‘It is a duel to the death, mon ami. You and I on the one side, the Big Four on the other.’
(Poirot striking the tone of melodrama right from the start, The Big Four, Chapter 2)
There was a cold malignity about her that froze me to the marrow. It was so at variance with the burning fire of her eyes. She was mad—mad—with the madness of genius!
(The overwrought shilling shocker tone of this terrible book)
‘Mon ami, he overlooked the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot.’ Poirot has his virtues, but modesty is not one of them.
(Even when he’s appearing in a terrible book, Poirot’s egotism remains undented, Chapter 11)
‘The Big Four’ is the fourth novel by Agatha Christie to feature her Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. Like most of them it is narrated by Poirot’s dim sidekick, Captain Hastings. At the end of the second novel Hastings had headed off for South America with a beautiful young woman he had met during the adventure and who he intended to marry, which explains why the third novel in the series is narrated not by him, but by a temporary replacement, Dr Sheppard.
‘The Big Four’ opens with Hastings returning from what he tells us has been 18 months on a ranch in the Argentine and looking forward to looking up old friends in London, notably ‘A little man with an egg-shaped head and green eyes—Hercule Poirot!’
However, the novel is drastically different from it predecessors and most of its sequels for two reasons: first of all it was cobbled together from what were initially a dozen short stories which had been published separately and, as a consequence, it feels very bitty and episodic and, above all, rushed.
But the more obvious difference is that it is not a traditional murder mystery at all: instead of the staid English country house setting, this is a story of international intrigue and espionage featuring a secretive international organisation along the lines of John Buchan’s ’39 steps’, the fiendish international enemies that plucky Bulldog Drummond has to fight, the kind of gang that Tintin would find himself up against in the 1930s.
In fact it’s so completely different in content, tone and pacing from the traditional murder mysteries that it could possibly be categorised as spy fiction, an international thriller.
Plot summary
Hastings discovers that Poirot is about to dash off himself, and to South America, where he has been lured with the promise of an enormous fee. He wishes he wasn’t going because he has become more and more interested in an international crime cartel called The Big Four.
While they’re discussing this, they hear a noise from the bedroom and find a man in rags and covered in mud who has obviously climbed up through the window into Poirot’s bedroom and can only repeated his name, Mayerling, Poirot’s address before he collapses. When Hastings mentions the Big Four it triggers the man reciting, as if hypnotised, details of the organisation and its four leaders: Number 1 is a Chinese political mastermind named Li Chang Yen*; Number 2 is probably American; Number 3 is a Frenchwoman; and Number 4 is known only as ‘the Destroyer’.
Leaving the man in the care of their housekeeper, Mrs Pearson, Poirot insists they rush off to Waterloo to catch a train to Southampton, so Poirot can catch his boat to South America. But half way there he has an insight and realises the whole South America job was to lure him away from England altogether. So next time the train stops he and Hastings jump out and hotfoot it back to London.
Here they discover the man Mayerling is dead, gagged and poisoned. They fetch a doctor to confirm the death but no sooner is that sorted than a man arrives claiming to be from Hanwell Asylum. He claims the muddy man Mayerling is an escaped lunatic, confirms the identity of the body, then leaves, promising to send someone to collect it.
It’s only a bit later, as he examines the body, that Poirot comes to the conclusion that the Hanwell Asylum man was Number 4, the Destroyer, in disguise, come to meet the gang’s number one enemy, Poirot, in person.
A week later Poirot invites Hastings to come with him on a visit to a British expert on the criminal underworld of China, one Mr. John Ingles, to find out more about Li Chang Yen. Ingles tells them that the Big Four are behind everything wrong in the world:
‘Everything. The world-wide unrest, the labour troubles that beset every nation, and the revolutions that break out in some. There are people, not scaremongers, who know what they are talking about, and they say that there is a force behind the scenes which aims at nothing less than the disintegration of civilisation. In Russia, you know, there were many signs that Lenin and Trotsky were mere puppets whose every action was dictated by another’s brain. I have no definite proof that would count with you, but I am quite convinced that this brain was Li Chang Yen’s.’
