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Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie (1936)

‘Murder can be an art! A murderer can be an artist.’
(The deliberately provocative – and in the end fatally glib – view of the cosmopolitan exquisite, Mr Shaitana, Chapter 1)

‘He was alive – and now he is dead and, as I told him once, I have a bourgeois attitude to murder. I disapprove of it.’
(Poirot, Chapter 8)

‘Here we are,’ continued Mrs Oliver, ‘three private individuals – all women. Let us see what we can do by putting our heads together.’
(Mrs Oliver the feminist, Chapter 12)

‘Life is a difficult business,’ continued Mrs Lorrimer. ‘You’ll know that when you come to my age. It needs infinite courage and a lot of endurance. And in the end one wonders, “Was it worth while?”‘
(Chapter 18)

Mrs Oliver said, ‘I don’t suppose for a moment you’ll tell us anything you don’t want to.’
Battle shook his head. ‘No,’ he said decidedly. ‘Cards on the table. That’s the motto for this business. I mean to play fair.’
(One meaning of the title, Chapter 19)

‘Cards on the Table’ is the 15th Hercule Poirot book and, since one of them is a collection of short stories and another was the novelisation of a play by someone else, it is the 13th Poirot novel. In the last few novels before this (‘ABC Murders’ and ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’) Christie cannily held Poirot back until we had a good sense of the setting and characters. He only appears half-way through ‘Mesopotamia’. By sharp contrast Poirot is front and centre of this novel from page 1.

Quick plot summary

Mr Shaitani, a louche, camp, upper-class sophisticate of uncertain nationality, hosts fabulous parties at his flat on Park Lane. At one of these he is introduced to Poirot and boasts that he not only has terrific collections of objets d’art and so on, he even has a collection from Poirot’s own field, of crime. In fact (he gushes on) not just cheesy objects like knives and jemmies, but of the best part of a murder, the murderers themselves.

‘I collect only the best!’
‘The best being?’ asked Poirot.
‘My dear fellow – the ones who have got away with it! The successes! The criminals who lead an agreeable life which no breath of suspicion has ever touched. Admit that is an amusing hobby!’ (Chapter 1)

Poirot sagely opines that this sounds like a dangerous kind of collection, but Mr Shaitani sails on oblivious and asks whether he’d like to come to dinner.

So chapter 2 finds Poirot arriving for dinner at Shaitani’s apartment and discovering seven other guests. Poirot realises that four of them are law and order types of one kind or another – himself, Superintendent Battle from CID, the crime fiction writer Mrs Ariadne Oliver, and a pukka traveller chappie, Colonel Race, who everyone says is something to do with the Secret Service.

‘The four murderers and the four sleuths – Scotland Yard. Secret Service. Private. Fiction. A clever idea.’ (Mrs Oliver, Chapter 8)

Which means – if Shaitani is keeping his promise to show off his collection of murderers – that one or more of the other four guests must be murderers. They are: Doctor Geoffrey Roberts, Mrs Lorrimer, Major John Despard and Miss Anne Meredith.

After they’ve all been introduced the eight guests have a nice dinner, then Shaitani suggests they split into two fours to play bridge, each in a different room. Poirot plays with the other officials until someone from the other room makes the dramatic announcement that Shaitani is dead. He doesn’t play bridge and so had been sitting over by the fire and is discovered in his armchair with a stiletto to the heart.

So they call the cops etc, then Superintendent Battle sums up the problem as he discusses it with Poirot. This is that not only did one of the four people in the bridge party murder Shaitani, but, if Shaitani has kept his boast, then some or all of them had previously murdered someone i.e. they’re dealing with not one but four murderers.

So the task is not just to investigate the puzzling murder of Shaitani, but to delve back into the past histories of the four suspects and try and find the mysterious deaths connected with them.

‘And the devil of it is we’ve got to check up on four possible murders in the past, not one.’ (Chapter 8)

So this is what Battle and Poirot proceed to do, each approaching the challenge in completely different ways which are at various points directly compared and contrasted.

Apart from this clever structure, the novel is notable for introducing the colourful character of Ariadne Oliver, an overweight middle-aged woman always fussing about her hair who happens to be a bestselling author of detective novels, as well as being a dogmatic feminist, with an entertainingly down-to-earth if not positively debunking and mocking attitude to her own works. Some commentators call her a self-portrait by Christie but that’s obviously too simplistic. She’s more like a comic caricature of the type of the popular lady novelist, and very enjoyable with it.

Cast

  • Mr Shaitana – host of numerous high society parties, ‘fond of posing as a modern Mephistopheles’, so much so that Miss Meredith tells Superintendent Battle that he won a prize at the hotel in Switzerland where she first met him, in a fancy dress competition dressed as Mephistopheles (Chapter 14)

