Cards on the Table - Agatha Christie [89]
Sunday Express: ‘Superb, vintage Christie.’
39. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975)
Captain Arthur Hastings narrates. Poirot investigates. ‘This, Hastings, will be my last case,’ declares the detective who had entered the scene as a retiree in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the captain’s, and our, first encounter with the now-legendary Belgian detective. Poirot promises that, ‘It will be, too, my most interesting case—and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent…X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot!’ The setting is, appropriately, Styles Court, which has since been converted into a private hotel. And under this same roof is X, a murderer five-times over; a murderer by no means finished murdering. In Curtain, Poirot will, at last, retire—death comes as the end. And he will bequeath to his dear friend Hastings an astounding revelation. ‘The ending of Curtain is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised,’ writes her biographer, Charles Osborne.
Of note: On 6 August 1975, upon the publication of Curtain, The New York Times ran a front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot, complete with photograph. The passing of no other fictional character had been so acknowledged in America’s ‘paper of record.’ Agatha Christie had always intended Curtain to be ‘Poirot’s Last Case’: Having written the novel during the Blitz, she stored it (heavily insured) in a bank vault till the time that she, herself, would retire. Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976.
Time: ‘First-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny.’
Charles Osborne on Cards on the Table
In Chapter 3 of The ABC Murders (1935), Poirot asks Hastings, ‘If you could order a crime as one orders a dinner, what would you choose?’ Hastings reveals a preference for a body, preferably that of some highly important personage, discovered in the library, and suspicion falling upon a houseful of guests. Poirot disdainfully comments that what Hastings has described is ‘a very pretty resumé of nearly all the detective stories that have ever been written’. He, Poirot, would prefer ‘a very simple crime. A crime with no complications. A crime of quiet domestic life…very unimpassioned—very intime.’ As he might have said, un crime pas passionel! Then, as his imagination warms to the task, he proceeds to describe the kind of crime he would most like to investigate. Four people in a room are playing bridge, while a fifth reads in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening, it is discovered that the man by the fire has been killed. No one has been in or out of the room, and the murderer must have been one of the four players while he or she was dummy. ‘Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?’
It is well known that life frequently imitates art, and a year or so after imagining such a crime, Poirot finds himself actually investigating it. Mr Shaitana, an exotic connoisseur of the bizarre, who exists ‘richly and beautifully in a super flat in Park Lane’, gives a supper party to which he invites four people who, in one way or another, are detectives or investigators of crime, and four people who have each, according to him, at some time in the past committed murder and got away with it. After dinner, two games of bridge are set up: the four investigators play in one room, and Mr Shaitana’s four successful murderers in another, while their host, a non-player, sits by the fire to read or observe. When the four investigators finish their five rubbers of bridge, and go into the next room to say goodnight to their host, they find the other game still in progress. Mr Shaitana is sitting by the fire, but he has been stabbed in the chest with an ornamental dagger, one of a number of ‘knick-knacks