And:
‘What exactly he hopes to get out of it all I cannot pretend to say for certain,’ went on Mr. Ingles; ‘but I assume his disease is one that has attacked great brains from the time of Akbar and Alexander to Napoleon—a lust for power and personal supremacy. Up to modern times armed force was necessary for conquest, but in this century of unrest a man like Li Chang Yen can use other means. I have evidence that he has unlimited money behind him for bribery and propaganda, and there are signs that he controls some scientific force more powerful than the world has dreamed of.’
(Might be worth noting that this was only a decade after the English author Sax Rohmer kicked off his series of adventure novels about the fiendish criminal mastermind Dr Fu Manchu in 1913, another archetypal figure who went on to have nearly as prolific an afterlife as Poirot, in numerous novels, short stories, radio shows, comic strips and comic books, TV and movies, until the intrinsic racism of the stereotype became unacceptable. See ‘No Chinamen’, below.)
Ingles describes a succession of journalists who’ve published articles about then promptly died in mysterious circumstances, not to mention a young scientist who came to him suffering from a nervous breakdown having carried out disgusting experiments on Chinese coolies for Li Chang Yen, and that night Ingles’s house was set on fire and the scientist died.
Ingles shows Poirot a letter from a Jonathan Whalley, who lives in Hoppaton, Dartmoor, claiming his life was in danger from the Four. So Poirot on the spot tells the others he is heading off by train for Hoppaton straightaway. It’s that kind of book, helter-skelter, cartoon panic movement.
Inevitably they arrive at Hoppiton to discover that Whalley is dead, murdered, bludgeoned then had his throat cut. Poirot does his thing and is able to prove that the servant the police arrested, although he turned out to have a criminal record and was caught stealing some of the dead man’s Chinese curios, did not do it. A man disguised as the local butcher did it with a frozen leg of mutton. Poirot attributes this man to be the aforementioned Number Four, same as the Hanwell Asylum man. In other words this is all a preposterous farrago.
Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard had been called to the scene and now introduces a new character, an American named Captain Kent. He tells an even more preposterous story, about how in a recent disaster loads of ships and torpedo boats were dashed against the American coast. A roundup of criminal gangs produced papers suggesting it was all caused by a new Superweapon, ‘some powerful wireless installation—a concentration of wireless energy far beyond anything so far attempted, and capable of focusing a beam of great intensity upon some given spot.’
So Captain Kent was dispatched to come to Britain and meet a British scientist who’s said to be the leading expert in this field, one Halliday. Only one problem, said Halliday went missing two months ago on a trip to Paris. His worried wife lives in Surrey so guess what? Off to Chetwynd Lodge, near Chobham, our little gang next head.
Halliday’s wife explains that her husband went to Paris to meet the famous Madame Olivier, checked into a hotel, spent a day meeting colleagues and visiting the Madame, went back to the hotel, dinner, bed, next morning went out and has never been since.
So guess what? Off to Paris head our gang. They interview Madame Olivier, a tall, obsessed woman, about her meeting with Halliday and she compares it with her own research into radium C which has remarkable properties.
Leaving her laboratory, they are almost crushed by a tree falling in the street! Humour lightens the preposterousness of all this:
‘But for my quick eyes, the eyes of a cat, Hercule Poirot might now be crushed out of existence—a terrible calamity for the world. And you, too, mon ami—though that would not be such a national catastrophe.’
Poirot realises Halliday was kidnapped before he even got back to his Paris hotel. The hotel staff who reported seeing him didn’t really know him and were seeing an imposter. Returning to Madame Olivier’s villa he unmasks her recently appointed secretary as Countess Rossakoff, an old antagonist (who in fact first appears in this ‘novel’). She admits she was hired by the Big Four to help kidnap Halliday but claims he has been moved from the villa next door where he was originally incarcerated.
