Dead Man's Folly - Agatha Christie [88]
The local names are fictitious. For Nasse House and the river Helm, read Greenway House and the Dart, for Agatha Christie has based this ‘big white Georgian house looking out over the river’ on the house on the upper reaches of the Dart which she and Max Mallowan had purchased in 1939 and had lived in since the end of the war. (The author’s daughter and son-in-law now occupy it.) She has even made use of Greenway House’s boathouse: ‘It jutted out on to the river and was a picturesque thatched affair.’10 That was where Mrs Oliver intended ‘the body’ to be discovered, and that is where, despite the presence of Hercule Poirot at the fête, it is discovered.
Poirot was summoned by Mrs Oliver, who had vague forbodings that something might go wrong, for she had been staying at Nasse House for a day or two before the fête, and sensed that the atmosphere was somehow wrong. Dead Man’s Folly begins with Mrs Oliver’s phone call to Poirot, whose telephone number, trivia collectors will want to note, as TRAfalgar 8137. ‘I don’t know if you’ll remember me,’ Mrs Oliver says to Poirot, but of course he does. They first met twenty years earlier (see Cards on the Table, 1936) and, again, only four years earlier when Poirot investigated the death of Mrs McGinty (Mrs McGinty’s Dead, 1952).
And so Poirot takes a train to Devon, and to the riverside house not far from Dartmoor. The moor, one of Agatha Christie’s favourite places where in old age she still loved to picnic with family and friends, does not intrude into the narrative but is palpably there in the background as it is in more than one other Christie novel. (The chauffeur who conveys Poirot from the railway station at Nassecombe to Nasse House attempts to draw the great detective’s attention to the beauties of the scene – ‘The River Helm, sir, with Dartmoor in the distance’ – and Poirot makes the proper appreciative noises although he has very little interest in nature and scenery.)
More often than not, when characters in a Christie novel refer to previous events which are irrelevant to the plot it will be found that the reference is to an earlier novel. As we have seen, such references can sometimes be irritatingly indiscreet. But, in Dead Man’s Folly, when Poirot claims to remember the local police investigator, Inspector Bland, from fifteen years ago when Bland was a young Sergeant, he appears to be recalling a case which has not been recorded. The reader has not previously met Inspector Bland.
Dead Man’s Folly is a good, average, traditional Poirot novel, entertaining though not outstanding. The colourful Ariadne Oliver, Mrs Christie’s good-natured parody of herself and her writing habits, plays a leading part: the story would lack flavour without her. Mrs Oliver’s appearances in Christie novels, mostly those also involving Poirot, will become increasingly frequent in future years, and always to splendid effect.
At the end of Dead Man’s Folly, Poirot announces his solution and identifies the murderer, but the novel ends before the person in question is apprehended by the police. In fact, it is not absolutely certain that an arrest will take place, for Poirot’s brilliant guesses are not always supported by the kind of evidence that would stand up in a court of law. Often, he has to trick his criminal into confession or collapse. Here, the question is left open. The feeling, however, is that the killer, ‘ruthless…without pity…and without conscience’ as described by a close relative, will not get away with it.
Some critics of this novel have failed to be convinced by the author that an army deserter could return to his local village disguised only by a beard and a change of name, and not be recognized. They have a point.
A TV movie of