Taken At The Flood (1948)

PLOT: Can Poirot save rich widow Rosaleen Underhay?



Poirot's made it through the Second World War. When we first met him he was a refugee during the First World War and possibly retired. So how old is he now? It's best not to ask.

Taken At The Flood is interesting from the point of "Does Christie change with the times, or does she simply redress her mannequins in fashionable outfits?". This is a grim novel of a damaged, glum Britain, with air raids, blitzed London and villages plunged into miserable poverty. It's very contemporary and appropriate - there's no sense of conspicuous affluence or that the cast haven't been changed by the global upheaval.

And yet... peel off the new wrappings, and we've the classic village full of suspicion, a rich young heiress, a black sheep, a tiny bit of occult and a lot of vocal and chemical poison. The sense is that, despite everything, England carries on - the world of quiet malice behind the flower arranging.

Poirot is dragged in by the poisonously new age Mrs Lionel Cloade ("M. Poirot, I have come to you under spirit guidance"). It's a story of an Old Family who are trying to adjust to New Money - to their rich brother's nervous widow, Rosaleen, and her domineering brother, David.

It's world of subtle nastiness and complicated resentments. The Cloades despise Rosaleen, but depend on her for money, at the same time as questioning just how she came into her inheritance. The story all comes down to what noble Lynn Cloade realises - "We'd do anything, anything for money."

The story splits two ways - both an investigation of mystery of the past and a mysterious stranger from the present, and Poirot hovers over both, quietly, regretfully investigating. And everywhere he turns is the same motive - "We'd do anything for money". So it is that we meet characters like the shabby genteel Major, who still goes to his club but lives in threadbare poverty, broken by taxation. Every single person in the book is driven by greed - this is the world of classic Christie but come upon hard times.

So it is that we find Poriot at a miserable hotel ("Here there was a good fire, but in a large arm-chair, toasting her toes comfortably, was a monumental old lady who glared at Poirot" and the Coffee Room, "the only time coffee was served there was somewhat grudgingly for breakfast and that even then a good deal of watery hot was its principal component"), carrying out his investigation into the lives of people who are literally mean-spirited. In many ways it's business as usual - complicated lies and alibis, but hanging over it is a sense of tiredness and despair. The war is over but there's no real sense of victory, and everyone's morals are slightly off balance.

It's a melancholy, dismal book, and affecting in its sense of tragedy. The noblest character is Lynn, returning from war to find herself repelled by her lovelorn cousin Rowley and instead besotted with rakish David. But who will she end up with? Well, actually, that's one of the most interesting, and troubling scenes...

SPOILERS:

Lynn goes to see Rowley to break the news that she's leaving him for exciting, risky David. Rowley is anguished - she's been away to war, he's been stuck behind, having to keep the farm going. He feels left out of life and now abandoned by her. For her part she's refusing to give up her independence, her love of excitement.

And then Rowley cracks, and strangles Lynn, and we realise that Rowley's broken the law to keep order.

Only... Poirot turns up at the last minute, suggests a pot of tea, and explains what's really happened. It's quite startling - oddly like the kitchen murder from Torn Curtain in its savagery and civility, but also has a really, really odd conclusion.

Lynn realises that, after all, it is Rowley she loves. Or, as she puts it, "When you caught hold of me by the throat... I knew then that I was your woman." Umm. I think the point is that she's realised that Rowley isn't as meek as she thought he was, but the message that's coming over is that a bit of domestic violence can bring necessary spice to a relationship. Ah well, different times.

The ending is ultimately and appropriately bleak and morally curious. Poirot, the avenging angel, allows death to be misattributed and for a killer to find happiness with someone they attempted to murder.

Peril At End House (1932)

PLOT: Who could possibly want to kill the eccentric heiress of a ramshackle house?



Crikey. On one level this is a jolly murder romp with a neat twist ending. On another level this is a very dark game of cat and mouse - and Poirot's not necessarily the cat.

Superficially bright and sunny this is Poirot and Hastings on a seaside holiday taking strolls and, in between cups of tea, trying to save young Nick Buckley from some implausible plots against her life.

