Curtain - Agatha Christie [88]
Curtain is a sad, muted and nostalgic book. Sad, in that Poirot dies, and apparently without having brought the murderer to justice; muted, in that the inhabitants of Styles, no longer a country manor house but a private hotel or guesthouse not unlike the one in The Mousetrap, are, with one or two exceptions, people who are old or disappointed or embittered; nostalgic, in that Hastings is continually aware of the wheel having come full circle, of Poirot and himself ending their long and productive collaboration in the house in which they had begun it. Hastings learns, or is at least momentarily aware, that nostalgia for the happy past is a snare and a delusion. The past, after all, is happy mainly because it is past, because it has been endured.
Hastings’ wife has died in Argentina, but one of his four children, his daughter Judith, is among the guests at Styles. It is because of a problem concerning Judith that Hastings is driven to contemplate, and even to take steps to commit, murder. Poirot, during the course of events, fulfils a prophecy made jokingly by Inspector Japp forty years earlier in The ABC Murders.
Confined to a wheelchair, his face thin, lined and wrinkled, though with moustache (dyed) and hair (a wig) still as black as ever, Poirot has to rely more than ever on his little grey cells. ‘This, Hastings,’ he is forced to admit, ‘will be my last case. It will be, too, my most interesting case – and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent, that arouses admiration in spite of oneself. So far, mon cher, this X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot! He has developed the attack to which I can find no answer.’
X, the murderer, does indeed operate in such a manner (a more than usually improbable manner, it must be confessed) that the law cannot touch him. Nor, it seems, can Hercule Poirot. It is only four months after Poirot’s death, when Hastings comes into possession of a manuscript bequeathed to him by his old friend, that the truth is revealed. A knowledge of Shakespeare’s Othello and of the character of Iago, in particular, has helped Poirot considerably. In fact, he leaves Hastings, as clues, copies of Othello and of the play John Ferguson by St John Ervine, an interesting playwright of Agatha Christie’s generation who is now almost forgotten. John Ferguson (which Christie misspells) is Ervine’s finest play.
The ending of Curtain is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised. If it somehow fails to make the effect that it ought to, this may be because the character of the murderer has been too lightly sketched throughout the novel, and his motivation not made sufficiently convincing. The basic idea behind Curtain had been adumbrated in one chapter of the 1932 novel, Peril at End House; had its characters been more fully developed, Poirot’s last case could have become Christie’s finest novel.
If Curtain is not Agatha Christie’s finest, it is, surely, her saddest novel. Who among her readers could fail to be affected by the death of the lovable and infuriating Hercule Poirot? What other character of fiction has had his obituary published on the front page of the New York Times?
HERCULE POIROT IS DEAD:
FAMED BELGIAN DETECTIVE
Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous, has died in England. His age was unknown.
Mr Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904. His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, was one of the most illustrious in fiction.
At the end