A Murder Is Announced (1950)

Plot: A murder is announced... please accept this, friends, the only intimation.

This is a book about spinsters. It's a subject tackled head-on in other crime of the period, such as Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night, with its sexual frustration and violence, but this is a different take entirely.

Is it a lesser work than Gaudy Night? Well, it's certainly a different one. The book also suffers from "Gone With The Wind"'s problem of there being a much-more-celebrated adaptation in existence. When you're up against a telly version by Alan Plater, you're in trouble. Maybe it's my personal prejudice - but the book is a disappointment in a way that The Body In The Library is a triumph. But this is all unfair - comparing A Murder Is Announced to an amazing television version and to Gaudy Night is, at the end of the day, merely comparing grapes, plums and bananas.

Let's start with the central concept, which is brilliant - another village trope, that of the local paper, and how regional gossip is more important than national events - bookends the work. We start off with dismissive mention of twenty-three dead in food-poisoning at a hotel, which is mere trivia compared to local adverts for false teeth and dachshunds.

Dropped into all this, like the hand of fate, is the announcement that a murder will take place. It's almost supernaturally creepy, and also, like The Body In The Library, a notion that's too fictional to be real, and yet it is. This bizarreness is both celebrated and played on - of course the doomed Rudi Scherz shouts "Stick em up", naturally everyone assumes he's holding a gun, and obviously the lights go out before the murder happens.

Now, all that aside, and girding our spoiler-loins, let's look at the women.

This is a story about single women. The book features only one happy marriage - that of Bunch to the Vicar. They're a loving couple (almost carbon copies of Vicar+Wife in St Mary Mead). Bunch even has the splendidly named Tiglath Pileser for a cat. The vicar and his wife are all that is good and harmonious about Chipping Cleghorn - and naturally aren't even suspected for a second.

We also get Belle Goedler, the dying widow in the remote Highlands. She's had a brilliant life and knows the fulfilment of being married, and as such can judge the quiet sadness of Letitia Blacklock.

And that's it for wedded bliss.

Colonel and Mrs Easterbrook harbour a dreadful secret that's never uncovered - she's much younger than him and is flustered about her alibi, but what her flaw is is never revealed.

Similarly, Phillipa Haymes is married - but her husband is an army deserter who dies unmourned in a hospital as a tramp. She lives a life of torment and sadness, never able to tell her son the truth, nor to move on. As such she's seen as beautiful, but frozen like a statue, waiting to thaw upon his death.

The central spinsters of the novel of Lotty and Letty Blackwood - only one of whom actually appears. Both kind, one amoral - both driven. Letitia is a financial and business genius who allies herself to the Goedlers, a genuinely good woman who lives for finance and who never interests herself in men. She's the happy spinster in the book - one who never realises that she is incomplete.

By contrast, the disfigured Charlotte drives herself indoors, a once-pretty woman who cannot bear the world to see her. Her crippled self-confidence curdles her soul. Her mainstay is her belief in her father, a doctor who refuses her the simple operation that will cure her deformity. Lotty becomes a truly pathetic figure - her betrayed worhsip of her father causing an odd sort of arrested development. We learn that her dreams are of "travel, to have a house and beautiful grounds - to have clothes and jewels and go to plays and concerts, to gratify every whim - it was all a kind of fairy tale". Charlotte's fairly tale world has no mention of an adult relationship with a man. Instead she moves in her childhood friend Bunny and they recreate the magic of the old days, spending idyllic afternoons blackberrying. Charlotte remains childish - giving Bunny a child's birthday party send off. Even the devising of the "Murder Is Announced" plot is prankish and immature.

Bunny is Charlotte's accomplice in setting up this fairytale world. It is she who colludes in Charlotte's impersonation and fraud, but to her it is all so simple and plainly just. Bunny is a child grown old without having grown up - a simple person who finds being old confusing and saddening. Bunny gets a remarkable speech to Miss Marple in the coffee shop about the poverty she was reduced to:

"Darning one's clothes and hoping it won't show. And applying for jobs and always being told you're too old. And then perhaps getting a job and after all one isn't strong enough. One faints. And you're back again. It's the rent - always the rent - that's got to be paid. Otherwise you're out in the street. And in these days it leaves so little over. One's old age pension doesn't go far."

