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Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops

—Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.
Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.
—By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.

The division of James Joyce’s epic novel ‘Ulysses’ into three parts – of 3, 12 and 3 chapters each – is clear for everyone to read in its table of contents. Here is that table of contents. (Note: none of the Greek title names are actually indicated in the text; they were given by Joyce to early commentators who published them in books and articles about the novel, and have been used by critics and commentators, including me, ever since):

Part 1. Telemachiad

  1. Telemachus
  2. Nestor
  3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

  1. Calypso
  2. Lotus Eaters
  3. Hades
  4. Aeolus
  5. Lestrygonians
  6. Scylla and Charybdis
  7. Wandering Rocks
  8. Sirens
  9. Cyclops
  10. Nausicaa
  11. Oxen of the Sun
  12. Circe

Part 3. Ithaca

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

But the book can also be informally split into two halves, breaking after ‘Sirens’ thus:

Part 1. Initial style

  1. Telemachus
  2. Nestor
  3. Proteus
  4. Calypso
  5. Lotus Eaters
  6. Hades
  7. Aeolus
  8. Lestrygonians
  9. Scylla and Charybdis
  10. Wandering Rocks
  11. Sirens

Part 2. One-off chapters

  1. Cyclops
  2. Nausicaa
  3. Oxen of the Sun
  4. Circe
  5. Eumaeus
  6. Ithaca
  7. Penelope

This is because the first ten or so chapters are all done in a roughly similar stream-of-consciousness style. Joyce himself in a letter referred to them as being in ‘the initial style’. From ‘Sirens’ onwards, however, each individual chapter has not only a style but a format of its own. They are all longer and, in their different ways, more contrived and artificial than the initial ten. So I’m going to give individual explanations of these final seven chapters starting with chapter 12, ‘Cyclops’.

Chapter 12. Cyclops

‘To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their patois.’ (the Citizen)

1. First-person narrative

Unlike the first 11 chapters, this one is not narrated by a (sort of) third person narrator, but switches to a highly flavoured first-person narrative given by an unnamed Dublin lowlife and drinker, a self-described ‘collector of bad and doubtful debts’. He’s currently working a job on behalf of a Jewish tea merchant (Herzog) who is owed money by a man called Geraghty.

This narrator describes dropping into Barney Kiernan’s pub along with Joe Hynes, where they encounter a person referred to throughout only as The Citizen, who is an aggressive and intimidatingly fierce Irish Nationalist figure. Unwisely, Leopold Bloom later drops into the pub (looking for Martin Cunningham) and he is subjected to needling and then outright abuse, with some other characters coming to his partial support.

(Incidentally, the unnamed Citizen is generally believed to be a satirical version of Michael Cusack, a founder member of the Gaelic Athletic Association.)

2. Mock epic

The second element which makes this chapter stand out as unique is that there is a second narrator or figure who intersperses the first-person narrative with really long passages of mockery. On almost every page the first-person narrative of events is interrupted by a long passage parodying a range of ‘official’ types of content or tone. To begin with these passages parody the high-flown romantic tone of the Celtic Revival, mocking the heroic figures of Irish legend and the sentimental-heroic style they were written about by authors of the Celtic Revival in the generation before Joyce.

Here’s what I mean. First here’s the tone of the colloquial and half-drunk narrator:

I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D.M.P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes.

By contrast, here’s just part of the long first passage in the sentimental mock nationalist style:

In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated.

As you can see, this starts out as slushy sentimentalism but quickly becomes, as Monty Python would put it, ‘silly’. In the tradition of learnèd wit which stretches from Rabelais through Don Quixote to Tristram Shandy, one way of mocking the heroic style (and book learning generally) was by concocting absurdly long lists. The Cyclops chapter is bulked out with plenty of these:

Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale, York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.

There is much more where this came from. If you have the leisure time to really savour these interruptions, they are often very funny. Here’s a description of Terry the barman at Barney Kiernan’s pub bringing the boys another round.

Terence O’Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup full of the foamy ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.

So: by describing the setting and the Citizen in the flowery, exaggerated style of Celtic legends or medieval epics, Joyce mocks the tendency of the culture of his day to romanticize Irish identity and history.

He also deploys the strategy of the mock heroic genre (which itself goes back to ancient times) i.e. to portray bathetic, lowlife, contemporary figures in the style of the grand epics associated with Homer for comic and satiric purposes. Which is of course, in a sense, the fundamental approach of the entire novel.

Thus Joyce’s absurdly inflated style elevates the drunken, narrow-minded Citizen into a mythical, giant-like figure to create a humorous, mock heroic parallel. And the Homeric comparison with the one-eyed Cyclops is a scathing satire on Joyce’s conception of violent Irish nationalism for being as ‘one-eyed’ (i.e. narrow-minded, bigoted and violent) as the giant Cyclops is in the Odyssey.

3. Many parodies

But it’s not just Celtic legends that Joyce satirises. There are 32 of these long, overwritten insertions in this chapter and some of them go on to mock what Joyce saw as other forms of pretentiousness, including bad literary style, sports jargon, absurdly formal language, a séance (in which the spirit of dead Paddy Dignam speaks!), pompous academic writing, and the Bible (‘for I will on nowise suffer it even so saith the Lord.’) At one point it drops into a parody of Hansard, treating the crew of drunks in the pub as if they were MPs in the House of Commons:

Mr Cowe Conacre (Multifarnham. Nat.): Arising out of the question of my honourable friend, the member for Shillelagh, may I ask the right honourable gentleman whether the government has issued orders that these animals shall be slaughtered though no medical evidence is forthcoming as to their pathological condition?
Mr Allfours (Tamoshant. Con.): Honourable members are already in possession of the evidence produced before a committee of the whole house. I feel I cannot usefully add anything to that. The answer to the honourable member’s question is in the affirmative.

In other words, nothing is safe, nothing goes unmocked, nothing is sacred.

What actually happens

The overall shape of the narrative is clear but it’s pretty hard to make out the detail of what happens without some kind of guide or crib. The key events are that the narrator and a pal, Joe Hynes, drop into Barney Kiernan’s pub and are greeted by the Citizen; they order drinks and are soon joined by Alf Bergan and Bob Doran (very drunk). Leopold Bloom enters, is offered a drink but wisely opts to take merely a cigar proffered by Joe Hynes, not wanting to be obliged to buy a round later.

Alf Bergan has got hold of a bundle of job applications sent to the Dublin High Sheriff from men volunteering to be the official hangman, which he gives to Joe and Joe reads out to everyone’s disgust. This points to the grim reality of capital punishment under British rule but also, in stark contrast to the nationalistic talk in the bar, indicates there are plenty of Irishmen ready to hang their fellow countrymen for pay. They discuss the urban legend that being hanged gives male hangees an erection. Or, in mock scientiese:

The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus…

Bloom insists on taking a scientific view of the matter and this riles the half-drunk Citizen, who aggressively yells an Irish toast for their next drinks. Bloom explains he was only looking for Martin Cunningham about aspects of Paddy Dignam’s will. It is about 5pm. All the fandango about the elaborate parodies can’t hide the fact that we are down among real lowlife, violent shiftless drunks:

Gob, Jack made him toe the line. Told him if he didn’t patch up the pot, Jesus, he’d kick the shite out of him.

Talk turns to the foot-and-mouth disease which is being discussed at the cattle markets and by some local politicians including Nannetti who we met in the newspaper offices. Once again, Bloom, stone cold sober, launches in on a scientific explanation of the issues which really riles the drunk Citizen and the narrator who calls him ‘Mister Knowall’.

A remark about a ban on playing Irish games in the park leads into a discussion of Irish sports. The narrator is really cross with Bloom continually interrupting these drunk rambles to give lucid sensible analyses. When Alf mentions that Blazes Boylan is rumoured to have made £100 betting on a boxing match, Bloom hurriedly tries to continue the existing topic. He wants to avoid any mention of Blazes, his nemesis, the man who is probably screwing his wife as they speak.

Incidentally the boxing match, between Myler Keogh (‘Dublin’s pet lamb’ and an Irish champion) and Percy Bennett (‘the Portobello bruiser’ a sergeant-major representing British forces) is fictional and clearly another representation of the central them of the antagonism between Ireland and Britain. At the same time it is described in an extended parody of sports journalism. Nothing is sacred.

They are joined in the pub by J. J. O’Molloy and Ned Lambert who have passed the madman Denis Breen and his worried wife Mrs Breen. Breen madly wants to bring a libel case which prompts discussion of recent lawsuits, one of which is then described in flowery Medieval English. Someone involved in it was Jewish which sets the Citizen to lamenting that we ever let ‘them’, the Jews, into the country.

Next to enter the crowded pub are John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan ‘with him with a face on him as long as a late breakfast’ because they lost money betting on the Gold Cup horserace, but this is a digression from the Citizen who delivers an extended vision of Ireland restored to her rightful place on the high seas and fine industries and thriving population – ‘All wind and piss like a tanyard cat’ according to the jaded narrator.

The Citizen gets distracted into a rant about the appalling conditions in the Royal Navy which triggers a blasphemous interpolation.

They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth, and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.

Bloom is foolishly sober and pedantic:

—Perfectly true, says Bloom. But my point was…

The episode is overtly presented as a clash between bigoted nationalism and a Jew, a case of antisemitism – which it explicitly is – but as always with Joyce, it’s other things too.

1) It’s a clash between sobriety and drunkenness. Bloom is not teetotal but he chooses to drink nothing while the ten or so Dubliners around him proceed to get very drunk, angry, arguing, fighting drunk.

2) It’s a class thing. Bloom is lower middle-class and we know about his calm intellectual curiosity about things, whereas most of the others are portrayed as real lowlifes, parasites, leaches, drunken gamblers (O’Molloy the lawyer isn’t nor, in fact, is the Citizen himself). Bloom is not just a nice Jewish boy who’s stumbled into a den of bigots; he’s a nice middle-class man generally, who’s stumbled into a den of drunken roughs.

Then the Citizen asks Bloom direct what his nation is and, when Bloom replies ‘Ireland’, the Citizen hawks and spits in disgust. Suddenly Bloom loses his temper and briefly speaks about the repression of his people, here and now. It’s worth quoting in full:

—And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant.
Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.
—Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle.
—Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.
—I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.
—Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.
That’s an almanac picture for you. Mark for a softnosed bullet. Old lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he’d adorn a sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse’s apron on him. And then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as limp as a wet rag.
—But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now…

Of course the irony is that Bloom is preaching the gospel of love promoted by Jesus Christ to supposed Christians but this so infuriates the Citizen that he swears he’ll murder him, he’ll crucify him, for all the world sounding like the Jewish and Roman authorities who conspired to execute Christ.

