‘It’s just like a serial, isn’t it? What’s the next thrilling instalment?’
(Jane Olivera mocks Poirot’s exposition of the case so far, p.102)

‘That dentist chap shooting himself, and then this Chapman woman packed away in her own fur chest with her face smashed in. It’s nasty! It’s damned nasty! I can’t help feeling that there’s something behind it all.’
(The same sense of some hidden meaning or conspiracy expressed in all Christie’s novels, voiced here by Alistair Blunt, p.151)

Within the limits of her chosen genre, I admire Agatha Christie’s experiments and innovations. Lots of her novels try out novel scenarios and variations on the basic idea of a murder mystery. This one belongs to the sub-genre of ‘murder mystery inspired by a nursery rhyme’, a category which she virtually invented – see Other Agatha Christie books and short stories which share this naming convention, such as Hickory Dickory Dock, A Pocket Full of Rye, Five Little Pigs, How Does Your Garden Grow? and ‘And Then There Were None’.

‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’ obviously refers to the popular children’s nursery rhyme:

One, two, buckle my shoe.
Three, four, shut the door.
Five, six, picking up sticks.
Seven, eight, lay them straight.
Nine, ten, a good fat hen.
Eleven, twelve, men must delve.
Thirteen, fourteen, maids are courting.
Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen.
Seventeen, eighteen, maids in waiting.
Nineteen, twenty, my plate’s empty.

(Actually the version I remember from childhood departs from this at several points.)

So the gimmick is that each of the novel’s ten chapters corresponds to one line of the rhyme. This is made most explicit when Poirot himself applies the rhyme, stating about half way through that he has ‘picked up the sticks’ (i.e. various bits of evidence) and now needs to ‘lay them straight’ i.e. arrange them into a coherent order. To give the passage:

He remembered how he had sat before, jotting down various unrelated facts and a series of names. A bird had flown past the window with a twig in its mouth. He, too, had been collecting twigs. Five, six, picking up sticks…

He had the sticks – quite a number of them now. They were all there, neatly pigeonholed in his orderly mind – but he had not as yet attempted to set them in order. That was the next step – lay them straight.

What was holding him up? He knew the answer. He was waiting for something. Something inevitable, fore-ordained, the next link in the chain. When it came – then – then he could go on…

And also, I was slow to realise the significance when very early on a car pulls up, the door opens, a woman’s leg emerges, wearing a shoe with a buckle, which snags on the door and comes off. Buckle my shoe. Indeed, the detail of this loose shoe buckle will turn out to be the thread which Poirot uses to unravel the whole case. Clever.

Plot summary

Poirot is going to the dentist. There are half a dozen people in the waiting room, going in or coming out of treatment, for the two dentists at the practice he visits, Mr Morley and Mr Reilly.

Next day Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard rings Poirot up and informs him that this bland inoffensive dentist, Morley, was found dead of a gunshot wound an hour after he treated Poirot. Was it suicide or murder?

So Japp and Poirot team up to interview all the employees at the practice and then all the patients in the appointments diary.

But barely have they started this process than another body turns up. A dodgy middle-aged foreigner, Mr Amberiotis, is found dead at his hotel, apparently from an overdose of the kind of local anaesthetic a dentist prescribes. For Japp this confirms the suicide theory: Morley accidentally gave Amberiotis a fatal overdose of anaesthetics, realised what he’d done, and killed himself out of shame and mortification. Doesn’t sound very likely, does it? Surely even a fool like Japp wouldn’t believe such an improbable story. And that’s one of the things wrong with this book; it never really persuades or grips.

Then another person on the list, Miss Sainsbury Seale steps out of her hotel (the Glengowrie Court Hotel) the next evening and doesn’t return for dinner or at all.

So everyone who attended the dentist’s that morning seems to be being bumped off or disappearing. Why? A whole new complexion is out on everything when Poirot goes out to Ealing to visit another patient on the list, a Mr Reginald Barnes.

One of the key figures in the waiting room was a ‘big bug’ named Alistair Blunt. Barnes now explains that Blunt is a key figure in the City and in the network of Britain’s financial system. If you were a foreign power seeking to overthrow Britain, or a communist activist seeking to sweep away the existing capitalist system, bumping off Blunt would be a good starting point.

