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‘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

Evil Under the Sun

Agatha Christie published two books in 1932, one a new Poirot mystery Peril at End House, and the other a volume of stories featuring Miss Marple….

Though it is one of her best murder mysteries, when she came to write her memoirs about thirty years later Mrs Christie had to confess that Peril at End House had left so little impression on her mind that she could not even remember having written it. This seems to have led some recent critics to under-value what is, in fact, one of Agatha Christie’s most ingenious puzzle stories with a brilliant plot and some very lively characterization.

The action at Peril at End House takes place at ‘the Queen of Watering Places’ on the south coast of England, a town called St Loo which reminds Hastings forcibly of the Riviera. Although it is supposed to be in the adjoining county of Cornwall, from the author’s description of its topography St Loo is obviously her home town of Torquay in Devon, and the Majestic Hotel where Poirot and Hastings are holidaying is the famous Imperial Hotel, lightly disguised. Hastings is in England on one of his periodical visits from the Argentine: reference is made to the murder on the Blue Train two or three years earlier, which Poirot had been forced to solve without Hastings’ assistance….

Peril at End House is one of those novels in which Mrs Christie behaves most like the stage conjuror who confuses his audience by compelling them to watch his right hand while he deceives them with his left. It is also one of those novels in which she plays tricks with people’s names.

The particular deception which she practises in Peril at End House is one which Mrs Christie liked so much that she resorted to it again in more than one future novel. Some readers might think it as unfair as the infamous trick she played in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, though no one appears to have objected to it when the novel first appeared. The characters are an especially lively bunch, most of them friends or relatives of the ultra-modern Miss Buckley….

They include a mysterious Australian couple who, as Poirot observes, are almost too good to be true, with their cries of ‘Cooee’ and their not quite properly employed antipodean slang (‘And now you tell me you’re a bonza detective’). The Australia she had visited some years earlier was perhaps beginning to fade in Mrs Christie’s memory. Hastings has a decidedly odd lapse of memory when, in response to a comment by Poirot on the success which he and his wife have made of their ranch in the Argentine, he says, ‘Bella always goes