She makes a deal with Poirot, Halliday for her liberty. He agrees so she phones the bad guys and arrange for Halliday to be delivered to their hotel. When they get back to their room they find Halliday alive, but worn and shattered. But he cannot say a thing. He tells them if he says anything the Big Four will kill him and his family.
Halliday departs for England back to his family. Poirot and Hastings are just discussing what to do next when there’s a knock at the door and a tall hook-nosed gentleman enters. He is an emissary from the Big Four and offers a huge bribe if Poirot will cease investigating them and go back to domestic murders. Hastings makes a bolt at him but the man throws him using a Japanese ju-jitsu move then escapes dressed as a hotel porter.
On the floor is a wallet he dropped which contains a piece of paper saying the next meeting of the Big Four council will take place at 11am on Friday and it is now Friday 10.30am. But Poirot immediately sees that it is a trap and doesn’t budge.
Instead they receive a telegram from Madame Olivier asking her to revisit them. She tells them last night her secretary disappeared and her laboratory was burgled. She tells them they stole some stuff but failed to take the most valuable item, her supply of radium, locked in a lead-lined safe and invaluable. Poirot is certain they’ll return so he tells Madame Olivier to act innocently and tell her assistants nothing.
Then he makes Hastings join him on a train back to England. Why? Because they are certainly being watched. Which is why he gets a friend of his, Pierre Comnbeau, to pull the emergency cord on the train and while he is arguing with the guards, Poirot and Hastings climb off, change into disguise and head back to Paris.
They are just preparing to stake out Madame Olivier’s villa when they are jumped, bound and gagged. They are carried into the house and up to the safe which swings open to reveal… Steps down into a secret underground chamber! Here is waiting for them a tall imperious Frenchwoman who is clearly the Big Four’s Number Three. When she takes off her mask it is to reveal herself as none other than… Madame Olivier!!
She taunts her tied and bound victims and asks Poirot if he has any last requests. He asks for a cigarette so she takes out his cigarette case and puts one in his mouth. At which point he tells her it’s a miniature blowpipe charged with a little dart tipped with lethal curare. Even Indiana Jones wouldn’t be so cheesy. So Poirot forces Madame Olivier to unbind Hastings who promptly ties her up and frees Poirot.
They get free of the villa but when Hastings asks if he’s going to give her up to the police, Poirot points out they have no evidence whatsoever, in fact all the evidence could be twisted to accuse them of breaking and entering. No. Back to London tomorrow!
Back in London they’ve got a letter from Abe Ryland the American multimillionaire who offered him the fabulous sum to go to Buenos Aires, but now Poirot wonders whether he is Number Two, what with his immense fortune, power and influence, and the fact we know Number Two is American.
So Poirot goes to meet Ryland. The chief outcome of this is to discover that the millionaire needs a secretary so Poirot returns to tell Hastings he will put him forward. He’ll even get a testimony from the Home Secretary who he once did a great favour for (this sounds exactly like Sherlock Holmes).
Hastings is rigged up with a ridiculous amount of make-up and even padding in his cheeks, goes to meet Rylands in his rooms at the Savoy under the fake name of Major Arthur Neville, is hired and taken down to his country house, Hatton Chase, where he meets the rest of the staff.
After three weeks a pretty maid comes to him complaining that she hates being shouted at and is thinking of quitting. She explains that she usually opens Mr Ryland’s mail except for ones on blue paper but this morning when not concentrating opened a blue one by mistake. He was furious and started yelling at her. She noticed it had a little 4 in the corner but the message was quite innocuous and short.
Hastings is v excited because he thinks their plan is working so he gets her to repeat the letter to him. Later that evening he realises it’s in code and is asking its addressee for a meeting that in the quarry not far from the house. Next day Hastings sends a letter to Poirot in London telling him about the meeting, leaving it up to him whether he wants to come or not. That evening he waits till his day’s duties are done then sneaks out and down to the quarry. However, when he gets there Ryland and colleague are waiting there with guns. The whole thing was a setup. Now they just await Poirot and then, he explains, they’ll arranged for them both to be killed in a fatal landslide.
