Mrs. McGinty's Dead Read online

  Of note: Crime novelist Ariadne Oliver, of Cards on the Table, returns to help Poirot and Spence solve the crime.

  Sunday Times: ‘So simple, so economical, so completely baffling. Each clue scrupulously given, with superb sleight of hand.’

  San Francisco Chronicle: ‘The plot is perfect and the characters are wonderful.’

  The New York Times: ‘The best Poirot since…Cards on the Table.’

  29. After the Funeral (1953)

  Mrs Cora Lansquenet admits to ‘always saying the wrong thing’—but this last remark has gotten her a hatchet in the head. ‘He was murdered, wasn’t he?’ she had said after the funeral of her brother, Richard Abernethie, in the presence of the family solicitor, Mr Entwhistle, and the assembled Abernethies, who are anxious to know how Richard’s sizable fortune will be distributed. Entwhistle, desperate not to lose any more clients to murder, turns to Hercule Poirot for help. A killer complicates an already very complicated family—classic Christie; pure Poirot.

  Liverpool Post: ‘Keeps us guessing—and guessing wrongly—to the very last page.’

  30. Hickory Dickory Dock (1955)

  An outbreak of kleptomania at a student hostel is not normally the sort of crime that arouses Hercule Poirot’s interest. But when it affects the work of his secretary, Miss Lemon, whose sister works at the hostel, he agrees to look into the matter. The matter becomes a bona fide mystery when Poirot peruses the bizarre list of stolen and vandalized items—including a stethoscope, some old flannel trousers, a box of chocolates, a slashed rucksack, and a diamond ring found in a bowl of a soup. ‘A unique and beautiful problem,’ the great detective declares. Unfortunately, this ‘beautiful problem’ is not just one of thievery and mischief—for there is a killer on the loose.

  Times Literary Supplement: ‘An event…There is plenty of entertainment.’

  The New York Times: ‘The Christie fan of longest standing, who thinks he knows every one of her tricks, will still be surprised by…the twists here.’

  31. Dead Man’s Folly (1956)

  Sir George and Lady Stubbs desire to host a village fete with a difference—a mock murder mystery. In good faith, Ariadne Oliver, the much-lauded crime novelist, agrees to organise the proceedings. As the event draws near, however, Ariadne senses that something sinister is about to happen—and calls upon her old friend Hercule Poirot to come down to Dartmoor for the festivities. Ariadne’s instincts, alas, are right on the money, and soon enough Poirot has a real murder to investigate.

  The New York Times: ‘The infallibly original Agatha Christie has come up, once again, with a new and highly ingenious puzzle-construction.’

  Times Literary Supplement: ‘The solution is of the colossal ingenuity we have been conditioned to expect.’

  32. Cat Among the Pigeons (1959)

  A revolution in the Middle East has a direct and deadly impact upon the summer term at Meadowbank, a picture-perfect girls’ school in the English countryside. Prince Ali Yusuf, Hereditary Sheikh of Ramat, whose great liberalizing experiment—‘hospitals, schools, a Health Service’—is coming to chaos, knows that he must prepare for the day of his exile. He asks his pilot and school friend, Bob Rawlinson, to care for a packet of jewels. Rawlinson does so, hiding them among the possessions of his niece, Jennifer Sutcliffe, who is bound for Meadowbank. Rawlinson is killed before he can reveal the hiding place—or even the fact that he has employed his niece as a smuggler. But someone knows, or suspects, that Jennifer has the jewels. As murder strikes Meadowbank, only Hercule Poirot can restore the peace.

  Of note: In this novel we meet Colonel Pikeaway, later to appear in the non-Poirots Passenger to Frankfurt and Postern of Fate, and we meet the financier Mr Robinson, who will also appear in Postern of Fate and who will show up at Miss Marple’s Bertram’s Hotel.

  Daily Express, of Cat Among the Pigeons: ‘Immensely enjoyable.’

  The New York Times: ‘To read Agatha Christie at her best is to experience the rarefied pleasure of watching a faultless technician at work, and she is in top form in Cat Among the Pigeons.’

  33. The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960)

  ‘This book of Christmas fare may be described as “The Chef’s Selection.” I am the Chef!’ Agatha Christie writes in her Foreword, in which she also recalls the delightful Christmases of her youth at Abney Hall in the north of England. But while the author’s Christmases were uninterrupted by murder, her famous detective’s are not (see also Hercule Poirot’s Christmas). In the title novella, Poirot—who has been coerced into attending ‘an old-fashioned Christmas in the English countryside’—gets all the trimmings, certainly, but he also gets a woman’s corpse in the snow, a Kurdish knife spreading a crimson stain across her white fur wrap.

  Collected within: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (novella); ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’; The Under Dog (novella); ‘Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds’; ‘The Dream’; and a Miss Marple mystery, ‘Greenshaw’s Folly.’