Guests at the fatal bridge night

  1. Hercule Poirot
  2. Mrs Ariadne Oliver – one of the foremost writers of detective and other sensational stories, creator of a famous fictional detective from Finland, Sven Hjerson.’ She wrote chatty, if not particularly grammatical, articles on ‘The Tendency of the Criminal’, ‘Famous Crimes Passionnels’, ‘Murder for Love v. Murder for Gain’. She was also a vociferous feminist and when any murder of importance was occupying space in the press there was sure to be an interview with Mrs Oliver, and it was mentioned that Mrs Oliver had said, ‘Now if a woman were the head of Scotland Yard!’ She was an earnest believer in woman’s intuition’
  3. Superintendent Battle of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) – who we’ve met in the non-Poirot novels The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Murder, so this is by way of him crossing over from those novels into this one – ‘an exceedingly English, big burly gentleman.’ – ‘A big square wooden‐faced man moved forward. Not only did an onlooker feel that Superintendent Battle was carved out of wood ‐ he also managed to convey the impression that the wood in question was the timber out of a battleship’
  4. Colonel Race – ‘A dark, handsome, deeply bronzed man of fifty, he was usually to be found in some outpost of Empire ‐ especially if there were trouble brewing. Secret Service is a melodramatic term, but it described pretty accurately to the lay mind the nature and scope of Colonel Race’s activities’
  5. Doctor Geoffrey Roberts – ‘a cheerful, highly coloured individual of middle age. Small twinkling eyes, a touch of baldness, a tendency of embonpoint and a general air of a well‐scrubbed and disinfected medical practitioner. His manner was cheerful and confident. You felt that his diagnosis would be correct and his treatments agreeable and practical: “a little champagne in convalescence perhaps.” A man of the world!’
  6. Mrs Lorrimer – referred to as an old woman, she is 63 years old – ‘She had lovely cut features, beautifully arranged grey hair, and a clear, incisive voice’ – ‘She’s a widow. Moderately well off. Intelligent, well‐bred woman ‐ first class bridge player’
  7. Major John Despard – ‘a tall, lean, handsome man, his face slightly marred by a scar on the
    temple’
  8. Miss Anne Meredith – treated as hopelessly shy and ineffectual, Anne is 25; ‘She was of medium height and pretty. Brown curls clustered in her neck, her grey eyes were large and wide apart. Her face was powdered but not made up. Her voice was slow and rather shy’
  • Miss Burgess – Dr Roberts’ secretary, been with him 7 years
  • Rhoda Dawes – Miss Meredith’s friend, lives with her in a country cottage (Wendon Cottage) outside Wallingford
  • Mrs Astwell – the cleaner who does for them
  • Sergeant O’Connor – a copper
  • Miss Elsie Batt – late parlour‐maid to old Miss Craddock, who O’Connor takes out in order to question about Miss Meredith’s
  • Mrs Luxmore – ‘a tall, rather handsome woman’, widow of a Professor Luxmore who died in the Amazon on an expedition which included Major Despard
  • Inspector Harper – of the Devonshire police in Combeacre
  • Combeacre doctor
  • Combeacre vicar
  • Mrs Benson of Combeacre – died of drinking mislabelled poison while Anne Meredith worked for her – ‘A self‐righteous grenadier of a woman, working her companions hard and changing her servants often’
  • Doctor Davidson – the divisional surgeon attending Mrs Lorrimer
  • Stephens – ‘a big, awkward‐looking man with red hair entered’, member of the Chelsea Window Cleaners Association and key witness to the murderer
  • Sir Charles Imphrey – the Home Office analyst
  • Mr Gerald Hemmingway – a very promising young actor, hired by Poirot to trick the murderer into confessing

Is Shaitani gay?

The opening pages show him being very camp and bitchy in a way that sounded more like Noel Coward than Christie. A lot later Major Despard is called on to describe his rooms.

‘I don’t know that I’m much of a hand at that sort of thing,’ said Despard slowly. ‘It was a rotten sort of room, to my mind. Not a man’s room at all.’ (Chapter 15)

But it’s doubtful if Christie intended her character to be literally gay; more a ‘type’ of debased, cosmopolitan (he seems to have relatives in Syria) sensualist.

Detective methods

Poirot’s technique is very deliberately contrasted with Battle’s. Battle is all police procedural, gathering facts, sifting documents. Poirot is interested almost entirely in the suspects’ characters, in their psychology.

The importance of psychology

Early on Poirot explains:

Superintendent Battle said, ‘And I’d also like to know what you think of the psychology of these four people. You’re rather hot on that.’
Still smoothing his bridge scores, Poirot said, “You are right, psychology is very important. We know the kind of murder that has been committed, the way it was committed. If we have a person who from the psychological point of view could not have committed that particular type of murder, then we can dismiss that person from our calculations…’ (Chapter 8)

A lot later on the two detectives’ approaches are contrasted: Battle is all legwork and interviewing witnesses and suspects:

‘Well, every man to his taste. I don’t deal much in these fancy approaches. They don’t suit my style.’
‘What is your style, Superintendent?’
The superintendent met the twinkle in Poirot’s eyes with an answering twinkle in his own. ‘A straightforward, honest, zealous officer doing his duty in the most laborious manner ‐ that’s my style. No frills. No fancy work. Just honest perspiration. Stolid and a bit stupid – that’s my ticket.’
Poirot raised his glass. ‘To our respective methods – and may success crown our joint efforts. ‘(Chapter 10)

Whereas Poirot has mostly been thinking about the suspects’ characters:

‘So those are what you call facts, eh?’ said Battle curiously… ‘It’s an odd method of approach,’ said Battle thoughtfully. “Purely psychological.

And this is because of one of his deepest convictions, expressed in novel after novel:

‘No one can do a thing that is not dans son caractère!’ (Chapter 28)

Poirot’s egotism

‘The question is,’ he said, ‘can Hercule Poirot possibly be wrong?’
‘No one can always be right,’ said Mrs Lorrimer coldly.
‘I am,’ said Poirot. ‘Always I am right. It is so invariable that it startles me.’ (Chapter 26)

Age

Mrs Lorrimer is referred to as an ‘old woman’ when she is ‘only’ she is 63 years old.