Actually, this is a complicated look at the Bright Young Things. We've seen them before in The Secret of Chimneys deftly mixing crime and cocktails, but this is a darker brew. Young Nick may seem like an untidy saint, but her friends paint a blacker picture of the society she mixes in, all involved in drug-smuggling, debt and dirty weekends.

We get Nick's best friend Freddie, who doesn't really like Nick, is off her head most of the time, and yet has a certain integrity. We get the honest naval officer who is anything but and the successful art dealer whose as fast as his car.

This contrasts with two dull cousins - honest Maggie and the lawyer, neither of whom are painted as particularly exciting, and yet both of them are revealed as having a lot more going on than first appears.

This is a book of fragile appearances and constant impersonation - only Poirot and Hastings are who they appear to be. We even reach a stage where Poirot meets some comedy Australians and remarks that they're a bit too comedy Australian to be believable.

By the end of the book, even Poirot is being impersonated as part of a plot involving chocolates that aren't what they appear to be and we've a corpse that isn't what it appears to be and ... oh my lord.

You won't be surprised to hear that this is a book with a good twist ending that sees Poirot more than justify his reputation - and a good job too, as the book has seen characters assuring Poirot that they've never heard of him. As it turns out, that isn't what it appears to be, either.

The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)

PLOT: Divorse! Diamonds! and Dead Heiresses on the Blue Train to Nice.



James: Written when Christie was going through her divorce, this book suffers as a consequence. It's not that it's bad, but that the events were perhaps preying on her mind.

On the one hand it's a dry run for Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile - glamourous setting, a background of intrigue, a doomed millionaire, suspicious supporting artists... and yet...

At heart it's a tale of two heiresses. There's Ruth Van Alden the tough woman of the world. And then there's Katherine Grey (note the name) - the dull one. Is Christie working out her complicated feelings towards her first husband through these two women?

Poor Ruth has been trapped in a messy marriage with a philandering husband and is trying to escape for a little happiness. Of course, she is one of Christie's doomed heiresses, and she won't trouble us for longer than to convince us of her flaws.

By contrast, Katherine has come into some money and is learning how to live. She's almost impossibly saintly and forms an instant rapport with Poirot over romans policier, as he calls them. She's striving to fit into international society but her heart belongs in... St Mary Mead!

St Mary Mead is another strange trace element in the book, which takes a while to get going and then goes all over the place. We open with mysterious jewel thieves and international assassins. Then we've Ruth's domestic drama, then St Mary Mead and the questions over Katherine's inheritance, then the Blue Train and then it's villas and hotels and police stations and beaches and Moonbase Alpha.

Murder on the Orient Express makes much more use of the single setting of the train and the restrained approach makes it a claustrophobic book, whereas Mystery Of The Blue Train plays out rather like a holiday novel with a bit of crime nibbling at the edges.

Similarly, Death On The Nile does all its set up in the first chapter and dumps us straight in Egypt, compared to Blue Train's hundred pages of set up before "And then the train started."

It's full of loose ends, or ideas that will be made more of in later books. The double-whammy of jewel theft and heiress slaying will reoccur in Death On The Nile, but this time as part of a triple twist.

When we next see St Mary Mead, there will be no mention of inquistive Katherine Grey, nor of her old lady friend Amelia Viner, who has a sharp understanding of human nature and a wicked intelligence... but we can see where this one is going. We'll even see Poirot taking on another female sidekick who is an Agatha Christie figure, but we'll have to wait a while for that.

This is nowhere near as bad a book as Christie makes out. Written at a time when she was having understandable trouble trusting men, it does have a strangely dual approach to them. The main suspect is a no-good toy boy who is undeniably attractive - and he's by no means the worst man in the book.

Poirot himself does all right here (even getting the attentions of a lady). He is on fine form, but sadly missing the narrative skills of Hastings, all pomposity without the leavening that Hastings provieds. He's really just there to solve the mystery. He doesn't feel like a super brain with the wings of fate beating at his shoulder. He's simply the world's greatest detective.

NEXT: Shall we have another go at that? It's Murder On The Orient Express