Sure enough a few minutes later Poirot quietly appears in the quarry but when Ryland tells him ‘Hands up’ Poirot quietly explains that ten policemen and detectives are watching right now, whistles, and they come forward. Ryland and sidekick are arrested and Poirot explains that he always intended Hastings to be bait for some kind of trap – much to Hastings’ disgruntlement.
But there’s another twist. Next morning at breakfast, Inspector Japp arrives and tells them Ryland and the entire staff swear the whole thing was a prank set up by the staff and that Ryland himself was never in the quarry. The man they took to be Japp was heavily dressed and swathed in coat and hat and turned out to be the footman. Ryland was in bed all the time.
Here, half way through this preposterous farrago, I’m going to stop summarising. The remaining stories or episodes are:
The affair of the Yellow Jasmine
Poirot investigates the death of a Mr Paynter in Worcestershire. Before his death, Paynter had written in ink ‘yellow jasmine’ on his newspaper, and attempted to draw a Number Four. Poirot reveals that Paynter’s attending physician, a Doctor Quentin, was in fact Number Four and it was he who gave Paynter an injection of yellow jasmine.
The greatest power for evil in the world to-day is this ‘Big Four.’ To what end they are tending, no one knows, but there has never been another such criminal organisation. The finest brain in China at the head of it, an American millionaire, and a French woman scientist as members, and for the fourth—
The affair of the Dead Chess Player
Chess grandmaster Gilmour Wilson dies from heart failure while playing Russian refugee Dr Savaronoff. Poirot deduces that the real Savaronoff died in Russia and that Number Four impersonated him, killing Wilson in order to preserve his cover. More info about the master of many disguises and killer, Number Four:
‘Ivan is none other than the famous Number Four.’
‘What?’
‘Yes. The man is a marvellous character actor. He can assume any part he pleases.’
I thought back over past adventures, the lunatic asylum keeper, the butcher’s young man, the suave doctor, all the same man, and all totally unlike each other.
Hastings is kidnapped by Chinese
Who blackmail him, telling him they have kidnapped his wife in Argentina. They force him to write a letter to Poirot telling him to rush to this address because they want to kidnap him, too. But when Poirot arrives he throws a gas bomb into the building which knocks the baddie Chinese out (Poirot himself is wearing a gas mask under a muffler).
The life and death of Flossie Monro
Poirot gives a long list of reasons why he has deduced that the killer, Number Four, must be an actor, of a particular age, height, build and hair colour. And how, because of his ability to adopt disguises, he thinks he is an actor. After extensive research he’s narrowed it down to a list of four and he’s put an ad out in newspapers targeting friends or family of the four to get in touch.
Flossie Monro, a down-on-her-luck actress and one-time girlfriend of one of the four, Claud Darrell, gets in touch and they take her for lunch. She reveals a few tell-tale habits of Claud and promises to send them an old photo she has. but barely have they got back to their flat than there’s a call from a hospital saying Flossie’s been brought in after being hit by a car.
They rush to the hospital but Flossie dies just before they arrive. So they race to Flossie’s flat only to discover it ransacked and the photograph taken from its frame.
Poirot tells the Home Secretary and French Prime Minister about the Big Four
Hastings has to put on his best suit for the occasion. The French Prime Minister is outraged when Poirot tells her that French national heroine Madame Olivier is among the conspirators.
Poirot’s brother
‘I think—I really think—that I shall have to bring my brother into this.’
‘Your brother,’ I cried, astonished. ‘I never knew you had a brother?’
‘You surprise me, Hastings. Do you not know that all celebrated detectives have brothers who would be even more celebrated then they are were it not for constitutional indolence?’
