Hickory Dickory Dock (1955)

PLOT: Student flatshare - Bizarre thefts, death by poisoning, rucksacks and racism. It's the 1950s version of This Life


This is both the most racist and the least racist Christie I've read by far. Set in a shared student house with a clutch of international students, owned by the vile Greek Mrs Nicoletis, there are several sentences that make you wince, such as Mrs Nicoletis's first rant ("as for these coloured ones - scram!"). We meet the student known "affectionately" as Black Bess, and the gentle Mr Akibombo, and there's even the ghastly Nigel, who is probably a gay. He's not quite the mincing horror from Murder Is Easy, but he's always laughing and shrieking and spreading marmalade on toast in the middle of a crisis. And if that isn't a sign of a wendy, then I don't know what is.

Poirot muddles through admirably. As a foreigner himself he avoids the worst of it, but there are a fair few clumps of outdated terms and unsympathetic characters. In amongst all this is a fascinating portrait of shared student housing - and a remarkably mixed, accepting lot they are if you remember that at the time many boarding houses had signs outside saying "No Dogs, No Irish, No Blacks". But still... this isn't an easy read at times.

It's the stray details that disturb. I think we're meant to loathe Mrs Nicoletis, and not to like the vile Chandra Lal, and we're supposed to think fondly of Mr Akibombo, who appears to go out on dates with one character even though she actually falls for someone else, even though she does ask him to her wedding. It's just the occasional descriptions of the poor man - sometimes he's quite eloquent, other times he's like the Um-Bongo commercial. And then there are lines like "Akibombo nodded an enthusiastic black woolly head and showed his white teeth in a pleased smile", which is as close to Bo-Jo's dreaded "picaninny smiles" as you would want to get.

But this isn't actually a story about racism. It is about love. And Poirot "suddenly felt very tired of love", when he clears up an initial mystery, which turns out to be about a student turning kleptomaniac in order to gain the interest of the psychology student she loves. This all goes horribly wrong, and soon there's an impressively high body count.

By the end it's all quite curious. Some things are resolved and some things aren't - the mysterious smuggling ring, for example either does, or does not work out neatly. A few people fall in love, and some real nastiness is revealed. It's a great read, but at the same time, there's that troubling question of "Is Christie simply being honest about her times and is she actually quite liberal for them?" remains.

They Came To Baghdad (1951)

PLOT: Bridget Jones does James Bond in a ripping thriller of intrigue, murder and bad typing.


Victoria Jones is bored of being a very bad typist and on a whim follows a dashing stranger to Iraq where she gets involved in an international conspiracy. Along the way she's kidnapped, betrayed, and goes undercover as an archaeologist with no idea that she alone is the last living key to a global disaster.

Crikey! This is thumpingly good stuff. Just when I was getting tired of murder cocktail with a twist, here comes a charming thriller starring plucky Victoria Jones. By her own admission she's neither intelligent nor smart, but she has bucketloads of pluck and cunning which sees her through a world of lethal murder and secret revolutions admirably.

Victoria is a great heroine and proves how even more fun a Bridget Jones book would be if the guest cast dropped like flies. She's endearingly at home at an ambassador's reception and totally out of place infiltrating a sinister society. It's knuckle-gasp time as she trots into work, surrounded by obviously Villainous Sorts, making a hash of typing up the lethal plans of the Olive Branch.

With her wounded pride and her "Some of the cleverest people can't spell" attitude she sticks out like a sore thumb against the ice cool Catherine who you just know is a bad 'un. After Poirot's perfections, Victoria is a breath of fresh air, armed only with her niceness and determination.

Christie pulls off 1950s Iraq with aplomb and not a whiff of racism, peopling it with vivid locals, arrogant Englishers, and offices with secret doors and hidden agendas. We get the super-super spy Fakir Carmichael who is so noble he'd make Biggles blub, we've the secretly efficient Mr Dakin, we've a wonderfully decent hotelier who doesn't mind that Victoria's broke, and diplomats with a love of good furniture.

It's splendid, splendid stuff - and just when you think it can't get better, comes Victoria's visit to the archaeological dig, and a spot of clear autobiography for Christie as she faithfully explains her Mesopotamian labours and the wonders of Max Mallowan. As charming as the reality was, the real Christie wasn't on the tun from a death cult. But there we are.

NEXT: Big bad momma in Petra - it's Appointment With Death!

The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)

Plot: A man is found dead surrounded by seven alarm clocks. Lady Bundle Brent hunts down a sinister international conspiracy.