So Barnes’ testimony to Poirot transforms this from being a boring domestic murder which would probably turns out to be about sex or who stands to gain from the dead man’s will – into an International Intrigue with overtones of spying and espionage. It plunges us back into the feverish world of Christie’s preposterous early spy novels like The Big Four, The Seven Dials Mystery and The Secret of Chimneys.

Here’s how Barnes explains it, to show you the cartoon level of the discourse:

‘That’s why certain people have made up their minds that Blunt must go.’
‘Ah,’ said Poirot.
Mr Barnes nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know what I’m talking about. Quite nice people some of ’em. Long-haired, earnest-eyed, and full of ideals of a better world. Others not so nice, rather nasty in fact. Furtive little rats with beards and foreign accents. And another lot again of the Big Bully type. But they’ve all got the same idea: Blunt Must Go!’

So Barnes’s theory is that ‘they’ (‘the organization that’s behind all this’) tried to persuade Morley to bump off Blunt but, when he refused, had to bump off him instead, and all the other people who, for one reason or another, might have seen or overheard something: Amberiotis, Miss Sainsbury Seal. So who actually shot Morley? His partner, Reilly.

So much for Mr Barnes’s theory. Is he right or is he paranoid and delusional? Poirot comes away wondering…

Next day Poirot goes to see Howard Raikes, a young American who was also waiting in the waiting room on the tragic morning (11.30 appointment). He finds him a firebreathing communist. I’m going to quote his big speech because of the way it echoes the sentiments expressed only a few years earlier by the writers of the Auden Generation, Auden himself and Louis MacNeice and especially Cecil Day Lewis who carried on being a communist after the war. When Auden wrote this kind of thing in verse in the early to mid-1930s it sounded thrilling and vivid; when Christie gives this speech to Raikes it sounds desperately immature and pathetic.

‘You’re Blunt’s private dick all right.’ His face darkened as he leaned across the table. ‘But you can’t save him, you know. He’s got to go – he and everything he stands for! There’s got to be a new deal – the old corrupt system of finance has got to go – this cursed net of bankers all over the world like a spider’s web. They’ve got to be swept away. I’ve nothing against Blunt personally – but he’s the type of man I hate. He’s mediocre – he’s smug. He’s the sort you can’t move unless you use dynamite. He’s the sort of man who says, “You can’t disrupt the foundations of civilization.” Can’t you, though? Let him wait and see! He’s an obstruction in the way of Progress and he’s got to be removed. There’s no room in the world today for men like Blunt – men who hark back to the past – men who want to live as their fathers lived or even as their grandfathers lived! You’ve got a lot of them here in England – crusted old diehards – useless, worn-out symbols of a decayed era. And, my God, they’ve got to go! There’s got to be a new world. Do you get me – a new world, see?’

Enquiries reveal that the missing Miss Sainsbury Seale was friends with a couple named Mr and Mrs Chapman and went to see them on the same day that Japp and Poirot interviewed her (at their flat in King Leopold Mansions, Battersea).

Enquiries reveal that Mr Chapman is currently abroad and that Mrs Chapman hasn’t been seen for weeks. In fact it’s over a month before one of the police investigators (Detective Sergeant Beddoes) becomes suspicious of Mrs Chapman’s lengthy absence and gets a pass key from the manager, and discovers a decomposed woman’s body locked in a trunk, presumed to be the missing Miss Sainsbury Seale.

When Poirot arrives, at Japp’s invitation, he sees that the woman’s face has been beaten to a pulp. All very disgusting but instantly made me realise – as always happens when anybody’s face has been smashed up in this kind of novel – that it’s been done to confuse the dead person’s identity and, sure enough, dental examination shows that the body is not Seale but Mrs Chapman.

Why? Maybe it’s just me but it felt like the story progresses at quite a slow pace. There are a lot of suggestive elements in it but somehow they don’t gel, and fail to create a sense of urgency or peril.

When he gets home, Poirot finds Mr Barnes waiting for him. He explains that Mr Albert Chapman, owner of the flat, is a spy! An agent for the British Intelligence Service, codename Q.X.912. The real question is why Barnes is telling Poirot all this? Out of the kindness of his heart, or has he been put up to it by someone?

Next thing Japp rings Poirot and tells him he’s been officially ordered to stand down the police enquiry into the murder. Clearly this has something to do with the Secret Service / espionage aspect of the whole thing. Japp is fuming at being stymied like this but Poirot, of course, being free of any official structure, can carry on investigating at will.

