Taken at the Flood - Agatha Christie [96]
Collected within: ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’; ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’; ‘The Cornish Mystery’; ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’; ‘The Double Clue’; ‘The King of Clubs’; ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’; ‘The Lost Mine’; ‘The Plymouth Express’; ‘The Chocolate Box’; ‘The Submarine Plans’; ‘The Third-Floor Flat’; ‘Double Sin’; ‘The Market Basing Mystery’; ‘Wasps’ Nest’; ‘The Veiled Lady’; ‘Problem at Sea’; ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’
Sunday Express: ‘Superb, vintage Christie.’
39. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975)
Captain Arthur Hastings narrates. Poirot investigates. ‘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 Taken at the Flood
Alternative title: There is a Tide
POIROT (1948)
Max Mallowan returned to his excavations in the Middle East in 1948, which meant that Agatha Christie was able also to return to the way of life she had enjoyed before the war. It was, of course, not quite the same. The Orient Express was no longer the cheapest way to travel to Syria and Iraq, nor was it even possible to make the entire journey on that train, which was not what it used to be. This time, as Mrs Christie puts it in her autobiography, it was ‘the beginning of that dull routine, travelling by air’. The desert bus service no longer functioned: ‘you flew from London to Baghdad and that was that.’
But she enjoyed participating in the life and work of the dig during the excavation season, and equally enjoyed quite different kinds of pleasure in England, such as going to the opera in London, or enjoying summers surrounded by family in Devon. As before, she frequently wrote her crime novels in the Middle East, and now she also began to think about an autobiography, the actual writing of which was to occupy her, on and off, from 1950 to 1965. This took time away from the novels, but from now until the year of her death, she continued to publish at least one title each year. In 1948, there were two, a novel (Taken at the Flood) and a volume of stories (Witness for the Prosecution).
Both the British and the American titles of the novel came from Brutus’s speech in Act IV, scene iii of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, printed as epigraph at the beginning