James: The sequel to The Secret of Chimneys may not be quite the same perfect trifle, but it's doing some interesting things. There are still the Bright Young Things, but they're in it up to their necks. In the first few pages they start dropping dead, and soon it is plucky Lady Bundle Brent against the world, with only a clutch of wise friends aiding her in her mission to stay one step ahead of the machinations of the Club of Seven Dials.

Yet another deft blend of country house murder mystery with John Buchan and PG Wodehouse, this book finds time to fold in an Arnolod Bennett pop at the ex-bicycle salesman Sir Oswald Coote and his wife who just can't handle the servant problem - unlike the capable Bundle and her father, the foggy Lord Caterham. There's also a bit more restrained racism, such as when one character protests at an alias "Short of being described as Rothschild I don't mind" and there's much puzzling of the ways foreigners spell their names - but there's little to trouble the horses.

This is archly self-aware. Bundle frequently says about the sinister Seven Dials things like "They're the sort of crowd I always imagined... only existed in books" - and, as the book ticks on, the sinister club of masked adventurers seems both more menacing and more bizarre, with the theories about who these sinsister schemers could be seeming more and more improbable.

It all leads to a denouement that is both baffling and remarkable. There's no "You may be wondering why I called you here today" scene - instead, the twist is so good we hear "Get a chair for her! It's all been a bit of a shock, I can see." And then... well, what happens next is quite remarkable.

If we are cheated of the "Damn your meddling, Poirot!" unveiling, there's still a lot of unmasking, as Christie explains to us, tactfully and carefully how thoroughly she has deceived us for a couple of hundred pages. It's not unusual to arrive at the end of a Christie mystery with no idea of the villain(s), to have missed most of the clues, and to be pleasantly thrilled at our own stupidity. But this is rather like the Birmingham ferris wheel that gave a merry narration of the Paris skyline. While Christie does not lie to us, we arrive at the end having been constantly misinformed and misdirected, but having had a thoroughly pleasant journey - and with an odd yearning to go round again just to make sure.

The Secret of Chimneys (1925)

The Plot: Much to the alarm of Lord Caterham, the family seat of Chimneys finds itself the centre of an international conspiracy, with dead royalty, stolen treasure, and master criminals wandering the grounds.

James: This is PG Wodehouse's James Bond novel. Possibly the most rewarding book ever written, this is a giddy whirl of crown princes, foreign locations, hotels, sinister assassins, secret passages, dead foreigners, impassive detectives and blundering young things.

Let's quickly turn to the marvellously dry Superintendent Battle, who is basically Jeeves:

"Detective stories are mostly bunkum... but they amuse people... and they're useful, sometimes."

The entire cast are beautifully depicted - this is a leap on from The Mysterious Affair At Styles. The story has a firm centre with implacable Battle, plucky gal "Bundle" Brent, twinkling adventuress Mrs Revel and international rogue Tony Cade. But beyond that are a wonderfully-depicted collection of baffled gentry and bumbling foreigners.

The Well-To-Do English get both barrels from Christie, especially stuffed shirt politico George Lomax (forever on the point of a fine speech) and his assistant, the lovelorn dimwit Bill Eversleigh. A lot of Christie's casual racism actually emanates from these kind of people - the thoughtless and the pompous, who are conviced the world is off to rack-and-ruin all thanks to Johnny Foreigner. These are lazy, arrogant, wasteful people who deserve everything that's coming to them, yet somehow avoid it.

The true class of the book rests with Lord Caterham and his daughter - the Lord too wisely indolent to care, and dear Bundle crammed full of pluck and stamina and shrewd character judgment.

It is people like this who can take one look at Anthony Cade and decide that, for all his outward roguery, he's got a heart of gold and deserves a stiff cocktail. Cade may be devious and cunning, but he's a good egg - and it's a measure of all the other characters in this book how they react to him. Women adore him, both the wily Battle and the eccentric Baron Lollipop are impressed by him, and there's something about him that turns quiet waiters into cat burglars.

Cade is Christie's first Action Hero. He's full of thoughtful vim in a story where every other man is reserved. Even Supintendent Battle is practically asleep, leaving all leaping to the quasi-comical Surete Expert. Compare Cade's rugged candour to Poirot, and the contrast is remarkable - this is a man with brains and more than two gears.