‘Do you think this man Poirot is clever?’
‘He doesn’t look a Sherlock,’ said Rhoda. ‘I expect he has been quite good in his day. He’s gaga now, of course. He must be at least sixty.’ (Chapter 23)

‘Speech is the deadliest of revealers’

‘Gave himself away, did he? That sounds unlike him.’
Oh, my dear friend, it is impossible not to give oneself away ‐ unless one never opens one’s mouth! Speech is the deadliest of revealers.’
‘Even if people tell lies?’ asked Mrs Oliver.
‘Yes, Madame, because it can be seen at once that you tell a certain kind of lie.’ (Chapter 19)

Bookishness

Like all Christie’s books, this one draws attention to the genre of detective stories and has characters exclaim that it’s all so preposterous it could come from a book! This is  way of pre-empting readerly criticism, and also lulling you into the artificial realm of Murder Mystery World.

Superintendent Battle sighed. ‘This isn’t a detective story, Mrs Oliver,’ he said. Race said, ‘Naturally all information must be handed over to the police.’ (Chapter 8)

‘Not at all,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Least likely person. It seems to work out in real life just the same as in books.’ (Chapter 30)

Every Christie novel has to make an arch reference to Sherlock Holmes, it’s an iron law. Here is Dr Roberts, followed by Poirot himself

‘That seems to remind me of something.’
‘It reminds you of Sherlock Holmes does it not? The curious incident of the dog in the night. The dog did not howl in the night. That is the curious thing! Ah, well, I am not above stealing the tricks of others.’ (Chapter 9)

Mrs Oliver

Given how much she talks about bookishness, it’s surprising that when she introduces actual writers into her stories, they often play a relatively small part. This is an exception. For the first time the fictional author character does play quite a large role. That said her function is mostly comic.

Hair A good deal of comic business is had about her ever-changing hairstyles:

She was an agreeable woman of middle age, handsome in a rather untidy fashion, with fine eyes, substantial shoulders, and a large quantity of rebellious grey hair with which she was continually experimenting. One day her appearance would be highly intellectual – a brow with the hair scraped back from it and coiled in a large bun in the neck; on another, Mrs Oliver would suddenly appear with Madonna loops, or large masses of slightly untidy curls. On this particular evening Mrs Oliver was trying out a fringe. (Chapter 2)

This hair thing then becomes a running gag:

Mrs Oliver gave a sigh and ran her hands freely through her fringe until it stood upright and gave her a wholly drunken appearance. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I rather believe now that she did it! It’s lucky it’s not in a book. They don’t really like the young and beautiful girl to have done it. All the same, I rather think she did.’ (Chapter 6)

Later:

‘My dear, how nice to see you, said Mrs Oliver, holding out a carbon‐stained hand and trying with her other hand to smooth her hair, a quite impossible proceeding. (Chapter 17)

Fiction better than life First there are jokes about how she would manage everything better in a book:

‘I should have kept him to the end,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘In a book I mean,’ she added apologetically.
‘Real life’s a bit different,’ said Battle.
‘I know,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Badly constructed.’ (Chapter 4)

And:

Mrs Oliver said bitterly as the door closed behind him, ‘Copy! Copy indeed! People are so unintelligent. I could invent a better murder any day than anything real. I’m never at a loss for a plot. And the people who read my books like untraceable poisons!’ (Chapter 4)

Writing is a job Christie gives several extended descriptions of how writing is a job like any other, and lets the awestruck fan, Rhoda, into some of the crushingly practical considerations involved.

‘I always think I’ve finished and then when I count up I find I’ve only written thirty thousand words instead of sixty thousand and so then I have to throw in another murder and get the heroine kidnapped again. It’s all very boring.’ (Chapter 17)

Compounding it with wonderfully irreverent descriptions of her own work:

‘I mean would it bother you awfully if I sent one of your books to you; would you sign it for me?’
Mrs Oliver laughed.
‘Oh, I can do better than that for you.’
She opened a cupboard at the far end of the room.
‘Which would you like? I rather fancy The Affair of the Second Goldfish myself. It’s not quite such frightful tripe as the rest.’ (Chapter 18)

‘Frightful tripe’, that’s a phrase worth remembering when reading Christie.

Feminist Then there are Christie’s gentle mocking of Mrs Oliver’s feminist over-reach, how she sees it as her job to continually claim that women are much superior to men in every department – claims which often sound more like the more egotistical boasting about her own superiority than the broader cause. Thus when Battle says:

‘It’s odd, but a criminal gives himself away every time by that.’
‘Man is an unoriginal animal,’ said Hercule Poirot.
‘Women,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘are capable of infinite variation. I should never commit the same type of murder twice running.’ (Chapter 8)

Allied with the usual criticisms of men:

‘And Major Despard?’ asked Anne.
‘Pah!’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘He’s a man! I never worry about men. Men can look after themselves. Do it remarkably well if you ask me.’ (Chapter 12)

At one point, very amusingly:

Mrs Oliver put on her ‘how like a man’ expression. (Chapter 13)

Middle-aged At other moments she is used to describe a middle-aged, fairly weighty woman’s point of view:

Mrs Oliver extricated herself from the driving seat of her little two‐seater with some difficulty. To begin with, the makers of modern motor cars assume that only a pair of sylphlike knees will ever be under the steering wheel. It is also the fashion to sit low. That being so, for a middle‐aged woman of generous proportions it requires a good deal of superhuman wriggling to get out from under the steering wheel. (Chapter 10)

More comically:

Anne led the way to a little group of deck and basket chairs, all rather dilapidated. Mrs Oliver chose the strongest looking with some care, having had various unfortunate experiences with flimsy summer furniture. (Chapter 12)

So mostly she’s a broadly comic character, as in another debunking rhodomontade against her own profession.