After he’s stalked out, Lenehan mistakenly spreads the rumour that Bloom had a hot tip on the Gold Cup race, Throwaway, and has gone to collect his winnings. And this triggers venomous gossip about Bloom undermining the nationalist cause, and his father being a swindler.

At this point, at the end of the episode, nice Martin Cunningham arrives and his arrival is described in cod medieval style, maybe parodying Walter Scott.

Our travellers reached the rustic hostelry and alighted from their palfreys.
—Ho, varlet! cried he, who by his mien seemed the leader of the party. Saucy knave! To us!
So saying he knocked loudly with his swordhilt upon the open lattice.
Mine host came forth at the summons, girding him with his tabard.

Disappointingly, Martin joins in the general slagging off of Bloom and pads out the accusation that his father helped the British authorities in Dublin castle draw up repressive legislation and practices. At which point Bloom unexpectedly and unwisely appears back in the pub, in search of Cunningham to do good for Dignam’s widow. But nobody believes this story; his name is thoroughly blackened now, and the narrator thinks:

There’s a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat.

He and Martin exit, getting up into a cab but the Citizen finally staggers to his feet and makes his way to the pub door and yells after Bloom: ‘—Three cheers for Israel!’ drawing the attention of passersby. Bloom, incensed yells back:

—Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

The Citizen is so incensed by this that he stumbles back into the pub, looking for the knackered old biscuit barrel his dog had licked clean of its last crumbs, as a weapon. He grabs it, returns to the door and throws it at the horse-driven cab (terrifying the horse) as his furious mangy hound Garryowen runs after the carriage and passersby laugh at these yelling drunks.

The throwing of the biscuit tin is a mock heroic reference to the end of the Cyclops story in the Odyssey, where Odysseus, having tricked the Cyclops, escaped from the cave where he had been imprisoned, made it to his ship and sailing away, is incautious enough to yell taunts at back at his captor. At which the giant Cyclops picks up an enormous boulder and hurls it at the ship, only narrowly missing. Heroic version: giant rock. Modern mock heroic equivalent: biscuit tin.

The Arranger

Canadian critic Hugh Kenner says that the critic David Hayman was the first to identify and name Ulysses’ main technical innovation, which was the irruption into the text of a voice which belongs to none of the characters nor to any narrator, but just intrudes, as we’ve seen happens in ‘Cyclops’.

Its first significant appearance in the text takes the form of the 63 newspaper captions which punctuate the ‘Aeolus’ chapter. Who is ‘saying’ these headlines? Nobody. And as the chapters follow you realise that, yes, we are still getting the famous ‘stream-of-consciousness’ thoughts of the leading characters but that there is another voice who adds phrases in among the characters’ thoughts.

Hayman gives it a name, calling it The Arranger. Kenner devotes a whole chapter to describing its effects and I note the name is still being used by modern commentators. And this chapter 12, the ‘Cyclops’ chapter, is the first one where we really see The Arranger fully in action. Who speaks the 32 comic parodies and exaggerations which punctuate the text? Not the lowlife narrator of the episode, not the narrator of the initial sections, who is by and large close to the idea of a traditional third-person narrator. No, someone else.

At one level, obviously it’s James Joyce who wrote the whole thing. But I really like Hayman’s idea that, within the experience of reading the text, it’s someone else, something else, a powerful supra-authorial entity, a science fiction invader from some other realm of discourse, concocting these solid blocks of text. This makes them not only funny, but spooky, adding to the luminous sense of ‘Ulysses’ coming, in some sense, from another world.

General xenophobic insults

The Citizen isn’t just rude about the Jews.

  • The French! says the citizen. Set of dancing masters! Do you know what it is? They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland.
  • the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe, haven’t we had enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that’s dead?
  • [Of Nannetti the Italian]
    Hairy Iopas, says the citizen, that exploded volcano, the darling of all countries and the idol of his own.
  • [Of the English king]
    We have Edward the peacemaker now.
    —Tell that to a fool, says the citizen. There’s a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo. Edward Guelph-Wettin…
    And what do you think, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in His Satanic Majesty’s racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the horses his jockeys rode…
    —They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself, says little Alf.

Comic phrases and vivid speech

The face on him all pockmarks would hold a shower of rain.

—Here you are, says Alf, chucking out the rhino. [handing over money]

—I beg your parsnips, says Alf.

Mister Knowall. Teach your grandmother how to milk ducks.

Gob, he’d have a soft hand under a hen.

—Me? says Alf. Don’t cast your nasturtiums on my character.

—What’s up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had lost a bob and found a tanner.

—Who made those allegations? says Alf.
—I, says Joe. I’m the alligator.

—Expecting every moment will be his next, says Lenehan.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

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by Simon on February 2, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 2, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/02/ulysses-james-joyce-cyclops/

Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie (1940)

‘It looks, does it not, as though we return to our muttons?’
(Translation of a French phrase which means, ‘go back to the start’, part 2, chapter 2)

‘I’m not one to gossip!’
(In the pantomime world of Agatha Christie, this always the preliminary to someone launching into a massive gossip, in this case gabby Nurse O’Brien)

‘Just like the pictures, isn’t it?’
(Nurse O’Brien sums up the pop culture cheesiness of the plot)

‘Old sins have long shadows, as they say!’
(Pithy proverb from Nurse Nolan)

Mrs. Bishop’s bust heaved with a flash of jet.

Part 1. The murder of Mary Gerrard

The narrative is cast in three parts. Part one gives us the events leading up to The Murder.

Old Mrs Laura Welman is bed-ridden after a stroke. She is attended round the clock by two nurses, older, plump Nurse Jessie Hopkins and Nurse O’Brien, and periodically visited by the handsome, humorous local doctor, Dr Peter Lord.

Laura’s husband died years ago and she is the owner and sole inhabitant of the Hunterbury estate (well, along with the raft of servants). At the end of the drive is the village of Maidensford. When she dies it is expected that she will divide the estate between her niece, Elinor, and her late husband’s nephew, Roderick ‘Roddy’ Welman.

We are shown numerous scenes between Roddy and Elinor where it becomes clear that 1) they have been in love since they were boy and girl playing on the lovely Hunterbury estate; 2) neither of them have plans to get a job or career because their plans for their future entirely depend on inheriting Aunt Laura’s money; 3) Elinor is cold and calculating, deliberately restraining her love for Roddy, and wondering how long before Aunt Laura finally dies.

The fly in the ointment who queers the whole situation is Mary Gerrard. She is the same age as Elinor and Roddy but born into a different class. She’s the daughter of the grumpy old lodge keeper to the estate, angry old Ephraim Gerrard. But here’s the thing: when Mary was a girl, Laura Welman, with no child of her own, took a shine to her and paid for her to go to private school, have French and piano lessons and be sent abroad to finishing school. She is just back from two years in Germany. Thus she has been educated ‘above her station’.

Not only this, but here, right at the start of the narrative, Elinor receives a letter which is really a scrawled, illiterate note, warning her that someone is sucking up to the old lady in the hope of winning her fortune. This can only refer to Mary, but the question is: who wrote and sent Elinor this note? And why?

The scenes between Elinor and Roddy quite cleverly build up the picture of two immature and naive young people who think they’re in love because they’ve been such jolly good friends for so long, and who’ve put their lives on hold while they wait for the old lady to pass away, but whose love is not real. It is a kind of formality or type of politeness to each other. They way they continually ask each other whether they love each other indicates its superficiality and fragility.

All this is exposed by the simple event of Roddy walking by himself through the grounds wondering about the future and pondering his love for Elinor when out of the woods, illuminated by sunlight, walks Mary Gerrard like a vision of beauty. I’ll quote the entire little scene because it shows how clearly Christie writes, with a beautiful limpidity and simplicity. As Christie’s biographer Laura Thompson says (and maybe it’s an obvious enough remark) Christie’s popularity is less down to her plots or characters, than to her immense readability.

He went out of the walled garden by the gate at the far end. From there he wandered into the little wood where the daffodils were in spring. They were over now, of course. But the green light was very lovely where the sunlight came filtering through the trees.

Just for a moment an odd restlessness came to him – a rippling of his previous placidity. He felt: ‘There’s something – something I haven’t got – something I want – I want – I want….’

The golden green light, the softness in the air – with them came a quickened pulse, a stirring of the blood, a sudden impatience.

A girl came through the trees towards him – a girl with pale, gleaming hair and a rose-flushed skin. He thought, ‘How beautiful – how unutterably beautiful.’

Something gripped him; he stood quite still, as though frozen into immobility. The world, he felt, was spinning, was topsy-turvy, was suddenly and impossibly and gloriously crazy!

The girl stopped suddenly, then she came on. She came up to him where he stood, dumb and absurdly fishlike, his mouth open. She said with a little hesitation:

‘Don’t you remember me, Mr. Roderick? It’s a long time of course. I’m Mary Gerrard, from the lodge.’

Short sentences. Short paragraphs. Simple characters. Child-like psychology. Easily understood. Perfect undemanding holiday reading for generations of satisfied readers.

So Roddy not so much falls in love with as is transfixed by this vision of young beauty. And Elinor sees it. In every subsequent scene where Mary appears, Roddy stops in the middle of what he’s saying to follow her with his eyes, with the result that Elinor becomes a seething cauldron of hate and jealousy.

Roddy and Elinor are both based in London where they have their separate flats. They visit Aunt Laura one or two times more before they get a message that she’s had another stroke and is a bad way. They rush down to Hunterbury to comfort the poor woman who now can’t speak. But the nurses and the doctor, when he attends, can see that Laura is upset about something and between them work out that she is very concerned about her will. She appears to want to make provision for her beloved Mary in it. Elinor (witnessed by the two nurses) promises she’ll do this, and also call the family solicitor Mr Seddon to come and see her tomorrow.

But tomorrow never comes. Aunt Laura dies in the night intestate i.e. she never made a will. In these circumstances the entire estate, and her considerable fortune, go to her next of kin who is Laura, with nothing to Roddy and nothing to Mary. Says the family lawyer:

‘The death duties, I am afraid, will be somewhat heavy, but even after their payment, the fortune will still be a considerable one, and it is very well invested in sound gilt-edged securities.’