Unworldly Bunny is actually the most worldly character in the book, broken by the true sadness of the world and hiding it all under fluff and good nature. It's a dramatic portrait of a sadly shabby life, aware of her own stupidity and yet unable to alter it and just bumbling on and living in her make-believe fairy castle with her childhood friend.

You'll have gathered by now that I'm banging on about this as a novel of character. Which brings us to remarkble Murgatroyd and Hinch. Two practical old ladies sharing a farmstead. Agatha Christie does lesbians of a certain age, but without trumpet or fanfare. Instead they're both marvellous. They're reflections of Charlotte and Bunny. Whereas the former live a fantasy life, Murgatroyd and Hinch are solidly practical. Hinch is the muddy-booted schemer, slaughtering pigs, running a black market ring, all grit and colourful language ("I'm standing against the mantelpiece with my tongue hanging out for a drink"), while Murgatroyd is Bunny ("Oh, dear, Hinch, you know what a muddle I get into!").

The slaughter of Murgatroyd is the most horrific murder in Christie (am I still biased by watching Joan Sims die the part on telly?), no more dreadful for Hinch's reaction. She is described as inconsolable:

"Nobody offered Miss Hinchcliffe sympathy or mentioned Miss Murgatroyd's death. The ravaged face of the tall vigorous woman told its own tale, and would have made any expression of sympathy an impertinence."

Hinch is a remarkable and a brilliant character. She feels real. Her reaction when she finds her friend's body is stunning - she's horrified, but still practical, insisting on telling Miss Marple what they'd been doing while they wait for the police to turn up. No hysterics, but also no doubt of the awful grief going on. She also gets the best line in the book when she turns up for the denouncement:

"[Inspector Craddock] said I needn't come unless I liked," said Miss Hinchcliffe. "But I do like."

I genuinely and utterly love Hinch. She's my second favourite "spinster" in the book.

My favourite spinster, naturally, is Miss Marple, even though she takes a subtle backseat. It's quite clear what she's there for, as soon as Sir Henry Clithering realises she's in town ("Ye Gods and Little Fishes, can it be...? My own particular, one and only, four starred Pussy. The super Pussy of all old Pussies.").  Marple is slower and quieter in this book (you get the feeling it's about two-thirds of the way through before she KNOWS who did it). I'm deducting points from the Pan edition for the back cover that reprints Miss Marple's end-of-book list of clues ("Lamp. Violets. Where is bottle of aspirin? Delicious Death. Maing enquiries. Severe affliction bravely borne. Iodine. Pearls. Letty. Berne. Old Age Pension.") - but it does at least prove the old dear is sharp as ever. She has her list of clues, but she's not quick enough to prevent a murder turning into a killing spree.

In the meantime she manages a lot of knitting, some cunning observations, and some slighting comments about the local cakes at the coffee shop. But it is Miss Marple who knows everyone - there's a neat section of village parallels and then a remarkable final chapter where she explains the psychology of the murderer in a way that's as sympathetic as it is heartbreaking ("She was quite a kindly woman... It's what's in yourself that makes you happy or unhappy.")

Finally, there's the servant problem. In a book stuffed full of remarkable characters there's Mitzi "the Mittel European", a character who makes it through to the end of the book surprisingly unscathed. She's outlandish and terrible and yet the sheer outpouring of her makes her very believable. Even the murderer finds her exhausting, and it's part of the book's astute eye on the 1950s servant problem and the agonies of rationing that the murderer has to placate Mitzi in the middle of at least three lethal plots as good cooks are just so hard to find.

Anyway, after a book all about miserable single women and unconventional relationships, we end with a wedding. Remarkably it's between two characters who, according to Miss Marple's judgment really shouldn't go anywhere near each other. What makes their union most peculiar is that they appear to get married in between pages - we assume that Chapter 22 follows almost immediately after the unveling of the murderer in Chapter 21, but then there's sudden talk of wedding presents. Is it really a happy ending, or simply a conventional one?

The Body in the Library (1942)

Plot: "Ma'am, there's a body in the library!"

