Third girl - Agatha Christie [109]
The new Christie in 1966 was Third Girl, a Poirot mystery. Poirot is now incredibly aged. He ought, by rights, to be well over a hundred, but we are probably meant to think of him in the context of the novel as approaching eighty. At the beginning of Chapter I, he is lingering over his breakfast of a brioche and hot chocolate. He had recently completed his magnum opus, an analysis of great writers of detective fiction which he had been working on, you realize, during the events narrated in The Clocks (1963). At least, he had at that time been doing some preliminary reading and research. We now discover that, in his monograph,
He had dared to speak scathingly of Edgar Allen [sic] Poe, he had complained of the lack of method or order in the romantic outpourings of Wilkie Collins, had lauded to the skies two American authors who were practically unknown, and had in various other ways given honour where honour was due and sternly withheld it where he considered it was not. He had seen the volume through the press, had looked upon the results and, apart from a really incredible number of printer’s errors, pronounced that it was good.
All very well, but now he had no task in hand, and he was bored. Thus, when his manservant, George, announces that a young lady has called to consult Poirot ‘about a murder she might have committed’, the great detective condescends to see her. He is intrigued by that ‘might have’. When the visitor, a girl of about twenty, enters, Poirot is disappointed. Here is no beauty in distress, but merely a scruffy modern miss in a state of some perplexity.
His visitor is equally disconcerted by her first sight of Poirot. ‘I’m awfully sorry and I really don’t want to be rude,’ she blurts out, ‘but — you’re too old. Nobody told me you were so old.’ And she rushes away before Poirot has a chance to question her. But his interest has been aroused, he consults his old friend Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, and soon they are collaborating on the case of Norma Restarick, the ‘third girl’ — the third of three girls sharing a flat — who may or may not have committed murder.
The plot of Third Girl is not lacking in Christiean complexity or ingenuity, but it is by no means faultlessly constructed, and one or two incidents will not bear close examination. How Poirot manages to ensure that X is on the scene when an attempt is made on Y’s life is not revealed, nor is his explanation of the double life led by Z at all feasible. The strength of Third Girl lies rather in its elderly author’s shrewd and not too uncharitable observation of modern youth, its manners and morals. She has turned a critical eye on the ‘hippies’ of the sixties:
Long straggly hair of indeterminate colour strayed over her shoulders. Her eyes, which were large, bore a vacant expression and were of a greenish blue. She wore what were presumably the chosen clothes of her generation. Black high leather boots, white open-work woollen stockings of doubtful cleanliness, a skimpy skirt, and a long and sloppy pullover of heavy wool. Anyone of Poirot’s age and generation would have had only one desire. To drop the girl into a bath as soon as possible. Such girls, he reflected, were not perhaps really dirty. They merely took enormous care and pains to look so.
The boys get off comparatively lightly:
He was a figure familiar