Ariadne Oliver – BooksPlease

Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie

Published on December 9, 2014 by Margaret5 Comments

Hallowe’en Party begins with the party given by Mrs Drake for teenagers. One of the guests, Joyce Reynolds, a boastful thirteen-year old, who likes to draw attention to herself, announces that once she’d witnessed a murder. It seems nobody believed her and yet later on she is found dead, drowned in the tub used for the bobbing for apples game – someone had believed her and had killed her. Mrs Ariadne Oliver was at the party and she asks Poirot to help in finding the murderer.

This is one of Agatha Christie’s later books, first published in 1969, when she was approaching 80, and although I did like it for the most part, it is certainly not one of her best. It’s not terribly coherent and it lacks focus in parts as several characters, not sharply defined, are introduced along with a lot of detail and repetition. The plot, as usual in Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries is convoluted with lots of red herrings and loose ends. I thought the revelation of one of the character’s parenthood at the end was just too contrived to be believable. There are meandering and critical conversations about the ‘young people today’ and the state of the mental health service, with overcrowded mental homes, which so many of the characters thought must be the cause of the murder.

… so doctors say “Let him of her lead a normal life. Go back and live with his relatives, etc. And then the nasty bit of goods, or the poor afflicted fellow, whichever way you like to look at it, gets the urge again and another young woman goes out walking and is found in a gravel pit, or is silly enough to take lifts in a car. (page 37)

So it is down to Poirot to discover the real motive, but not before there is another murder. He investigates the possibility that Joyce was telling the truth and asks retired Superintendent Spence, living in the area with his sister, for details of any local deaths and disappearances over the past few years.

Even though I found this book less satisfying than many of Christie’s other books there are things in it that I liked. The relationship between Ariadne Oliver and Poirot for one – Poirot has to have a sip of brandy to fortify himself for the ‘ordeal’ of talking to her:

‘It’s a pity,’ he murmured to himself, ‘that she is so scatty. And yet she has originality of mind. It could be that I am going to enjoy what she is coming to tell me. It could be -‘ he reflected a minute ‘- that it may take a great deal of the evening and that it will all be excessively foolish. Eh bien, one must take one’s risks in life.’ (page 20)

And for another there is the description of a beautiful garden in a sunken quarry, a well designed garden with the appearance of being perfectly natural. There are several pages lyrically describing this garden, which seemed to me to reflect Agatha Christie’s own interest in gardens, particularly the gardens at her house in Devon, Greenway. Seeing this garden sends Poirot into an almost mystical state of mind as he absorbed the atmosphere:

It had qualities of magic, of enchantment, certainly of beauty, bashful beauty, yet wild. Here, if you were staging a scene in the theatre, you would have your nymphs, your fauns, you would have Greek beauty, you would have fear too. Yes, he thought, in this sunk garden there is fear. (page 93)

Overall, there are some vivid descriptions in this book – the Hallowe’en party and some of the descriptions of the teenagers ’60s style clothing for example as well as the beauty of the sunken garden, which for me compensated for its flaws. But if you haven’t read any of Agatha Christie’s books I wouldn’t recommend that you start with this one.

Third Girl by Agatha Christie

Published on August 15, 2013 by Margaret4 Comments

Third Girl was first published in 1966. In it Poirot is probably meant to be approaching eighty, although if he had aged with the books he would have been well over a hundred! Anyway, the young lady who comes to see him about ‘a murder she might have committed‘ runs out of his room after blurting out:

‘You’re too old. Nobody told me you were so old. I really don’t want to be rude but – there it is. You’re too old. I’m really very sorry.’ (page 13)

Poirot is bored. He had finished his Magnum Opus, an analysis of detective fiction writers, in which he had spoken scathingly of Edgar Allen Poe, and had complained of the lack of method or order in the romantic outpourings of Wilkie Collins. He had no idea what to do next, so, his interest is aroused by the young lady’s announcement and he sets out to discover what murder she ‘might have committed.’ It turns out that Mrs Ariadne Oliver had told the girl about him when talking with friends about detectives and together they discover that she is Norma Restarick, the ‘third girl’, sharing a flat with two other girls.