Next thing is Poirot receives a note from Alistair Blunt inviting him to come and stay at his country place at Exsham, in Kent. He’s barely finished reading the note when the phone rings and an unknown female voice tells him to give up his enquiries, steer clear of the case, keep his nose out of this business or else!

The narrative topples over into the ridiculous when there’s an attempt on the Prime Minister’s life. As he stepped out of Number 10 someone took a pot shot at him and missed. Now he just happened to be stepping out with what the press described as ‘a friend’ but Poirot quickly hears was the egregious Mr Alistair Blunt. Was the bullet meant for Blunt?

Not only that but the angry American communist Howard Raikes, one of the people in Morley’s waiting room that morning, just happened to be on the spot. He grabbed a man near to him and shouted to the police that he’d caught the shooter, only for this to be revealed as a mistake or decoy, because the person who fired the shot, a disgruntled Indian, was almost immediately caught with the gun on him. So what on earth was Raikes doing there and why on earth did he deliberately try to mislead the police?

As he prepares to go and stay with Blunt in Kent it becomes crystal clear that neither of Blunt’s womenfolk want him to go. Their relationship is a little complicated. Blunt was married to a woman named Rebecca Arnholt who was 20 years older than him, and a very successful financier in her own right, in fact critics said he only married her for her money. Julia Olivera was the niece of Rebecca Arnholt, being the daughter of Rebecca’s sister; and Jane Olivera is the daughter of Julia Olivera, and so Rebecca Arnholt’s grand niece.

Both of them are very superior creatures and loftily dismissive of Poirot who likens the scornful critical tones of old Mrs Olivera as like a ‘clucking hen’. It took me a moment to realise this is part of the joke or conceit or gimmick of the novel, whereby each chapter is named after – and to some extent cashes out or elaborates – a line from the rhyme, in this case ‘Nine, ten, a good fat hen’.

Poirot is driven down to the financier’s comfortable country house at Exsham in Kent in his chauffeur-driven Rolls (this is another obviously reassuring aspect of so many of Christie’s novels – it is that so many of the characters are reassuringly wealthy and upper class. It’s the same combination of nostalgia and fantasising about living that kind of life, that made the TV series ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ so popular when I was a boy, and more recently made ‘Downton Abbey’ such a hit. Petit bourgeois viewers and readers love fantasising about living the pampered lives of the Edwardian and Georgian upper classes, all country houses and huge staff.)

Anyway, the narrative had until now been all set in London and the urban setting gave the ridiculous spy story a kind of plausibility. Now setting switches to a plush country house, all gardeners and butlers, and changes tone entirely.

Here Poirot is introduced to Helen Montressor who is Blunt’s ‘cousin’. He interviews Blunt at great length, asking who would want to murder him etc. He discovers that one of the gardeners at the house is none other than Morley’s secretary’s fiancé, the touchy Frank Carter. He discovers that Jane Olivera a) hates and despises him (Poirot) for being so despicably bourgeois and b) reveals a surprising sympathy for Howard Raikes and his communist rhetoric.

The novel descends perilously close to farce when there is another assassination attempt on Blunt. Blunt is showing Poirot round his garden when a shot rings out. The bullet misses him but there is an immediate flurry in the laurel bushes and Howard Raikes falls through them, clutching Frank Carter who is holding a pistol. He claims he’s been framed, he was clipping some shrubs when the shot rang out and the gun was thrown at his feet.

When interviewed by the police, Frank claims he was offered the job by the Secret Service.

His instructions were to listen to the other gardeners’ conversations and sound them as to their ‘red’ tendencies, and to pretend to be a bit of a ‘red’ himself. He had been interviewed and instructed in his task by a woman who had told him that she was known as Q.H.56, and that he had been recommended to her as a strong anti-communist. She had interviewed him in a dim light and he did not think he would know her again. She was a red-haired lady with a lot of make-up on.

Poirot groaned. The Phillips Oppenheim touch seemed to be reappearing… (p.

E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866 to 1946) was a prolific writer of best-selling adventure fiction, featuring glamorous characters, international intrigue and fast action. So Christie’s two references to Oppenheim indicate how aware she was that her story, right from the start, verged on cheap populist melodrama.

