‘Decidedly wherever I go, there is something to remind me of crime!’ he murmured to himself.
(Chapter 1)

Frenchmen were all alike, she thought, obsessed by sex!
(Chapter 2)

‘Here’s to crime!’
(Bluff Colonel Carbury’s toast to Poirot)

Psychological deduction
(Only now, in the 16th Poirot novel, do we get this, the best short description of his method, p.111)

This is one of Christie’s ‘travel’ detective novels i.e. set in an exotic location. Its predecessor, ‘Death on the Nile’ is set in Egypt. This one is set in the geographically adjacent territory of British-run Palestine and Jordan. One imagines Agatha had recently taken some trips to these locations because the books contain (a handful) of vivid descriptions of their respective landscapes.

Part 1

Mrs Boynton

Despite the overall structural similarity, the novel feels different from anything else I’ve read by Christie for a central reason. This is because of its peculiar atmosphere of psychological horror.

The first half of the book is dominated by the horrible, controlling figure of old Mrs Boynton, an American widow who wields a genuinely horrifying psychological control over her three young adult step-children (her dead husband’s children by his first wife) – Lennox (unhappily married), Raymond and Carol – and her own daughter by her dead husband, Ginevra, a deeply disturbed young girl.

Old Mrs Boynton is a monster, who keeps absolute control over her brood, banning them from going anywhere without her, banning them from having contact with outsiders, banning them speaking to members of the opposite sex. If she catches them fraternising with outsiders, it only takes a few words of her low, rasping, threatening voice to make them quail, dry up, and step back into line.

And then, suddenly, the old woman’s eyes were full on him, and he drew in his breath sharply. Small, black, smouldering eyes they were, but something came from them-a power, a definite force, a wave of evil malignancy. (Chapter 4)

This psychological menace is a new tone in her works, which are generally light and cartoonish in feel.

At the Solomon Hotel

So the novel falls naturally into two parts, with the first part itself divided in two.

In part one a) we find ourselves in the Solomon Hotel, Jerusalem, where we are introduced to the members of the cast – to the Boynton family, dominated by their horrifyingly controlling matriarch, but also to a few other guests at the hotel, including the bland and optimistic Jefferson Cope, a fellow American and old friend of the Boynton family who carries a torch for the married daughter, Nadine; to a couple of Christie’s comic female characters, the big, loud American feminist Lady Westholme who married a British peer, got herself elected to the House of Commons and works on all kinds of committees and causes, and her polar opposite, and the feeble Miss Annabel Pierce.

There are also two psychiatrists – a famous older academic named Dr Gerard, and a young newly-qualified and idealistic psychiatrist named Sarah King. I’ve mentioned Christie’s (generally fairly superficial) interest in psychology, which has occasionally led to discussion of psychological theories in her previous novels, and there have been several characters who run sanatoriums for nerve patients, most notably the scary Dr Nicholson in ‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’

But I think this is the first time we’ve had really serious psychiatrists as central characters, and not just one but two of them. This means Christie can give them differing opinions about how and when to apply psychiatric theories and have them debate them, specifically their analysis of the character of Mrs Boynton.

To spice things up, Christie also has Gerard be a man with outrageously sexist views about women which, predictably, bridle young female psychologist Sarah King.

And to make the distinction even clearer, Gerard is very much a French man who airily tells Sarah that all English women (and men) are repressed about sex, much to her fury.

Sarah cried out, laughing: ‘Oh, you Frenchmen! You’ve got no use for any woman who isn’t young and attractive.’
Gerard shrugged his shoulders. ‘We are more honest about it, that is all. Englishmen, they do not get up in tubes and trains for ugly women-no? No.’ (p.81)

Last but by no means least, at the Solomon Hotel also happens to be staying the world-famous detective Hercule Poirot without whom the novel wouldn’t be possible.

Trip to Petra

In part one b) this motley crew – the Boynton family, Cope, Lady W and Pierce, Sarah and Gerard but not Poirot – set off in several charabancs on the two-day journey across the desert to the fabled stone city of Petra, in the Jordanian desert.

