Curtain: Poirot's Last Case Read online

  The Times: “Splendid.”

  38. Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)

  With his career still in its formative years, we learn many things about how Poirot came to exercise those famous ‘grey cells’ so well. Fourteen of the eighteen stories collected herein are narrated by Captain Arthur Hastings — including what would appear to be the earliest Poirot short story, ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball,’ which follows soon on the events of The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Two of the stories are narrated by Poirot himself, to Hastings. One, ‘The Chocolate Box,’ concerns Poirot’s early days on the Belgian police force, and the case that was his greatest failure: ‘My grey cells, they functioned not at all,’ Poirot admits. But otherwise, in this most fascinating collection, they function brilliantly, Poirot’s grey cells, challenging the reader to keep pace at every twist and turn.

  Collected within: ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’; ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’; ‘The Cornish Mystery’; ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’; ‘The Double Clue’; ‘The King of Clubs’; ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’; ‘The Lost Mine’; ‘The Plymouth Express’; ‘The Chocolate Box’; ‘The Submarine Plans’; ‘The Third-Floor Flat’; ‘Double Sin’; ‘The Market Basing Mystery’; ‘Wasps’ Nest’; ‘The Veiled Lady’; ‘Problem at Sea’; ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’

  Sunday Express: ‘Superb, vintage Christie.’

  39. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975)

  Captain Arthur Hastings narrates. Poirot investigates. ‘This, Hastings, will be my last case,’ declares the detective who had entered the scene as a retiree in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the captain’s, and our, first encounter with the now-legendary Belgian detective. Poirot promises that, ‘It will be, too, my most interesting case — and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent... X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot!’ The setting is, appropriately, Styles Court, which has since been converted into a private hotel. And under this same roof is X, a murderer five-times over; a murderer by no means finished murdering. In Curtain, Poirot will, at last, retire — death comes as the end. And he will bequeath to his dear friend Hastings an astounding revelation. ‘The ending of Curtain is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised,’ writes her biographer, Charles Osborne.

  Of note: On 6 August 1975, upon the publication of Curtain, The New York Times ran a front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot, complete with photograph. The passing of no other fictional character had been so acknowledged in America’s ‘paper of record.’ Agatha Christie had always intended Curtain to be ‘Poirot’s Last Case’: Having written the novel during the Blitz, she stored it (heavily insured) in a bank vault till the time that she, herself, would retire. Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976.

  Time: ‘First-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny.’

  Charles Osborne on

  Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

  POIROT (1975)

  As her publishers had feared, Agatha Christie was no longer able to sustain the effort and concentration necessary to complete another novel. She had, of course, no need to. She had gone on writing for as long as it remained not too difficult a task, but for many years now her income had been such that it was pointless for her to earn any more. A company, Agatha Christie Ltd, set up as long ago as 1955 to handle incoming royalties on all her works after that date, had been reorganized in 1968 when the firm of Booker McConnell bought a fifty-one per cent stake for an unspecified sum. Later, some pre-1955 Agatha Christie titles were taken under the wing of the company, and Booker McConnell extended its holding to sixty-four per cent. It was now by far the major shareholder, the remainder of the company being partly owned by Agatha Christie’s daughter and grandson and partly vested in various family and charitable trusts. In June 1998 Booker sold their shares to Chorion plc, the company that also owned and managed Enid Blyton’s works.

  With royalties from books, films and plays for the year ending 31 December 1974 totalling £366,000, Agatha Christie and her family may have had no need of a new ‘Christie for Christmas’ in 1975, but her publishers, understandably, felt differently. Remembering the two crime novels (one featuring Poirot and the other Miss Marple) which their author had written during the Second World War and salted away for posthumous publication, her publishers, in the person of Sir William Collins, approached Dame Agatha with the request that she release one of the two novels for publication in 1975. She was at first reluctant to do so, but eventually agreed that Curtain, the earlier novel of the two, and the one in which Poirot conducts his final investigation, could appear in time for the Christmas season.

  Agatha Christie had already assigned the author’s rights in Curtain to her daughter Rosalind (and those in the Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, to Max Mallowan). (‘I thought it a useful way of benefiting my relations,’ she explained to an interviewer. ‘I gave one to my husband and one to my daughter – definitely made over to them, by deed of gift. So when I am no more they can bring them out and have a jaunt on the proceeds – I hope!’)