Meanwhile, Raikes is on the scene both times someone fired a shot at Blunt. He is a communist hothead who thinks Blunt should be eliminated. Blunt’s posh niece Jane sympathises with him. Angry Frank Carter claims he’s some kind of fall guy for the Security Services. Behind all this lurks a series of unsolved murders and the involvement of a mystery British secret agent, Q.X.912. Could it get any more preposterous?

As usual, at this point I’ll stop summarising a) because it gets increasingly complicated before we arrive at the characteristically ludicrous and convoluted climax and b) I don’t want to give the game away.

 ‘I know, M. Poirot, that you have a great reputation. Therefore I accept that you must have some grounds for this extraordinary assumption—for it is an assumption, nothing more. But all I can see is the fantastic improbability of the whole thing.’ (p.225)

You can read the whole novel online.

Cast

• Mr Henry Morley – dentist, ‘was a small man with a decided jaw and a pugnacious chin’
• Miss Georgina Morley – Morley’s sister who keeps house for him, ‘a large woman rather like a female grenadier, ‘ tall and grim’
• Gladys Nevill – Morley’s secretary, ‘a tall, fair, somewhat anæmic girl of about twenty-eight’
• Frank Carter – Gladys’s fancy man, ‘ fair young man of medium height. His appearance was cheaply smart. He talked readily and fluently. His eyes were set rather close together and they had a way of shifting uneasily from side to side when he was embarrassed’ – turns out to be a blackshirt i.e. Fascist or, as the novel has it, ‘Imperial Shirt’
• Agnes Fletcher – Morley’s house-parlourmaid
• Mr Amberiotis – started as a Greek hotel keeper, known spy and possibly blackmailer
• Alistair Blunt – quiet and modest and one of Britain’s great financiers
• Rebecca Arnholt – Blunt’s dead wife, 20 years older than him, ‘a notorious Jewess’ in the words of Gladys Nevill
• Julia Olivera – niece of Blunt’s deceased wife, Rebecca Arnholt, being the daughter of Rebecca’s sister
• Jane Olivera – daughter of Julia Olivera and so Rebecca Arnholt’s grand-niece – American and offensive ‘She was tall, thin, and her face had an intelligence and aliveness that redeemed its lack of actual beauty. She was dark with a deeply tanned skin’ – madly in love with fellow American, Howard Raikes
• Hercule Poirot
• Alfred – boy assistant at the dentists’ surgery, ‘a boy in page-boy’s uniform with a freckled face, red hair, and an earnest manner’
• Colonel Abercrombie – ‘a military-looking gentleman with a fierce moustache and a yellow complexion. He looked at Poirot with an air of one considering some noxious insect’
• Miss Sainsbury Seale – posh, returned from India where she had unwisely married a Hindu who already had a wife, gives elocution lessons, keen amateur actress, ‘nearer fifty than forty. Pince-nez. Untidy yellow-grey hair’ – ‘a woman of forty odd with indecisively bleached hair rolled up in untidy curls. Her clothes were shapeless and rather artistic, and her pince-nez were always dropping off. She was a great talker’
• George – Poirot’s butler
• Chief Inspector Japp – of Scotland Yard, familiar figure from ten or so previous Poirot novels
• Mr Reilly – Morley’s partner at the dental practice, young and flippant – ‘a tall, dark young man, with a plume of hair that fell untidily over his forehead. He had an attractive voice and a very shrewd eye’
• Reginald Barnes – another patient (12 noon) who turns out to be a former Home office official and fantastically well informed about the international conspiracy to bump off Blunt
• Mrs Harrison – proprietor of the Glengowrie Court Hotel
• Mr Howard Raikes – American, embittered communist – ‘A lean hungry face, an aggressive jaw, the eyes of a fanatic. It was a face, though, that women might find attractive’ cf Ferguson in ‘Death on the Nile’
• Mrs Merton – friend of Mrs Chapman, in whose flat at Battersea Miss Sainsbury Seale’s body is found
• Mrs Adams – friend of Mrs Chapman, her name found on a letter in the murdered woman’s flat, lives in Hampstead, Poirot visits and questions

Method

‘You’re an odd man, M. Poirot.’
‘I am very odd. That is to say, I am methodical, orderly and logical—and I do not like distorting facts to support a theory—that, I find—is unusual!’