The trip is arranged by a tour operator which lays on a fat and unstoppably garrulous dragoman or local guide and factotum, Mahmoud (who, interestingly, won’t stop telling everyone about the iniquities visited on the Arab population by Jewish immigrants and Zionists). (Just to be crystal clear, I am not taking sides in this endless argument, just pointing out that it was a familiar enough issue to her readers, for Christie to attribute it as a clichéd or stock topic to what is essentially a comic character. I.e. it was an over-familiar issue in 1938!)

By this stage we have been in the company of all the characters long enough to realise that every member of the Boynton family has cause to murder, or has thought about murdering, or has even been overheard discussing murdering, their terrible stepmother. They are all potential suspects.

When they get to Petra, Mrs Boynton takes up pole position sitting in a chair at the entrance of one of the caves which has been rigged up as accommodation for some of the tourists (others are staying in tents down on the valley floor). From here she looks down on proceedings like some grotesque Buddha.

On the afternoon of their arrival, all the other characters go for a walk, soon splitting up into smaller groups, who all drift back to the camp around 6pm at sunset. It’s only when a ‘boy’ (as the native servants are uniformly referred to) is sent up to her cave to fetch Mrs M for supper, that he discovers she is stone dead, still squatting in her chair. When he runs back down to the camp in a panic, pandemonium ensues.

Whodunnit?

And, as always happens, suddenly all the events surrounding the trip have a bright spotlight shone on them to reveal all kinds of motives and possibilities and discrepancies and anomalies.

Nadine had finally told her mother-ridden husband Lennox that she was going to leave him so as to escape the family’s poisoned atmosphere. Would that have motivated him to kill the old biddy in a bid to keep his wife?

Right at the start of the novel Raymond and Carol were overheard discussing the possibility of murdering their stepmother, so was it them? Later, Raymond had managed (despite the monster’s best efforts) to meet, talk to and boyishly fall in love with the student psychiatrist staying at the hotel, Sarah King. Now, on this late afternoon walk, he tells her he going to do something decisive, it’s now or never etc, and sets off back to the camp on his own? Was he referring to bumping his stepmother off?

And his sister, Carol – she was part of that early conversation about killing Mrs B, so was it her?

Or could it have been the outsider Jefferson Cope, vowing to liberate the woman he loves from the thrall of the monster, Nadine, even though she’s married to Lennox?

Or was it Sarah King, who has the medical expertise, and realised the only way to free a family she’d come to realise were living in hell, was to kill off the she-devil?

Or was it even her superior as a psychiatrist, Dr Gerard? Early in the novel the pair had had a debate about when it was right to intervene in people’s psychological problems: was this a dramatic intervention by the older doctor? Short answer, almost certainly not because before the walk I’ve mentioned even got going Dr Gerard was struck down by a recurrence of malaria (picked up in the Congo) and so turned and blundered back to his tent, looking for quinine to pump himself full of before passing out?

Or did he? He therefore has the best alibi of the lot but, as we know from reading Christie, often it’s the people with the best alibis who turn out to be the murderer.

Or, last and least, was it the much-overlooked youngest member of the downtrodden family, young Ginevra, who Gerard had diagnosed as being on the verge of schizophrenia (p.131), withdrawing from the impossibly controlled environment of her family life into a world of romantic fantasies picked up from popular fiction and the movies? Could she be Christie’s first child murderer?

Part 2

Part two whisks us away from the crime scene at Petra and to Amman, capital of Jordan. This is where Poirot came when he left the Solomon Hotel, so wasn’t at all involved in the death at Petra. But it’s here that he is summoned to the office of a pukka British official, Colonel Carbury. This chap has heard about Poirot from his friend, Colonel Race, the British intelligence officer who we met working with Poirot in the previous book, ‘Death on the Nile’ and, earlier, in the Shaitana murder, described in ‘Cards on the Table’.

Now Mrs Boynton’s death would have been treated as entirely natural – she was old, she had a heart condition, the trip to Petra had been arduous even for the younger members of the family – all would have been accepted and forgotten had it not been for Dr Gerard.