In the event Elinor does the decent thing: she gifts Mary £2,000 which everyone thinks is very generous. But when she tries to offer Roddy some of the money he says he doesn’t want her charity and they end up having a row. In other words, the money which was meant to bring them together and ensure they lived happily ever after, ends up diving them more bitterly. They have broken off their engagement. Elinor suggests that Roddy goes away, abroad, takes a long break, to decide whether it’s she (Elinor) or Mary that he loves, so off he goes.

More than once Elinor is shown thinking ‘If only Mary wasn’t here… But for Mary… If only Mary were gone…’ maybe things between her and Roddy would return to ‘normal’.

Worse is to come because, now that they are not going to get married, Elinor is left as the sole inhabitant of the big old house at Hunterbury and decides she can’t bear to live there amid the ruins of her dreams. So she decides to sell it. All its rooms and gardens which she fondly planned to share in her happy marriage to Roddy, all these taste of ashes because of that damn Mary Gerrard! And so the narrative amply conveys all the reasons Elinor has for hating Mary, and how Elinor’s character becomes increasingly cold, calculating and bitter.

(I should have mentioned that shortly before Aunt Laura’s second stroke, Nurse Hopkins had mentioned to Nurse O’Brien that she can’t find one of the tubes of morphine in her nurse’s bag (it’s for a different patient of theirs: Eliza Rykin with cancer). She either mislaid it or, while her bag was left open in the hall, someone must have stolen it… a thought which neither of them fully acknowledge and quickly stifle, because it would imply that someone is up to no good.)

To cut a long story short, Mary dies and is thought to have been murdered. The actual death takes place at an innocent sandwich lunch. Laura has put Hunterbury up for sale. She therefore has to clear out all the furniture and writes asking Mary to come and do the same for the lodge where she grew up. Mary asks Nurse Hopkins to help her. On this particular day we are shown Elinor going shopping in the village high street and, at the butcher’s, buying types of paste to make sandwiches with. She frivolously mentions the fact that some fish pastes have been reported as causing food poisoning which the butcher assures her are not true of his.

Anyway, come lunchtime, Elinor invites Mary and Nurse Nolan from the lodge (where they’re cleaning out) up to the big house. Here she offers them the fish paste sandwiches we saw her making from the fish paste we saw her buying. Nurse Hopkins makes a pot of tea. Mary has a cup but Elinor doesn’t. Then Elinor invites Nurse Hopkins upstairs to take a look at the clothes she plans to throw out: maybe some of them can be redistributed to the poor and elderly in the village.

They do this for some time and when they come downstairs find Mary slumped in her chair, unconscious and blue. Nurse Hopkins immediately diagnoses poisoning, speaks very harshly to Elinor (obviously suspecting her of foul play) and barks at her to phone Dr Lord.

Here, on this dramatic scene, ends Part 1 of the novel.

Red herrings

According to Wikipedia:

A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. A red herring may be used intentionally, as in mystery fiction or as part of rhetorical strategies (e.g., in politics), or may be used in argumentation inadvertently.

The term was popularized in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, who told a story of having used a strong-smelling smoked fish to divert and distract hounds from chasing a rabbit.

Euthenasia? Anyway, there are several red herrings I haven’t got round to mentioning yet. One is that we are shown old Aunt Laura confiding in Dr Lord, a sympathetic man, that she doesn’t want to end up helpless and gaga, being washed and cared for like a vegetable.

‘She’d talked to me about it. Asked me more than once if I couldn’t ‘finish her off.’ She hated illness, the helplessness of it…’

She would much rather the doctor put her out of her misery, something he cheerfully refuses to do, saying he didn’t intend to be hanged for murder. But did he? Put her quietly to sleep, as per her wishes?

Talking of Lord, it becomes clear in part 2 that he (rather inexplicably) carries a torch for Elinor. Could the doctor conceivably, somehow have poisoned Mary to make Elinor’s life better? Wildly improbable, but I’ve read worse things in Christie.

Ted Bigland’s anger This is Mary’s boyfriend, from her own (working) class. He is ‘a fine sturdy specimen’ who grew up with Mary and they obviously had some kind of understanding. We are shown a couple of scenes in which Ted asks to go out with her but Mary refuses and we are shown Ted’s frustration and then anger that Mary now thinks she’s ‘too good’ for him etc. Could this anger be motive enough for ted to murder her?

Mary’s mysterious parentage Late in part 1, looking through paperwork in the Lodge, Nurse Hopkins comes across a marriage certificate for old Gerrard and his wife but the date of the marriage is a year after Mary (now 21) was born. Further enquiry reveals that Mary wasn’t old Gerrard’s daughter at all. He confirms this in person. Mary’s father was an unnamed ‘gentleman’ who impregnated a lady’s maid to old Mrs Welman. She subsequently married Gerrard after Mary was born. No wonder he resented Mary, and she said she often felt he didn’t behave like a father to her. The obvious question is who was the father and could it have any possible bearing on Mary’s murder?

Lewis Rycroft On one of her last nights, Mrs Welman called out ‘Lewis, Lewis, photograph’. She directed Nurse O’Brien to get an old photograph out of her (locked) tallboy, an old photo in a silver frame depicting a handsome young man. She held and admired it for a while and then ordered it be locked away again. Well, some time later, after Mrs Welman’s death, Nurse O’Brien moves to a new job with a new client, Lady Rattery, staying at a place called Laborough Court where, by the kind of fantastic coincidence beloved of Christie and romance authors in general, she sees on the grand piano the exact same photo, of a dashing young man. When she asks the butler, he tells her it’s a photo of Lady Rattery’s brother – Sir Lewis Rycroft. He lived locally and was killed in the War. She further finds out that Lewis was married but that his wife (Lady Rycroft) went into a lunatic asylum soon after the marriage, but remained living. In other words, according to the laws of the day, he was unable to divorce and remarry. Nurse O’Brien then speculates that this Sir Lewis and Mrs Welman must have had a love affair but couldn’t marry because of the mad wife problem. As she comments:

They must have been very fond of each other, he and Mrs W., and unable to marry because of the wife being in an asylum. Just like the pictures, isn’t it?

So I’m guessing this solves the mystery of Mary’s parentage. What if not only Mary’s father was Lewis Rycroft but somehow, he got Mrs Welman pregnant, and Mary was Mrs Welman’s natural daughter!!!

So that’s the state of play and information, as part 1 ends on the dramatic scene of Mary dying of poisoning in the sitting room at Hunterbury, as Elinor Welman looks on cold-eyed and Nurse Hopkins turns to accuse her, ‘her eyes hard with suspicion’.

Part 2. Enter Hercule Poirot

Part 2 opens with young Dr Lord visiting Poirot and begging him to help find the evidence to get Elinor off the charge of murder. She has been arrested and charged and the trial will take place soon. Poirot asks Dr Lord to give him a complete summary of all the characters and the events leading up to Mary Gerrard’s death – which is a very handy recap for the reader, too.

Poirot agrees to help and sets off on the usual round of interviews. A chapter apiece is devoted to his extended interviews of: Nurse Nolan; Mrs Bishop; Ted Bigland; Roderick Welman; Mr Seddon the family lawyer; Chief Inspector Marsden; Nurse O’Brien; then Elinor herself, in prison. Then he meets with Dr Lord and tramps about the scene of the crime, throughout the empty house, but also along the land running beside the house from which, they realise, anyone could have had a clear view through the kitchen window of Elinor making the sandwiches on the fatal morning.

Poirot returns alone to interview Nurse O’Brien and she confirms what I suspected about Mary being Mrs Welman’s illegitimate daughter. It’s spelled out in black and white in an old letter she found at the Lodge, written by Mary’s ostensible mother, the lady’s maid Eliza Riley, who took the baby as her own and married Ephraim Gerrard.

Part 3. In court

Christie was constantly experimenting with the format of her novels. More often than not someone is murdered and the narrative describes the process of finding the killer. This one plays a variation on the theme which is that it is the first novel in the Poirot series to feature significant part of the narrative in a courtroom.

The novel actually opens with a preliminary scene in court, with Elinor standing in the dock, being accused of the murder of Mary Gerrard and asked to enter a plea, before the scene shimmers and fades before our eyes and transports us back to the origins of the story (part 1) and Poirot’s investigations (part 2), which I have summarised above.

I say ‘experimentation’ but, of course, by 1940 this kind of brief opening in the present which quickly gives way to flashbacks explaining how we got to this point, had become commonplace in popular fiction and especially in the movies. And having a good deal of a murder mystery set in court as different witnesses present the evidence which slowly pieces together the truth, this device has obviously been used in tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of movies and TV crime series since.

But it was new in Christie’s oeuvre to include such a courtroom scene and to use it to reveal the truth. We’d gotten used to Poirot calling all the suspects together and doing one of his Big Explanations.

Cast

  • Aunt Laura Welman – owner of the Hunterbury estate, old lady, bed-ridden after a stroke
  • Henry Welman – her husband, died decades earlier after just five years of marriage
  • Sir Lewis Rycroft – who Laura was in love with decades earlier, during the Great War, in which he was killed
  • Miss Elinor Carlisle – young niece of Laura Welman, in love with Roddy – ‘I’ve always fancied that you had, perhaps, rather an intense nature—that kind of temperament runs in our family. It isn’t a very happy one for its possessor’ – says to herself, ‘ It’s that beastly brooding, possessive mind of yours’
  • Roddy Welman – Mrs Welman’s (dead) husband’s nephew, posh, nervous, attended Eton
  • Mary Gerrard – daughter of the lodge keeper of the Welman estate who Aunt Laura took a shine to and had educated, piano, French etc, beyond her station ‘At twenty-one, Mary Gerrard was a lovely creature with a kind of wild-rose unreality about her: a long delicate neck, pale golden hair lying close to her exquisitely shaped head in soft natural waves, and eyes of a deep vivid blue’ – Nurse Hopkins thinks ‘Mary was one of the most beautiful girls you’ve ever seen. Might have gone on the films any time’
  • Ephraim Gerrard – Mary’s father who has angrily rejected her since her posh education gave her hoity-toity ways: ‘an elderly man with a bent back was painfully hobbling down the two steps’; in the opinion of Horlicks the gardener, ‘always grumbling, and crusty as they make them’
  • Eliza Gerrard née Riley – lady’s maid to Mrs Welman, who had a baby and married Ephraim Gerrard
  • Ted Bigland – Mary’s boyfriend, from her original (working) class, works at Henderson’s garage – ‘a fine sturdy specimen’, a ‘good-looking, fair young giant’
  • Mrs Bishop – housekeeper at Hunterbury for 18 years, ‘a stately figure of ample proportions, handsomely dressed in black’
  • Nurse Jessie Hopkins – the District Nurse who came every morning to assist with the bed making and toilet of the heavy old lady, was a homely-looking middle-aged woman with a capable air and a brisk manner’ – ‘the biggest gossip in the village’ – according to Dr Lord, ‘the town crier’
  • Nurse O’Brien – ‘a tall red-haired woman of thirty with flashing white teeth, a freckled face and an engaging smile. Her cheerfulness and vitality made her a favourite with her patients’
  • Dr Peter Lord – ‘a young man of thirty-two. He had sandy hair, a pleasantly ugly freckled face and a remarkably square jaw. His eyes were a keen, piercing light blue’
  • Horlick the gardener – ‘a tall, good-looking young fellow wheeling a barrow’
  • Dr Ransom – Dr Lord’s predecessor, now retired
  • Mrs Slattery – Dr Ransom’s housekeeper
  • Mr. Seddon of Bloomsbury Square – Aunt Laura’s lawyer
  • Mr Abbot – the butcher
  • Chief Inspector Marsden – police officer in charge of the criminal investigation, an experienced, kindly looking man’