Familiarity can breed contempt. Or a mild boredom. I've put off reading The Body In The Library for just that reason - after all, if you've seen the brilliant BBC version several times, and sat squirming in horrified delight through the ITV travesty... well, why need you bother reading the wretched book? It can't better the opening of the BBC wonder - "There's a body in the library!" can it?

Oh yes it bloody can. The sheer delight of The Body In The Library is that it contains everything that The Murder On The Links was missing. The latter was a beautifully crafted machine of a plot - but The Body In The Library is just as wonderful a bit of engineering, only wrapped in a knitted fluffy pink cover.

The sublime opening line is "Mrs Bantry was dreaming. Her sweet peas had just taken a First at the flower show." We are straight back in St Mary Mead with all its domestic horrors and spinsters sniping across the privet. There are glorious cameos from The Murder At The Vicarage. Gossiping Miss Hartnell is back:

"'His poor wife,' Miss Hartnell tried to disguise her deep and ardent pleasure."

Also returning is Griselda the vicar's wife in a charming cameo rolling around on a rug with her toddler.

We also get returns from the cast of The Thirteen Problems - the Bantrys and Sir Henry Clithering.  Dolly Bantry rocks, as ever, summing up her reaction to her husband flirting with "pretty girls who come to tennis":

"There's no harm in it. And why shouldn't he? After all... I've got the garden."

But it is Miss Marple who dominates this book, and does so brilliantly, stealing scenes she's not even in. Every moment is perfectly, wonderfully described, such as when the telephone rings too early in the morning:

"So well ordered was her prim spinster's life that unforseen telephone calls were a source of vivid conjecture."

Which leads us to Dolly's breathlessly immortal:

"We've just found a body in the library."

It's tempting to just type out whole chunks of the book. It's as delightful as a menacing trifle. It'd be nice to say "Only Agatha Christie and Jane Austen really understood the true nature of the English Village" but... oh, sod it, let's.

There are so many glorious, incidental details. For instance Basil Blake's country cottage:

"A hideous shell of sham Tudor, was known to the postal authorities, and to William Booker, builder, as 'Chatsworth'; to Basil and his friends as 'The Period Place', and to the village of St Mary Mead at large as 'Mr Booker's new house'."

What's so lovely about this sentence is how much is tells us about the dry practicality of St Mary Mead, the modern wit of Basil Blake's set, and even the pretensions of poor William Booker, builder - a character who is not even in the book. But this is Christie at her absolute best, both as a plotter and a stylist. The sheer wonder of Miss Hartnell's envious protest at Miss Marple having gone up to view the body before breakfast - "Well, I mean, I think that is carrying things too far."

That's not to say the book is an out-and-out comedy - far from it. The humour is always shrewd and there are moments of genuine awkwardness, such as when the crippled millionaire Jefferson wakes up, both literally and from his infatuation with Ruby Keene - "'Margaret...' It was the name of his dead wife..."

There's a similarly delicate hand at work in the handling of the murder of the girl guide Pamela Reeves. Child murders are quite rare in Christie, and this compares interestingly with the comparatively callous description of the dispatch of the victim in Dead Man's Folly.

The humane shrewdness continues in Sir Henry's perfect introduction of Miss Marple:

"Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face, and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it as all in the day's work. Her name's Miss Marple."

Miss Marple is at her shrewdest in this book, dropping apposite stories about boys hiding frogs in clocks, and making wonderful comparisons to various maids, as when she reveals that her "little maid Janet" always relaxed too soon after telling a lie: "She'd explain quite convincingly that the mice had eaten the end of a cake and give herself away by smirking as she left the room."

This comes at the end of the scene where Miss Marple has interviewed girl guides and has decided which one has more to say. Wonderfully:


"Miss Marple spoke crisply.
'I'd like to speak to Florence Small.'"

Oh lawks, I have typed out most of this book, but it is a glorious thing. Miss Marple reduces everyone in the book to the "General Common Denominator", describing Jefferson's infatuation with Ruby Keene through village life, explaining how when Mr Harbottle's sister left him for to nurse a relative, she returned to find him infatuated with the maid and herself banished to "live most uncomfortably in rooms in Eastbourne" because "the old man found it much pleasanter to have a young, cheerful girl telling him how clever and amusing he was than to have his sister continually pointing out his faults to him". Isn't that just brilliant? In about three paragraphs we get a rattling good parable that also tells the whole story of three people utterly incidental to the story.