It is Dr Gerard who comes to the British authorities in Amman saying there was something fishy about the incident. Specifically that when he stumbled back to his tent on that ill-fated afternoon, 1) he looked for the syringe which he normally used to inject quinine but couldn’t find it anywhere so ended up taking the drug orally. 2) Next day, when he searched through his portable case of medicines, he discovered that his stock of digitoxin was very much diminished and the point is that Mrs Boynton was taking the closely related digitalis. An injection of digitonin would cause her heart to go into spasm but not show up at an autopsy as chemically different from the digitalis which everyone would expect to find in her body. 3) Lastly, when he examined her, Dr Gerard discovered a mark on Mrs Boynton’s wrist that could have been caused by the insertion of a hypodermic syringe. Did someone steal his syringe and digitonin and give Mrs B a fatal injection?

So all this has been enough to make him very suspicious and go to the authorities in the shape of Colonel Carbury. Carbury knew that the world famous detective Hercule Poirot was in the city (Amman) on holiday, and invites him in to see if he can shed light on the case.

Now Carbury can only hold the relatives for two days, so Poirot rather cockily promises he will discover the truth of the matter by the evening of the following day.

The interview board

And so we have the setup for a classic Poirot investigation and he sets about things in the usual way, calling each of the participants / suspects into an office for one-on-one questioning.

This procedure is a set piece in Christie’s novels, most memorably in ‘Orient Express’, in which she enjoys showing us how Poirot varies his voice, tone and approach to match each of the interviewees, in which the reader enjoys the series of oddballs and eccentrics being displayed for our entertainment and, if they’re really keen, tries to fit together the increasingly complicated and bewildering array of facts, events and motivations to find out whodunnit before Poirot reveals all.

He’s mentioned it a few times in earlier novels, but here Christie has Poirot quite a few times emphasise the essence of his approach, which is long interviews or more casual conversations, in which he gets the suspects to talk at such length that they eventually give themselves away.

‘To investigate a crime it is only necessary to let the guilty party or parties talk.’ (p.217)

Cast

• Hercule Poirot
• wicked old Mrs Boynton – second wife of millionaire Elmer Boynton – ‘that hulk of shapeless flesh, with her evil, gloating eyes’ (p.59)
• Lennox Boynton – 30, ‘fair-haired, loose-limbed’, married to…
• Nadine – Lennox’s wife, pleads with him to break free, ‘tall, dignified’, eventually threatens to leave him for Mr Cope
• Raymond Boynton – young adult stepson of Mrs B
• Carol Boynton – 23, young adult stepdaughter of Mrs B
• Ginevra ‘Jinny’ Boynton – Mrs B’s only biological daughter
• Dr Sarah King – young idealistic newly qualified psychologist, on the rebound from a 4-year-long affair with a doctor four years her senior
• Dr Theodore Gerard – famous French psychologist, author of papers on schizophrenia
• Mr Jefferson Cope – idealistic American, friend of the Boynton family, secretly in love with Nadine
• Lady Westholme – an enormous booming masterful American woman, married an English lord and so became a ‘Lady’, got herself elected to the House of Commons, sits on numerous committees, interested in lots of social causes, an earnest feminist, quick to criticise men for being rubbish
• Annabel Pierce – mimsy and timid, as the story evolves she becomes a comic companion and foil to Lady Westholme
• Mahmoud – the ‘ample’ dragoman or guide, ‘fat and dignified’
• Colonel Carbury – bluff British official in Amman, Jordan, who Gerard’s concerns force to order an investigation into Mrs Boynton’s death (p.111)

Sex

The word ‘sex’ had of course been around for some time to refer to gender, even existed in anodyne phrases such as ‘the fairer sex’. But sometime during the 1920s it began to acquire its more modern meaning of referring to the actual act of sexual intercourse, with the result that sensitive souls like Miss Pierce blush when they hear it.

Whereas, on the contrary, liberated modern scientifically-minded young women like Sarah King have no inhibitions about using the word with its modern connotation. So far, so ‘liberated’. But Sarah does, however, still bridle at discussing sex openly and candidly. She blushes or bridles when Dr Gerard raises the subject, leading him to accuse her of being as repressed on the subject as all her fellow English. And she still gives expression to basically Victorian conventions that somehow sex is associated with men, men have sex on the brain, sex is not something that ‘nice’ women talk about etc.