Women

Mrs Olivera clacked on. She was, thought Poirot, rather like a hen. A big, fat hen! Mrs Olivera, still clacking, moved majestically after her bust towards the door. (p.142)

Bookishness

Poirot asks the boy Arthur what he was reading:

What were you reading?’
‘Death at Eleven-Forty-Five, sir. It’s an American detective story. It’s a corker, sir, it really is! All about gunmen.’

‘Alfred reads detective stories – Alfred is enamoured of crime. Whatever Alfred lets slip will be put down to Alfred’s morbid criminal imagination.’

‘I’ve been looking forward, M. Poirot, to hearing a few of your adventures. I read a lot of thrillers and detective stories, you know. Do you think any of them are true to life?’
(Alistair Blunt)

As I’ve said, I think that Christie’s novels contain so many references to detective stories and thrillers in order to lower our standards of plausibility, help us suspend our disbelief and generally soften the reader up, ushering us into an imaginative world of preposterous goings-on.

Mr Barnes went on, tapping a book with a lurid jacket that lay on a table close at hand: ‘I read a lot of these spy yarns. Fantastic, some of them. But curiously enough they’re not any more fantastic than the real thing . There are beautiful adventuresses, and dark sinister men with foreign accents, and gangs and international associations and super crooks! I’d blush to see some of the things I know set down in print – nobody would believe them for a minute!’

The references to other detective stories, far from hiding the book’s artificiality, emphasise it, all the better to immerse the reader in the simple caricatures and preposterous plots of MurderMysteryWorld. As Japp remarks, citing the popular spy authors of the day:

As they went down the stairs again to No. 42, Japp ejaculated with feeling: ‘Shades of Phillips Oppenheim, Valentine Williams and William le Queux, I think I’m going mad!’ (p.122)

Sherlock Holmes

‘Talking of jobs, I’ve always been interested to know how you private detectives go about things? I suppose there’s not much of the Sherlock Holmes touch really, mostly divorce nowadays?’

The English

Among many other things, Poirot became vehicle by which Christie could express her amused fondness for her own nation and people. When Mr Morley’s secretary, Miss Gladys Nevill, comes to see him all of a-flutter, he knows how to calm her down.

Profiting by a long experience of the English people, Poirot suggested a cup of tea. Miss Nevill’s reaction was all that could be hoped for.
‘Well, really, M. Poirot, that’s very kind of you. Not that it’s so very long since breakfast, but one can always do with a cup of tea, can’t one?’
Poirot, who could always do without one, assented mendaciously.

Christie’s unfeminism

Glady’s boyfriend is unreliable, keeps losing jobs etc. But Gladys is naively confident that her love will redeem and change him, as so many women before her have made the same mistake.

‘But it will be different now. I think one can do so much by influence, don’t you, M. Poirot? If a man feels a woman expects a lot of him, he tries to live up to her ideal of him.’

Poirot sighed. But he did not argue. He had heard many hundreds of women produce that same argument, with the same blithe belief in the redeeming power of a woman’s love. Once in a thousand times, he supposed, cynically, it might be true.

In fact it is a running thread through all Christie’s books, this opinion that lots of women are attracted to bad men, to wrong ‘uns.

It was not as though he had any particular belief in, or liking for, Frank Carter. Carter, he thought dispassionately, was definitely what the English call a ‘wrong ’un’. He was an unpleasant young bully of the kind that appeals to women, so that they are reluctant to believe the worst, however plain the evidence. (p.171)

English sentimentality

‘It is not I who am sentimental! That is an English failing! It is in England that they weep over young sweethearts and dying mothers and devoted children. Me, I am logical.’ (p.204)

You only have to look at most Victorian art to see how vast a slab of sugary sentimentality used to be a central characteristic of the English.

Bookishness

Japp mocking Poirot’s claims that Morley was murdered triggers the self-mocking of her own genre and style which Christie deploys in every one of her novels.

