‘You’ve got a knack of turning up in the most unexpected places, M. Poirot.’
‘Isn’t Croydon aerodrome a little out of your beat, my friend?’ asked Poirot.
‘Ah, I’m after rather a big bug in the smuggling line. A bit of luck my being on the spot.’
(Inspector Japp explaining away the improbable coincidence that he is at Croydon Airport to greet the airliner on which there’s just been a murder, instead of on his normal beat in back London)

‘Rum business, this,’ he said. ‘Bit too sensational to be true. I mean, blowpipes and poisoned darts in an aeroplane—well, it insults one’s intelligence.’
(Dramatising summary from Inspector Japp)

‘The whole thing is a bit of a teaser.’
(Japp, puzzled as usual)

‘Every minute this case gets more puzzling,’ cried Fournier.
(Talking up the story’s mystery and atmosphere, Chapter 11)

‘It amazes me – the whole thing seems almost – unreal…’
(More talking up)

‘I have the feeling very strongly, Mademoiselle, that there is a figure who has not yet come into the limelight – a part as yet unplayed — There is, Mademoiselle, an unknown factor in this case. Everything
points to that…’’
(Adding depth to the mystery, Chapter 22)

Jane thought to herself with a touch of misgiving: ‘He’s French, though. You’ve got to look out with the French, they always say so.’
(Wise words, Chapter 13)

‘Ah, but, you see, an answer depends on the questions. You did not know what questions to ask.’
(Exactly what we’re learning about handing artificial intelligence – Poirot, Chapter 11)

Sensationalism dies quickly – fear is long-lived.’
(The wisdom of the old pro’, Chapter 16)

‘Mon cher, practically speaking, I know everything.’
(Poirot’s modesty)

‘If you ask me,’ said Mrs Mitchell, ‘there’s Bolshies at the back of it.’
(The comedy prole view, Chapter 19)

The setup

The regular Tuesday plane service from Le Bourget airdrome outside Paris to Croydon Airport south of London takes off with 11 passengers in First Class, and a similar number in Second Class. A few minutes before it’s due to land the steward shakes a sleeping woman who lolls forward onto her table. Marie Morisot is dead. He calls a doctor who confirms she’s dead.

Surreptitiously, Poirot has snuck up behind the stewards and the doctor, and points out that the dead woman has a red mark on her neck. Furthermore, he bends down to reveal a small dart at her feet, with a fluffy body and a thorn-like tip. Ms Morisot was murdered by a dart from a blowpipe! The American thriller writer, Clancy, is excited to see something he’s read and written about so often, in real life.

Anyway, who would want to murder Ms Morisot? And on an airplane flight? And with a blowpipe?

On landing they are met, improbably enough, by Poirot’s old friend Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard – Christie contrives an explanation about him being transferred to the anti-smuggling force to explain it – then they get down to the nitty gritty of interviewing each of the passengers, giving us readers a handy pen profile of each of them – full name, age, address, occupation and so on. Very much like the similarly stage-managed questioning of all the suspects on the Orient Express.

A few days later there’s the official inquest when the same series of witnesses are called to the stand and questions along with the local cops and doctor. Afterwards the young couple, Jane Grey and Norman Gale repair to a tea room where, after seeing off an offer by a redtop journalist to author a story about the murder, they decide to embark on the amateur investigation which feature in so many of Christie’s novels and Christie gives them a conveniently phrased excuse:

‘Murder,’ said Norman Gale, ‘doesn’t concern the victim and the guilty only. It affects the innocent too. You and I are innocent, but the shadow of murder has touched us. We don’t know how that shadow is going to affect our lives.’ (Chapter 5)

The main early revelation which opens the door, is the arrival of French Surete officers who reveal that the apparently harmless old French lady who’s been murdered is in fact a notorious loan shark to the aristocracy and professional classes. She loans these people small fortunes but her security is never a house or assets, it is knowledge about their intimate affairs. I.e. they take the loan knowing that if they don’t pay it back on time, she will leak the compromising information she has on them.

