Elephants Can Remember - Agatha Christie [91]
In the summer a revised version of the previous year’s play was presented, as Fiddlers Three, and in November The Mousetrap celebrated its twentieth birthday.
A new Poirot novel, Elephants Can Remember, was published in time for Christmas. The impresario Peter Saunders published his memoirs, The Mousetrap Man, and Agatha Christie wrote a friendly Introduction in which she recalled the many occasions on which they had collaborated.
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Elephants Can Remember, although no one realized this at the time of its publication, was to be Poirot’s penultimate case. It was, in fact, the last Poirot novel that Agatha Christie wrote, for the final Poirot, Curtain, which would appear in 1975, was one which she had written during the Second World War with the intention that it be published posthumously as the final case of Hercule Poirot. Elephants Can Remember also marks the last appearance of Ariadne Oliver, who plays a leading part in the investigation.
Mrs Oliver is at her most delightful, and most scatty, in this, her farewell appearance. Her similarity in some respects to her creator has been mentioned several times: like Dame Agatha, Mrs Oliver is no conventional feminist, for she is relieved when a luncheon in honour of celebrated female writers, which she is obliged to attend, turns out not to be confined to female writers. She is as vague as Agatha Christie, too, concerning Hercule Poirot’s address. Dame Agatha has given it in the past both as Whitehaven and as Whitehouse Mansions. Miss Oliver thinks it might be Whitefriars Mansions. Now we shall never know for certain. (Mrs Oliver complains of her new secretary, Miss Livingstone, and bewails the loss of Miss Sedgwick, of whom we have never heard until that moment.) Max Mallowan, in his memoirs, mentions that Mrs Oliver was ‘a portrayal of Agatha herself ’, and adds, somewhat mischievously, that a pretended scattiness was one of Mrs Oliver’s assets.
This is one of those stories about crime committed in the past. In this case, a girl’s father murdered her mother, or perhaps it was the mother who murdered the father. All that is certain is that both parents died, the murderer having committed suicide immediately afterwards. Twelve years later, when the girl is now a young woman engaged to be married, her prospective mother-in-law thinks it important to know who killed whom. The elephants of the title are people whose memories of the events of twelve years earlier are accurate. Mrs Oliver goes on rather tiresomely about elephants never forgetting: it becomes a dreadfully winsome joke between her and Poirot, and at least five of the nine references to it ought to have been deleted.
This is one of the more meandering Christies. Elephants may never forget, but the author who is now over eighty frequently does. Her publisher ought to have provided her with an editor to help her deal with dates, ages and calculations, for these frequently go awry in Elephants Can Remember. At one point we are told that a man is twenty-five years older than his wife; later we learn that ‘as a young man’ he had been in love with his wife’s twin sister. How young a man was he? If he was under forty, then she was under fifteen! No one is ever quite certain whether the deaths of Celia Ravencroft’s parents occurred ten, twelve, fifteen or twenty years in the past. Poirot reminisces with his old friend Superintendent Spence about cases on which they have collaborated in the past, and gets an important detail about Five Little Pigs wrong. But then Poirot, too, is getting old. Even his author realizes this, and wittily reminds us of the fact:
Hercule Poirot stopped himself with a slight effort from saying firmly ‘Most people have heard of me.’ It was not quite as true as it used to be, because many people who had heard of Hercule Poirot, and known him, were now reposing with suitable memorial stones over them, in country churchyards.
Young Celia is made to say that she knows very little about the family