  Rosalind was able to have, or at least to begin, her ‘jaunt on the proceeds’ in her mother’s lifetime, for the amount of money earned by Curtain was remarkable, even by Agatha Christie’s standards. A first British edition of 120,000 sold out quickly, American hardback rights were sold for an advance of 300,000 dollars, and American paperback rights for one million dollars. No doubt Agatha Christie had not realized how generous she was being when she assigned those rights away in the forties; but her own earnings in 1975 were close to £1,000,000. (In the United States, the success of the film version of Murder on the Orient Express had resulted in sales of 3,000,000 copies of a paperback reprint of the novel.)

  In Curtain, whose sub-title is ‘Poirot’s Last Case’, Hastings returns as narrator for the first time since Dumb Witness in 1937 (except for a few short stories written earlier but not collected into volumes until the sixties), and immediately the problem of chronology arose. To some extent, Hastings’ place as Poirot’s colleague had been taken over in the post-war years by Ariadne Oliver. Now, at the end, Hastings comes back to visit his old friend Poirot, who is staying at, of all places, Styles, the country house which had been the scene of their first case, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920. But when is this end, when must this last case, in the course of which Poirot dies, be presumed to happen? We know that Curtain was written during the war years of the forties, but there is, of course, no reference to the war in the novel, for Agatha Christie had to remain vague as regards the year in which Poirot was to die. She had determined that it would be shortly after her own death, and she was, at the time of writing Curtain, a healthy woman in her early fifties.

  This plays havoc with the ages of the characters in the novel, and not least with that of Poirot and Hastings. It must be assumed that the events in Curtain take place after those in Elephants Can Remember, Poirot’s penultimate case in 1972. Hastings mentions that their earlier Styles adventure had been in 1916. He and Poirot are therefore fifty-six years older than they were in Agatha Christie’s first novel. This would make Hastings eighty-six years of age, and Poirot at least one hundred and twenty! From what is often called internal evidence, however, the reader can work out Hastings’ age in Curtain as being just over fifty, while the description of Poirot is of a man close to death, but nearer to eighty-five than to one hundred and twenty. We should simply be grateful that Agatha Christie, while the bombs were falling on London, had given thought to the rounding-off of Poirot’s career, and refrain from looking a gift detective in the mouth.

  Curtain is a sad, muted and nostalgic book. Sad, in that Poirot dies, and apparently without having brought the murderer to justice; muted, in that the inhabitants of Styles, no longer a country manor house but a private hotel or guesthouse not unlike the one in The Mousetrap, are, with one or two exceptions, people who are old or disappointed or embittered; nostalgic, in t
hat Hastings is continually aware of the wheel having come full circle, of Poirot and himself ending their long and productive collaboration in the house in which they had begun it. Hastings learns, or is at least momentarily aware, that nostalgia for the happy past is a snare and a delusion. The past, after all, is happy mainly because it is past, because it has been endured.

  Hastings’ wife has died in Argentina, but one of his four children, his daughter Judith, is among the guests at Styles. It is because of a problem concerning Judith that Hastings is driven to contemplate, and even to take steps to commit, murder. Poirot, during the course of events, fulfils a prophecy made jokingly by Inspector Japp forty years earlier in The ABC Murders.

  Confined to a wheelchair, his face thin, lined and wrinkled, though with moustache (dyed) and hair (a wig) still as black as ever, Poirot has to rely more than ever on his little grey cells. ‘This, Hastings,’ he is forced to admit, ‘will be my last case. It will be, too, my most interesting case – and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent, that arouses admiration in spite of oneself. So far, mon cher, this X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot! He has developed the attack to which I can find no answer.’

  X, the murderer, does indeed operate in such a manner (a more than usually improbable manner, it must be confessed) that the law cannot touch him. Nor, it seems, can Hercule Poirot. It is only four months after Poirot’s death, when Hastings comes into possession of a manuscript bequeathed to him by his old friend, that the truth is revealed. A knowledge of Shakespeare’s Othello and of the character of Iago, in particular, has helped Poirot considerably. In fact, he leaves Hastings, as clues, copies of Othello and of the play John Ferguson by St John Ervine, an interesting playwright of Agatha Christie’s generation who is now almost forgotten. John Ferguson (which Christie misspells) is Ervine’s finest play.

  The ending of Curtain is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised. If it somehow fails to make the effect that it ought to, this may be because the character of the murderer has been too lightly sketched throughout the novel, and his motivation not made sufficiently convincing. The basic idea behind Curtain had been adumbrated in one chapter of the 1932 novel, Peril at End House; had its characters been more fully developed, Poirot’s last case could have become Christie’s finest novel.

