Hercule Poirot's Christmas - Agatha Christie [93]
Collected within: ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’; ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’; ‘The Cornish Mystery’; ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’; ‘The Double Clue’; ‘The King of Clubs’; ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’; ‘The Lost Mine’; ‘The Plymouth Express’; ‘The Chocolate Box’; ‘The Submarine Plans’; ‘The Third-Floor Flat’; ‘Double Sin’; ‘The Market Basing Mystery’; ‘Wasps’ Nest’; ‘The Veiled Lady’; ‘Problem at Sea’; ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’
Sunday Express: ‘Superb, vintage Christie.’
39. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975)
Captain Arthur Hastings narrates. Poirot investigates. ‘This, Hastings, will be my last case,’ declares the detective who had entered the scene as a retiree in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the captain’s, and our, first encounter with the now-legendary Belgian detective. Poirot promises that, ‘It will be, too, my most interesting case—and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent…X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot!’ The setting is, appropriately, Styles Court, which has since been converted into a private hotel. And under this same roof is X, a murderer five-times over; a murderer by no means finished murdering. In Curtain, Poirot will, at last, retire—death comes as the end. And he will bequeath to his dear friend Hastings an astounding revelation. ‘The ending of Curtain is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised,’ writes her biographer, Charles Osborne.
Of note: On 6 August 1975, upon the publication of Curtain, The New York Times ran a front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot, complete with photograph. The passing of no other fictional character had been so acknowledged in America’s ‘paper of record.’ Agatha Christie had always intended Curtain to be ‘Poirot’s Last Case’: Having written the novel during the Blitz, she stored it (heavily insured) in a bank vault till the time that she, herself, would retire. Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976.
Time: ‘First-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny.’
Charles Osborne on
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Murder for Christmas is the title under which Hercule Poirot’s Christmas first appeared in the United States, some months after its British Publication. When it was reissued in paperback in the U.S. in the forties, the title was changed to A Holiday for Murder. All the titles seem to promise one of the cosier Christie murders, with perhaps a dash of arsenic in the Christmas pudding, but the epigraph from Macbeth which prefaces the volume—‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’—suggests something more violent, as does the author’s dedicatory note to her brother-in-law, James Watts…
The reader of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas would do well to think carefully about the Macbeth quotation. (Shakespeare is the writer most quoted in the works of Agatha Christie, and there are more allusions to Macbeth than to any other shakespeare play. The English poets of the nineteenth century are also frequently quoted, and so is Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. But it is traditional English nursery rhyme that Agatha Christie most frequently turns to…)
Two themes are combined in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas: the traditional murder in the English country house party, in this case a house in the Midlands with the family of a wealthy, unpleasant old man assembled at Christmas from far-flung out-posts; and the locked-room mystery, more of a feature of John Dickson Carr than of Agatha Christie, who preferred to humanize her puzzles. Though the action takes place over Christmas, there is as little Christmas atmosphere in the novel as there is Christmas feeling in the hearts of its characters: the old patriarch is brutally murdered on Christmas Eve. The family suspects are, for the most part, stereotypes of the exotic foreigner, the strong, silent colonial prodigal son, the sympathetic, understanding wife, and so on. One of them is explored in