Poirot employs a peculiar manner sometimes which makes it well nigh impossible to know whether he is jesting or in earnest. That manner was very evident at the moment.
‘What is your brother’s name?’ I asked, trying to adjust myself to this new idea.
‘Achille Poirot,’ replied Poirot gravely. ‘He lives near Spa in Belgium.’
‘What does he do?’ I asked with some curiosity, putting aside a half-formed wonder as to the character and disposition of the late Madame Poirot, and her classical taste in Christian names.
‘He does nothing. He is, as I tell, of a singularly indolent disposition. But his abilities are hardly less than my own—which is saying a great deal.’
‘Is he like you to look at?’
‘Not unlike. But not nearly so handsome. And he wears no moustaches.’
‘Is he older than you, or younger?’
‘He happens to have been born on the same day.’
‘A twin!’ I cried.
The first part of this is so obviously a direct copy of Sherlock Holmes and his smarter older brother Mycroft Holmes, as to be shameful.
The only woman Poirot ever admired
Sherlock Holmes was said to have only been smitten by one woman, Irene Adler, the only woman to ever outsmart him. Again, in what seems to be a shamelessly direct copy from Holmes, Christie tells us Poirot had a soft spot for only one woman in the world, Countess Vera Rossakoff, and for more or less the same reason i.e. she was a smart enemy.
Poirot, for some reason or other, had always had a sneaking fondness for the countess. Something in her very flamboyance attracted the little man. She was, he was wont to declare in moments of enthusiasm, a woman in a thousand. That she was arrayed against us, on the side of our bitterest enemies, never seemed to weigh in his judgment.
The affair of Mr Templeton’s illness
At a country house down in Hertfordshire. Except that they’ve barely finished dinner with the various family members suspected of poisoning Mr Templeton and gone up to their bedroom, when Poirot hurriedly tells Hastings they must climb out the window, down the ivy and run away. The young man they met at dinner was playing with his bread in exactly the way poor dead Flossie Monro told them that Claud Darrel did. So it was all a trap.
Death of Poirot
They have only just got back to their rooms in London than Hastings strikes a match to light the fire and there’s a gas explosion. When he comes to he finds local doctor, Dr Ridgeway, bending over him, relieved to see that he’s alright but telling him that Poirot didn’t make it.
This is a really low-down cheap trick, because we know Poirot isn’t dead, in fact we only have to flick ten pages later in the book to find him chatting away to Hastings. It’s the cheapest trick in the book to fake his death and have Hastings tug at our heartstrings for a few pages. Shame on you, Dame Agatha!
- Hastings is called to the deathbed of a Chinaman stabbed in the street.
- Hastings is warned to leave England by a stranger in a Soho restaurant.
- Hastings is warned to leave England by the Countess Rossakoff
- Hastings receives a letter from Poirot’s own lawyers telling him to leave England
So he takes ship for Argentina but in the middle of the night is woken up in his cabin and told he is being transferred to a Royal Navy destroyer (!) and taken back to the coast of Belgium. From here he is taken into the forest of the Ardennes and eventually to a villa where… he is reunited with a very alive Poirot! As every reader knew he would be.
They wait and wait for months until the time comes and a British secret service agent comes to tip them off. They take train to Paris, change and train on towards Italy. En route Poirot tells Hastings the Big Four have built a secret underground headquarters in the Dolomites and from here they will send out messages to the thousands they control in each country to achieve world domination. The significance of Madame Olivier is that she has solved the problem of atomic power.
‘I believe that she has, to a certain extent, succeeded in liberating atomic energy and harnessing it to her purpose. Her experiments with the nitrogen of the air have been very remarkable, and she has also experimented in the concentration of wireless energy, so that a beam of great intensity can be focused upon some given spot.’
The whole thing has gone wildly off the rails to become a sub-H.G. Wells fantasy, with Buchan and Bulldog Drummond thrown in.
They arrive at a hotel in sight of the (fictitious) Felsenlabyrynth, ‘all big boulders piled about in a most fantastic way—a path winds through them’.