In court

  • Sir Samuel Attenbury – counsel for the prosecution – there’s a flicker of Christie’s casual antisemitism when she has Elinor describe him as ‘the horrible man with the Jewish nose’
  • Sir Edwin Bulmer, K.C. – leading barrister assigned to defend Elinor; he is described as ‘the forlorn hope man’ because he takes on hopeless cases – a specialist in ‘sob stuff – stressing the prisoner’s youth’ etc
  • Dr Alan Garcia – distinguished forensic analyst
  • Inspector Brill – police officer in charge
  • Alfred James Wargrave – rose grower from Emsworth, Berkshire
  • James Littledale – qualified chemist employed by the wholesale chemists, Jenkins & Hale
  • Amelia Sedley of Boonamba, Auckland, New Zealand
  • Edward of Auckland, New Zealand, now living in Deptford

Nurses

I’ve been reading Laura Thompson’s account of Christie’s time as a nurse working for a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) at Torquay Hospital during the First World War. It’s a happy coincidence that this novel is the one which contains more nurses, and comment about the profession of nursing, than any others to this point.

Dr Lord numerous times emphasises the professionalism of the two nurses, but also how they’d be scared to death of lapsing in their duties. When interviewing Nurse Nolan, Poirot is a little patronising and she quickly corrects him in the tone of brisk practicality which is what the reader also picks up from Thompson’s account of Agatha’s own time as a nurse.

Poirot sighed. He said: ‘As you say, men fight shy of illness. It is the women who are the ministering angels. What should we do without them? Especially women of your profession – a truly noble calling.’
Nurse Hopkins, slightly red in the face, said: ‘It’s very kind of you to say that. I’ve never thought of it that way myself. Too much hard work in nursing to think about the noble side of it.’
(Part 2, chapter 3)

Bookishness

Hercule Poirot said: ‘One does not practise detection with a textbook! One uses one’s natural intelligence.’
Peter Lord said: ‘You might find a clue of some sort there.’
Poirot sighed: ‘You read too much detective fiction.’

‘Her mother had been a lady’s maid to old Mrs Welman. She married Gerrard after Mary was born.’
‘As you say, quite a romance – a mystery romance.’

Wordsworth

Suddenly, out of the blue, Poirot quotes a fragment of Wordsworth and tells us he is a fan.

‘Therefore, the next step logically would seem to be: Mary Gerrard was not killed! But that, alas, is not so. She was killed!’
He added, slightly melodramatically:

“But she is in her grave, and oh,
The difference to me!”

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Roddy.
Hercule Poirot explained:
‘Wordsworth. I read him much.’

Period vocabulary

Says Nurse Nolan:

‘She wasn’t one of these girls who are all S.A. and IT. She was a quiet girl!’

Where S.A. obviously stands for ‘sex appeal’, a phrase Nolan can’t even bring herself to utter, and IT refers to It Girl:

The expression ‘It Girl’ originated in British upper-class society around the turn of the 20th century. It gained further attention in 1927 with the popularity of the Paramount Studios film It, starring Clara Bow.

Summary

The two Agatha Christie novels I’ve enjoyed most have been The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery because they are the funniest, most high spirited books, the silly far-fetched plots being part of the comedy.

But of Christie’s mid-period novels this may be the one I’ve enjoyed reading most. The final explanation is as preposterously contrived as all her other plots but there’s something perilously close to depth and real psychology in the characterisation of Elinor Welman. And the penultimate scene where Dr Lord drives her to a sanatorium where she can finally rest and be at peace, had, for a moment, a flicker of the depth and real emotion you look for in proper literature.

But then the final scene of the novel has Poirot conveniently tidying up any loose ends for the benefit of the holiday reader and it turns back into pantomime again.

Credit

‘Sad Cypress’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in March 1940.

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Posted by Simon on August 29, 2025

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And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)

Vera took the words out of his mouth.
‘And yet it seems so incredible!’
Philip Lombard made a grimace.
‘The whole thing’s incredible!’
(Chapter 4)

‘It’s like some awful dream. I keep feeling that things like this can’t happen!’
(The common reaction of characters caught up in any Christie murder mystery)

Rogers wiped the perspiration from his forehead. He said hoarsely:
‘It’s like a bad dream, that’s what it is.’
(Chapter 10, section 2)

It’s mad – but so’s everything else.
(Blore, Chapter 11, section 5)

‘There are five of us here in this room. One of us is a murderer. The position is fraught with grave  danger. Everything must be done in order to safeguard the four of us who are innocent.’
(Judge Wargrave, Chapter 12, section 4)

Christie’s experimentation

You’ve got to admire Christie for continually stretching and experimenting with the format of the detective story: the unreliable narrator, the serial killer who manages to pin the blame on someone else, a murder on a train marooned in a snowdrift, at a remote archaeological dig, on a steamship down the Nile, murders committed some time ago which nobody even realised were murders, and so on… she was continually experimenting with the basic formula and inventing new variations.

‘And Then There Were None’ is another of these experiments, one of her most radical, and so successful that it went on to become the world’s best-selling mystery novel. In fact, with over 100 million copies sold, it is one of the best-selling books of all time (Wikipedia).

Setup

All over England eight apparently unrelated people receive invitations to come and stay the weekend at a new house built on Soldier Island off the coast of Devon. The invitations are a bit obscure and there are rumours in the media about who actually owns the island and therefore has invited them. Some people believe the story that it’s been bought by Miss Gabrielle Turl, the Hollywood film star. Others think it’s been bought by a society Lord. Still others claim it had been purchased by the Admiralty with a view to carrying out some hush-hush experiments.

And each invitation is signed by a different person – Mr Justice Walgrave’s invitation is signed by Lady Constance Culmington, Vera’s came from a Una Nancy Owen, Blore’s from U.N.O., others from other signatories…

In other words, precisely who invited these disparate strangers to take trains or cars and arrive at the fishing port of Sticklehaven – and why, and what, if anything, they have in common – all this is made deliberately obscure and unsettling right from the start.

Also new and experimental is the way Christie lets us into the thoughts of each of these guests as they pack for the trip, sit on their trains or drive their cars, meet up at Oakbridge station, identify themselves and are driven in pre-booked taxis to the fishing village of Sticklehaven, are ferried across to the island, are met by the husband and wife team of servants (Mr and Mrs Rogers), and unpack their bags in their rooms.

Some of them seem to know more than others. Several of them seem to have been assigned jobs or tasks to perform while on the island (for example, Philip Lombard). One or two seem to be adopting fake identities (William Blore). But all the little sections in which we share the guests’ thoughts are deliberately brief and allusive, creating a sense of mystery and expectation which, of course, the new 300 or so pages of the book are going to deepen and intensify before we get to the Final Explanation.

(Incidentally, these short snippets at the start of the book are all numbered to separate them, thus establishing the convention, for this novel, that each chapter is divided into a handful of shorter, numbered sections.)

Cast

  1. Dr Armstrong – successful physician uneasily hiding something bad in his past
  2. Mr Blore – who adopts the fake identity of a William Davis from South Africa – in reality an ex-police inspector who now runs a detective agency in Plymouth – ‘Blore spoke in his hearty bullying official manner’
  3. Miss Emily Brent – ‘sat very upright as was her custom. She was sixty-five’
  4. Vera Claythorne – games mistress in a third-class private school, haunted by the memory of a boy who drowned while in her care, a ‘good healthy sensible girl’
  5. Philip Lombard – paid £100 to come to the island by an Isaac Morris – ‘There was something of the panther about him altogether. A beast of prey – pleasant to the eye’
  6. General Macarthur –
  7. Anthony ‘Tony’ Marston – Norse god of a man, ‘his six feet of well-proportioned body, his crisp hair, tanned face, and intensely blue eyes’ – put up to visiting by a friend named ‘Badger’: ‘What could old Badger have been thinking about to let him in for this?’
  8. Mr Justice Wargrave – lately retired from the bench, ‘that frog-like face, that tortoise-like neck, that hunched up attitude – yes and those pale shrewd little eyes’
  9. Mr Rogers – husband and wife servants hired specially for the weekend – ‘a tall lank man, grey-haired and very respectable’
  10. Mrs Rogers – ‘had a flat monotonous voice. Vera looked at her curiously. What a white bloodless ghost of a woman! Very respectable-looking, with her hair dragged back from her face and her black dress. Queer light eyes that shifted the whole time from place to place’
  • Mr Isaac Morris – Lombard was commissioned to attend the weekend by this Morris, who is described in repellently antisemitic tropes
  • Fred Narracott – the ferryman, paid to meet and greet and then ferry the guests across to the island – he only knows that the people paying for everything are a Mr and Mrs Owen, though he’s never seen them

The poem

When the guests get to their bedrooms they discover that every one of them features a poster bearing the text of a poem, the same poem. I’ll quote the entire thing, as it’s the key to the story:

Ten little soldier boys went out to dine;
One choked his little self and then there were Nine.

Nine little soldier boys sat up very late;
One overslept himself and then there were Eight.

Eight little soldier boys travelling in Devon;
One said he’d stay there and then there were Seven.

Seven little soldier boys chopping up sticks;
One chopped himself in halves and then there were Six.

Six little soldier boys playing with a hive;
A bumble bee stung one and then there were Five.

Five little soldier boys going in for law;
One got in Chancery and then there were Four.