So any number of people, and possible other passengers on the plane, might have been in this position of having taken out a loan, being unable to repay it, and taking the desperate step of bumping off old Mme Morisot.

But there is a second obvious gainer from her death, her 25-year-old daughter, Anne Morisot, who is set to inherit her mother’s fortune of over £100,000.

As usual there are the customary clichés of the genre: characters telling each other that this form of murder was incredible, impossible, almost a miracle. Then, later, the conventional statement that the murderer must be a cunning devil, a fiend, a calculating fiend etc – none of which help in the detection, but all of which help to jack up the tension, deepen the atmosphere, make the whole thing a more intense reading experience.

Cast

On the flight

• Seat No. 2 Madame Giselle aka Marie Morisot, ‘one of the best-known moneylenders in Paris’
• No. 4 James Ryder – managing director of the Ellis Vale Cement Company
• No. 5 Monsieur Armand Dupont
• No. 6 Monsieur Jean Dupont – son, both ‘returned not long ago from conducting some very interesting excavations in Persia’
• No. 8 Daniel Clancy – small American writer of detective stories
• No. 9 Hercule Poirot –
• No. 10 Doctor Bryant – a Harley Street specialist on diseases of the ear and throat (there’s always one on hand to verify the murderee is in fact dead)
• No. 12 Norman Gale – dentist from Muswell Hill
• No. 13 The Countess of Horbury
• No. 16 Jane Grey – hairdressers assistant in a beauty salon in Bruton Street (location of Mrs Dacres’ dress shop in ‘Three Act Tragedy’), won £100 and used it to take a holiday in France
• No. 17 The Honourable Venetia Kerr –
• Henry Mitchell – chief steward on the airliner Prometheus
• Ruth, his wife – ‘a buxom, highly complexioned woman with snapping dark eyes’
• Albert Davis – second steward

Afterwards

• Chief Inspector Japp – ‘an erect soldierly figure in plain clothes’
• Constable Rogers – assistant to Japp
• Dr James Whistler – doctor for Croydon Airport
• Maître Alexandre Thibault – French lawyer for Madame Giselle
• Mr Winterspoon – chief Government analyst and an authority on rare poisons
• Detective-Sergeant Wilson
• Monsieur Fournier of the Sûreté – ‘a tall thin man with an intelligent, melancholy face’

In Paris

• Elise Grandier – the dead woman’s confidential maid, ‘a short stout woman of middle age with a florid face and small shrewd eyes’, who burned her mistress’s papers, as instructed, but kept Madam’s little black book which she hands over to Poirot
• Old Georges the concierge of Morisot’s apartment – a woman came to visit her the night before the flight (and her murder) but his eyesight is failing and he didn’t notice her face
• M. Gilles – Chief of the Detective Force at the Sûreté
• Zeropoulos – Greek antique dealer who reported the sale of a blowpipe and darts three days before the murder, ‘a short, stout little man with beady black eyes’
• Jules Perrot – clerk at the Universal Airlines office in Paris where Morisot’s plane ticket for England was bought, who turns out to have been bribed to make sure she was on the 12 noon flight
• Madame Richards – Marie Morisot’s married daughter and heir

Back in England, at Horbury Chase

• Stephen, Lord Horbury – another one of Christie’s dim English aristocrats: ‘Stephen Horbury was twenty-seven years of age. He had a narrow head and a long chin. He looked very much what he was—a sporting out-of-door kind of man without anything very spectacular in the way of brains. He was kind-hearted, slightly priggish, intensely loyal and invincibly obstinate’
• Madeleine – Lady Horbury’s maid
• ffoulkes, ffoulkes, Wilbraham and ffoulkes – the Horbury family solicitors, latest in a long line of gently mocked lawyers to the aristocracy

