Elephants Can Remember Read online

  This is one of the more meandering Christies. Elephants may never forget, but the author who is now over eighty frequently does. Her publisher ought to have provided her with an editor to help her deal with dates, ages and calculations, for these frequently go awry in Elephants Can Remember. At one point we are told that a man is twenty-five years older than his wife; later we learn that ‘as a young man’ he had been in love with his wife’s twin sister. How young a man was he? If he was under forty, then she was under fifteen! No one is ever quite certain whether the deaths of Celia Ravencroft’s parents occurred ten, twelve, fifteen or twenty years in the past. Poirot reminisces with his old friend Superintendent Spence about cases on which they have collaborated in the past, and gets an important detail about Five Little Pigs wrong. But then Poirot, too, is getting old. Even his author realizes this, and wittily reminds us of the fact:

  Hercule Poirot stopped himself with a slight effort from saying firmly ‘Most people have heard of me.’ It was not quite as true as it used to be, because many people who had heard of Hercule Poirot, and known him, were now reposing with suitable memorial stones over them, in country churchyards.

  Young Celia is made to say that she knows very little about the family tragedy, never having read any account of the inquest, and then two pages later says, ‘I think about it nearly all the time’, and reveals that she is by no means ignorant of the details. These narrative weaknesses, infrequent in the earlier novels, make themselves particularly noticeable in the late Tommy and Tuppence adventures, By the Pricking of My Thumbs and Postern of Fate, as well as in Elephants Can Remember.

  The story is actually an ingenious one, and the pace is not quite as leisurely as when the elderly team of Tommy and Tuppence amble into action. Also, it is enjoyable to encounter again such earlier colleagues of Poirot as Superintendent Spence and Mr Goby, the latter still gathering information for Poirot, forty-four years after his first appearance in The Mystery of the Blue Train. A certain premise is repeated from a story, ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’, which appeared in the volumes The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (UK: 1960) and Double Sin (USA: 1961). A final query: Why should a hand be covered with blood when all it has done is to push someone over a cliff?

  Elephants Can Remember was fortunate to collect some highly favourable reviews on its initial publication in London. ‘A quiet but consistently interesting whodunnit with ingenious monozygotic solution,’ wrote Maurice Richardson in The Observer, adding cryptically, ‘Any young elephant would be proud to have written it.’ ‘A beautiful example of latter-day Christie,’ said the Birmingham Post, while the Sunday Express thought it ‘a classic example of the ingenious three-card trick (now you see it, now you don’t) that she has been playing on her readers for so many years’.

  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.

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  * novelised by Charles Osborne

  Copyright

  ELEPHANTS CAN REMEMBER by Agatha Christie

  Copyright © 1972 Agatha Christie Limited (a Chorion company)

  “Essay by Charles Osborne” excerpted from The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie. Copyright © 1982, 1999 by Charles Osborne. Reprinted with permission.

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  Adobe Reader edition published September 2004 ISBN 0-06-079029-6

  EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780061741524

  This e-book was set from the Agatha Christie Signature Edition published 2002 by HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

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  1Five Little Pigs

  2Hallowe’en Party

  3Mrs McGinty’s Dead

  1Five Little Pigs