‘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.

Related links

• Cards on The Table online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1930s reviews