Curtain - Agatha Christie [87]
With royalties from books, films and plays for the year ending 31 December 1974 totalling £366,000, Agatha Christie and her family may have had no need of a new ‘Christie for Christmas’ in 1975, but her publishers, understandably, felt differently. Remembering the two crime novels (one featuring Poirot and the other Miss Marple) which their author had written during the Second World War and salted away for posthumous publication, her publishers, in the person of Sir William Collins, approached Dame Agatha with the request that she release one of the two novels for publication in 1975. She was at first reluctant to do so, but eventually agreed that Curtain, the earlier novel of the two, and the one in which Poirot conducts his final investigation, could appear in time for the Christmas season.
Agatha Christie had already assigned the author’s rights in Curtain to her daughter Rosalind (and those in the Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, to Max Mallowan). (‘I thought it a useful way of benefiting my relations,’ she explained to an interviewer. ‘I gave one to my husband and one to my daughter – definitely made over to them, by deed of gift. So when I am no more they can bring them out and have a jaunt on the proceeds – I hope!’)
Rosalind was able to have, or at least to begin, her ‘jaunt on the proceeds’ in her mother’s lifetime, for the amount of money earned by Curtain was remarkable, even by Agatha Christie’s standards. A first British edition of 120,000 sold out quickly, American hardback rights were sold for an advance of 300,000 dollars, and American paperback rights for one million dollars. No doubt Agatha Christie had not realized how generous she was being when she assigned those rights away in the forties; but her own earnings in 1975 were close to £1,000,000. (In the United States, the success of the film version of Murder on the Orient Express had resulted in sales of 3,000,000 copies of a paperback reprint of the novel.)
In Curtain, whose sub-title is ‘Poirot’s Last Case’, Hastings returns as narrator for the first time since Dumb Witness in 1937 (except for a few short stories written earlier but not collected into volumes until the sixties), and immediately the problem of chronology arose. To some extent, Hastings’ place as Poirot’s colleague had been taken over in the post-war years by Ariadne Oliver. Now, at the end, Hastings comes back to visit his old friend Poirot, who is staying at, of all places, Styles, the country house which had been the scene of their first case, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920. But when is this end, when must this last case, in the course of which Poirot dies, be presumed to happen? We know that Curtain was written during the war years of the forties, but there is, of course, no reference to the war in the novel, for Agatha Christie had to remain vague as regards the year in which Poirot was to die. She had determined that it would be shortly after her own death, and she was, at the time of writing Curtain, a healthy woman in her early fifties.
This plays havoc with the ages of the characters in the novel, and not least with that of Poirot and Hastings. It must be assumed that the events in Curtain take place after those in Elephants Can Remember, Poirot’s penultimate case in 1972. Hastings mentions that their earlier Styles adventure had been in 1916. He and Poirot are therefore fifty-six years older than they were in Agatha Christie’s first novel. This would make Hastings eighty-six years of age, and Poirot at least one hundred and twenty!