Category: Crime Fiction

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Curtain was first published in 1975, but it was written in the 1940s during the Second World War. Agatha Christie had written it with the intention that it be published after her death, but in 1975 her publishers persuaded her to release it so that it could appear in time for the Christmas season – a ‘Christie for Christmas’.

In this book Poirot and Hastings have come full circle, returning to Styles, the scene of their first case. Poirot is now an old man (just how old is not revealed  – I think if you go by the chronology of the novels he must have been about 120, but there is no need to be too precise), and close to death.  Hastings is the narrator of this mystery. He is saddened by the devastation age has had on Poirot:

My poor friend. I have described him many times. Now to convey to you the difference. Crippled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheeled chair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feeling by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious. There had been a time when I had been surprised to learn that the blackness of Poirot’s hair came out of a bottle. but now the theatricality was apparent and merely created the impression that he wore a wig and had adorned his upper lip to amuse the children!

Only his eyes were the same as ever, shrewd and twinkling, and now – yes, undoubtedly – softened with emotion. (pages 12-13)

Curtain is in many ways a sad book. Sad because this is Poirot’s last case and he dies, with  X, the murderer, apparently having got away with his crimes. Sad, too because Hastings is in a nostalgic and morbid frame of mind, mourning the death of his wife and wishing himself back into happier times. It doesn’t help him that one of his children, Judith, a secretive child now aged 21, is also staying at Styles, the assistant to Dr Franklin who is engaged in research work connected with tropical disease. She resents her father’s interference in her life and is scornful of what she considers his sentimental and old fashioned ideas. Sad too, because of the setting. Styles, once a well-kept country house has been sold  and is now being run as a guest house, the drive badly kept and overgrown with weeds and the house iself badly needing a coat of paint.

But is also an interesting puzzle. Poirot knows the identity of X, a murderer who is present at Styles but will not tell Hastings, because Hastings would not be able to conceal his knowledge – his face would give him away. Poirot is convinced that X will kill again, but he doesn’t know who the victim will be. He asks Hastings to be his eyes and ears whilst he is confined to his wheelchair. He also gives Hastings newspaper cuttings of five murder cases, all of which were committed by different people. X apparently had no motive for killing any of the victims, but he/she was connected with all of them.

Hastings is intrigued and suspects all the people staying at Styles in turn. The first mishap occurs when Colonel Luttrell, the owner of Styles, accidently shoots his wife, but she is only wounded and recovers. Then Barbara, Dr Franklin’s wife, who suffers from her nerves and is looked after by Nurse Craven is found dead, poisoned by one of the toxic substances her husband is researching. Finally Stephen Norton, another guest is found dead in his locked bedroom with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. It looks like suicide, but there is something about the scene that reminds Hastings of an earlier death.

When Poirot, himself dies, the mystery is unsolved, but there is a twist in the ending, which I didn’t see coming, making this one of my favourite Agatha Christie books. It is also a theatrical and dramatic ending to the book and to Poirot, himself.

Book Notes

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

These are notes on a couple of books I’ve read recently. They didn’t send me rushing to the computer to write about them, but they were good enough to finish.

I wrote a bit about Solar by Ian McEwan in a Teaser Tuesday post, whilst I was still reading it.

Opinion on Amazon is pretty much spread across the board, almost as many people  giving it five stars as those giving it one star. I thought it was OK, not as good as Atonement or Enduring Love both of which I loved.

It’s a story of greed, self-deception as well as climate science, global warming and photovoltaics.  The book is in three sections, 2000, 2005 and 2009 following the life of Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize winning physicist whose fifth marriage has failed.  His previous marriages had all ended due to his womanising,  but this time it’s his wife who has an affair and he can’t stand it. Beard is an unlikeable character, bemoaning his weight, overeating and drinking to excess, lecturing and lechering, stealing his colleagues research and setting up his wife’s lover for murder:

He was self-sufficient, self-absorbed, his mind a cluster of appetites and dreamy thoughts. Like many clever men who prize objectivity, he was a solipsist at heart , and in his heart was a nugget of ice … (page 169)

There are some interesting and some not so interesting parts to this book, some of it great and some not so great. It seemed as though it was really three episodes rather than one story.

The Turning of the Tide by Reginald Hill was originally published under the pseudonym of Patrick Ruell in 1971 as The Castle of the Demon. It’s described on the book jacket as an ‘intricately plotted thriller’. Emily has left her husband, the enigmatic Sterne Follett and is staying in Skinburness, a coastal town on the Solway Firth. At first the reasons for her doing this are not revealed. A sequence of sinister events unfolds, a body is found and Emily realises that her husband is involved – just how or why she has yet to discover.

