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— 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

Murder in the Mews

Murder in the Mews, the last of the 1937 Christies, is a volume of Hercule Poirot stories, unusual in that there are only four stories (three in the American edition, Dead Man’s Mirror, which omits ‘The Incredible Theft’) and that each is much longer than the average Christie short story. The title story of the English edition, ‘Murder in the Mews’, and that of the American edition, ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, are both novella-length. The fourth story, ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, is shorter, but even so is about twice the length of most stories by Agatha Christie.

In all four stories, Poirot is functioning on his best form. ‘Murder in the Mews’ finds him and Inspector Japp collaborating more closely than has often been the case to solve a murder disguised as suicide in a mews house, presumably somewhere in Mayfair…. The characterization is superb, and the plot clever and convincing, though the author had already used the central device in ‘The Market Basing Mystery’.42

42 Collected in The Under Dog (1951) and Poirot’s Early Cases (1974), as was ‘The Submarine Plans’.

‘The Incredible Theft’ is an earlier story, ‘The Submarine Plans’, expanded to more than three times its original length, and much improved in the expansion. The submarine has now become a bomber, and Poirot retrieves the plans by an especially brilliant exercise of his little grey cells…

Mr Satterthwaite of the Harley Quin stories and Three-Act Tragedy is among the characters in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, another expanded retelling of an earlier tale, in this case ‘The Second Gong’,43 and a first-rate example of the conventional murder mystery with a body in the library, a collection of suspects…, and the obligatory plan of study and hall as an aid to comprehension. One of the characters quotes from Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ the lines which twenty-five years later will provide the title of a Christie novel:

43 Collected in Witness for the Prosecution (1948), a volume published in the USA but not in Great Britain.

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Agatha Christie was, throughout her long career, not well served by her editors. No doubt she would have resisted having her spelling or grammar changed, but surely she would have been grateful for the opportunity to get rid of careless errors as, for instance, in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’ where she allows Poirot to show to one suspect a bullet-shaped pencil he had earlier relinquished to its owner, another suspect.

Incidentally, Poirot has been known to sneer at the type of detective who races about the lawn, measuring footprints in the wet grass, but in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’ we find him doing precisely this with every appearance of relish.

‘Triangle at Rhodes’, the final story in the volume, must have been in Agatha