This is dramatised in conversations between the psychologists Gerard and King, which use three vectors or binaries – gender, age and nationality.

What I mean is they not only take different views because one is a man and one is a woman; but because Gerard is middle-aged, with lots of experience and so somewhat cynical, compared with King’s youthful idealism. And that he is French and therefore considers he has a much more liberated attitude to sex than a repressed, hung-up Englishwoman like King.

Thus when they are discussing how to get through to the stepchildren who are so obviously under Mrs Boynton’s horrible control, after Sarah hasn’t made much impact on Carol, Gerard points out that she can use her ‘sex’, by which he means that she can try ‘attracting’ Raymond away from the prison of the family.

‘One comes always back to sex, does one not?’ (p.69)

He provocatively explains he means that the ‘desire of a man for a mate’ will be stronger than Mrs Boynton’s ‘hypnotic spell’. When Sarah makes excuses why she doesn’t want to do this, Gerard launches into his nationality-based critique.

‘That is because you are English! The English have a complex about sex. They think it is “not quite nice”.’
Sarah’s indignant response failed to move him.
‘Yes, yes; I know you are very modern – that you use freely in public the most unpleasant words you can find in the dictionary – that you are professional and entirely uninhibited! Tout de même, I repeat you have the same racial characteristic as your mother and your grandmother. You are still the blushing English Miss although you do not blush!’ (p.70)

Psychology

On a different tack, Gerard and King also have extended discussions analysing the origins and nature of the hold Mrs Boynton has over her stepchildren, and its possible origins, in professional psychological terms. Early on Sarah has a hurried conversation with poor Carol, who snatches some free time to explain the key fact about her stepmother:

Carol leaned forward and touched her arm. ‘Listen. I must try and make you understand! Before her marriage my mother – she’s my stepmother really – was a wardress in a prison. My father was the Governor and he married her. Well, it’s been like that ever since. She’s gone on being a wardress – to us. That’s why our life is just being in prison!’ (Chapter 6)

When she reports this to Dr Gerard, he mansplains the deeper significance to her. I’ll quote it at length because it’s one of the longest expositions about psychology in any of the Christie novels I’ve read so far:

Gerard pounced on one point. ‘Wardress in a prison, was she, that old hippopotamus? That is significant, perhaps.’
Sarah said: ‘You mean that that is the cause of her tyranny? It is the habit of her former profession?’
Gerard shook his head. ‘No, that is approaching it from the wrong angle. There is some deep underlying compulsion. She does not love tyranny because she has been a wardress. Let us rather say that she became a wardress because she loved tyranny. In my theory it was a secret desire for power over other human beings that led her to adopt that profession.’

From there he delivers a little explanation about human nature:

His face was very grave. ‘There are such strange things buried down in the unconscious. A lust for power – a lust for cruelty – a savage desire to tear and rend – all the inheritance of our past racial memories . . . They are all there, Miss King, all the cruelty and savagery and lust . . . We shut the door on them and deny them conscious life, but sometimes they are too strong.’
Sarah shivered. ‘I know.’

So by the end of the 1930s these ideas, originally outlined by Freud but subsequently elaborated by umpteen followers (Adler, Jung) not to mention countless popularisers, magazine articles, books etc were widespread enough to be completely assimilable in a popular fiction like this.

But Gerard doesn’t stop there. His speech goes on to generalise about the state of society as a whole, by which he means the (by 1938) very obvious threats from totalitarian regimes, in Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, and their psychological origins.

Gerard continued: ‘We see it all around us today-in political creeds, in the conduct of nations. A reaction from humanitarianism, from pity, from brotherly good will. The creeds sound well sometimes, a wise regime, a beneficent government – but imposed by force-resting on a basis of cruelty and fear. They are opening the door, these apostles of violence, they are letting out the old savagery, the old delight in cruelty for its own sake! Oh, it is difficult. Man is an animal very delicately balanced. He has one prime necessity – to survive. To advance too quickly is as fatal as to lag behind. He must survive! He must, perhaps, retain some of the old savagery, but he must not – no, definitely he must not – deify it!’