They notice one of the guests, a young bland looking man, walking around the terrace then notice him at dinner time. He comes over to their table and makes polite conversation and is just leaning over to light a cigarette when all the lights go out and Hastings passes out.
This is because the young man was Number Four and he broke an anaesthetic glass under their noses. As Poirot and Hastings passed out, accomplices from other tables gagged and bound them, carried them through the hotel, out the back, along underground passages and out into the open and up up up the mountainside.
By the time Hastings fully regains consciousness they are at the opening in the Felsenlabyrinth. There’s a huge boulder in their way but one of their captors presses a magic switch and the rock swings out of the way to reveal a secret passage into the mountainside. they’re carried along this into a cavern.
Claud Darrell aka Number Four controls them at gunpoint and takes them into another room with four big chairs. In two of them are sitting Abe Ryland and Madame Olivier and Darrell climbs into the fourth. Entering the room to join them comes the Countess Rossakoff. However she is the one who realises that Poirot is not Poirot – it is his twin brother and she pulls off his fake moustache to prove it.
So Achille reveals this is all part of the plan, that their mountain hideaway has been known and watched for months, that most of the guests at the hotel as secret service agents from the allied governments. He tells us his shoes were laced with aniseed so dogs could follow his trail and will have found the secret entrance behind the big boulder. Meanwhile the cunning Poirot is outside guiding all these operations against them.
Then things get even cheaper and cheesier. There are explosions in the distance so the three bosses go off in different directions, leaving the Countess Vera Rossakoff. Quickly Achille says he will offer her anything she desires if she will set them free. She thinks she’s being cruelly ironic when she asks him to bring her dead son back to life. But Achille tells her to look in his wallet which the baddies had put along with all their belongings on a table and she gasps as she finds in it a photograph of her son. He is still alive. Achille promises to reunite her with him. And so she undoes their bindings.
So she guides them through the underground labyrinth of tunnels right through the mountain and out the other side. They have barely emerged into the open before there’s an enormous explosion and they are thrown to the ground.
No twin after all
When Hastings regains consciousness he’s in a hospital bed and Poirot is looking down at him. Poirot explains there was never any twin, the entire twin story was a scam – he discoloured his eyes and skin and shaved off his precious moustaches and gave himself a scar on the lip – but it helped that Hastings believed it. Why, you may well ask. Poirot’s explanation is that:
The whole crux of the affair was to make them believe that Hercule Poirot was still at large directing operations.
But this is no answer. Why would that make any difference, when they knew the combined intelligence agencies of half a dozen countries were lined up against them? In other words, the climactic play or gambit or scam with which Poirot saves the day seems curiously hollow and pointless.
Anyway: three of the four were killed when they blew up their own mountain; and Poirot now shows Hastings a newspaper cutting reporting that notorious master of crime Li Chang Yen had killed himself after engineering a revolution which had failed.
So that’s that, then. What a shambolic, cheap and superficial farrago. Graham Greene suppressed his first two novels as he came to realise they were sub-standard. Surprising Christie didn’t suppress this little horror. Poirot’s final words are:
‘Together we have faced and routed the Big Four; and now you will return to your charming wife, and I—I shall retire. The great case of my life is over. Anything else will seem tame after this. No, I shall retire. Possibly I shall grow vegetable marrows! I might even marry and range myself!’
All this talk of retirement. And yet we know that he had barely even started what would turn out to be forty more years of novels, stories and adventures.
*No Chinamen
In 1929 author and priest Ronald Knox wrote a jokey Ten Commandments for writing classic detective stories. Rule Five was ‘No Chinaman must figure in the story’. Delving a bit deeper, Knox explained that: ‘I see no reason in the nature of things why a Chinaman should spoil a detective story. But as a matter of fact, if you are turning over the pages of an unknown romance in a bookstore, and come across some mention of the narrow, slit-like eyes of Chin Loo, avoid that story; it is bad.’