  Times Literary Supplement: ‘There is the irresistible simplicity and buoyancy of a Christmas treat about it all.’

  34. The Clocks (1963)

  Sheila Webb, typist-for-hire, has arrived at 19 Wilbraham Crescent in the seaside town of Crowdean to accept a new job. What she finds is a well-dressed corpse surrounded by five clocks. Mrs Pebmarsh, the blind owner of No. 19, denies all knowledge of ringing Sheila’s secretarial agency and asking for her by name—yet someone did. Nor does she own that many clocks. And neither woman seems to know the victim. Colin Lamb, a young intelligence specialist working a case of his own at the nearby naval yard, happens to be on the scene at the time of Sheila Webb’s ghastly discovery. Lamb knows of only one man who can properly investigate a crime as bizarre and baffling as what happened inside No. 19—his friend and mentor, Hercule Poirot.

  The New York Times: ‘Here is the grand-manner detective story in all its glory.’

  The Bookman: ‘Superlative Christie…extremely ingenious.’

  Saturday Review: ‘A sure-fire attention-gripper—naturally.’

  35. Third Girl (1966)

  Hercule Poirot is interrupted at breakfast by a young woman who wishes to consult with the great detective about a murder she ‘might have’ committed—but upon being introduced to Poirot, the girl flees. And disappears. She has shared a flat with two seemingly ordinary young women. As Hercule Poirot—with the aid of the crime novelist Mrs Ariadne Oliver—learns more about this mysterious ‘third girl,’ he hears rumours of revolvers, flick-knives, and blood-stains. Even if a murder might not have been committed, something is seriously wrong, and it will take all of Poirot’s wits and tenacity to establish whether the ‘third girl’ is guilty, innocent, or insane.

  Sunday Telegraph: ‘First-class Christie.’

  Financial Times: ‘Mesmerising ingenuity.’

  36. Hallowe’en Party (1969)

  Mystery writer Ariadne Oliver has been invited to a Hallowe’en party at Woodleigh Common. One of the other guests is an adolescent girl known for telling tall tales of murder and intrigue—and for being generally unpleasant. But when the girl, Joyce, is found drowned in an apple-bob-bing tub, Mrs Oliver wonders after the fictional nature of the girl’s claim that she had once witnessed a murder. Which of the party guests wanted to keep her quiet is a question for Ariadne’s friend Hercule Poirot. But unmasking a killer this Hallowe’en is not going to be easy—for there isn’t a soul in Woodleigh who believes the late little storyteller was actually murdered.

  Daily Mirror: ‘A thundering success…a triumph for Hercule Poirot.’

  37. Elephants Can Remember (1972)

  ‘The Ravenscrofts didn’t seem that kind of person. They seemed well balanced and placid.’

  And yet, twelve years earlier, the husband had shot the wife, and then himself—or perhaps it was the other way around, since sets of both of their fingerprints were on the gun, and the gun had fallen between them. The case haunts Ariadne Oliver, who had been a friend of the couple.
The famous mystery novelist desires this real-life mystery solved, and calls upon Hercule Poirot to help her do so. Old sins have long shadows, the proverb goes. Poirot is now a very old man, but his mind is as nimble and as sharp as ever and can still penetrate deep into the shadows. But as Poirot and Mrs Oliver and Superintendent Spence reopen the long-closed case, a startling discovery awaits them. And if memory serves Poirot (and it does!), crime—like history—has a tendency to repeat itself.

  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

  Mrs McGinty’s Dead

  Alternative title: Blood Will Tell

  POIROT (1952)

  The year 1952 was an important and memorable one for Agatha Christie. On her sixty-second birthday, on 15 September, it might have seemed to her likely to be memorable only because on that day she fell and broke her wrist. Three months later, however, she knew that her play, The Mousetrap, was destined for a very long run at the Ambassadors Theatre in London, for it had opened on 25 November to great acclaim. Even so, she could hardly have guessed that the play would outlast her and still not have come to the end of its first run in London forty-seven years after.

  The dampest journalistic squib of the year was produced by a columnist in the Daily Mail who, unaware that, to use an un-Christiean phrase, the author’s cover had already been blown three years earlier in the Sunday Times, announced, ‘I learned yesterday that Miss Agatha Christie has for fifteen years been publishing books under a nom-de-plume.’ Mrs Christie had, in any case, been doing it not for fifteen but for twenty-two years.

  During 1952 Agatha Christie published three titles, two of them detective fiction and the third a Mary Westmacott novel. The first of the crime novels was Mrs McGinty’s Dead (Blood Will Tell is an alternative American title, but the novel is known in some editions in the United States by its British title.)