And then, from this lofty disquisition on the nature of Mankind and Society, we revert back to the individual specimen under analysis.

There was a pause. Then Sarah said: ‘You think old Mrs. Boynton is a kind of Sadist?’
‘I am almost sure of it. I think she rejoices in the infliction of pain-mental pain, mind you, not physical. That is very much rarer and very much more difficult to deal with. She likes to have control of other human beings and she likes to make them suffer.’ (Chapter 6)

But there is one more point Gerard / Christie has to make, about what happens to all these raging unconscious forces if they are repressed. And this again is worth quoting because you suspect it represents Christie’s view or, more precisely, is a point of view which underpins and enables the fictions:

Dr Gerard said gravely: ‘I believe at least in one of the chief tenets of the Christian faith – contentment with a lowly place. I am a doctor and I know that ambition-the desire to succeed-to have power-leads to most ills of the human soul. If the desire is realized it leads to arrogance, violence and final satiety; and if it is denied – ah! If it is denied let all the asylums for the insane rise up and give their testimony! They are filled with human beings who were unable to face being mediocre, insignificant, ineffective and who therefore created for themselves ways of escape from reality so to be shut off from life itself forever.’
Sarah said abruptly: ‘It’s a pity the old Boynton woman isn’t in an asylum.’
Gerard shook his head. ‘No – her place is not there among the failures. It is worse than that. She has succeeded, you see! She has accomplished her dream.’ (Chapter 6)

The idea of the lowly and frustrated achieving power and specialness through appalling behaviour, specifically the act of murder, underpins some of the stories – for example, it features heavily in ‘The A.B.C. Murders’ until the real motive for the crimes emerges. It’s so important this novel that Gerard repeats the idea, explaining it to the naive and optimistic Jefferson Cope:

‘My dear sir, I have made a life’s study of the strange things that go on in the human mind. It is no good turning one’s face only to the fairer side of life. Below the decencies and conventions of everyday life, there lies a vast reservoir of strange things. There is such a thing, for instance, as delight in cruelty for its own sake. But when you have found that, there is something deeper still. The desire, profound and pitiful, to be appreciated. If that is thwarted, if through an unpleasing personality a human being is unable to get the response it needs, it turns to other methods – it must be felt – it must count – and so to innumerable strange perversions. The habit of cruelty, like any other habit, can be cultivated, can take hold of one –.’ (p.98)

So this kind of things isn’t exactly a fundamental premise of all the stories, it’s more like one of the received opinions of the time, which helps the stories function and provides a sort-of psychological explanation, if you need one.

This is all interesting up to a point, but at that point you realise that Christie doesn’t really have that deep an understanding of the subject. She knows enough to be able to give basic psychological analyses to her characters, but then it stops. To be honest, given the setup and centrality of this monster figure, I was hoping for more. What I’ve just quoted is the two psychologists’ longest conversation and it feels disappointingly shallow.

It’s a good indicator of the way Christie’s books aren’t literature, because she needs just enough ideas to make her stagey characters and their conversations sound sort of plausible, and to make the plot whizz along at speed. But there’s no depth. And the more the two psychologists explain, the more superficial and entry-level they sound. Magazine level.

This kind of thing, this entry level psychology, also provides opportunities for comedy

And just enough air of fake sophistication to make bluff old Colonel Carbury’s philistine English response to all this psychology stuff amusing (p.114).

Turning point in Sarah’s perception of Mrs Boynton

It is maybe Sarah’s psychological training which gives her the key insight into Mrs Boynton:

Sarah passed them and went into the hotel. Mrs. Boynton, wrapped in a thick coat, was sitting in a chair, waiting to depart. Looking at her, a queer revulsion of feeling swept over Sarah. She had felt that Mrs. Boynton was a sinister figure, an incarnation of evil malignancy. Now, suddenly, she saw the old woman as a pathetic ineffectual figure. To be born with such a lust for power, such a desire for dominion, and to achieve only a petty domestic tyranny! If only her children could see her as Sarah saw her that minute – an object of pity – a stupid, malignant, pathetic, posturing old woman. (Chapter 9)