Four little soldier boys going out to sea;
A red herring swallowed one and then there were Three.

Three little soldier boys walking in the Zoo;
A big bear hugged one and then there were Two.

Two little soldier boys sitting in the sun;
One got frizzled up and then there was One.

One little soldier boy left all alone;
He went and hanged himself and then there were None.

The voice

The host and hostess still haven’t arrived, but Mrs Rogers has prepared an excellent dinner and Rogers is an excellent waiter. One of the guests points out the set of ten little china figurines at the centre of the table… The guests are all fed and watered and enjoying coffee when suddenly a loud booming voice is heard, like something from a nightmare. The guests all freeze in astonishment and hear the voice say:

Ladies and gentlemen! Silence please!

Everyone was startled. They looked round – at each other, at the walls. Who was speaking? The Voice went on – a high clear voice:

‘You are charged with the following indictments:

‘Edward George Armstrong, that you did upon the 14th day of March, 1925, cause the death of Louisa Mary Clees.

‘Emily Caroline Brent, that upon the 5th of November 1931, you were responsible for the death of Beatrice Taylor.

‘William Henry Blore, that you brought about the death of James Stephen Landor on October 10th, 1928.

‘Vera Elizabeth Claythorne, that on the 11th day of August, 1935, you killed Cyril Ogilvie Hamilton.

‘Philip Lombard, that upon a date in February, 1932, you were guilty of the death of twenty-one men, members of an East African tribe.

‘John Gordon Macarthur, that on the 4th of January, 1917, you deliberately sent your wife’s lover, Arthur Richmond, to his death.

‘Anthony James Marston, that upon the 14th day of November last, you were guilty of the murder of John and Lucy Combes.

‘Thomas Rogers and Ethel Rogers, that on the 6th of May, 1929, you brought about the death of Jennifer Brady.

‘Lawrence John Wargrave, that upon the 10th day of June, 1930, you were guilty of the murder of Edward Seton.

‘Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defence?’

Well, that clears up what they’re all doing there. ‘The Voice’ reckons each of them are responsible for deaths or are outright murderers. Some of them go into the adjoining room where they find a table pressed up against the partition door, the speaker facing the door – the voice came from a record playing on it and it doesn’t take much questioning for Rogers to admit that he was instructed to do this in a letter from ‘Mr Owen’, although he swears he had no idea what was on the record till he heard it like everyone else.

Obviously the guests immediate fall to talking at once. It’s wizened old Judge Wargrave who takes charge and first of all gets everyone to explain who invited them; and then gets each to speak to the charge laid against them by The Voice.

Having done all that, they’re in the middle of discussing what to do next when young, virile, fit and handsome Anthony Marston takes a swig of his drink, chokes and falls down dead. The others rush to his assistance but too late. None of them have yet put 2 and 2 together (as the reader surely has done by now) and realised that they are going to be picked off one by one, which is what indeed happens…

Another death occurs later the same day and the survivors agree they’ll pack their bags and leave immediately… Until Rogers informs them that there’s no boat on the tiny island. So they will wait for the daily boat to come from the mainland bringing supplies, as it does every morning at 8am. Only the next morning the boat doesn’t come, although they keep an anxious lookout all day… nor the next day…

U.N Owen

When they compare the signatories of the invitations they receive, several use the surname Owen with variations in the first names, sometimes just U.N.O. but in one letter Ulick Norman Owen, in another Una Nancy Owen. It takes Judge Wargrave to realise the initials are a (sick) joke, and can be read as UN Owen or, simply, Unknown. They have been invited to meet their fates by person or persons Unknown.

The house on the island

If this had been an old house, with creaking wood, and dark shadows, and heavily panelled walls, there might have been an eerie feeling. But this house was the essence of modernity. There were no dark corners – no possible sliding panels – it was flooded with electric light – everything was new and bright and shining. There was nothing hidden in this house, nothing concealed. It had no atmosphere about it. Somehow, that was the most frightening thing of all…
(Chapter 5, section 2)

The maniac trope

The notion that the murderer or protagonist is a lunatic, maniac and fiend, is axiomatic in all Christie’s crime books. Here the setup is so peculiar, so bizarre and unreal feeling, that the accusations of madness fly thick and fast.

Vera cried: ‘But this is fantastic – mad!’
The judge nodded gently. He said:
‘Oh, yes. I’ve no doubt in my own mind that we have been invited here by a madman – probably a dangerous homicidal lunatic.’
(Chapter 3, section 3)

General Macarthur patted her shoulder. He said: ‘Fellow’s a madman. A madman! Got a bee in his bonnet! Got hold of the wrong end of the stick all round.’
(Chapter 4, section 2)

Armstrong had gone pale. He said: ‘You realize – the man must be a raving maniac!’
(Chapter 7, section 3)

‘No doubt you also reached a certain conclusion as to the purpose of Mr Owen in enticing us to this island?’
Blore said hoarsely:
‘He’s a madman! A loony.’
(Chapter 8, section 5)

‘I reiterate my positive belief that of the seven persons assembled in this room one is a dangerous and probably insane criminal.’
(Chapter 9, section 7)

‘One of us, ’is lordship said. Which one? That’s what I want to know. Who’s the fiend in ’uman form?’
(Rogers, Chapter 10, section 2)

‘You must remember that anyone who’s mentally unhinged has a good deal of unsuspected strength.’
(Armstrong, Chapter 11, section 3)

‘If you ask me that woman’s as mad as a hatter! Lots of elderly spinsters go that way – I don’t mean go in for homicide on the grand scale, but go queer in their heads.’

He said violently:
‘It’s mad! – absolutely mad – we’re all mad!’

Vera cried:
‘But don’t you see, he’s mad ? It’s all mad! The whole thing of going by the rhyme is mad!
(Chapter 15, section 1)

Just to raise the temperature even more, rigid old Miss Brent, sternly and unforgivingly religious, insists it is not just a question of mania, but possession by a devil.

Emily Brent, still knitting, said:
‘Your argument seems logical. I agree that one of us is possessed by a devil.’
(Chapter 9, section 6)

In her diary she writes that the judge:

is convinced that the murderer is one of us. That means that one of us is possessed by a devil. I had already suspected that…

As the killings proceed, the story gains more and more the air of a psychological horror story, with something uncanny and spooky mixed in.

He was not afraid of danger in the open, only of danger undefined and tinged with the supernatural.

There’s a psychological intensity and a sense of horror to these last few novels that feels new: mad Mother Boynton in ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’, mad old Miss Waynflete in ‘Murder is Easy’.

Accompanying the mania trope is its equal and opposite cliché, the notion that the killer may be a maniac deep down but meanwhile be very unassuming in appearance and manner. (This was certainly the case of the person who was revealed to be the murderer in ‘Murder is Easy’, the mildest and most harmless of people, until they suddenly transformed into a homicidal killer.)

‘Nobody’s got a revolver, by any chance? I suppose that’s too much to hope for.’
Lombard said: ‘I’ve got one.’ He patted his pocket.
Blore’s eyes opened very wide. He said in an overcasual tone:
‘Always carry that about with you, sir?’
Lombard said: ‘Usually. I’ve been in some tight places, you know.’
‘Oh,’ said Blore and added: ‘Well, you’ve probably never been in a tighter place than you are today! If there’s a lunatic hiding on this island, he’s probably got a young arsenal on him – to say nothing of a knife or dagger or two.’
Armstrong coughed.
‘You may be wrong there, Blore. Many homicidal lunatics are very quiet unassuming people. Delightful fellows.’
(Chapter 8, section 1)

The thing is to realise that none of this reflects ‘the real world’. These are conventions of the genre which help the narrative, which help to justify the complete secrecy of the killer until the last moment and thus allow the narrative to function.

Christie’s prose

Something has happened to Christie’s prose. Maybe it was happening in the last few books but it’s only in this one that I first noticed it. Her prose has become much more stripped back. Sentences are much shorter. Paragraphs much shorter. The whole effect is much more succinct, pared back and minimalist than before. Here are the opening paragraphs of Chapter 10, section 5:

The storm increased. The wind howled against the side of the house.

Everyone was in the living-room. They sat listlessly huddled together. And, surreptitiously, they watched each other.

Pretty pithy, eh? Another thing she’s started doing is writing ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ on a separate line from what they say.

Armstrong said:
‘We’ve no idea, even, who it can be –’

Armstrong stared at him.
He said:
‘I don’t understand.’

It’s an odd effect. In a way, visually speaking, it’s almost like the layout of poetry.

Vera thought:
‘Funny how elderly people always get names wrong.’
She said:
‘Yes, I think Mrs Owen has been very lucky indeed.’

Christie does occasionally vary the operative verb, but predominantly uses the verb ‘said’ for every act of speech, and the repetition of this simple monosyllable, and the insistence on this 2-line layout, start to give the text a kind of formulaic, almost hieratic appearance, sometimes between a playscript and almost a liturgy, a chant, a religious ceremony.

Lombard said:
‘I agree.’
Tony said:
‘I’ll go and forage.’

Lombard said:
‘Well, we’ve got one piece of evidence. Only three little soldier boys left on the dinner-table. It looks as though Armstrong had got his quietus.’
Vera said:
‘Then why haven’t you found his dead body?’
Blore said:
‘Exactly.’

Antisemitism

I’ve pointed out the casual antisemitic slurs which occur quite often in some of the earlier novels. They’d disappeared from the last few and so I thought maybe Christie had grown out of them or that the Nazi pogroms of the 1930s had made antisemitism unacceptable in English polite society and/or publishing. Apparently not.

There had been a very faint smile on the thick Semitic lips of Mr Morris as he answered…

What exactly was up, he wondered? That little Jew had been damned mysterious.

He [Captain Lombard] had fancied, though, that the little Jew had not been deceived – that was the damnable part about Jews, you couldn’t deceive them about money – they knew!

Lombard said slowly: ‘I allowed you all to think that I was asked here in the same way as most of the others. That’s not quite true. As a matter of fact I was approached by a little Jew-boy – Morris his name was…’

I suppose you could argue that every one of these references comes from the mind of Lombard, and therefore the antisemitism is restricted to him and is part of his character alone.. But still… Why have an antisemitic character at all…?

Bookishness

‘A bit unsporting, what?’ he [Marston] said. ‘Ought to ferret out the mystery before we go. Whole thing’s like a detective story. Positively thrilling.’
(Chapter 4, section 4)

Out there in France, in the middle of all the hell of it [the Great War], he’d sat thinking of her, taken her picture out of the breast pocket of his tunic. And then – he’d found out! It had come about exactly in the way things happened in books. The letter in the wrong envelope…
(Chapter 5, section 5)

‘It’s only in books people carry revolvers around as a matter of course.’
(Chapter 8, section 5)

Credit

‘And Then There Were None’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in November 1939.