  If Curtain is not Agatha Christie’s finest, it is, surely, her saddest novel. Who among her readers could fail to be affected by the death of the lovable and infuriating Hercule Poirot? What other character of fiction has had his obituary published on the front page of the New York Times?

  HERCULE POIROT IS DEAD:

  FAMED BELGIAN DETECTIVE

  Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous, has died in England. His age was unknown.

  Mr Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904. His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, was one of the most illustrious in fiction.

  At the end of his life, he was arthritic and had a bad heart. He was in a wheelchair often, and was carried from his bedroom to the public lounge at Styles Court, a nursing home in Essex, wearing a wig and false moustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity. In his active days, he was always impeccably dressed.

  The news of his death, given by Dame Agatha, was not unexpected. Word that he was near death reached here last May.

  Dame Agatha reports in Curtain that he managed, in one final gesture, to perform one more act of cerebration that saved an innocent bystander from disaster. ‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it,’ to quote Shakespeare, whom Poirot frequently misquoted.16

  About Charles Osborne

  This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.

  About Agatha Christie

  Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

  Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.

  In 1926, now averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first of her books to be published by William Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship that lasted for fifty years and produced over seventy books. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was also the first of Agatha Christie’s works to be dramatised — as Alibi — and to have a successful run in London’s West End. The Mousetrap, her most famous play, opened in 1952 and runs to this day at St Martin’s Theatre in the West End; it is the longest-running play in history.

  Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of her books have been published: the bestselling novel Sleeping Murder appeared in 1976, followed by An Autobiography and the short story collections Miss Marple’s Final Cases; Problem at Pollensa Bay; and While the Light Lasts. In 1998, Black Coffee was the first of her plays to be novelised by Charles Osborne, Mrs Christie’s biographer.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  The Agatha Christie Collection

  Christie Crime Classics

  The Man in the Brown

  Suit The Secret of Chimneys

  The Seven Dials Mystery

  The Mysterious Mr Quin

  The Sittaford Mystery

  The Hound of Death

  The Listerdale Mystery

  Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?

  Parker Pyne Investigates

  Murder Is Easy

  And Then There Were None

  Towards Zero

  Death Comes as the End

  Sparkling Cyanide

  Crooked House

  They Came to Baghdad

  Destination Unknown

  Spider’s Web *

  The Unexpected Guest *

  Ordeal by Innocence

  The Pale Horse

  Endless Night

  Passenger To Frankfurt

  Problem at Pollensa Bay

  While the Light Lasts

  Hercule Poirot Investigates

  The Mysterious Affair at Styles

  The Murder on the Links

  Poirot Investigates

  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

  The Big Four

  The Mystery of the Blue Train

  Black Coffee *

  Peril at End House

  Lord Edgware Dies

  Murder on the Orient Express

  Three-Act Tragedy

  Death in the Clouds

  The ABC Murders

  Murder in Mesopotamia

  Cards on the Table

  Murder in the Mews

  Dumb Witness

  Death on the Nile

  Appointment w
ith Death

  Hercule Poirot’s Christmas

  Sad Cypress

  One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

  Evil Under the Sun

  Five Little Pigs

  The Hollow

  The Labours of Hercules

  Taken at the Flood

  Mrs McGinty’s Dead

  After the Funeral

  Hickory Dickory Dock

  Dead Man’s Folly

  Cat Among the Pigeons

  The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

  The Clocks

  Third Girl

  Hallowe’en Party

  Elephants Can Remember

  Poirot’s Early Cases

  Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

  Miss Marple Mysteries

  The Murder at the Vicarage

  The Thirteen Problems

  The Body in the Library

  The Moving Finger

  A Murder Is Announced

  They Do It with Mirrors

  A Pocket Full of Rye

  4.50 from Paddington

  The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side

  A Caribbean Mystery

  At Bertram’s Hotel

  Nemesis

  Sleeping Murder

  Miss Marple’s Final Cases

  Tommy & Tuppence

  The Secret Adversary

  Partners in Crime

  N or M?

  By the Pricking of My Thumbs

  Postern of Fate

  Published as Mary Westmacott

  Giant’s Bread

  Unfinished Portrait

  Absent in the Spring

  The Rose and the Yew Tree

  A Daughter’s a Daughter The Burden

  Memoirs

  An Autobiography

  Come, Tell Me How You Live

  Play Collections

  The Mousetrap and Selected Plays

  Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays