astor. Like Lady Astor, Lady Westholme is an American