In London

• M. Antoine – owner of the boutique where Jane Grey works, real name was Andrew Leech, whose claims to foreign nationality consisted of having had a Jewish mother
• Gladys – Jane’s friend, ‘an ethereal blonde with a haughty demeanour and a faint, faraway professional voice. In private her voice was hoarse and jocular’ – she calls the boss ‘Ikey Andrew’ which isn’t very nice
• Miss Ross – the nurse in Norman Gale’s dentist practice in Muswell Hill

Bookish

In previous reviews I’ve developed the idea that Christie having her characters regularly compare their situations and scenarios to the stereotypes and clichés of detective stories (or movies) serves several purposes. 1) It pre-empts criticism from critics or readers who may be tempted to complain about the corny (or preposterous) plot developments. 2) But at the same time it draws attention to the artificiality of the whole genre and nudges you away from even trying to compare anyone or anything that happens to ‘real life’, gently nudging you into the entirely fictional land of Detective Stories, where anything can happen, where anyone can disguise themselves as anyone else in order to carry out the most ludicrously complicated crimes.

Hence the succession of ‘nudges’ in this story.

‘It beats me,’ he said. ‘The crudest detective story dodge coming out trumps!’ (Japp, Chapter 3)

‘What an extraordinarily rum little beggar,’ said Gale. ‘Calls himself a detective. I don’t see how he could do much detecting. Any criminal could spot him a mile off. I don’t see how he could disguise himself.’
‘Haven’t you got a very old-fashioned idea of detectives?’ asked Jane. ‘All the false beard stuff is very out of date. Nowadays detectives just sit and think out a case psychologically.’
‘Rather less strenuous.’
‘Physically, perhaps; but of course you need a cool, clear brain.’ (Chapter 4)

‘Hullo, old boy,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a pretty near squeak of being locked up in a police cell.’
‘I fear,’ said Poirot gravely, ‘that such an occurrence might have damaged me professionally.’
‘Well,’ said Japp with a grin, ‘detectives do turn out to be criminals sometimes – in story books.’ (Chapter 6)

‘I’d like to do something,’ he said. ‘If I was a young man in a book I’d find a clue or I’d shadow somebody.’ (Chapter 14)

‘Anyway, we have heard something. Somebody – a woman – is going to be silenced, and some other woman won’t speak. Oh, dear, it sounds dreadfully like a detective story.’ (Chapter 14)

But as well as the usual arch references to the clichés and stereotypes of detective novels, this story actually features a writer of detective stories, who Japp immediately suspects and which gives him (and other characters) the opportunity to sound off about the iniquity of detective story writers.

‘Clancy let out that he bought a blowpipe. These detective-story writers… always making the police out to be fools… and getting their procedure all wrong. Why, if I were to say the things to my super that their inspectors say to superintendents I should be thrown out of the Force tomorrow on my ear. Set of ignorant scribblers! This is just the sort of damn fool murder that a scribbler of rubbish would think he could get away with.’ (Chapter 3)

‘I don’t think it’s healthy for a man to be always brooding over crime and detective stories, reading up all sorts of cases. It puts ideas into his head.’ (Chapter 7)

Or allows Clancy to make digs at the most famous detective of all:

‘Ah,’ said Mr Clancy. ‘But, you see, I have my methods, Watson. If you’ll excuse my calling you Watson. No offence intended. Interesting, by the way, how the technique of the idiot friend has hung on. Personally I myself think the Sherlock Holmes stories grossly overrated. The fallacies – the really amazing fallacies that there are in those stories –’

And generally satirise her own profession, by summarising the truly ludicrous plot Clancy is planning to elaborate from the plane murder and, when Poirot hesitantly suggests that it’s a bit melodramatic, explains that:

‘You can’t write anything too sensational,’ said Mr Clancy firmly. ‘Especially when you’re dealing with the arrow poison of the South American Indians. I know it was snake juice, really; but the principle is the same. After all, you don’t want a detective story to be like real life? Look at the things in the papers – dull as ditchwater.’