‘What really matters is plenty of bodies! If the thing’s getting a little dull, some more blood cheers it up. Somebody is going to tell something ‐ and then they’re killed first! That always goes down well. It comes in all my books ‐ camouflaged different ways of course. And people like untraceable poisons, and idiotic police inspectors and girls tied up in cellars with sewer gas or water pouring in, such a troublesome way of killing anyone really, and a hero who can dispose of anything from three to seven villains single‐handed. I’ve written thirty‐two books by now ‐ and of course they’re all exactly the same really, as Monsieur Poirot seems to have noticed ‐ but nobody else has; and I only regret one thing, making my detective a Finn. I don’t really know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said or done. They seem to read detective stories a good deal in Finland. I suppose it’s the long winters with no daylight. In Bulgaria and Rumania they don’t seem to read at all. I’d have done better to have made him a Bulgarian.’ (Chapter 8)

Black and white

Referring to someone as a ‘white man’ during the heyday of the British Empire in the 1920s and ’30s indicated that they had been to public school and were thus a gentleman, played with a straight bat (cricketing term), played the game (public school term) and were a ‘pukka sahib’, a Hindi expression used in British India which literally means ‘genuine master’. Thus Colonel Race does some background checking on Major Despard and concludes, from all accounts of him serving out East:

‘I’d lay long odds against its being Despard who did the dirty work the other evening. He’s a white man, Battle.’
‘Incapable of murder, you mean?’ (Chapter 17)

And:

‘Shaitana may have heard some garbled rumour of Professor Luxmore’s death, but I don’t believe there’s more to it than that. Despard’s a white man, and I don’t believe he’s ever been a murderer. That’s my opinion. And I know something of men.’

As an outsider, Poirot is allowed to mock this entire attitude:

‘Yes, a woman knows. But I never showed him that I knew. We were Major Despard and Mrs Luxmore to each other right up to the end. We were both determined to play the game.’ She was silent, lost in admiration of that noble attitude.
‘True,’ murmured Poirot. ‘One must play the cricket. As one of your poets so finely says, “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not cricket more.”‘
‘Honour,’ corrected Mrs Luxmore with a slight frown.
‘Of course ‐ of course ‐ honour. “Loved I not honour more.”‘ (Chapter 20)

And compared to whiteness, are a few comments about Black people which, for these characters at this period, included Arabs. Says Major Despard, who’s travelled to far-flung countries:

‘I never forget a face – even a black face, and that’s a lot more than most people can say.’ (Chapter 15)

While later on, Miss Elsie Batt the parlour-maid, laments that Mrs Craddock died of typhoid in Egypt seeing as she bought a load of lovely dresses specially for the trip but:

She added with a sigh, ‘I wonder what they did with all that lovely lot of clothes? They’re blacks out there, so they couldn’t wear them.’ (Chapter 16)

Tall

  • [Mr Shaitani] was tall and thin; his face was long and melancholy; his eyebrows were heavily accented and jet black…
  • Major Despard was a tall, lean, handsome man, his face slightly marred by a scar on the temple.
  • [Miss Dawes] was tall, dark, and vigorous looking.
  • Sergeant O’Connor… was an extremely handsome man. Tall, erect, broad‐shouldered, it was less the regularity of his features than the roguish and daredevil spark in his eye which made him so irresistible to the fair sex.
  • Mrs Luxmore… ‘a tall, rather handsome woman, was standing by the mantelpiece’
  • Doctor Davidson the divisional surgeon shook hands. He was a tall melancholy man.

Woman hater

I don’t think I’ve come across the expression ‘woman hater’ so many times as I have in Christie’s fiction. Why was she so fond of using it?

‘Your friend is a woman hater? He wants to make us suffer? But you must not allow that…’ (Mrs Luxmore, Chapter 20)

Credit

‘Cards on the Table’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1936 by the Collins Crime Club.

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Peril at End House by Agatha Christie (1932)

‘The little facts that are curious, I like to see them appear. They are significant. They point the way.’
‘The way where?’
‘You put your finger on the weak spot, my excellent Hastings. Where? Where indeed! Alas, we shall not know till we get there.’ (Chapter 4)

‘I cannot help feeling, Hastings, that there is something behind this – something that has not yet come to light.’ (Chapter 4)

‘Since this trouble with my back, I’ve read all the detective stories that ever were, I should think.
Nothing else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ (Mrs Croft laid up in bed, Chapter 5)

‘I am convinced that le bon Dieu created Hercule Poirot for the express purpose of interfering. It is my métier.’ (Poirot, Chapter 12)

Summary

This is the sixth Poirot novel and it’s not great. It’s certainly not as entertaining as its immediate predecessors, the non-Poirot stories The Murder at the Vicarage and The Sittaford Mystery. ‘Peril at End House’ suffers by comparison for at least two reasons:

  1. Poirot is not (heresy!) as entertaining a figure as Miss Marple, let alone the freelance female detectives in novels like The Secret of Chimneys or The Sittaford Mystery (Bundle Brent or Emily Trefusis, respectively).
  2. The story itself is thin and, instead of unfolding with impressive logic, felt to me contrived and propped up right up until the extraordinarily convoluted conclusion.

