Hercule Poirot's Christmas - Agatha Christie [94]
The clue to the locked-room mystery is an oddly unsatisfactory one. When it proves to be part of something larger, you are tempted to ask, ‘Where’s the rest of it?’ If you do, you will receive no answer. The clue to the murder, on the other hand, lies buried in the family and in family resemblances. The diabolically cunning author makes great play with this, and appears to be making things rather easy for the reader. References to a sense of déjà vu abound. At one point, Tressilian, the butler, says, ‘It seems sometimes, sir, as though the past isn’t the past! I believe there’s been a play on in London about something like that.’ He is right: it is not mentioned by name, but the play Tressilian is thinking of is J. B. Priestley’s I Have Been Here Before, produced in London in 1937.
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is one of the least realistic but most ingenious Christies, and Poirot performs brilliantly. He is on the scene because he has been staying with the Chief Constable of Middleshire, Colonel Johnson. Middleshire is a fictitious county: when Poirot last encountered Colonel Johnson, in Three-Act Tragedy, Johnson was Chief Constable of Yorkshire, which is generally thought not to be fictitious. Incidentally, the reader is warned that, in Johnson’s conversation with Poirot in section 5 of Part III, the identity of the murderer in Three-Act Tragedy is taken for granted and, by implication, revealed.
An example of the way in which the author fooled her readers as a conjuror does his audience occurs when Poirot indicates a large calendar hanging on a wall, ‘with tear-off leaves, a bold date on each leaf’, and asks why the date has been left as it is. The elderly butler, Tressilian, ‘peered across the room, then shuffled slowly across till he was a foot or two away’. Tressilian informs Poirot that the leaf has been torn off, and that the date is correct. ‘It’s the twenty-sixth today.’ Poirot then asks whose responsibility it is to keep the calendar up to date, and is told. We are encouraged to assume that Poirot has some complex theory connected with the calendar. In fact, as will become apparent only much later, in the dénouement, he has simply been testing Tressilian’s eyesight, and has satisfied himself that the old butler is extremely short-sighted.
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas received generally favourable reviews, the poet and critic Edwin Muir in The Listener asserting that ‘even the corpse is meritorious’…
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 1 January 1995.
About Charles Osborne
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.
A Christie for Christmas by
Carolyn Hart
When I was growing up, there was always a new and eagerly awaited “Christie for Christmas.” Those wonderful books—clever, insightful, unpretentious, and fun—were as much a part of the rhythm of life for this mystery reader as the changing seasons, quadrennial presidential elections, and the evening news with Huntley and Brinkley.
The day came when the last Christie was published.