His only match in the story are the gals, who are all spirited things, quite prepared, if absolutely necessary, to marry a dimwit if it's for the good of their country. But they'd rather do something ripping. Constantly coming over as much smarter than the men, they're all about quick thinking and fast cars and fun. It's what helps makes the book so giddy and clever. How perfectly screaming, as Bundle would say.

In contrast, Inspector Battle is a splendidly self-effacing non-entity. Like Jeeves he is classily classless. He's always there to say just the right thing, or offer a discrete word. His purpose is to save the day, with the minimum of fuss, and then to quietly disappear, the proprieties observed.

The foreigners are mostly there for fun and misdirection. "Talking to foreigners always makes me so thirsty" sighs Lord Caterham at one point. They may carry guns or knives, but they're always the butt of a cheap joke - with their silly names (Mr Hiram Fish), their conversational inelegance, and even their smoky rooms full of sinister plots. It's all good clean fun, and the portraits are pure Wodehouse - grandly-done sketches rather than calculated racism.

This isn't to say that the book gets off without the occasional wince. A comical Baron at one point remarks "Something wrong I knew there would be... He has married a black woman in Africa!" which is regrettable pidgin, to say the least. But, I suppose, it fits with the times.

Christie is actually at her most blistering when she looks at the English lower-middle-classes. Here's her description of daytrippers to Chimneys:

"Bert, the humorist of the party, nudges his girl and says 'Eh! Gladys, they've got two pennyworth of pictures here right enough.' And then they go and look at more pictures and yawn and shuffle their feet and wish it was time to go home."

She's also at her bleakest (understandably) when describing Public Transport: "My belief in the brotherhood of man died the day I arrived in London last week, when I observed people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room."

As a sentiment it seems to sit oddly in what looks like such a creamy froth of a book - but then, when you step back, you realise this is a dark subversion of Wodehouse: If these upper class fools really are running the country, then who is to save us? That this book manages to offer its own, quietly subversive solution is the real Secret of Chimneys.

And yes - if you're planning on reading just one Christie, please let it be this.

The Mysterious Affair At Styles (1920)

JAMES: We're starting at the beginning. And it's already archetypal Agatha Chrisite - Poirot investigates a locked-room mystery in a country house. But this book is about so much more than that.

For a start, it's a war novel - a First World War novel. And there aren't many of those. This genteel murder takes place while the guns go crump at The Front, which lends the book an odd air. Why should this single death matter when thousands are dying every day? And yet it is made to matter, due to Poirot's great humanity. While everyone else tuts about rationing, reads war poems, or decries the state of the gardens now that the servants are dead, it is Poirot who is the human centre.

We first meet him as a refugee. He's a dispossesed pensioner, limping from a war wound. Once Poirot was the world's greatest detective, but he's clearly on his last legs here. Even living in poverty-stricken solitude, he's still a commanding presence. And yes, he's an ecentric, fussy oddity right from the start, with his enormous egg of a skull and his precise manners - and yet he's the one person who cares the most about the murder victim, and about ensuring a happy outcome for the rest of the family. He even refers to himself as "Papa Poirot", asking the strange ragbag of ciphers to confide in him.

Because, yes, the guest cast are a strangely lifeless bunch. There's two plucky gals, two poor gentlemen, a bounder and a foreign doctor. Plus a dippy maid and a no-nonsense housekeeper. It's a little hard to differentiate them at times. The victim's boon companion, Miss Howard, is all guts and thunder and enormous fun, and that's about it. Oddly, some of the cameos, such as the out-of-breath chemist or the excited housemaid come across more sharply than some of the suspects.

Much is made of the "unreliable narrator" in her later work, but Christie gets right down to it with Captain Hastings. In the beginning he appears to be the detective who "came across a man in Belgium once. A very famous detective. My system is based on his, though of course I have progressed rather further". We see Christie at her funniest as we gradually realise how inept Hastings is, deliberately unleashed on the household by Poirot as an enormous distraction.

This device is oddly similar to Christie's contemporary PG Wodehouse. While Poirot solves all problems and mends all broken hearts with the tact of Jeeves, Hastings is poor old Bertie Wooster, blundering about, making disastrous proposals of marriage, and coming up with harebrained scemes. Actually, look at Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) - it's practically the same book. Only with less murder and more newts.

If Hastings is an enormous red-herring, then so too is much of the book. Suspects are ruled out in quick succession, there's much business with various different bottles of poison, amateur dramatics, and even a whole plot about spies. What's so clever is that each red-herring is actually not the complete distraction it seems, building up to a brilliant denoument, which makes you think "oh, now, hang one a minute... that's not playing fair".