Poirot and Captain Hastings are staying at the most expensive hotel in the Cornish Riviera resort of St Loo. Here they meet a devil-may-care young woman, Magdala ‘Nick’ Buckley and her circle of friends. They’re based at the big old family house she owns perched out on the cliffs, the End House of the title. The house belonged to her dissolute grandfather, old Sir Nicholas. When her mother and father died, it was her grandfather who raised her, hence she is nicknamed after him, Nick.

The central premise of the book is that Poirot comes to believe someone is trying to kill Nick and sets out to protect her. He partly fails because at a party to watch the fireworks over the resort’s harbour, in the dark, someone mistakenly shoots dead Maggie Buckley, a cousin of Nick’s who had borrowed the latter’s distinctive shawl. At which point Poirot has Nick whisked off to a nursing home for her own protection. We are at page 100 of this 250-page book and the next 150 pages see Poirot puzzling out who would want to murder Nick and why.

What I found unsatisfactory was the way they first meet, when the young woman is poncing about on the terrace of the hotel and ducks her head when she thinks a wasp has buzzed by. Somehow Poirot mystically knows it is not a wasp but a bullet which she heard, and which also pierced the hat she was wearing. Poirot finds the bullet which pinged off the wall and landed at his feet, and then identifies the hole in the hat. This is a preposterous incident and a very weak premise to hang the rest of the book on. Why would anyone try to shoot the woman in a public place and when she’s just a few yards from the most famous detective in the world? For me the novel never recovers from this contrived and improbable beginning.

It’s in light of this failed assassination attempt that Nick and her friends mention three other recent ‘accidents’: when one night the big heavy framed painting hanging over her bed fell onto her pillow and it was only luck that she’d got up and was out of bed at that moment: the way her car ran away with her because the brakes had failed / been tampered with; on a walk along the cliffs a big boulder came bouncing down the path and only just missed her. So all this is what persuades Poirot that someone is trying to murder the flighty young woman, despite her own dismissal of all three ‘accidents’.

Next problem I had is that Nick makes it super-abundantly extra clear, especially after her friend is killed instead of her, that there is something Poirot, Hastings and all the others ‘don’t know’:

She only shook her head, reiterating: ‘You don’t know! You don’t know!’

And yet Poirot completely ignores her and bundles her off to the nursing home, wasting days devising lists of suspects and their possible motives when all along all he had to do was ask her. I was jumping up and down and yelling ‘ask her what she means’ but Poirot doesn’t get round to doing this till page 120, by which time I had already guessed from clues in the text what she was on about. In other words, Poirot was stupider and slower than me, a not particularly bright reader.

So 1) the book starts from a flawed or clumsy premise, and 2) in it Poirot is uncharacteristically dense and slow.

Next Poirot continually talks up and exaggerates the situation – someone is trying to assassinate a young woman – into a world historical crisis, claiming the would-be murderer is a fiend, an arch criminal, a devil etc etc rather than a would-be murderer. Similarly, he goes to pieces in his sympathy and compassion for Nick with every twist in the plot, in a way which seems ludicrously overblown.

Finally, I laughed in disbelief when, at the climax of the novel, Poirot suggests holding a séance to flush out the identity of the murderer. Altogether this felt like a contrived, stretched, implausible and tired effort, a big disappointment after the richly entertaining ‘The Murder at the Vicarage’ and ‘The Sittaford Mystery’.

Comedy

It starts promisingly enough, playing to the fundamental fact about the Poirot novels which is that they are comedies. Poirot’s preening pomposity and endless egotism are continually exaggerated for comic effect:

‘They say of me: “That is Hercule Poirot! – The great – the unique! – There was never any one like him, there never will be!” Eh bien – I am satisfied. I ask no more. I am modest.’ (Chapter 1)

‘Monsieur Poirot is – er – was – a great detective,’ I explained.
‘Ah! my friend,’ cried Poirot. ‘Is that all you can find to say? Mais dis donc. I say then to
Mademoiselle that I am a detective unique, unsurpassed, the greatest that ever lived!’
(Chapter 2)

So much so that when, later on, anyone remarks on his fame Christie doesn’t even have to describe Poirot’s smug preening.

‘You are a great detective, M. Poirot?’ said Mrs Buckley.
‘It has been said, Madame.’
(Chapter 16)

Just as exaggerated for comic effect are his sidekick Captain Hastings’s two key attributes which are 1) his obtuseness (continually not noticing evidence, facts, implications staring him in the face):

‘What I particularly missed was your vivid imagination, Hastings,’ he went on dreamily. ‘One needs a certain amount of light relief.’

‘Almost incredible, my poor Hastings, how you hardly ever do see ! It amazes me every time anew!’ (Chapter 1)

‘You have an extraordinary effect on me, Hastings. You have so strongly the flair in the wrong direction that I am almost tempted to go by it! You are that wholly admirable type of man, honest, credulous, honourable, who is invariably taken in by any scoundrel.’ (Chapter 4)

And 2) his weakness for a pretty face i.e. he is easily distracted by pretty women:

She looked rather lovely as she sat up in bed, her two hands clenched, and her cheeks burning.

and Poirot continually mocks him for both.