Emily is staying in a house facing the long spit of land called the Grune, a sandy raised shingle beach. She suspects someone has been in the house, moving her things, she sees a green face looking in the window at her, an American staying at the local hotel goes missing, there are two archaeologists digging in a patch of furze and gorse. Then she is attacked whilst walking back from the hotel. She doesn’t know who to trust.

I wasn’t totally convinced by the plot, although there is plenty of tension. There was no way I would have guessed the outcome which I thought was a bit far-fetched. The descriptions of the location, however are very good:

They walked along the shore in a silence which became almost companionable after a couple of minutes. The sun was quite low now, shooting a line of varnished brightness up the Solway, laying a golden boundary between England and Scotland. The line of the tide running down to the Irish Sea was obscured by light. Her mind played with the phrase for a moment, then let it be washed away by the gentle lap of the ebbing water which, with their own footsteps, was the only sound. It seemed to merge with the silence rather than break it, just as the buildings that were now in sight seemed to lie flat against the frieze of grass, sea and sky rather than intrude into it. (page 12)

I borrowed both books from the library.

Agatha Christie on Poirot

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

These are some of Agatha Christie’s thoughts on creating Hercule Poirot, taken from her Autobiography.

She had decided to write a detective story whilst working in a hospital dispensary during World War 1. Surrounded by poisons it seemed natural that death by poisoning would be the method. She then decided who should be poisoned, who would be the poisoner, when, where and how. And then who should be the detective? She was steeped in the Sherlock Holmes tradition but decided she had to invent a detective of her own and he had to have a friend as a ‘kind of butt or stooge’. He had to be unique, a character that hadn’t been used before. She considered a schoolboy, or a scientist, but when she remembered the Belgian refugees who were living in a colony in Tor that is who she settled on.

She decided her detective should be a Belgian – a refugee and a retired police officer and only later realised what a mistake she had made:

What a mistake I made there. The result is that my fictional detective must be well over a hundred by now.

Anyway, I settled on a Belgian detective. I allowed him to grow slowly into his part. He should have been an inspector, so that he would have a certain knowledge of crime. He would be meticulous, very tidy, I thought to myself, as I cleared away a good many untidy odds and ends in my own bedroom. A tidy little man, I could see him as a tidy little man, always arranging things, liking things in pairs, liking things square instead of round. And he should be very brainy – he should have little grey cells of the mind – that was a good phrase: I must remember that – yes he would have the little grey cells. (page 263 -4)

And then he had to have a name, rather a grand name. She wondered about calling her little man Hercules but his last name was more difficult. She didn’t know how the name Poirot came to her – whether it just came into her head or whether she saw it in a newspaper or written down somewhere, but it didn’t go with Hercules; eventually she decided that it should be Hercule – Hercule Poirot. So, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was conceived and eventually published. She was jubilant – her book was going to appear in print. She didn’t know that this was the start of her long  writing career and that

Hercule Poirot, my Belgian invention, was hanging round my neck, firmly attached there like the old man of the sea. (page 285)

Because  Poirot had been quite a success in The Mysterious Affair at Styles she was encouraged to use him again and then she realised that she was tied to both Poirot and his Watson: Captain Hastings.

I quite enjoyed Captain Hastings. He was a stereotyped creation, but he and Poirot represented my idea of  a detective team. I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp – and now I added a ‘human foxhound’, Inspector Giraud, of the French police. Giraud despises Poirot as being old and passé.

Now I saw what a terrible mistake I had made in starting with Hercule Poirot so old – I ought to have abandoned him after the first three or four books, and begun with someone much younger. (page 290)

Poirot, whatever Agatha Christie thought of him is one of her most famous characters, vying in popularity with Miss Marple. Each time I read on of the 33 novels he appears in or see him portrayed by David Suchet (who is Poirot for me) I think he is my favourite. But then I’m equally as fond of Miss Marple (Joan Hickson fitted the part to perfection) and she too is my favourite. I can’t pick one over the other – they are both outstanding creations.

Teaser Tuesday – Missing Link by Joyce Holms

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

On Sunday I was wondering which book to read next and eventually decided upon Missing Link by Joyce Holms. She is a new writer to me. I liked the description of her at the front of the book:

Joyce Holms was born and educated in Glasgow. The victim of a low boredom threshold, she has held a variety of jobs, from teaching window dressing and managing a hotel on the Isle of Arran to working for an Edinburgh detective agency and running a B & B in the Highlands. Married with two grown up children she lives in Edinburgh and her interests include hill-walking and garden design.

Val McDermid’s blurb on the front cover reads, ‘Holms is a magician – the reader is so busy laughing, the clues just slip by unnoticed.’ More words by other authors are on Joyce Holms’s website , like this from Ian Rankin: Joyce’s humour is sharp without being nasty, her characters well drawn, and her Edinburgh a place you’ll want to spend time in….. read her books.

