Cards on the Table - Agatha Christie [90]
In a Foreword to Cards on the Table, her account of Poirot’s investigation of the murder of Mr Shaitana, Agatha Christie makes reference to the usual type of murder mystery in which, nine times out of ten, the least likely person is the criminal, and then goes on to describe her new novel…
Mrs Christie ends her Foreword by informing the reader that Hercule Poirot considered the Shaitana murder one of his favourite cases but that, when he described it to Captain Hastings, his friend thought it very dull.
The four bridge players, one of whom murdered Shaitana, are a young woman who may once have poisoned her employer, a doctor who may have removed one or two troublesome patients, a widow whose husband died under suspicious circumstances, and a Major who may have killed a noted botanist during an expedition up the Amazon. The other four guests, the investigators of one kind or another whom it had amused Shaitana to invite along with his collection of murderers, were Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, whom Agatha Christie introduced to her readers in The Secret of Chimneys and who also appeared in The Seven Dials Mystery; Colonel Race, the Secret Service agent who is ‘usually to be found in one of the outposts of the Empire where trouble was brewing’, and who was first encountered in The Man in the Brown Suit, Mrs Ariadne Oliver, the famous author of detective stories, here beginning an association with Poirot which was to endure through six novels; and, of course, Hercule Poirot himself.31
Cards on the Table is one of Agatha Christie’s finest and most original pieces of crime fiction: even though the murderer is, as the author has promised, one of the four bridge players, the ending is positively brilliant and a complete surprise. The novel is of particular interest to bridge enthusiasts, and it has been said that by carefully studying the players’ scores (reproduced in the volume) alongside the text it is possible to come up with the right answer. But those with no knowledge of bridge need not feel at a disadvantage, for the superb construction of the plot and the detailed characterization make this a positively gripping novel. Until the exciting conclusion, it is the puzzle that grips, for Poirot is here at his most cerebral.
Mrs Ariadne Oliver, the celebrated crime novelist, one of Agatha Christie’s most endearing characters, is a satirical self-portrait, as Max Mallowan confirms in his memoirs. Mallowan also points out that, in Cards on the Table, there is a very good description of the pain and toil of writing and that some of Mrs Oliver’s remarks must have been written with a view to debunking those of Agatha Christie’s fans ‘who so often wrote saying what a wonderful pleasure writing must be’. Just as Mrs Christie became somewhat bored with Hercule Poirot, Mrs Oliver detested her Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson. ‘I only regret one thing,’ she exclaims to Superintendent Battle, ‘—making my detective a Finn. I don’t really know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said or done.’ Mrs Christie must have received a good many letters criticizing Poirot’s French!
One of the suspects from Cards on the Table survives to reappear twenty-five years later, and married to another character from the same book, in The Pale Horse, the only novel in which Ariadne Oliver appears without her friend Hercule Poirot. Poirot, incidentally, in Cards on the Table quite gratuitously reveals the solution to the Murder on the Orient Express mystery. It is difficult to understand why Agatha Christie allowed this to happen. Perhaps she imagined at this stage of her career that, after its initial sales, each of her books would die a natural death and would not be likely to be reprinted. Although Poirot does not mention the title of the earlier novel, his comment on a gift presented to him by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits really does give the game away. Readers of Cards on the Table who have not already