Miss Marple is at her absolute sharpest. There's the wonderful showdown with Basil Blake and his lover Miss Dinah Hill where they're both absolutely vile to her and she simply sits there and strips away their wicked veneer to reveal how deeply lovingly conventional they are, winning them both over in a couple of lines. It's an amazing scene, and gets followed by Miss Marple's remarkable revelation of the real Basil when she says how he rescued four people and a dog from a burning building in an act of stunning heroism.

A lot of this is sheer, glorious window dressing. A delight in knowing the plot from the television is realising that Miss Marple has solved it very early on. By halfway through she has announced "There was a very careful plan made. What happened was that the plan went wrong". A few pages later she announces of a vital clue "It had been worrying me, you know - how to account for her nails." There's still nearly a hundred pages to go, but this isn't annoying. Miss Marple isn't smug - we're enjoying the journey and we know she'll tell us in her own time. She even later informs Dolly that she knows everything but won't tell Dolly because she knows her too well. "It's no good, dear."

Although Miss Marple dominates the book, other characters sing. Colonel Bantry's social exclusion is marvellously described:


"Did you go to dinner with the Duffs on Thursday?"
"Oh, that! It was put off. Their cook was ill."
"Stupid people," said Mrs Bantry... She sat down by the desk and absent-mindedly picked up a pair of gardening scissors. With them she cut off the fingers, one by one, of her second glove.
"What are you doing, Dolly?"
"Feeling destructive,"

There's also the exceedingly painful description of Jefferson finding a picture of a young man in Ruby Keene's handbag, which is Agatha Christie's equivalent of Desdemona's handkerchief: "Now then Kitten, now then. You know who it is right enough."

Even a cameo such as the dancer Raymond Starr ("one of the Devonshire Starrs" it is claimed) gets the following remarkable speech about why he left work at a hotel in the Riviera, after overhearing an old Colonel saying:

"Where's the gigolo? I want to get hold of the gigolo. My wife and daughter want to dance, yer know. Where is the feller? What does he sting yer for? It's the gigolo I want."

Raymond even gets the last line of the book to himself when, dreams crushed he must carry on:


"Oh well, my luck's out. Dance, dance, little gentleman!"

There's also the peculiarly lovely touch of the nine year-old detective who announces proudly "I've got autographs from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie" - make of that what you will. This is an author who is on top of her game and knows it - but is also accidentally setting up the cute self-awareness of the Margaret Rutherford films. Let's just for a second imagine the glory of Margaret Rutherford and Mr Stringer solving the case of The Body In The Library. Oh go on - ballroom dancing, tennis, girl guides and film stars and even more ballroom dancing. The frocks alone would make you faint.

Seriously, this is utterly, utterly brilliant.

Third Girl (1966)

Plot: Dolly birds on disco drugs! Poirot sails into the sixties!

Yet more japes with Ariadne Oliver and Hercule Poirot, this time set in the wild whirl of sixties flatshares. Things have come quite a way from the boarding house of Hickory Dickory Dock - we're in a world where three young gals pal up in a flat, swapping chit chat over morning coffee and sharing gossip about their come-downs:

"I was up too late last night," Frances said, "... Basil would make us try some new pills - Emerald Dreams."

Now, don't roll your eyes. Despite all this lunacy it's all very jolly. Christie's always been quite blase about drugs, and despite this odd hiccup, the relentless sang-froid actually suits the feel of the story - which is a bit like that Murray Lachlan Young poem "Everyone's Taking Cocaine".

The constant drugs form an important background, as underneath all this (slight spoilers) is the suspected Gaslighting of poor Norma the Third Girl. Is she really a mentally disturbed murderess? Is she taking refuge in drugs? Is she doing things unconsciously? Or is something stranger happening? The truth is both interesting and complex, and shows Christie experimenting with a whole new type of murder and a whole new type of poisoning.

The trick that Christie is pulling is actually very clever, as she uses the drugs both as a red herring and as a key ingredient, and also uses them to misdirect you away from what's really going on (which has slight echoes of Curtain).

Both Poirot and Ariadne are clearly very old here - in fact, the whole mystery starts because Norma takes one look at Poirot, nearly tells him everything and then says "I'm sorry, but you're too old" and rushes out of the room.