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The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie (1928)

‘My name is Hercule Poirot,’ he said quietly, ‘and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.’
(Poirot, modest as ever, ‘The Mystery of the Blue Train’, chapter 17)

‘They will grab at the money and abuse you all the more afterwards.’
‘Well,’ said Katherine, ‘let them if they like. We all have our own ways of enjoying ourselves.’
(Katherine Grey’s plucky sense of humour, chapter 8)

‘What is important? What is not? One cannot say at this stage. But we must note each little fact carefully.’
(Poirot in typically sententious mode, chapter 11)

How should it have occurred to Ruth, except as the wildest coincidence, that the first person that the maid should run across in Paris should be her father’s secretary? Ah, but that was the way things happened. That was the way things got found out.
(Or at least that was the way things happen in classic detective stories which abound in outrageous coincidences and improbable situations.)

‘You are the goods, Monsieur Poirot. Every time, you are the goods.’
(Mr Van Aldin gets his money’s worth, chapter 25)

‘At the tennis one meets everyone.’
(Tennis, one of the 1920s’ new sports crazes, along with golf)

Executive summary

Millionaire’s daughter Mrs Ruth Kettering is travelling to the south of France on the famous Blue Train when, somewhere between Paris and Lyons, she is murdered in her compartment. Her jewel case, including the famous red rubies her father gave her, is stolen. Who did it? Suspicion falls on two obvious suspects:

  1. Her ne’er-do-well husband, Derek Kettering, heir to a title and large inheritance but is deeply in debt due to his addiction to gambling; who Ruth’s father was telling her to divorce because of his infidelity; and whose hard-hearted mistress, the dancer Mirelle, had suggested would be much better off if Ruth died before she divorced him because then he would inherit her millions; and who was on the same train heading south as Ruth, although he swears they were travelling separately and he didn’t know she was on it too.
  2. The Comte de la Roche: Ruth’s long-term secret lover, a seducer and exploiter of rich women well known to the police, who had written to Ruth asking her to come and visit him in the south of France and explicitly told her to bring the precious rubies because he was writing a book about famous gems; might he have been the mysterious man seen by various eye witnesses entering Ruth’s compartment soon before her death?

It just so happens that Poirot was travelling on the very same Blue Train and so, once the murdered woman’s body is found, he volunteers his services to the local police and sets about untangling the complicated motives of all the major players in the story, along with various peripheral figures (such as Ruth’s maid, Van Aldin’s secretary, and the mysterious figure of ‘the Marquis’).

Only after Christie has strewn the narrative with numerous red herrings and complicated but ambiguous details, does Poirot finally identify the murderer.

Longer summary

‘The Mystery of the Blue Train’ is the fifth Poirot novel. But it is not narrated by his sidekick, Captain Hastings, who doesn’t appear at all, so it lacks the layer of (often unwitting) comedy which Hastings brings to the stories. And it completely lacks the sparkling high spirits of the very funny comedy murder mysteries, The Secret of Chimneys and ‘The Mystery of the Seven Dials’, with their cast of wonderfully droll and self-aware young chaps and chapesses. Those two novels have preposterously complicated and far-fetched plots but that just makes them all the more amusing.

By striking contrast, ‘The Mystery of the Blue Train’ is a much more sober affair: there is only one murder and the three leading figures are rather boring. Katherine Grey is a former lady’s companion, who has led a boring life until the old lady she’s been caring for dies and leaves her a fortune; Derek Kettering is a suave but impetuous adulterer, quick to anger; and the Comte de la Roche is a slick con-man. No real laughs between the three of ’em.

Instead there’s such a long and elaborate build-up of character and backstory meaning that Poirot doesn’t appear until chapter 11 of this 36-chapter book.

Van Aldin-Ruth-Derek

Nothing is too good for American millionaire Rufus Van Aldin‘s daughter, Ruth. Which is why the narrative opens with him doing dodgy deals amid Paris’s criminal underworld, and even fighting off a mugging attempt by the notorious ‘Apaches’ or street criminals, in order to get his hands on some world-famous red rubies, including the legendary Heart of Fire which was supposedly worn by Catherine the Great of Russia. Why these lurid opening scenes? 1) Nominally in order to give them tom his beloved daughter Ruth. But 2) also to create a sense of crime and violence which is to loom over the rest of the novel.

Van Aldin’s daughter, Ruth, is no soft touch.

Ruth Kettering was twenty-eight years of age. Without being beautiful, or in the real sense of the word even pretty, she was striking looking because of her colouring. Van Aldin had been called Carrots and Ginger in his time, and Ruth’s hair was almost pure auburn. With it went dark eyes and very black lashes—the effect somewhat enhanced by art. She was tall and slender, and moved well. At a careless glance it was the face of a Raphael Madonna. Only if one looked closely did one perceive the same line of jaw and chin as in Van Aldin’s face, bespeaking the same hardness and determination. It suited the man, but suited the woman less well. From her childhood upward Ruth Van Aldin had been accustomed to having her own way, and anyone who had ever stood up against her soon realized that Rufus Van Aldin’s daughter never gave in.

Unfortunately, no amount of gifts can conceal the fact that Ruth is unhappy because she is married to the Honourable Derek Kettering who is a drawling philanderer who cares nothing for her.

…thirty-four, lean of build, with a dark, narrow face, which had even now something indescribably boyish in it…

In the scene where he gives Ruth his dramatic present of super-valuable rubies, Van Aldin also forces her to concede that, after putting up with Derek’s wretched behaviour for years, it’ about time she divorced him. Ruth appears reluctant because (the narrative strongly implies) any court case might bring out the fact that Ruth herself has been less than an angel, and we slowly realise this is because she has remained in touch with her first love, the louche Comte de la Roche.

In a separate scene Van Aldin calls Derek Kettering in for an interview. He loathes his son-in-law and tells him he must divorce his daughter but Derek infuriates the old man with his suave irony and flippancy. He counters Van Aldin’s criticism of him by pointing out that the main reason Ruth married him was because he is heir to the title of Lord Leconbury, ‘one of the oldest families in England’. When the current Lord dies, Derek will inherit the title and the grand house at Leconbury and Ruth will become its mistress. Derek says Ruth is well aware it would be a shame to divorce him (Derek) now, just as his father is on his last legs, just as he is about to inherit the title, at which point Ruth would become a Lady and chatelaine of a grand English country house. Derek leaves Van Aldin with the parting shot that the father (Van Aldin) ought to know the daughter (Ruth) better than he evidently does.

Derek then goes to the apartment of his lover, the attractive but slovenly Mirelle.

The dancer was a beautifully made woman, and if her face, beneath its mask of yellow, was in truth somewhat haggard, it had a bizarre charm of its own.

In their conversation it becomes clear that Derek is very poor, he has borrowed large sums against the promise of his inheritance and managed to lose most of it gambling. When he jokily describes how losing Ruth would leave him utterly penniless Mirelle makes it clear she will leave him if he is ruined. There is no love lost between them. She jokily suggests that Derek should bump off Ruth while they’re still married; then her fortune would come to him. But he doesn’t take it seriously and storms out.

Meanwhile, Van Aldin hires a private detective, Mr Goby, to find out the dirt on Derek, mainly confirming for Van Aldin what the reader has just learned – that he is broke and has a mistress.

After some business in the City, Van Aldin calls in again on his daughter and almost bumps into a man coming out of her hotel apartment. Only talking to Ruth does he realise that the man was Armand, the Comte de la Roche.

The Comte’s charm of manner was usually wasted on his own sex. All men, without exception, disliked him heartily.

Now it comes out that when Ruth was living in Paris she fell deeply in love with the Comte but her father, convinced he was a swindler (which the novel goes on to show that he is), broke them up and more or less forced her to marry Derek. So she blames her father for wrecking the love of her life and attaching her to a drawling wastrel (Derek).

Summary so far

To summarise: Van Aldin is pressurising his daughter Ruth to divorce her no-good husband Derek. Derek has discussed the possibility of murdering Ruth to ensure he inherits her fortune. Ruth is reluctant to take divorce proceedings because any legal action is likely to bring out the fact that she has carried on having an affair with the Comte de la Roche i.e. been just as unfaithful as Derek.

As for the Comte, we don’t get many scenes with him early on so we are inclined to Van Aldin’s view that he is a gold-digger, that he has always only pretended to love Ruth in order to get his hands on her fortune. The arrival of the famous red rubies in Ruth’s possession has only raised the stakes all round. And Mirelle is a wild card because she alternately loves Derek (for his money) and hates him (for threatening to leave her / becoming penniless).

In other words the three men and two women in this matrix of relationships all have good reason to resent and dislike each other.

On an impulse Derek decides that he wants to get away from London and drops into the Thomas Cook shop in Piccadilly to buy a ticket on the Blue Train to the Riviera. (Unbeknown to him, his wife is also going to be travelling on the same train, in response to the letter from the Comte.) And here (in the Thomas Cook office) he bumps into a mysterious grey-haired lady, who is also buying a ticket on the Blue Train. Who is she?

Miss Katherine Grey-Lady Tamplin

At which point we are introduced to a new thread and the other major character in the story:

Katherine Grey was thirty-three. She came of good family, but her father had lost all his money, and Katherine had had to work for her living from an early age. She had been just twenty-three when she had come to old Mrs Harfield as companion… Katherine Grey was born with the power of managing old ladies, dogs, and small boys, and she did it without any apparent sense of strain.

The Katherine narrative is more straightforward. For years she has been a companion to old Mrs Harfield in the sleepy village of St Mary Mead. The old lady has recently passed away. When Katherine goes to see the family solicitor, she expects she will get a little nest egg from the old lady who was always frugal, but is astonished to learn she had been nursing a small fortune which will now come to Katherine. What shall she do with it and with her life? Well, certainly buy some nice clothes but what then?

It’s at this juncture that Katherine receives a letter from one Lady Tamplin. A chapter is devoted to introducing her in her villa in the south of France. Lady Tamplin is:

A golden-haired, blue-eyed lady in a very becoming negligee. That the golden hair owed something to art, as did the pink-and-white complexion, was undeniable, but the blue of the eyes was Nature’s gift, and at forty-four Lady Tamplin could still rank as a beauty.