‘If—only if, mind you—that blasted woman committed suicide, if she’d drowned herself for instance, the body would have come ashore by now. If she was murdered, the same thing.’
‘Not if a weight was attached to her body and it was put into the Thames.’
‘From a cellar in Limehouse, I suppose! You’re talking like a thriller by a lady novelist.’
‘I know—I know. I blush when I say these things!’
‘And she was done to death by an international gang of crooks, I suppose?’ (p.107)

After a minute or two, Japp went on with his summing up of the Sainsbury Seale situation.
‘I suppose her body might have been lowered into a tank of acid by a mad scientist—that’s another solution they’re very fond of in books! But take my word for it, these things are all my eye and Betty Martin. (p.109)

Wittgenstein

Poirot insists that solving a murder mystery requires a certain amount of fact finding, obviously yes yes yes – but then what is really required is thinking long and hard so as to arrange everything that is known into a logical sequence which fits all the facts and matches the psychology of the people involved i.e. is psychologically plausible. Hence his repeated insistence in all the books on the imperative importance of sitting back and thinking.

To be more precise, you have to find the right angle, the right vantage point, from which all the facts fit into a logical and psychologically consistent pattern. And so it is here, again.

A snare cunningly laid—a net with cords—a pit open at his feet—dug carefully so that he should fall into it.

He was in a daze—a glorious daze where isolated facts spun wildly round before settling neatly into their appointed places.

It was like a kaleidoscope—shoe buckles, 10-inch stockings, a damaged face, the low tastes in literature of Alfred the page-boy, the activities of Mr Amberiotis, and the part played by the late Mr Morley, all rose up and whirled and settled themselves down into a coherent pattern.

For the first time, Hercule Poirot was looking at the case the right way up… (p.176)

Now this idea, that a mental problem is only a problem because we are looking at it from the wrong perspective, and that what is required is not finding a solution so much as finding the right angle from which to regard the facts – this reminded me exactly of the later philosophy of the twentieth century’s greatest philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In my review of the brilliant biography of Wittgenstein by Ray Monk, I summarise his later attitude thus:

Wittgenstein isn’t about making theories or coming up with theoretical foundations. He wants to release people from their confusions and perplexities by making them see the ‘problem’ in a new way, from a different perspective. There are no solutions. But if you see problems from the right angle, they cease to be problems any more and so the lack of solutions, also, ceases to cause you anxiety and worry. Philosophy is the therapy which cures anxiety about philosophical problems.

Apparently Wittgenstein was fond of quoting the physicist the German physicist Heinrich Herz who struggled with the problems in mechanical theory bequeathed by Isaac Newton’s notion of ‘force’. But in his book ‘The Principles of Mechanics’, Herz explained that if you dumped the notion of force altogether and simply observed the wide variety of events which used to be corralled together to create the definition – if you actually just looked at what was in front of your eyes – then all the ‘problems’ raised by hanging onto Newton’s out-dated notion simply disappeared.

“When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.” (Quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk, 1991, page 446)

Wittgenstein was delighted by this passage because it exactly epitomised his own approach to the so-called ‘problems’ of philosophy.

Which all closely matches the approach of the great fictional detective.

‘Me, I have dealt with crime for many years now. I have my own way of regarding things.‘

Poirot has a way, an angle, a perspective, which again and again solves complex mysteries which all his peers, whether professional or amateur, find impossible to solve. And he nearly always ends up by saying that, once regarded from the correct angle, most of these ‘insoluble’ puzzles turn out to be astonishingly simple.

So the twentieth century’s greatest detective and its greatest philosopher shared this fundamental approach in common 🙂

1930s slang: ‘lay’

Christie always lards Inspector Japp’s speech with plenty of Cockney slang to emphasise his lower class, not-so-well-educated character. I was struck in this novel by use of the word ‘lay’ which I don’t think I’ve seen used in this way before.

He was in close touch with some of our Central European friends. Espionage racket.’
‘You are sure of that?’
‘Yes. Oh, he wasn’t doing any of the dirty work himself. We wouldn’t have been able to touch him. Organizing and receiving reports – that was his lay.’

And:

‘Did you know that Miss Sainsbury Seale was a close friend of the late Mrs Alistair Blunt?’
‘Who says so? I don’t believe it. Not in the same class.’
‘She said so.’
‘Who’d she say that to?’
‘Mr Alistair Blunt.’
‘Oh! That sort of thing. He must be used to that lay.’ (p.108)

Thoughts

‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’ is a reversion to the preposterous atmosphere of international intrigue, secret crime organisations, spies and espionage, which characterised The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery. Only with measurably less of the charm and humour which made those early novels so hilarious.

Credit

‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in November 1940.

Related links

• One, Two, Buckle My Shoe online (PDF)

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1940s reviews