It's an unusual ending. It's suddenly a courtroom drama (which will crop up in stuff like Witness For The Prosecution), but it's handled with admirable skill by Christie - all bullying baristers and alarming retelling of evidence in a suddenly damning light. Will the case end in court, you start to think? Oddly, this is a formula used in every Perry Mason novel, but here it's just a fourth-act distraction before Poirot slaps his forehead and summons everyone into a drawing room for the "You may be wondering why I called you here today" denoument that we know, love and expect.

Finally, a lot of noise is made about Chrisite the racist/ anti-semite, which I hope to find out more about as we go on. But here, oddly, the one Jewish character is treated with surprising sympathy, even with admiration by Poirot. I'm prepared to be wrong (and I'm sure The Book With The N-Word will get me), but I'm going to advance the theory that while Christie may make the odd incidentally insensitive comment, her overall view of foreigners is sympathetic. My big reason for this is amazing Poirot. He's the constant butt of snide, sour racial intolerance, but he triumphs over it. If anything, Christie's approach seems to be that the British are simple-minded buffoons, all manners and no thought. Hastings and his friend Cavendish are true members of the Drones Club - frequently lost for words, emotionally stunted, and incapable of independent thought. It is this staid quality that nearly lets the murderer get away with it - and proves that England really does need outside help. Even if from a damned Belgie like Poirot.

With hindsight, it's hard not to draw parallels here with the senseless slaughter going on on the continent. The survivors of that Great War will provide much of the guest cast for the rest of Christie's oeuvre. And frequently, they're not valiant heroes, but blundering old salts and stuffy sahibs. Which makes you wonder what point's being drawn there too.

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KATE: This first Christie novel is both completely typical (country house murder, limited cast of suspects, collection of slightly stock characters from faithful servant to winsome young love interest….) and quite atypical in its use of courtroom drama and the legal technicality the ending hinges on.

Outside ‘Witness for the Prosecution’, legal procedures rarely impinge on Poirot’s deductive process. Not only do we rarely see the inside of a courtroom, but in many of the novels, Japp and his slow-witted colleagues never get as far as an arrest. As the series develops, Christie sometimes goes out of her way to exclude the police from the action, setting plots on islands, in snow-bound trains and at remote archaelogical digs where Poirot is on his own to solve the case without official support or forensic evidence.

While I’d agree that Christie’s treatment of Poirot is sympathetic, especially in contrast to the wooden English gentry who surround him, he is always an isolated figure. Ever the foreigner who sticks out like a sore thumb in this green and pleasant England, not only is he the stranger who intrudes on family crises, but a solo private detective who is unable to confide fully in sidekick Hastings, who would inevitably give the game away. He appears at his most pitiful and most foreign in ‘Mysterious Affair at Styles’, a refugee, living on charity, who couldn’t be more different from his benefactors the Inglethorpes. As Christie’s portrayal of Poirot develops, he starts to use that foreignness strategically, knowing that the average Englishman will assume anyone with a foreign accent must be a halfwit.

I think you’re bang on in comparing this to Wodehouse; in much the same way as he presents light, diverting tales of upper-class life, Christie’s writing intellectual jigsaw puzzles that barely graze the surface of real life. Sympathy for the victim is almost beside the point – their death isn’t a human tragedy, just the jumping-off point for the puzzle that has to be solved. In a stoicism perhaps borrowed from the bloody front of the First World War, the victim’s relatives and friends never seem so much devastated by death as inconvenienced by it. Unlike most contemporary crime, it’s not unusual for Christie’s victims to be the least likeable characters in the story, for whom you’d struggle to feel much regret.

Murder in the house means delaying dinner and the delicate social problem of how to feed visiting policemen (usually with beer and sandwiches in the butler’s pantry). Even Poirot “does not approve of murder” and, habitually neat as he is, seems driven to tidy up the mess more than to punish the killer or avenge the dead. Littered with comic relief (mainly provided by the blundering Hastings), these are stories intended to divert the reader and impress them with Christie’s cleverness, not set them musing on the human condition.

Speaking of victims, what did you think of Mrs Inglethorpe – innocent victim, or dominating matriach who brought it on herself?

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JAMES: Ooh, she's curious, isn't she? She's a figure of great charity, but she's also shown as vain, domineering and capricious, who loves using her money as power over those close to her.

NEXT: Poirot in a valiant thriller, The Big Four