Mrs McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christie [11]
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
Mrs McGinty’s Dead
Alternative title: Blood Will Tell
POIROT (1952)
The year 1952 was an important and memorable one for Agatha Christie. On her sixty-second birthday, on 15 September, it might have seemed to her likely to be memorable only because on that day she fell and broke her wrist. Three months later, however, she knew that her play, The Mousetrap, was destined for a very long run at the Ambassadors Theatre in London, for it had opened on 25 November to great acclaim. Even so, she could hardly have guessed that the play would outlast her and still not have come to the end of its first run in London forty-seven years after.
The dampest journalistic squib of the year was produced by a columnist in the Daily Mail who, unaware that, to use an un-Christiean phrase, the author’s cover had already been blown three years earlier in the Sunday Times, announced, ‘I learned yesterday that Miss Agatha Christie has for fifteen years been publishing books under a nom-de-plume.’ Mrs Christie had, in any case, been doing it not for fifteen but for twenty-two years.
During 1952 Agatha Christie published three titles, two of them detective fiction and the third a Mary Westmacott novel. The first of the crime novels was Mrs McGinty’s Dead (Blood Will Tell is an alternative American title, but the novel is known in some editions in the United States by its British title.)
At the beginning of Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Poirot the gourmet is leaving one of his favourite Soho restaurants, having dined alone but exceedingly well. He walks back to his Mayfair flat, a trifle bored, wishing that his old friend Hastings were not on the other side of the world. He glances without interest at a newspaper placard about the McGinty trial, for he recalls a brief paragraph he had read about it. Not a very interesting murder, merely some wretched old woman knocked on the head for a few pounds. But he arrives home to find that he has a visitor. It is Superintendent Spence, whom he had worked with four years earlier (Taken at the Flood: 1948), and who wishes to consult him about the murder of Mrs McGinty, an old washer-woman who lived in a cottage in the village of Broadhinny. Her lodger, James Bentley, has been found guilty, but Spence is not satisfied with the verdict, and he manages to persuade Poirot to visit the scene of the crime.
This is one of those rare Christie murder mysteries in which the author steps down a rung or two on the social ladder to concern herself with working people. Some of them may be middleclass, but they are the new post-war impoverished middleclass, the nouveau pauvre. There are, for example, Major and Mrs Summerhayes, who run in slovenly fashion the horrid guest house where Poirot stays while he is pursuing his investigations. There is Mrs McGinty’s niece, Bessie Burch, who does not grieve for her aunt, and there are, or there may be, a few ‘Women Victims of Bygone Tragedies’. There is, of course, languishing in gaol awaiting execution, the unprepossessing James Bentley,