‘The Big Four’ is a textbook demonstration of this rule.
Heightism
Captain Kent was a tall, lean American, with a singularly impassive face which looked as though it had been carved out of wood.
Mrs. Halliday received us at once, a tall, fair woman, nervous and eager in manner.
Madame Olivier was a very tall woman, her tallness accentuated by the long white overall she wore, and a coif like a nun’s that shrouded her head.
‘Mademoiselle Claude, one of my assistants.’ A tall, serious-faced young girl bowed to us.
A man stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He was a tall, thin man, with a slightly hooked nose and a sallow complexion.
Number Three – A woman stood there, tall and imposing, with a black velvet mask covering her face.
Ryland was sitting at a table… It was my first sight of the American millionaire, and, in spite of myself, I was impressed. He was tall and lean, with a jutting out chin and slightly hooked nose.
Dr. Savaronoff – was an imposing figure. Tall, gaunt, with huge bushy eyebrows and white beard, and a face haggard as the result of starvation and hardships.
The bearer of the message was a tall impassive Chinaman, neatly but rather shabbily dressed.
I was facing an immense cushioned divan on which sat a tall thin Oriental dressed in wonderfully embroidered robes, and clearly, by the length of his finger nails, a great man.
M. Desjardeaux, the French Prime Minister – Standing with his back to the fireplace was a tall thin man with a pointed black beard and a sensitive face.
Mrs. Templeton, a tall dark woman, with sinuous movements and uneasy eyes.
Thoughts
This is a bad book. Don’t bother reading it. The basic scenario and idea of the Big Four is twaddle.
‘There is in the world to-day a vast organisation—an organisation of crime. It is controlled by four individuals, who are known and spoken of as the Big Four. Number One is a Chinaman, Li Chang Yen; Number Two is the American multi-millionaire, Abe Ryland; Number Three is a Frenchwoman; Number Four I have every reason to believe is an obscure English actor called Claud Darrell. These four are banded together to destroy the existing social order, and to replace it with an anarchy in which they would reign as dictators.’
Captain Kent is correct to find it all preposterous nonsense:
‘What was the idea in sinking those boats? Are the Big Four a German stunt?’
‘The Big Four are for themselves—and for themselves only, M. le Capitaine. Their aim is world domination.’
The American burst out laughing…
As should the reader as they throw this book in the bin. As to the ‘cases’ which punctuate the text, they’re clever but trivial because, dealt with so quickly, they never develop a fraction of the depth, grip and traction of the novel-length stories. There are some gestures towards the deeper characterisation of the proper novels:
Poirot nodded, as he arranged the glasses in a neat row on the tray. His love of order was as great as ever.
‘My dear Japp, all through dinner my fingers have been itching to rearrange your own tie-pin. You permit, yes? Ah! that is much more pleasing to the eye.’
Poirot’s eyes were shining with the green light I knew so well.
I realised that Poirot’s vanity was of the case-hardened variety which could withstand all attacks.
And the usual comedy at Hastings’ expense:
Poirot was most childishly delighted with this discovery [of enemy notes about their characters]. Personally I could not see that it was of any value whatever, especially as whoever compiled the notes was ludicrously mistaken in some of his opinions. I pointed this out to my friend when we were back in our rooms.
‘My dear Poirot,’ I said, ‘you know now what the enemy thinks of us. He appears to have a grossly exaggerated idea of your brain power, and to have absurdly underrated mine, but I do not see how we are better off for knowing this.’
But basically Christie ‘phoned it in’, as the Americans say. Tripe.
ITV adaptation
Some or all of this sprawling set of stories was adapted for ITV’s Poirot series starring David Suchet, series 13, episode 2.
Credit
‘The Big Four’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1927 by John Lane. References are to the 1984 Pan paperback edition.
Related links
Related reviews
- Agatha Christie reviews
- 1920s reviews
Books & Boots 