And you only have to consider the plots of some of Christie’s own novels or, for some reason the James Bond novels pop into my head, to know the truth of this generalisation.

Poirot’s method

In each Poirot novel the great Belgian repeats the key elements of his procedure: 1) to educate newcomers, 2) to please existing fans by repeating all his best moves. These are:

1. trust no-one – everyone is a suspect until proven innocent
2. every witness keeps something back, no matter how trivial, sometimes unconsciously
3. seek out who the crime benefits
4. use order and method to establish the facts
5. then employ ‘the little grey cells’ to come up with ‘little ideas’ i.e. draft theories, which connect the facts
6. accept no theory which doesn’t accommodate all the facts i.e. don’t jump to conclusions or hold onto pet theories which there is evidence disproving
7. finally, your theory must be congruent with psychology i.e. with the characters of the people involved

Throughout the text he iterates these principles:

Suspect everyone

‘Shall I tell you something, Mademoiselle Grandier? It is part of my business to believe nothing I am told – nothing that is, that is not proved. I do not suspect first this person and then that person. I suspect everybody. Anybody connected with a crime is regarded by me as a criminal until that person is proved innocent.’ (Chapter 10)

Order and method

‘If one approaches a problem with order and method there should be no difficulty in solving it—none whatever,’ said Poirot severely. (Chapter 18)

‘You jump about a good deal.’
‘Not really. I pursue my course logically with order and method. One must not jump wildly to a conclusion. One must eliminate.’ (Chapter 19)

‘I proceed a step at a time, with order and method…’ (Chapter 21)

‘There must be in all things order and method. One must finish with one thing before proceeding to the next.’ (Chapter 24)

Little grey cells

‘Close your eyes, my friend, instead of opening them wide. Use the eyes of the brain, not of the body. Let the little grey cells of the mind function…Let it be their task to show you what actually
happened.’ (Chapter 9)

All the facts

‘I proceed always in the simplest manner imaginable! And I never refuse to accept facts.’ (Chapter 21)

Psychology

‘Ah, M. Poirot, that is your little foible. A man like Fournier will be more to your mind. He is of the newest school – all for the psychology. That should please you.’
‘It does. It does.’ (Chapter 11)

Japp’s cockneyisms

Japp’s being a class down from the posh aristocrats or upper middle-class protagonists, is indicated by his phraseology and vocabulary.

‘I suppose that little writer chap hasn’t gone off his onion and decided to do one of his crimes in the flesh instead of on paper?’

‘Everybody’s got to be searched, whether they kick up rough or not; and every bit of truck they had with them has got to be searched too – and that’s flat.’

‘If you ask me, those two toughs are our meat…. you must admit they don’t look up to much, do they?’

‘You don’t say so,’ said Japp with a grin.

Christie does the plebs.

‘That’s all right, old cock,’ said Japp, slapping him heartily on the back. ‘You’re in on this on the ground floor.’ (Chapter 6)

‘Just as well she wasn’t on that plane,’ said Japp drily. ‘She might have been suspected of bumping off her mother to get the dibs.’ (Chapter 7)

Several times Poirot actively objects to Japp’s offensive terminology, for example when, instead of asking whether he has an idea, he crudely accuses Poirot of having a ‘maggot’ in his brain. Is it me, or does Christie make Japp noticeably coarser and cruder in this book?

‘That’s the Honourable Venetia. Well, what about her? She’s a big bug.’ (Chapter 7)

‘Yes, she’s the type of pigeon to be mixed up with Giselle.’

Japp’s role

As usual Japp is positioned as not only crude in his speech and manner (beside the dapper, restrained Poirot, ‘exquisitely dressed in the most dandiacal style’) but as intellectually crude and limited, too.