I began reading and was immediately drawn into the mystery. Mrs Sullivan wants to be proved guilty of murder and asks Fizz Fitzpatrick, a lawyer to help her. This extract is from the Prologue describing the murder of Amanda Montrose. Amanda is  driving home when the narrow country road ahead is partially blocked by old Volkswagen and someone has the bonnet up and is leaning under it. Amanda goes to see what’s the problem:

The driver straightens and turns, smiling, and fear surges through Amanda’s body like an electric charge. She sees the hammer. She sees the gloating, resolute eyes. And she knows she is looking at her own death. (page 14)

The question is did Mrs Sullivan kill Amanda or was it Terence Lamb, a known criminal, or one of the other people who also claimed to have killed her?

A Detective at Death’s Door

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

A Detective at Death’s Door is the first book by H R F Keating that I’ve read. I was expecting it to be good because Keating, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature  is a winner of the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Awards. From the information in the book I see that his most famous novels are the Inspector Ghote books. A Detective at Death’s Door is the fifth Harriet Martens novel. For more information about Keating see this article by Martin Edwards.

Source: borrowed from the library.

From H R F Keating’s website:

A Detective at Death’s Door (2004)
ISBN: 1405048069

In her most traumatic case yet, Harriet Martens finds herself placed in grave danger at the hands of a deft and cunning poisoner. Whilst relaxing with her husband at the Majestic pool one hot August Bank Holiday, Harriet does not expect the refreshing glass of Campari soda at her side to conceal a deadly drug. When she awakes from a doze she is no longer by the water, but in a hospital bed recovering from a near fatal dose of Aconitine. As Harriet makes her slow recovery, she tries to come to terms with the terrible fact that someone wanted to kill her. Even more difficult for her to face is the knowledge that she must find the person responsible, if anything for her own peace of mind. But no sooner has she mustered enough energy to begin making tentative enquiries and initial investigations, than the poisoner strikes again. And this time he is successful€¦ Will Harriet have the strength of mind and body to find the murderer before he finds another victim and before the local population begin to panic?

I suspect that this is not one of Keating’s better books. The pace was slow as Harriet regains her strength and tries to get involved in the police investigations, against her doctor’s advice and her husband’s wishes. It was repetitive as one by one more deaths occur with little build up of tension.  Harriet is known as the ‘Hard Detective’ but for most of this book she  is in ‘a state of fluffy confusion‘. Still, I liked it enough to borrow One Man and His Bomb, the sixth Harriet Martens book, from the library last week.

Following the Detectives

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

From the back cover:

Following the Detectives follows the trail of over 20 of crime fiction’s greatest investigators, discovering the cities and countries in which they live and work. Edited by one of the leading voices in crime fiction, Maxim Jakubowski, each entry is written by a crime writer, journalist or critic with a particular expertise in that detective and the fictional crimes that have taken place in each city’s dark streets and hidden places. Following the Detectives is the perfect way for crime fiction fans to truly discover the settings of their favourite detective novels.

Following the Detectives is a beautiful book both to look at and to read. It’s full of information about each detective, with colour photos, details of film/theatre/TV dramatisations and clear maps showing the locations, plus links to useful websites. It’s just what you need –  a cross between a crime fiction companion and a travel guide.

The detectives include:

  • Ian Rankin’s Rebus  – Edinburgh by Barry Forshaw
  • Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe – Los Angeles by Maxim Jakubowski
  • Donna Leon’s Brunetti – Venice by Barry Forshaw
  • Sara Paretsky’s Warshawski  – Chicago by Dick Adler & Maxim Jakubowski
  • Arnaldur Indidason’s Erlendur – Iceland by Peter Rozovsky
  • John Dee MacDonald’s Travis McGee – Florida by Clive Cogdill
  • Colin Dexter’s Morse – Oxford by Martin Edwards
  • Henning Mankell’s Wallender – Sweden by Barry Forshaw
  • George V Higgins’s Eddie Coyle – Boston by Michael Carson
  • John Harvey’s Charlie Resnick – Nottingham by John Harvey
  • Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano – Sicily by Peter Rozovsky
  • George Pelecanos’s Washington DC by Sarah Weinman
  • Peter James’s Roy Grace – Brighton by Barry Forshaw
  • James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux – New Orleans by Maxim Jakubowski
  • Georges Simenon’s Maigret -Paris by Barry Forshaw
  • Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadwell – Shropshire by Martin Edwards
  • Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade – San Francisco by J Kingston Pierce
  • Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy – Dublin by Declan Burke
  • Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer – Southern California by Michael Carson
  • Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes – London by David Stuart Davies
  • Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder – New York by Sarah Weinman

It’s a treasure trove of information.

My thanks go to the publishers who kindly sent me a copy of this book.  Following the Detectives is published by New Holland publishers, price £17.99. Enter the discount code BooksPlease at the checkout to receive 20% discount and free p&p (offer valid until 31 December 2010).