‘You would say that! It would appeal, I knew, to your romantic but slightly mediocre mind. Buried treasure – yes, you would enjoy that idea.’ (Chapter 9)

But somehow, somewhere along the way, all this stops being so funny and becomes a mannerism.

Self-referential bookishness

I can’t quite define exactly the effect but Christie repeatedly has her narrators or characters point out how much the plot they’re involved in resembles a cheap thriller, a detective story or movie, as if this self-awareness somehow elevates them above that level. Whereas it does the opposite and simply highlights how close to genre fiction, packed with the clichés and stereotypes of the genre, they actually are. Thus when someone tries to shoot the book’s lead female character, Miss Magdala ‘Nick’ Buckley.

‘And now we ask the question of the cinema, of the detective novel—Who profits by your death, Mademoiselle?’ (Chapter 3)

Or:

‘Well, this is all too, too marvellous. Do you think someone really wants to do away with me? It would be thrilling. But, of course, that sort of thing doesn’t really happen. Only in books.’ (Chapter 2)

Or when Christie has someone or other jokily compare Poirot and Hastings to Holmes and Watson:

‘One should not keep a dog and have to bark oneself,’ agreed Nick, with mock sympathy. ‘Who is the dog, by the way? Dr Watson, I presume.’
‘My name is Hastings,’ I said coldly.
(Chapter 2)

But again, Christie loses out by the comparison. Poirot may be well known but Sherlock Holmes is a global icon.

It was his constant dictum that all the world knew Hercule Poirot. Here was someone who did not.

So why does she do it numerous times in every novel? Was this knowing self-referentiality part of the genre itself? Do all detectives in all detective stories, at some point or another, compare themselves to Sherlock Holmes or suddenly realising that they’re behaving just like a character in a detective novel?

‘Since this trouble with my back, I’ve read all the detective stories that ever were, I should think. Nothing else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ (Mrs Croft laid up in bed, Chapter 5)

‘I have let myself go to the most absurd suppositions. I, Hercule Poirot, have descended to the most ignominious flights of fancy. I have adopted the mentality of the cheap thriller.’ (Chapter 9)

‘You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories. In real life, nine times out of ten, it is the most likely and the most obvious person who commits the crime.’ (Chapter 9)

‘Oh dear, whoever would have thought of such a thing? Seems like an Edgar Wallace, doesn’t it?’ (nurse at the nursing home, Chapter 17)

(Richard Edgar Wallace, 1875 to 1932, wrote over 170 novels, many of them crime thrillers.)

‘Diable!’ said Poirot, as we walked away. ‘Is no one ever quite sure? In detective books – yes. But life – real life – is always full of muddle.’ (Chapter 17)

Retired

Also, I don’t understand why Christie had Poirot retire from working as a consulting detective in the second novel about him and then kept him in this state of supposed retirement for the next 40 years!

‘I am completely retired – but what will you? I have retired – I’m finished.’
‘You are not finished,’ I exclaimed, warmly.
Poirot patted my knee. ‘There speaks the good friend – the faithful dog. And you have reason, too. The grey cells, they still function – the order, the method – it is still there. But when I have retired, my friend, I have retired! It is finished! I am not a stage favourite who gives the world a dozen farewells. In all generosity I say, Let the young men have a chance.’

Except it’s the exact opposite which happens, in novel after novel: the young men don’t stand a chance; the world famous Hercule Poirot is always stepping in and solving everything for them. Poirot himself seems confused, or conflicted.

‘But surely I read that you had retired – that you’d taken a holiday for good and all.’
‘All ! Madame, you must not believe everything you read in the papers.’ (Chapter 5)

Symmetry OCD

Poirot was as jumpy as the proverbial cat. He walked about our sitting room all the afternoon, murmuring to himself and ceaselessly rearranging and straightening the ornaments.

He reached for his hat and carefully flicked an infinitesimal speck of dust from its surface. (Chapter 5)

With careful fingers he straightened the objects on the table in front of him. (Chapter 10)

See his thing with playing cards, below.

Cast

As usual, a fundamental part of Christie’s strategy is to create such a large cast of characters that just having Poirot discover all their basic backstories, and then uncover all the secrets they’re hiding, in such a way as to cast suspicion on most of them, actually makes up the text.