Japp always jumps to rash conclusions, takes against suspects (often on the simple basis that they’re foreigners, the long deep Farageist thread in the English character). In every novel he mocks Poirot:

Japp whispered to Norman: ‘Fancies himself, doesn’t he? Conceit’s that little man’s middle name.’ (Chapter 26)

And accuses Poirot of over-thinking things, of actively preferring to make things complicated.

Take the way he dismisses Poirot’s insistence on the subtleties of psychology:

‘It is most important in a crime to get an idea of the psychology of the murderer.’
Japp snorted slightly at the word psychology, which he disliked and mistrusted. (Chapter 7)

The net result is that when you read any opinion offered by Japp, you must immediately consider the opposite to be likely or, more accurately, you immediately suspect Christie is using him to dismiss a possibility which, later on, we will find out is in fact true.

Poirot’s OCD

Poirot did not answer, and Fournier asked curiously: ‘It gives you an idea, that?’
Poirot bowed his head assentingly. ‘It gives rise to, say, a speculation in my mind.’
With absent-minded fingers he straightened the unused inkstand that Japp’s impatient hand had set a little askew… (Chapter 7)

Poirot did not answer for a moment or two; then he took his hands from his temples, sat very upright and straightened two forks and a saltcellar which offended his sense of symmetry. (Chapter 25)

It’s actually referred to nowadays as symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Poirot’s comic English

Obviously there are hundreds of examples of  this, mostly fairly humdrum. But I laughed at:

‘Let us have an end of what you call in this country the fool-tommery.’

These novels are, essentially, comedies.

1930s locutions

‘She was an – an absolute – well, I can’t say just what she was through the telephone.’ (Chapter 21)

Through the telephone?

He looked at her sharply. ‘He attracts you – eh – this young man? Il a le sex appeal?’

In a later novel, a character abbreviates this to S.A.

Poirot explains a fundamental human need

‘What a horrible, tricky sort of person you are, M. Poirot,’ said Jane, rising. ‘I shall never know why you are saying things.’
‘That is quite simple. I want to find out things.’
‘I suppose you’ve got very clever ways of finding out things?’
‘There is only one really simple way.’
‘What is that?’
‘To let people tell you.’
Jane laughed.
‘Suppose they don’t want to?’
‘Everyone likes talking about themselves.’
‘I suppose they do,’ admitted Jane.
‘That is how many a quack makes a fortune. He encourages patients to come and sit and tell him things. How they fell out of the perambulator when they were two, and how their mother ate a pear and the juice fell on her orange dress, and how when they were one and a half they pulled their father’s beard; and then he tells them that now they will not suffer from the insomnia any longer, and he takes two guineas; and they go away, having enjoyed themselves – oh, so much – and perhaps they do sleep.’
‘How ridiculous,’ said Jane.
‘No, it is not so ridiculous as you think. It is based on a fundamental need of human nature – the need to talk – to reveal oneself.’

While mocking the widely known practice of psychoanalysis, Poirot concedes its basis on a fundamental human need. Elsewhere, it is explicitly raised and mocked.

‘Ah, yes, the flute… These things interest me, you understand, psychologically.’
Mr Ryder snorted at the word psychologically. It savoured to him of what he called that tom-fool business psychoanalysis. (Chapter 18)

But he reiterates his ‘compulsion to talk’ theory right at the book’s end:

‘It is my experience that no one, in the course of conversation, can fail to give themselves away sooner or later… Everyone has an irresistible urge to talk about themselves.’ (Chapter 26)

The press

Christie’s attitude to the British press may be gauged from the fact that in an earlier novel she names a national newspaper the Daily Shriek and this novel features a journalist from the Weekly Howl.