Lady Tamplin lives with her dim husband, ‘Chubby’, and her sharp, ironic daughter, the Honourable Lenox Tamplin.

A daughter such as Lenox was a sad thorn in Lady Tamplin’s side, a girl with no kind of tact, who actually looked older than her age, and whose peculiar sardonic form of humour was, to say the least of it, uncomfortable.

The point is that the Katherine Grey who has just inherited a fortune is a distant relative of Lady Tamplin. Lady T has just read about the legacy in The Times and sees an opportunity to mulct some money out of the innocent Katherine. So this is why Lady T decides to invite Katherine to come and stay with them on the Riviera, so that she and Lenox can introduce her into the ways of the upper class and/or try to extract some of her fortune from her, and writes her a letter of invitation to come and stay. At a loose end, Katherine agrees to accept the invitation.

So this is what she is doing at Thomas Cook’s offices in Piccadilly. Here she recognises the man in the queue to be served; he nearly bumped into her in the Savoy Hotel that morning (as he came out of the suite inhabited by the visiting millionaire Van Aldin). It is Derek Kettering. He has reserved a berth on the Blue Train to the Riviera on the 14th of the month under the name of his man, Pavett. Katherine follows him in the queue, and also buys a berth on the Blue Train to the Riviera on the 14th of the month.

What neither of them know is that Derek’s wife, Ruth, is also going to be on the same Blue Train because she has been invited to come and meet him in the south of France by the Comte.

After Derek’s got back home from buying his ticket, he is paid a visit by Van Aldin’s secretary, Major Knighton, ‘a tall fair man with a limp’ from a wound received in the war. Deeply embarrassed, Knighton presents van Aldin’s final offer that, if Derek doesn’t contest the divorce, VA will give him £100,000 flat. Derek listens then tells him to go to hell. Then tells his man to start packing his bags for his trip to the south of France.

On the Blue Train

So Ruth and Katherine are on the same Blue Train and end up sitting opposite each other at lunch and get talking. After over a decade as a lady’s companion, Katherine is used to listening, has an aura of confidentiality about her. So they quickly become confidential and Ruth confesses that she is going against her father’s explicit orders, to meet her lover in the south of France. Katherine learns all about her marital misfortunes but nonetheless advises her to telegram her father when the train gets to Paris to let him know where she’s going, and Katherine agrees.

They two women pass the afternoon on the train in their different ways, then, at dinner, Katherine finds herself sat opposite a small man with a waxed black moustache and an egg-shaped head. Well, any Christie fan immediately knows who this is – the world-famous detective Hercule Poirot, who is all politeness, charm and egotism.

‘It is true that I have the habit of being always right—but I do not boast of it.’ (Chapter 10)

He notices that Katherine is reading a detective novel (a roman policier in French). She says she enjoys reading them because such things never happen in real life. Poirot politely points out that sometimes they do. Either way a connection has been made between them.

More minor incidents occur the most significant of which is that just before the train reaches Lyon, Katherine thinks she sees the man she saw in the Thomas Cook office, in the corridor and then entering the compartment of Ruth. She thinks. Later she is not 100% sure…

The murder

When the train reaches Nice a train assistant knocks on the door, then enters, and discovers Ruth’s body. She is lying peacefully up in her bed, with her head turned away. Only when he shakes her does the train assistant realise she is dead. She has been strangled from behind and then, notable detail, her face severely disfigured by punches or blows.

The police are called in the shape of M. Caux the Commissary of Police. One by one they interview witnesses in an office in the station. The Commissary is surprised when there’s a knock on the door and in looks the famous Hercule Poirot. He and the other police officials enthusiastically welcome Poirot’s offer to help the investigation, so from here on he sits in on all the interviews of all the relevant witness.

It’s in this context that he meets Katherine again and notes that ‘From the beginning we have been sympathetic to each other’ going on to say, in his confidential manner:

‘This shall be a ‘roman policier‘ à nous. We will investigate this affair together.’ (Chapter 11)

And a little later:

‘This is our own roman policier, is it not?’ said Poirot. ‘I made you the promise that we should study it together. And me, I always keep my promises.’ (Chapter 20)

To some extent, Katherine replaces the figure of Captain Hastings, as a sort of assistant who he can bounce ideas off, muse out loud with and thus, at the same time, share his ideas with the reader.

At the Villa Marguerite

When she is released from questioning by the police, Katherine continues her plans. She is met at Nice station by Lady Tamplin’s husband, the harmless ‘Chubby’ Evans (Lady T’s title derives from a former marriage), and taken to the Villa Marguerite. Katherine quickly gets the measure of its three inhabitants:

She looked in turn at the three people sitting round the table. Lady Tamplin, full of practical schemes; Mr. Evans, beaming with naïve appreciation, and Lenox with a queer crooked smile on her dark face. (Chapter 12)

Later there is lunch and she is staggered to find herself sitting next to the (to her, unnamed and unknown) man who she saw in the queue at Thomas Cook’s, and then saw on the Blue Train. Even more staggered when a servant hands him a message and reveals his name is Kettering and so she learns that he is the husband of the murdered woman.

The cops

Van Aldin is in the middle of doing work with his secretary when he gets the telegram saying his daughter has been murdered. He immediately makes plans to catch the first train south and 24 hours later is joining the investigation, along with his own theories and prejudices (he thinks the murder must be Derek).

Cut to Van Aldin and his secretary arriving in Nice and being introduced to the French police and Poirot. They question Ruth’s maid, Mason. Oddly, Ruth had told her to stay behind, in Paris, at the Paris Ritz, and await further instructions. Why?

Van Aldin is staggered to learn that Ruth had taken her jewels with her, in a red morocco case, even the red rubies, when he had specifically told her to lock them in a safe deposit in London. All becomes clear when the French Juge d’Instruction, M. Carrège, produces a letter found on Ruth’s body, sent from the Comte, telling her to bring her jewels with her as he claimed to be writing a book about famous jewels.

The conference of cops gravitates to the theory that this Comte did the murder and stole the jewels, bringing themselves into conflict with Van Aldin who is unshakably convinced that it was his no-good son-in-law. Van Aldin hires Poirot on a commercial basis, as a freelance investigator, and the book takes on a new complexion. Out of the rather anarchic setup, we emerge into clarity knowing that whatever happens going forward, Poirot will, eventually, fix it all. For example it is Poirot who discovers that the Comte is staying at a villa he’s rented, the Villa Marina at Antibes.

So the police call in for questioning, or requestioning, the following witnesses: the Comte, Derek Kettering, the maid, and Katherine.

And it’s at this point that the plot becomes convoluted in the familiar Christie way because a straightfoward narrative of events starts to get overlaid and mixed up with the theories developed by the various personnel:

  • obviously the police have their theories
  • Poirot hints at his ideas, not least in conversations with Katherine, and adds questions to the police interrogations designed to confirm or refute them
  • Van Aldin has his simple animus against Derek and carries out his own interviews with Katherine and the maid to try and prove his point
  • and we are party to Katherine’s evolving theories about who did what, where.

‘But this is an entirely new theory,’ cried Knighton. (Chapter 33)

So it’s at this point that I’ll stop even trying to summarise the plot because from here onwards it consists of all the characters concocting theories which themselves continually shift and need updating as more information becomes available:

  • Who did the cigarette case found on the train with a monogrammed ‘K’ belong to?
  • What is the renowned and unscrupulous jewel merchant M. Papopolous (and his daughter Zia) doing in Nice?
  • What favour did Poirot do for Papopolous 17 years ago, and why does he call it in now?
  • What role is played by the mysterious figure M. Papolous refers to as ‘the Marquis’?
  • What is Derek’s mistress Mirelle doing in Nice and, furious at being dumped by him (‘She looked not altogether unlike a leopardess, tawny and dangerous’), will her spiteful denunciation persuade the police that Derek is guilty?

And many more convoluted questions. Not to mention the two leading suspects engaging in guilty behaviour of one sort or another.

You can read the whole thing, along with its surprising denouement, online. Here are a few scattered thoughts or observations.

Poirot

Poirot drew himself up. ‘Leave it in the hands of Hercule Poirot,’ he said superbly; ‘have no fears. I will discover the truth.’ (Chapter 24)

‘I am a good detective. I suspect. There is nobody and nothing that I do not suspect. I believe nothing that I am told.’ (Chapter 35)

Retirement

As always, I am puzzled why Poirot is permanently presented as having retired.

‘This is M. Hercule Poirot; you have doubtless heard of him. Although he has retired from his profession for some years now, his name is still a household word as one of the greatest living detectives.’ (Chapter 14)

How odd of Christie to introduce her detective as having retired just as he was about to embark on a 40-year career of solving crimes (that last Poirot book was published in 1974).

Poirot’s process

As far as I can tell Poirot’s process has two aspects: 1) record the facts and lay them out as logically and dispassionately as possible, 2) supplement the facts with psychology: why would so-and-so do x? Is it consistent with his or her character?

Here he is on the facts:

‘Let us arrange our facts with order and precision….’

‘I mean nothing,’ said Poirot. ‘I arrange the facts, that is all.’

And on the importance of psychology:

Poirot wagged an emphatic forefinger. ‘The psychology.’
‘Eh?’ said the Commissary.
‘The psychology is at fault. The Comte is a scoundrel—yes. The Comte is a swindler—yes. The Comte preys upon women—yes. He proposes to steal Madame’s jewels—again yes. Is he the kind of man to commit murder? I say no! A man of the type of the Comte is always a coward; he takes no risks.’

In summary:

‘It is nothing,’ said Poirot modestly. ‘Order, method, being prepared for eventualities beforehand—that is all there is to it.’ (Chapter 21)

‘I am always punctual,’ said Poirot. ‘The exactitude—always do I observe it. Without order and method—’

Poirot’s green eyes

As to Poirot’s other characteristics, they are all here to please fans. The green light in his eyes when he becomes excited:

Poirot sat up suddenly in his chair. A very faint green light glowed in his eyes. He looked extraordinarily like a sleek, well-fed cat. (Chapter 17)

When the car had driven off he relapsed into a frowning absorption, but in his eyes was that faint green light which was always the precursor of the triumph to be. (Chapter 28)

As Lenox remarks:

‘I have rather lost my heart to him. I never met a man before whose eyes were really green like a cat’s.’ (Chapter 29)

Poirot’s monstrous ego

‘Voilà,’ said the stranger, and sank into a wooden arm-chair; ‘I am Hercule Poirot.’
‘”Yes, Monsieur?’
‘You do not know the name?’
‘I have never heard it,’ said Hippolyte.
‘Permit me to say that you have been badly educated. It is the name of one of the great ones of this world.’
(Chapter 29)

Papa Poirot

The spooky way he refers to himself as Papa Poirot, especially when talking to women.