  • Poirot
  • Captain Hastings
  • Magdala ‘Nick’ Buckley – owner of the End House, ‘her small impudent dark head’, She is charming, Mademoiselle Nick, but she is a feather-head. Decidedly she is a feather-head.’
  • Commander George Challenger – would like to marry Nick
  • Frederica ‘Freddie’ Rice – Nick’s best friend, ‘Married to a beast—a man who drank and drugged and was altogether a queer of the worst description. She had to leave him a year or two ago.’ ‘She was an unusual type – weary Madonna describes it best. She had fair, almost colourless hair, parted in the middle and drawn straight down over her ears to a knot in the neck. Her face was dead white and emaciated – yet curiously attractive. Her eyes were very light grey with large pupils. She had a curious look of detachment… She impressed me, I think, as the most tired person I had ever met—tired in mind, not in body, as though she had found everything in the world to be empty and valueless.’ Turns out to be a drug addict.
  • Freddie’s husband aka ‘the mess’
  • Jim Lazarus – the art dealer in Bond Street, ‘He’s a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one’. ‘A tall, fair, rather exquisite young man, with a rather fleshy nose and over-emphasised good-looks, he had a supercilious manner and a tired drawl. There was a sleekness about him that I especially disliked.’
  • Charles Vyse – local solicitor, Nick’s cousin, stands to inherit End House if Nick dies
  • William Wilson – the gardener at End House, husband of…
  • Ellen Wilson – housemaid
  • their son, Alfred, who gleefully describes watching pigs being slaughtered
  • Bert and Mildred ‘Milly’ Croft – Australian couple who have rented the Lodge
    • Edith – their maid
  • Maggie Buckley – Nick’s sensible cousin: ‘It was, I think, her appearance of calm good sense that so attracted me. A quiet girl, pretty in the old-fashioned sense – certainly not smart. Her face was innocent of make-up and she wore a simple, rather shabby, black evening dress. She had frank blue eyes, and a pleasant slow voice.’
  • Dr Graham – the trusted local doctor, there’s always one
  • Colonel Weston – Chief Constable of Devon
  • The Reverend Giles Buckley – father of murdered Maggie Buckley, ‘a small man, grey-headed, with a diffident appealing manner’
  • Mrs Jean Buckley – ‘a woman of character, tall and fair and showing very plainly her northern ancestry’
  • Captain Michael Seton – dashing airman, engaged on a long-distance flight to Australia
  • Sir Matthew Seton – his gruff old uncle, ‘the second richest man in England’, who disapproved of his relationship with Nick Buckley (or any other woman, come to that)
  • Mr Whitfield – Captain Seton’s solicitor
  • matron of the nursing home where Nick is sent
  • Hood – orderly at the nursing home, ‘a stupid but honest-looking young fellow of about twenty-two’
  • nurse probationer at the nursing home

Conventions

1. Suspicion

Just like Miss Marple, Poirot is suspicious of everyone.

‘What a suspicious old devil you are!’
‘You are right, mon ami. I am suspicious of everyone – of everything.’

Compare Miss M:

‘Ah!’ said Miss Marple. ‘But I always find it prudent to suspect everybody just a little. What I say is, you really never know, do you?’ (The Murder at the Vicarage, Chapter 16)

2. More

And early on in any of these mysteries someone always utters the classic trope of the genre, that there’s more to this affair than meets the eye:

‘I cannot help feeling, Hastings, that there is something behind this—something that has not yet come to light.’ (Chapter 4)

Compare:

‘Do you know, Clement,’ [Colonel Melchett] said suddenly, ‘I’ve a feeling that this is going to turn out a much more intricate and difficult business than any of us think. Dash it all, there’s something behind it.’
(The Murder at the Vicarage, Chapter 12)

And:

‘I think,’ said Inspector Narracott deliberately, ‘that there’s a lot more in this case than meets the eye.’
(The Sittaford Mystery, Chapter 4)

The strain of modern life

More than once Christie has had characters refer to ‘the strain of modern life’. She does it again here.

‘What do you mean exactly by that. Mademoiselle ? On top of everything else?’
‘I don’t mean anything particular. What the newspapers call ‘ the strain of modem life,’ I suppose. Too many cocktails, too many cigarettes – all that sort of thing. It’s just that I’ve got into a ridiculous – sort of state.’ (Chapter 5)

This phrase also crops up in some of Noel Coward’s 1920s plays. It was obviously a received idea and cliché of the time.

Poirot’s method

Poirot’s insistence on Order and Method and Psychology, is explained in every novel and quickly became formulaic.

‘Order and method! That is the first stage. To arrange the facts with neatness and precision. The next stage—’
‘Yes.’
‘The next stage is that of the psychology. The correct employment of the little grey cells…’ (Chapter 9)

Less flatteringly, there’s simply nosing around.

‘Mon ami,’ said Poirot, ‘I like to inquire into everything. Hercule Poirot is a good dog. The good dog follows the scent, and if, regrettably, there is no scent to follow, he noses around – seeking always something that is not very nice. So also, does Hercule Poirot. And often – oh ! so often – does he find it!’ (Chapter 16)

Poirot the outsider

There are some obvious points about Poirot. An essay I read said that Christie developed him during the First World War when the established doyen of detectives was Sherlock Holmes and the new author of adventure stories on the block was John Buchan. Holmes is obviously tall, fit, a dab hand with a sword, a drug addict, with a weird ability at the violin, in many ways a freak. Buchan’s heroes do lots of running round and biffing baddies. Both are true blue, public school Englishmen. Poirot is obviously conceived to be the opposite of all these things. Poirot is:

Foreign and so completely outside the English class system, completely outside, for example, the way Captain Hastings responds to other public-school educated military men as ‘pukka sahibs’. Thus his cross riposte to Hastings:

‘Poirot,’ I cried, scandalised. ‘You really can’t do that. It isn’t playing the game.’
‘I am not playing a game, mon ami.’ His voice rang out suddenly harsh and stern. ‘I am hunting down a murderer.’ (Chapter 13)

Outsider So he is an outsider to almost all English customs, cuisine, politics, traditions and so on, not just an outsider but a critic (for example, of England’s notoriously disgusting food).

Ambivalence he speaks with a French accent and has a French-sounding name and yet he isn’t French. Maybe it started out as a joke to make him Belgian and have every character he encounters think he’s French, but it turns into something more allegorical. Even in Europe, he doesn’t fit in. Or: he doesn’t fit in even with people’s stereotypes of foreigners. A Frenchman would be easy to dismiss given the millennium-old antagonism between the English and French. But Poirot both is (name and speech) and isn’t (actual nationality) French. He is neither fish, flesh nor fowl.