In a way this is the story of the Golden Age of Crime trying to come to terms with the 1960s. Although, what actually happens is that the Golden Age storytelling tames the 60s. Gradually Christie stirs some familiar ingredients into the new age - so we get a country house, a mysterious old colonel writing his memoirs, a sinister foreign nurse, and a ruggedly heroic doctor type who is planning on emigrating to the colonies. Elements that Christie cannot control she cunningly unleashes Poirot on, so we see him running an espionage network, and even arranging a kidnapping from a greasy spoon cafe.

Ariadne Oliver is as splendid as ever, and gets to go on a secret mission, attend an artist's studio party, and get clubbed unconscious. The latter act has curious similarities to the indisposal of Tuppence in By The Pricking Of My Thumbs - surely, you think later, it would have been easy to murder the old love? But then we'd be denied a great character.

Talking of characters, we get a lovely old loopy colonel who manages this week's winning racist remark about Poirot:

"A clever chap but a thorough frog, isn't he? You know, mincing and dancing and bowing and scraping."

Again, not a *great* book, but a thoroughly lovely rattle of a read which gets away with it.

Dead Man's Folly (1956)

Plot: A murder mystery game turns real.

You're in for a bit of a surprise with Dead Man's Folly. It pulls off that strange late Christie trick of being very readable and entertaining whilst being... er, not very good.

Things that suck:

1) The murder of a child.
Christie just sails into this without even a flicker of sentimentality. Poor Marlene Tucker is vulgar, which kind of marks her out for death. There's even the monstrous moment where a doctor is asked if it's a sex crime: "I wouldn't say so, no. I shouldn't say she'd been a very attractive girl." Marlene's family are treated similarly badly with mutterings about their grubbiness, nagging, and general weakness. Her mother's reaction is a mixture of sobbing grief and a lament that her husband won't get his chance at the coconut shy now.

2) Not with Poirot around
By now, surely, you'd know better than to stage a murder with Poirot on the scene? We've encountered this problem before in Death On The Nile, but this is a positive trumpeting, arranging for Poirot to be on hand for a pre-determined death. Are we supposed to believe that murderers are brashly over-confident?

3) The whole reason for the crime
When you realise what's causing all this, you do have a sudden spike of worry. Is that really all it comes down to? There are about three different solutions that would avoid any homicide. One of which is to claim mumps, the other is to rush off shopping and leave a note. It's genuinely a case where murder just seems like a lot of trouble just to avoid an awkward social occasion.

4) The ending
It's not just rushed, it's a positive cascade of revelation. Many of the facts are Utterly New to the reader. There's no feeling of "Oh, if only I'd realised" just a lament of "Oi, that's not fair!". This is offset by the marvellous symbolism of Poirot's last act which makes the entire book make sense.

But what's to love about this book?

1) Ariadne and Hercule
Christie's fictional alter ego bumbles through the book brilliantly. She's outraged at learning that "apparently she drinks like a fish" and is all mad hair and scatty schemes that make her great fun - and Poirot positively softens under her influence. The two balance each other nicely and make for a great pair.

2) The Idea
There's a story in "While The Last Lasts" based on a treasure hunt Christie was asked to devise. Here we see a whole mystery built up around a murder game... the only shame is that the game is abandoned so quickly, and proves to be almost incidental to the actual murder (a good hard shove on a dark night would be a lot subtler).

3) The Parallels
Ariadne Oliver's mind creates some bizarre characters for her game - outlandish grotesques who all, eventually, turn out to have their twins somewhere in the book. It's a clever way of Christie getting away with a larger-than-life plot while at the same time mocking the extravagances of crime fiction.

4) Mrs Folliat
The lapsed gentlewoman is lovely. We've come a long way from the roaring gals of the 1920s to the genteel poor. Mrs Folliat is a proto-Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton, renting out the lodge while her stately home is occupied by newcomers. She maintains her social position almost effortlessly, and behaves with perfect grace as the real lady of the manor. It's a very complicated, bittersweet portrait of fallen grandeur, and Christie pulls it off brilliantly... especially when we realise that Mrs F's sacrifices have been more severe than we originally realised.