Christie’s anti-feminists

Christie’s feminists are always figures of fun. In this book it is the larger-than-life American loudmouth Lady Westholme, one of Christie’s fearsomely strong, bullish feminists, always ready with a pithy saying that ridicules men and promotes womankind:

Lady Westholme looked with grim satisfaction after the departing car. ‘Men always think they can impose upon women,’ she said. Sarah thought that it would be a brave man who thought he could impose upon Lady Westholme! (p.78)

And turning her fearsome address onto Sarah:

‘You are a professional woman Miss King?’
‘I’ve just taken my M.B.’
‘Good,’ said Lady Westholme with condescending approval. ‘If anything is to be accomplished, mark my words, it is women who will do it.’ (p.79)

These stirring words do not, however, ‘liberate’ Sarah, just make her feel uneasy, making her feel ‘uneasily conscious for the first time of her sex’.

It is no coincidence that this storm-the-barricades, feminist force of nature turns out, in the end, to be the baddy and, when found out, kills herself rather than face the humiliation.

One of the surprises of reading Laura Thompson’s biography of Christie is to discover just how untouched she was by feminism or suffragettism, and how utterly conventional in her views of gender relations (a young woman’s job was to find a man, marry and have babies; careers were for men, and other shockingly anti-feminist beliefs). In this novel, although she bridles at Dr Gerard’s outrageously sexist comments, Sarah also recoils from Lady Westholme’s boosterism. She is sensibly centrist which, you can’t help thinking (after reading Thompson’s biography) was Christie’s position.

‘It’s awful, isn’t it, but I do hate women! When they’re inefficient and idiotic like Miss Pierce, they infuriate me, and when they’re efficient like Lady Westholme, they annoy me more still.’ (p.82)

And when Miss Pierce feebly praises big strong Lady Westholme, Sarah again expresses views very close to her creator:

Miss Pierce did not notice the acerbity [in Sarah’s voice] and twittered happily on: “I’ve so often seen her name in the papers. So clever of women to go into public life and hold their own. I’m always so glad when a woman accomplishes something!’
‘Why?’ demanded Sarah ferociously.
Miss Pierce’s mouth fell open and she stammered a little. ‘Oh, because – I mean-just because – well – it’s so nice that women are able to do things!’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s nice when any human being is able to accomplish something worthwhile! It doesn’t matter a bit whether it’s a man or a woman. Why should it?’ (p.84)

Bookishness

As always, the novel has characters commenting on how events sound like they come from a detective novel, or are reading such a novel, or interpret events in light of their reading of such books. My working hypothesis is that rather than conceal the fact that her stories are popular entertainments, Christie thus emphasises the fact, emphasises their artificiality, and thus encourages readers away from applying everyday standards of plausibility and verisimilitude, instead luring them into her MurderMysteryWorld of caricatures characters, stock situations and outrageous solutions.

Colonel Carbury… said: ‘Know what I think?’
‘I should be delighted if you would tell me.’
‘Young Raymond Boynton’s out of it.’
‘Ah! You think so?’
‘Yes. Clear as a bell what he thought. We might have known he’d be out of it. Being, as in detective stories the most likely person. Since you practically overheard him saving he was going to bump off the old lady – we might have known that meant he was innocent!’
‘You read the detective stories, yes?’
‘Thousands of them,’ said Colonel Carbury. He added and his tone was that of a wistful schoolboy: ‘I suppose you couldn’t do the things the detective does in books? Write a list of significant facts – things that don’t seem to mean anything but are really frightfully important – that sort of thing?’
‘Ah,’ said Poirot kindly. ‘You like that kind of detective story? But certainly, I will do it for you with pleasure.’

And Poirot proceeds to raw up precisely the kind of list of suspects and key facts about them that Colonel Carbury expects any self-respecting detective to do, based on his extensive reading in the genre.

Christie is clearly playing with the reader, sharing the joke that what we are reading is a story, meeting our scepticism head-on, and defusing it with a smile.

And it’s not just passive references to those kinds of novels: some of the characters actively copy the behaviour and information they’ve learned from these kinds of books.