So whenever Poirot corrects people’s misconception about his nationality, it always wrongfoots them. Holmes is what people expect, tall, commanding, authoritative. Poirot always unsettles and unnerves people.

Short not tall – compare the over-6-foot-tall Sherlock.

Unmanly – he is dapper and preening and fussy, not at all like the manly and indifferent-to-appearance heroes like Richard Hannay / Sandy Arbuthnot. In fact Christie chose to emphasise this very unEnglish, unheroic fussiness by giving him symmetric obsessive compulsive disorder:

Symmetry OCD is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) characterized by an intense need for things to be perfectly aligned, balanced, or arranged in a symmetrical manner. Individuals with this condition experience significant distress and anxiety when objects or patterns appear asymmetrical or imperfect.

Hence, on a physical level, his fussiness about his personal appearance, and his fiddling with objects on the table or mantelpiece to position them just so. Which is an obvious physical manifestation of the similar mental compulsion to arrange all the facts into a neat pattern. Given vivid embodiment when Poirot unexpectedly asks Hastings to go and buy him a pack of playing cards.

‘If you would be the good friend – the good helpful friend…’
‘ Yes’ I said, eagerly.
‘Go out, I beg of you, and buy me some playing cards.’
I stared. ‘Very well,’ I said coldly. I could not but suspect that he was making a deliberate excuse to get rid of me. Here, however, I misjudged him. That night, when I came into the sitting-room about ten o’clock, I found Poirot carefully building card houses – and I remembered! It was an old trick of his – soothing his nerves. He smiled at me.
‘Yes – you remember. One needs the precision. One card on another – so – in exactly the right place and that supports the weight of the card on top and so on, up.’ (Chapter 17)

Woman haters and other stereotypes

Christie uses the phrase woman hater’ in this novel and its immediate predecessors. Here, Captain Seton’s uncle, Sir Matthew Seton, is described as one.

‘He [Michael] comes of rather a mad family,’ he [Lazarus] said. ‘His uncle. Sir Matthew Seton who died about a week ago – he was as mad as a hatter.’
‘He was the mad millionaire who ran bird sanctuaries, wasn’t he?’ asked Frederica.
‘Yes. Used to buy up islands. He was a great woman-hater. Some girl chucked him once, I believe, and he took to Natural History by way of consoling himself.’ (Chapter 7)

In The Sittaford Mystery, the murdered man, Captain Trevelyan, is described by several characters as a ‘woman hater’. Mrs Willett has no time for this description.

‘I’ve known dozens of men like it. They are called women haters and all sorts of silly things, and really all the time it’s only shyness. If I could have got at him,’ said Mrs Willett with determination, ‘I’d soon have got over all that nonsense. That sort of man only wants bringing out.’
(Chapter 14)

Either 1) there were a lot of these ‘woman haters’ about in the 1920s and ’30s, or 2) Christie was particularly intrigued by them, or 3) the most likely explanation, they were yet another handy stock type of the kind her stories are constructed from (the timid vicar, the solid doctor, the handsome young artist, the flighty young woman etc etc).

Because our own age is obsessed by gender and riddled with feminist ideology, this kind of stereotype leaps out at us (just as our other modern obsession with race and ethnicity means that Christie’s stereotypical references to Jews and to any other racial type or ethnicity also leap out at the modern reader, and are liable to cause offence).

But the entire books are made of stereotypical incidents and stock character types. Modern readers just alight on some of the stereotypes, the ones which press modern buttons, and find them offensive. But if there were any Cockneys left, they might find Christie’s clichéd depiction of the Londoner Inspector Japp, offensive:

‘Well, you mustn’t be depressed, old cock,’ said Japp. ‘Even if you can’t see your way clear – well you can’t go about at your time of life and expect to have the success you used to do. We all of us get stale as the years go by. Got to give the young ‘uns a chance, you know.’
‘And yet the old dog is the one who knows the tricks,’ murmured Poirot. ‘He is cunning. He does
not leave the scent.’..
‘You’re a caution, isn’t he, Captain Hastings ? Always was. Looks much the same – hair a bit thinner on top but the face fungus fuller than ever.’
‘Eh?’ said Poirot. ‘What is that?’
‘He’s congratulating you on your moustaches,’ I said, soothingly.

‘A caution’, ‘Old cock’, ‘face fungus’ – these locutions are as stereotypical as the stereotyped posh young chap who says, ‘What ho! old chap’, the stereotyped maid who says, ‘Lord, Miss, it’s not my place’, the stereotyped military man who says, ‘Dashed bad business, Poirot’. Some of the characters themselves comment on how stereotypical they are.

‘The late Sir Matthew was the second richest man in England,’ replied Mr. Whitfield, composedly.
‘He had somewhat peculiar views, had he not?’
Mr. Whitfield looked at him severely.
‘A millionaire, M. Poirot, is allowed to be eccentric. It is almost expected of him.’ (Chapter 16)

It is certainly expected of him in this kind of novel. All these novels offer not only the challenge of the central puzzle and the challenges of all the related puzzles and mysteries which spin off from it, the entertainment value of Poirot and his comedy sidekick – but all the pleasures of recognising a gallery of stock types and caricatures, as recognisable and deeply pleasurable as characters in a panto.

Credit

‘Peril at End House’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1932 by the Collins Crime Club.

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by Simon on July 23, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 23, 2025

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