  At the beginning of Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Poirot the gourmet is leaving one of his favourite Soho restaurants, having dined alone but exceedingly well. He walks back to his Mayfair flat, a trifle bored, wishing that his old friend Hastings were not on the other side of the world. He glances without interest at a newspaper placard about the McGinty trial, for he recalls a brief paragraph he had read about it. Not a very interesting murder, merely some wretched old woman knocked on the head for a few pounds. But he arrives home to find that he has a visitor. It is Superintendent Spence, whom he had worked with four years earlier (Taken at the Flood: 1948), and who wishes to consult him about the murder of Mrs McGinty, an old washer-woman who lived in a cottage in the village of Broadhinny. Her lodger, James Bentley, has been found guilty, but Spence is not satisfied with the verdict, and he manages to persuade Poirot to visit the scene of the crime.

  This is one of those rare Christie murder mysteries in which the author steps down a rung or two on the social ladder to concern herself with working people. Some of them may be middleclass, but they are the new post-war impoverished middleclass, the nouveau pauvre. There are, for example, Major and Mrs Summerhayes, who run in slovenly fashion the horrid guest house where Poirot stays while he is pursuing his investigations. There is Mrs McGinty’s niece, Bessie Burch, who does not grieve for her aunt, and there are, or there may be, a few ‘Women Victims of Bygone Tragedies’. There is, of course, languishing in gaol awaiting execution, the unprepossessing James Bentley, ‘a deceitful fellow with an ungracious, muttering way of talking’.

  The character of Bentley is especially well drawn. He is so unsympathetic that you almost cease to care whether or not he is innocent of Mrs McGinty’s murder. Poirot, fortunately, does care, and devotes his attention to discovering why the old lady was killed: it was not for the thirty pounds she had saved and hidden in her cottage. The fact that, unless Poirot discovers the real murderer, James Bentley will soon be hanged does, of course, add an element of tension to the story, for this is 1952 when murder in England could still be punished by sentence of death. No one is executed in England nowadays, which is for the most part a sign of progress. It does, however, make life rather more difficult for the writer of murder mysteries. When murderers are given sentences so light as virtually to encourage the committing of the act, a particular frisson is removed from the literary genre of the crime novel. If James Bentley had been facing not the rope but a suspended two-year sentence, Poirot might still have devoted his energy to proving Bentley innocent, but would the reader have cared? The puzzle element becomes more important as the punishment of the criminal becomes more and more negligible.

  The crime novelist Ariadne Oliver is present in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, making her first appearance since Cards on the Table sixteen years earlier (see p. 139). She is now more than ever like her creator, expressing her dislike of the Finnish detective she has created:

  How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got?…Fond of him? If I met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than any I’ve ever invented.

  But she makes it clear that she enjoys the fame and fortune Sven Hjers
on has brought her. When Robin Upward, a talented young playwright who is adapting one of Mrs Oliver’s crime novels for the stage, suggests that she write a novel to be published posthumously, in which she, Ariadne Oliver, murders the detective, Mrs Oliver replies: ‘No fear! What about the money? Any money to be made out of murders I want now.’ You can almost hear Mrs Christie’s gleeful chuckle as she types that sentence. She probably also took one or two ideas about Robin Upward from Hubert Gregg, who directed her play, The Hollow, in 1951, who certainly made suggestions to her for changes in the dialogue, and some of whose conversations with Mrs Christie may well have been similar to those of Robin Upward with Mrs Oliver.

  This picture of life and death among the rural proletariat and bourgeoisie is a lively and entertaining one, and the solution is vintage Christie. As the New York Herald Tribune said, ‘We have gone up the garden path, led by the most delicate misdirection in English prose.’

  In the early 1960s, a series of four rather poorly made British films featuring Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple was released, with the popular English comedy actress Margaret Rutherford as Jane Marple. The first and the best of them, Murder, She Said, was based on 4.50 From Paddington (see pp. 283–7), a Miss Marple adventure. The second, Murder at the Gallop, however, was based on a Poirot novel, After the Funeral, with Poirot transformed into Miss Marple for the film (see p. 266). And the third, Murder Most Foul (1964), is based, very loosely and distantly, on Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and again turns Hercule Poirot into Jane Marple! Apart from Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple, who finds herself on a jury and in disagreement with her fellow jurors who think the accused guilty, the cast includes Ron Moody, Charles Tingwell, Megs Jenkins and Margaret Rutherford’s husband, Stringer Davis, a mediocre actor who, at his wife’s insistence, had a role written into the series for him. The murdered woman is no longer an old charlady but a blackmailing actress. The limp screenplay is by David Pursall and Jack Seddon, who wrote three of the four Miss Marple films, as well as two other Christie film adaptations (Ten Little Indians and The Alphabet Murders, both in 1965), and the director is George Pollock, who was responsible for all of the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films and for Ten Little Indians.