‘You mock yourself at me,’ said Poirot genially, ‘but no matter. Papa Poirot, he always laughs the last.’ (Chapter 21)

Poirot’s arrogance

It amused her to see the little man plume himself like a bird, thrusting out his chest, and assuming an air of mock modesty that would have deceived no one. (Chapter 21)

Poirot raised a hand. ‘Grant me a little moment, Monsieur. Me, I have a little idea. Many people have mocked themselves at the little ideas of Hercule Poirot—and they have been wrong.’ (Chapter 21)

‘M. Van Aldin is an obstinate man,’ said Poirot drily. ‘I do not argue with obstinate men. I act in spite of them.’ (Chapter 27)

At several points he compares himself to God, as being the only two forces in the world you can utterly rely on.

‘Trust the train, Mademoiselle, for it is le bon Dieu who drives it.’ The whistle of the engine came again. ”Trust the train, Mademoiselle,’ murmured Poirot again. ‘And trust Hercule Poirot. He knows.’
(Last words of the novel)

Praise from others

‘He is a very remarkable person,’ said Knighton slowly, ‘and has done some very remarkable things. He has a kind of genius for going to the root of the matter, and right up to the end no one has any idea of what he is really thinking.’ (Chapter 21)

Christie’s antisemitism

Apparently, the Anti-Defamation League in America complained to her publishers about the antisemitic stereotypes or tropes often found in Christie’s stories. ‘The Mystery of the Blue Train’ is no exception.

A little man with a face like a rat. A man, one would say, who could never play a conspicuous part, or rise to prominence in any sphere. And yet, in leaping to such a conclusion, an onlooker would have been wrong. For this man, negligible and inconspicuous as he seemed, played a prominent part in the destiny of the world. In an Empire where rats ruled, he was the king of the rats… His face gleamed white and sharp in the moonlight. There was the least hint of a curve in the thin nose. His father had been a Polish Jew, a journeyman tailor. It was business such as his father would have loved that took him abroad to-night. (Chapter 1)

A face like a rat?!

‘Seventeen years is a long time,’ said Poirot thoughtfully, ‘but I believe that I am right in saying, Monsieur, that your race does not forget.’
‘A Greek?’ murmured Papopolous, with an ironical smile.
‘It was not as a Greek I meant,’ said Poirot.
There was a silence, and then the old man drew himself up proudly.
‘You are right, M. Poirot,’ he said quietly. ‘I am a Jew. And, as you say, our race does not forget.’
(Chapter 22)

Christie’s sexism

Along with the stereotypes about Jews (and lots of other nationalities) go a raft of sexist generalisations about women. Obviously the books are of their time, allowances ought to be made etc, but it’s still notable. In particular there’s a lot of dwelling on the idea that women are attracted to romantic bad guys.

‘He is Lord Leconbury’s son, married a rich American woman. Women are simply potty about him.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, the usual reason—very good-looking and a regular bad lot.’
(Chapter 12)

I don’t know where we are on the idea that some women are attracted to bad boys. It’s been true in my experience, but my experience is just a drop in the ocean. It’s certainly a recurring trope in this story, because both the men in it are wrong ‘uns who both seem to be popular with the ladies and, in particular, with Katherine.

‘A mauvais sujet,’ said Poirot, shaking his head; ‘but les femmes—they like that, eh?’
He twinkled at Katherine and she laughed.
(Chapter 20)

But really the bad boy in question is Derek Kettering.

‘There are men who have a strange fascination for women.’
‘The Comte de la Roche,’ said Katherine, with a smile.
‘There are others—more dangerous than the Comte de la Roche. They have qualities that appeal—recklessness, daring, audacity…’

Poirot repeats the thought to Kettering:

‘Your reputation is bad, yes, but with women—never does that deter them. If you were a man of excellent character, of strict morality who had done nothing that he should not do, and—possibly everything that he should do—eh bien! then I should have grave doubts of your success. Moral worth, you understand, it is not romantic. (Chapter 24)

All this is relevant because by the middle of the novel it’s become clear that Katherine is being actively wooed, both by Kettering and by Knighton. On the face of it they represent two polar opposites: the smooth seducer versus the honest war hero. And we are shown Katherine developing feelings for both of them. But can it be as simple as all that?

Other sexisms

The story invokes what I assume to be another sexist caricature, namely that women are preternaturally attracted by the glamour of precious stones, in a way that men aren’t.

Her eyes grew misty, a far-away light in them. The Comte looked at her curiously, wondering for the hundredth time at the magical influence of precious stones on the female sex. (Chapter 19)

‘They are all the same, these women—they never stop telling tall stories about their jewels. Mirelle goes about bragging that it has got a curse on it. ‘Heart of Fire,’ I think she calls it.’
‘But if I remember rightly,’ said Poirot, ‘the ruby that is named ‘Heart of Fire’ is the centre stone in a necklace.’
‘There you are! Didn’t I tell you there is no end to the lies women will tell about their jewellery?’
‘You have the outlook cynical,’ [Poirot] murmured.
‘Have I?’ There was no mirth in his sudden wide smile. ‘I have lived in the world long enough, M. Poirot, to know that all women are pretty much alike.’ (Chapter 24)

Well, in that case, are not all men pretty much alike. In reality, this is a meaningless statement except to express a kind of worldly misogyny. As many other empty generalisations along these lines:

‘And yet, who knows? With les femmes, they have so many ways of concealing what they feel—and heartiness is perhaps as good a way as any other.’ (Chapter 26)

But maybe the general thought about all these sweeping generalisations – so easy to notice and condemn in our progressive times – is that genre fiction like this is based on generalisations about human nature. The generalisations may have changed with the times, but maybe genre fiction can only really function if it not only complies with the requirements of the genre itself, but also abounds in obvious, easy and stereotypical generalisations about human nature – reflecting the commonly accepted values of the day in order to make the whole thing easier to consume.

Men

And so along with generalisations about ethnic groups and women, there are also generalising, stereotypical remarks about men. When he and Zia step out of the casino at Monte Carlo, she points out this is the garden where so many men have committed suicide after losing everything.

Poirot shrugged his shoulders. ‘So it is said. Men are foolish, are they not, Mademoiselle? To eat, to drink, to breathe the good air, it is a very pleasant thing, Mademoiselle. One is foolish to leave all that simply because one has no money—or because the heart aches.’
(Chapter 28)

And here is Katherine’s old lady friend, Miss Viner, later in the novel:

‘I was wrong about that young man of yours. A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love he can’t help looking like a sheep. Now, whenever that young man looked at you he looked like a sheep. I take back all I said this morning. It is genuine.’ (Chapter 30)

Sweeping generalisations about men and women are probably the oldest trope in all literature. Think for a moment about Shakespeare or Jane Austen.

Bookishness and self-referentiality

As I’ve pointed out in all my Christie reviews, she knows she is writing popular detective stories and part of this always seems to be having your characters point out that they seem to be appearing in a story which is remarkably like a piece of popular detective fiction. There’s a curious self-aware, meta aspect to these frequent reminders that the characters are in a fiction.

‘She has all the instincts of a lady, as they say in books,’ said Lenox, with a grin. (Chapter 12)

‘They say she is wearing a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg—not that I have ever seen a pigeon’s egg myself, but that is what they always call it in works of fiction.’ (Chapter 31)

A central example is the way Poirot first bonds with Katherine while she is reading a crime novel and Christie gives them a little exchange about the value of such things.

‘I see, Madame, that you have a roman policier. You are fond of such things?’
‘They amuse me,’ Katherine admitted.
The little man nodded with the air of complete understanding.
‘They have a good sale always, so I am told. Now why is that, eh, Mademoiselle? I ask it of you as a student of human nature—why should that be?’
Katherine felt more and more amused.
‘Perhaps they give one the illusion of living an exciting life,’ she suggested.
(Chapter 10)

This allows Poirot, once the murder is revealed, to suavely suggest that she join him in solving the murder. And, in their conversations, to remind her (and the reader) of the conventions of the genre of the book they are reading.

‘You confess that you read detective stories, Miss Grey. You must know that anyone who has a perfect alibi is always open to grave suspicion.’
‘Do you think that real life is like that?’ asked Katherine, smiling.
‘Why not? Fiction is founded on fact.’
‘But is rather superior to it,’ suggested Katherine.
‘Perhaps.’
(Chapter 21)

This self-referentiality is partly, I think, humorous. It makes the reader smile. And also it is a continuous reminder of the whimsically artificial nature of these kinds of books.

Humour

For me the single biggest appeal of Agatha Christie’s books is her consistently buoyant humorous tone. The entire story is told in a kind of tone of indulgent good humour (the entire character of Poirot is essentially comic), as well as comic interactions between other characters. In this novel the comedy is pre-eminently associated with Lady Tamplin and her daughter. Lady T is funny because of her predictable tone of snobbery and avarice.

‘I should like to meet Mr. Van Aldin,’ said Lady Tamplin earnestly; ‘one has heard so much of him. Those fine rugged figures of the Western world’—she broke off—’so fascinating,’ she murmured. (Chapter 21)

Which is perfectly complemented by the droll and knowing comments of her daughter, Lady Lenox, in exchanges like this:

‘Mademoiselle [Katherine] is wanted at the telephone,’ said Marie, appearing at the window of the salon. ‘M. Hercule Poirot desires to speak with her.’
‘More blood and thunder. Go on, Katherine; go and dally with your detective.’

Or:

‘What did Major Knighton ring up about?’ inquired Katherine.
‘He asked if you would like to go to the tennis this afternoon. If so, he would call for you in a car. Mother and I accepted for you with empressement. Whilst you dally with a millionaire’s secretary, you might give me a chance with the millionaire, Katherine. He is about sixty, I suppose, so that he will be looking about for a nice sweet young thing like me.’ (Chapter 21)

And:

‘Major Knighton was very particular to say it was Mr. Van Aldin’s invitation,’ said Lenox. ‘He said it so often that I began to smell a rat. You and Knighton would make a very nice pair, Katherine. Bless you, my children!’ Katherine laughed, and went upstairs to change her clothes.

It’s fun.

Credit

‘The Mystery of the Blue Train’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1928 by William Collins and Son.

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by Simon on July 14, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 14, 2025

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