One, two, buckle my shoe - Agatha Christie [84]
One, two, buckle my shoe,
Three, four, shut the door,
Five, six, pick up sticks,4
Seven, eight, lay them straight,
Nine, ten, a good fat hen,
Eleven, twelve, men must delve,
Thirteen, fourteen, maids are courting,
Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen,
Seventeen, eighteen, maids in waiting,
Nineteen, twenty, my plate’s empty.
4The novel uses the variant, ‘Five, six, picking up sticks’.
Each of the novel’s ten chapters corresponds, loosely, to a line of the verse: the shoe buckle of the first line is not without significance. The first person to die is an apparently harmless London dentist, with a fashionable practice in Harley Street. He is at first thought to have committed suicide, but he seemed in good spirits when Hercule Poirot was a patient in his chair an hour or so before his death, and so Poirot joins his old colleague Chief Inspector Japp in investigating the affair, which soon proves to have wider ramifications than were at first foreseen. International politics may be involved, hence the change of title for US publication to The Patriotic Murders. (An American paperback reprint in 1953 used a third title: An Overdose of Death.)
This is one of those Christie crime novels whose donneé the reader would be wise to scrutinize very closely, for things are not necessarily what they seem. The plot is a particularly complicated one but is clearly and unconfusingly presented, except at moments when Mrs. Christie intends to confuse. References to politics and to international intrigue abound, but they are both more specific and somewhat more sophisticated than in such Agatha Christie thrillers of the twenties as The Seven Dials Mystery and The Big Four. Left-wing agitators are more lightly satirized, conservative financiers no longer have to be treated as sacrosanct, both ‘the Reds’ and ‘our Blackshirted friends’ (Mosley’s Fascists) are seen as threats to democracy, and there is even a mention of the IRA. References are to the real world of 1939, teetering on the brink of war, and not to a cosily recalled, more stable past.
It is odd, surely, that Poirot, who has elsewhere described himself as bon catholique, should have known his way around the Anglican forms of service sufficiently to take part, even if ‘in a hesitant baritone’, in the chanting of Psalm 140 when he accompanies a family to morning prayers in the parish church. ‘The proud hath laid a snare for me,’ he sang, ‘and spread a net with cards; yea, and set traps in my way,’ and suddenly he sees clearly the trap into which he had so nearly fallen. It is comforting to think that Poirot has derived some benefit from his visit, for this is the only church service he is known to have attended in the course of his abnormally long career.
Walking through Regent’s Park at one point in the story, Poirot notices young lovers sitting under ‘nearly every tree’. He compared the figures of the ‘little London girls’ unfavourably with that of the Countess Vera Rossokoff, a Russian aristocrat and thief whose path had crossed his many years earlier in The Big Four, and who has lingered in his thoughts and dreams ever since. The Countess plays no part in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, but she will appear again, seven years later, in The Labours of Hercules.
Elsewhere during his investigation Poirot recalls another of his cases, one ‘that he had named the Case of the Augean Stables’. This, along with the other labours of Hercules, had not yet been collected into a volume, but will be found in 1947’s The Labours of Hercules.
A television adaptation of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first transmitted on London Weekend TV on 19 January 1992.
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