5) Lady Stubbs
The naively manipulative wife is another great portrait. Everyone involved announces that she's a really very stupid women, and yet no-one can quite escape her simpering manipulation. She manages to dominate the book while spending quite a lot of it absent, usually tucked up in bed.

There are also a lot of familiar themes knocking around - impersonation, long-lost relatives, sinister spies, dangerously smooth foreighners, and even the terrible mayhem wrought by a new wife...

Yes, it may be a bit of an odd read, and not one of the best, but it's still very rewarding.

Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

Plot: Poirot solves death at the digs.

Hello death! You're everywhere. One can imagine the dinner party where, after the soup a guest leans over and says, "But Mrs Christie, it must be so interesting spending six months of the year on a dig! You really must set one of your murders there, absolutely must."

As we've seen, archaeology and travel to the cradles of civilisation is a frequent theme in Christie, one that hardens once she meets Max Mallowan. It is in this story that it finds its clearest expression, both in the setting and the moment when Poirot finds a murdered body in a grave from thousands of years ago and ponders human existence, society, and the very notion of a murder mystery ("A Mrs Leidner of two thousand years ago").

Murder in Mesopotamia is about people living on a grave. We've all seen Amityville Horror and Pet Cemetery - we know what happens next. Christie plonks the 1930s like the latest layer on a tottering cake of death, putting all of human life into perspective. For Poirot, on his way back from Syria, this is just one more case. For the other players, but one event in their lives. Lives which are long over by the time we read it. Yet, for all that, Christie says it is still important.

Depending on how you look on it, Murder In Mesopotamia is either reliant on a bizarre contrivance or is a palimpsest. I was taught the word at univesity - a piece of parchment that was rubbed out and overwritten, just like several of the characters in Murder In Mesopotamia.

At the centre we have Mrs Leidner, the archaeologist's wife, a woman who 20 years ago married a spy and has almost wilfully forgotten every detail of him beyond his handwriting. We have the spy himself, who may still be alive somewhere in the ruins, unrecognised by his wife.

Crikey, you think. That's unlikely - and, indeed, the TV adaptation goes to some efforts to tidy this up, separating the lovers immediately after their wedding and saying "well, her first marriage was in black in white, there's no way she'd recognise him now". But this very personal history is indeed unearthed, with the added complication that, somewhere on the dig may also lurk that first husband's vengeful brother, who may even, suggests Poirot, be impersonating the female narrator, Nurse Leatheran.

This is, as you may have guessed, a story that layers improbability on improbability. We have letters from the dead husband, we have forged letters from the dead husband, we have art thieves, we have drug addicts shaking among the rubble, we have a jolly hockeysticks gal who keeps on turning up and suggesting tennis (she's wandered in from Murder At Ther Vicarage) ... and yet, at the same time, we have Poirot who cuts sharply through all this absurdity.

For example, there is the ghostly figure at the window, whose very unreality turns out to be both a cruel trick and a deadly lure. We have a squinting foreigner and a sinister monk, who Poirot dispatches with a couple of clues. It's all, in the most literal sense, window dressing. Murder In Mesopotamia is a puzzle box where none of the clues are not what they appear to be. Much time is spent, for example, in establishing movements at the fatal moment across the courtyard. Christie has great fun here recycling charming local colour from her memoir "Come Tell Me How You Live" and bamboozling the reader (there's even a diagram)... and it's all the auther red-herringing loudly "Look at the Courtyard! The Courtyard!".

A similar blind is Mrs Leidner's nature. In the book she is, according to who is speaking, either a charmer, a schemer, a hypocondriac or a siren. Nurse Leatheran decides that she likes her, and for the most part, she seems rather fun. But we are also supposed to think that she is the malign household god who drives the happy expedition to misery. This is easily done in the book, but, again, the TV adaptation struggles with this - on screen it's all too clear that Mrs Leidner is a good enough sort.

Mind you, the TV version does a decent job with poor Miss Johnson, who, before suffering a truly terrible death, must nearly reveal the solution three times. In print the first revelation works rather well. It is quite obvious, he says haughtily, that the second approach to the jump is mere teasing - she quite baldly states that she's worked it out, but just has to think about it. The TV version cleverly throws in a misdirection here, which covers what is in the genre the fine old declaration "I know the answer and so must die". Her third revelation (in very gruesome circumstances) is in a fine tradition of teasing ambiguity (Is there an occasion in Christie where a victim cries "Fred did it"?).