Drugs and drug addicts

I’m impressed by the ubiquity of illegal drugs in these stories: cocaine features in ‘Peril at End House’, while morphine crops up in:

• The Mysterious Affair at Styles where morphine is used to delay the effects of another poison, strychnine
• Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? where Henry Bassington-ffrench is a drug addict
• Three Act Tragedy, where Freddie Dacres with his pinpoint pupils is strongly hinted at being a dope fiend

Cocaine is here again, as Lady Horbury is revealed to be a user. Indeed at the very opening of the story we are given her internal monologue:

‘My God, what shall I do? It’s the hell of a mess – the hell of a mess. There’s only one way out that I can see. If only I had the nerve. Can I do it? Can I bluff it out? My nerves are all to pieces. That’s the coke. Why did I ever take to coke? My face looks awful, simply awful…’ (Chapter 1)

Christie’s cats

On the evidence of Christie’s novels, the word cat was widely used slang in the 1920s and ’30s for a bitchy, critical woman.

‘My face looks awful, simply awful. That cat Venetia Kerr being here makes it worse. She always looks at me as though I were dirt. Wanted Stephen herself. Well, she didn’t get him! That long face of hers gets on my nerves. It’s exactly like a horse. I hate these county women.’
(Lady Horbury’s internal monologue, Chapter 1)

Venetia thought, ‘She has the morals of a cat! I know that well enough. But she’s careful. She’s shrewd as they make ’em.’ (Chapter 12)

Stephen had been fond of her, but not fond enough to prevent him from falling desperately, wildly, madly in love with a clever calculating cat of a chorus girl…

However this meaning is interfered, like two beams of different coloured light intersecting, by the fact that Poirot, when he is on the trail, when he is excited by a breakthrough, is always described as developing green glowing eyes like a cat. Then sometimes there are just actual cats. So the two charged meanings overlap with each other, as well as the ordinary common or garden one, amusingly.

Meals

Novels very rarely indeed describe meals. They describe the events and the boring conversation, but rarely the actual dishes. So I note them when they occur. Thus Poirot in Paris suggests to Fournier they go for a ‘simple’ lunch.

‘A simple but satisfying meal, that is what I prescribe. Let us say omelette aux champignons, sole à la Normande – a cheese of Port Salut, and with it red wine.’

While in London, after interview Clancy, he takes Jane and Norman for:

Poirot ordered some consommé and a chaud-froid of chicken.

Muddle

JAPP: There you are again – unsatisfactory. The whole thing is a muddle.’
POIROT: ‘There is no such thing as muddle – obscurity, yes – but muddle can exist only in a disorderly brain.’

Wish I could have introduced Poirot to E.M. Forster whose novels are about nothing but muddle.

‘Every woman adores a fascist’ (Sylvia Plath)

Poirot laments that sweet Jane Grey was so strongly attracted by Norman Gale who turned out to be a serial killer.

‘A killer,’ said Poirot. ‘And like many killers, attractive to women.’ (Chapter 26)

The theme was aired in 1928’s ‘Murder on the Blue Train’ where young Ruth Kettering is attracted to Comte Armand de la Roche precisely because he has such a bad reputation. And in ‘Three Act Tragedy’ where the heroine’s mother, Lady Mary Gore fell for a wrong ‘un despite all her father’s warnings, and laments that:

‘There doesn’t seem to be anything that warns girls against a certain type of man. Nothing in themselves, I mean. Their parents warn them, but that’s no good – one doesn’t believe. It seems dreadful to say so, but there is something attractive to a girl in being told anyone is a bad man. She thinks at once that her love will reform him.’
(Lady Mary, Chapter 14)

Her daughter, Egg, is a chip off the old block who falls in love just as inappropriately, with an older man, with Sir Charles, who turns out to be a murderer.

It’s tempting to attribute the belief that good women are attracted to bad men to Christie herself, but I’m more inclined to think it’s one of the many standard clichés and stereotypes which she placed and positioned in order to construct her preposterous stories.

Credit

‘Death in the Clouds’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1935 by the Collins Crime Club.

Related links

• Death in the Clouds online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1930s reviews