Poirot said quickly: ‘That is the one point on which I am not yet completely informed. What was the method you counted on employing? You had a method – and it was connected with a hypodermic syringe. That much I know. If you want me to believe you, you must tell me the rest.’
Raymond said hurriedly: ‘It was a way I read in a book – an English detective story – you stuck an empty hypodermic syringe into someone and it did the trick.’ (p.226)

Americans

The family at the centre of the story are American, as are Jefferson Cope and Lady Westholme. There are lots of Americans in Christie’s stories. After all, her father was American so she had a plenty of American in-laws and a feeling for the national character. On the whole her books are very favourable to Americans.

As Dr Gerard knew by experience, Americans are disposed to be a friendly race. They have not the uneasy suspicion of a travelling Briton. (Chapter 5)

But here, as everywhere, stereotypes and caricatures (in this instance national stereotypes and caricatures) allow her to generate text, copy, discourse.

Mr Cope rose. ‘In America,’ he said, ‘we’re great believers in absolute freedom.’
Dr Gerard rose also. He was unimpressed by the remark. He had heard it made before by people of many different nationalities. The illusion that freedom is the prerogative of one’s own particular race is fairly widespread.
Dr Gerard was wiser. He knew that no race, no country and no individual could be described as free. But he also knew that there were different degrees of bondage… (p.39)

This isn’t particularly deep or insightful, just ‘deep’ enough to feel significant as you skate through the book breathlessly waiting for the next event. They’re like the quick crossword, an interesting blip, an amusing distraction, then back to the plot.

Poirot’s OCD

Poirot took a little time to speak. Methodically he arranged an ash-tray or two and made a little heap of used matches. (p.127)

Incidentally, we learn that Poirot insists on cleaning his own shoes. He takes everywhere his own little shoe-cleaning outfit and duster (p.150).

Poirot’s method

It is Colonel Race who uses the handy phrase ‘psychological deduction’, when recommending Poirot to his friend Colonel Carbury (p.111). And when Carbury asks how he intends to solve the mystery, Poirot patiently explains:

‘By methodical sifting of the evidence, by a process of reasoning… And by a study of psychological probabilities.’ (p.127)

Which is a pithy summary of the three elements. First the physical facts, the evidence. Then reflecting how the evidence can be fitted together like a jigsaw. Then the final test, whether the various jigsaw shapes can be reconciled with, align with, the psychology of the suspects, as he has come to know them through his extensive questioning and conversation and observation. The talking, the questioning, the careful listening, the picking up clues from the most casual remark, all key parts of the process:

‘My theory is that criminology is the easiest science in the world! One has only to let the criminal talk-sooner or later he will tell you everything.’ (p.185)

Only when all three elements are aligned does he have the solution.

Pity and compassion

Nadine mentions the case of the Orient Express which she, and all the other characters, have (apparently) read about. Somehow she knows that, at the end of that novel, Poirot effectively let all the murderers off because of the ‘justice’ of the murder they carried out (although, if you think about it a minute, this can’t have been common knowledge – the whole point is that Poirot decided to keep their actions and motivation a secret from the authorities; nobody could know this).

Anyway, that logical glitch aside, in this novel, during the investigation phase, Nadine asks whether Poirot can extend the same forgiveness to the wretched Boynton family and drop his investigation. Strikingly, Poirot refuses, and his reasons are worth noting here.

Nadine said passionately: ‘I have heard, M. Poirot, that once, in that affair of the Orient Express, you accepted an official verdict of what had happened?’
Poirot looked at her curiously. ‘I wonder who told you that.’
‘Is it true?’
He said slowly: ‘That case was – different.’
‘No. No, it was not different! The man who was killed was evil,’ her voice dropped, ‘as she was…’
Poirot said: ‘The moral character of the victim has nothing to do with it! A human being who has exercised the right of private judgment and taken the life of another human being is not safe to exist amongst the community. I tell you that! I, Hercule Poirot!’
‘How hard you are!’
‘Madame, in some ways I am adamant. I will not condone murder! That is the final word of Hercule Poirot.’
(Book 2, chapter 7)

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Credit

‘Appointment with Death’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in 1938. Page references are to the 2017 HarperCollins paperback edition.

Related links

• Appointment with Death online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1930s reviews