I should stick in a word here about the art thieves. This is an archaeological expedition where, to a greater or lesser extent, most of the expedition are frauds - some aren't who they claim to be, some just don't want to be there, and one's off his tits. It's poetic justice that their finds are all stolen and replaced with copies. No-one notices - which raises a few basic points about their competence, but also touches on the idea of the real value of a find - is it the object itself or simply the discovery?

Finally, a few words about Nurse Leatheran. I like the old bird. She's a Christie archetype - the stong, sympathetic type. We've seen her in Death In The Clouds and on The Blue Train. She's detatched, she's cool, she's reliable - and, such a sharp observer that Poirot fears for her life. The TV adaptation backgrounds her in favour of Hastings, which is understandable, especially as it gives the mystery another suspect. It is noticeable in this book that Poirot doesn't draw up a list of suspects. He'll rattle through them occasionally, but if we had one of his blunt lists we'd realise that they were rather thin on the ground.

This is also one of those Christies where if you play "Who has the least reason and the most solid alibi?" you'll get the correct answer immediately.

NEXT: Death in the Clouds

Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960)

Plot: A collection of "two main courses and a selection of entrees".


Short stories - some reprints from much earlier, one a rewrite, one an old story with a new title. Only the first story is "Christmassy" - Poirot is invited down to spend Christmas and unmask a jewel thief in a country house. In many ways this story is a pastische of what people think an Agatha Christie mystery to be - country house, bright young things, complications, impostors, glamorous thieves, lots of snow and servants, a dead body, a taint of international intrigue and a twist or two.

It's notable for showing Poirot staging a crime which is also a rather macabre practical joke. The other thing this isn't really is a "whodunnit" since it turns out that the thief is, er, well, pretty much who it was supposed to be all along.

It is the first story in the collection to feature disguise and assumed identity - an idea which is played out again in The Under Dog, and then rather more dramatically in The Dream, Four-And-Twenty Blackbirds, and Greenshaw's Folly. In fact, the shame of these last three stories is that the trick in each case is identical. Admittedly they're very different stories, but you wonder if Poirot spent his entire life surrounded by people in false whiskers.

The Dream is a very interesting story in that it places Poirot up against the supernatural. This is a terrible idea on the crook's part, as Poirot cannot accept an impossible explanation, and therefore solves the crime. It's also a match between the villain and Poirot's vanity - and there's no doubt who can win this one.

Servants underpin both The Under Dog and The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding. In the latter, Poirot receives a warning from a worried maid, in the first Poirot finds himself trying to rationally solve a murder while Lady Astwell jumps up and down pointing at a hapless secretary and denouncing him based only on feminine intuition.

The Under Dog and The Dream are both classic "House of Evil" adventures in miniature - a dead and unpleasant businessman, impostors, put-upon secretaries, a not-exactly grieving family.

These tropes rear their head again in Greenshaw's Folly, a Miss Marple story that features a strange house, its eccentric owner, resentful housekeeper, wretched gardener, locked door mysteries, a policeman, lost relatives, and a fair amount of disguise. It also, remarkably, features a divorced woman who is employed as a secretary. There's also a very strange sense of the story heading in one direction and then turning in another (there's a lot of mention early on about clocks and hidden treasure), but this may just be misdirection from the mystery here being remarkably similar to two other stories in the collection. In many ways the story fits in much better in "Miss Marple's Final Cases", an anthology which allows Miss M to shine, and where the mysteries are sufficiently different to prevent the reader from groaning "not again". Especially as you have Miss Marple solving the mystery by magic and also dropping the wonderful line "When I was a girl, Inspector, nobody mentioned the word Stomach."

Finally there's The Adventure of the Spanish (Baghdad) Chest. Which is a weird and satisfying blend of Othello and Rope, mixed in with a truly gruesome method of murder that's curiously like something out of Edgar Allen Poe. It's curiously like a stage play, and isn't really so much a mystery as a poisonous puzzle box.

Next: More short stories with Poirot's Early Cases