Big Four - Agatha Christie [86]
At the end of The Big Four, at least three of the four are dead. But a slight doubt remains about number four, the Englishman who is a master of disguise and who has played a number of roles throughout the novel. His body has been found, but the head was blown to pieces and it is just possible that the real Number Four has escaped again. Poirot cannot be absolutely certain, but he thinks that he has routed the Big Four, and that he can now retire, having solved the greatest case of his life, after which anything else will seem tame. Perhaps he will grow vegetable marrows, he says. And Hastings will return to his charming wife in the Argentine. So we should assume that the events in The Big Four have occurred before those in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which began with Poirot already in retirement and attempting to grow his marrows.
Though it is entertaining to read, and moves swiftly, The Big Four can hardly be counted among Agatha Christie’s more successful works. Poirot in The Big Four is, like Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, shabbily treated by his creator. Two of the novel’s characters, the Countess Rossakoff and Joseph Aarons, are to be met in other Poirot adventures. Aarons, the theatrical agent and friend of Poirot (it is reassuring to know that Poirot has at least one Jewish friend) has already helped the detective in The Murder on the Links and will do so again in The Mystery of the Blue Train, while the Countess Rossakoff, a flamboyant and exotic Russian beauty who gains Poirot’s respect and even affection, remains an acquaintance for many years, appearing in two short stories, ‘The Double Clue’ in which Poirot first meets her (1925, but not collected in a volume until 1961) and ‘The Capture of Cerberus’ in The Labours of Hercules (1947).
‘Those who come to expect subtlety as well as sensation in Mrs Christie’s writing will be disappointed,’ said the Daily Mail of The Big Four, and this seems to have been the general opinion. Nevertheless, this hastily assembled ‘novel’ managed to sell more than 8,500 copies of its first edition. There can be little doubt that the publicity surrounding its author’s disappearance a couple of months earlier was largely responsible for the increased sales.
About Charles Osborne
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.
About Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.
Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.
In 1926, now averaging a book