Norma thinks she might be crazy, but won’t see a doctor. She doesn’t always remember what she has done. She hates her stepmother and thinks she might have poisoned her. Poirot is intrigued but when a suspicion of espionage surfaces it is all too much for him:

Poirot gave an exasperated sigh.

‘Enfin,’ he said, ‘it is too much! There is far too much. Now we have espionage and counter espionage. All I am seeking is one perfectly simple murder. I begin to suspect that that murder only occurred in a drug addict’s brain! (page 211)

But as Poirot reminds himself it is his ‘metier’ to deal with murder, to clear up murder, to prevent murder and eventually with a casual phrase spoken by Mrs Oliver it all becomes clear to him.

The plot is complex, which is rather puzzling, but for me Third Girl is also interesting because of its commentary on the 1960s culture seen through the eyes of the older characters – the disparaging remarks about the youth of the day – beatniks, long hair, clothes that were of doubtful cleanliness, and skimpy skirts, and the Van Dyke type clothes some of the young men wore, the drink and drugs and wild parties. Mrs Oliver has her usual gripe about people saying things to her about her books and how they longed to meet her, making her feel ‘hot, bothered and rather silly‘ and how much they love the ‘awful detective Sven Hjerson‘ she had created and now hates.

Maybe it’s not one of Agatha Christie’s best books but I think it’s very entertaining.

Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie

Published on June 9, 2013April 25, 2018 by Margaret4 Comments

I think Cards on the Table is one of the best of Agatha Christie’s books. It was first published in 1936 and has been reprinted many times since then. My copy is a Pan Books edition published in 1951 with this cover:

Cards on the Table

From the back cover:

Mr Shaitana is a collector. He collects snuff boxes, Egyptian antiquities … and … murderers.

His murderers are of the very finest. Not the second rate individuals who are caught and convicted. Delighting in his role as a modern Mephistopheles, Shaitana gathers his four murderers for an evening of cards.

Before the evening ends, Mr Shaitana will himself be a murder victim. How very fortunate that he invited a fifth guest to his gathering, M. Hercule Poirot.

One of the things that pleased me about this book is Agatha Christie’s Foreword in which she states that it is not the sort of detective story where the least likely person is the one to have committed the crime. This story has just four suspects and any one of them ‘given the right circumstances‘ might have committed the crime. She goes on to explain that there are four distinct types, the motives are peculiar to each person and each would employ a different method. She concludes:

The deduction must, therefore, be entirely psychological, but it is none the less interesting for that, because when all is said and done it is the mind of the murderer that is of supreme interest.

All of which suits Poirot down to the ground as he considers the psychology of each of the four suspects, Dr Roberts, a very popular doctor who may have killed a patient or two, Mrs Lorimer, a first-class bridge player and a widow who husband died under suspicious circumstances, Major Despard, a daring character, an explorer who possibly killed a botanist whilst on an expedition up the Amazon, and Anne Meredith, a young woman, a timid and careful bridge player, who may have poisoned her employer.

Poirot is not on his own, also at the bridge party were Superintendent Battle, a stolid officer from Scotland Yard (he first appeared in The Secret of Chimneys), Colonel Race, a Secret Service agent (he first appeared in The Man in the Brown Suit), and Mrs Ariadne Oliver, writer of popular detective fiction, (meeting Poirot for the first time). It helps if you can play bridge to understand how Poirot uncovered the murderer, but it’s not necessary – I managed with just a minimal memory of the card game, and it all hinges on the psychology of the characters anyway.

As Ariadne Oliver is used by Agatha Christie to convey some of her own opinions I wondered whether this description of her physical appearance was how she viewed herself:

… she was an agreeable woman of middle age, handsome in a rather untidy fashion with fine eyes, substantial shoulders and a large quantity of rebellious grey hair with which she was continually experimenting. One day her appearance would be highly intellectual – a brow with the hair scraped back from it and coiled in a large bun in the neck – on another Mrs Oliver would suddenly appear with Madonna loops, or large masses of slightly untidy curls. On this particular evening Mrs Oliver was trying out a fringe. (page 13)

I think there is no doubt that Ariadne’s views on writing and on the character of her detective are Agatha Christie’s own views. For ‘Finn’ in the extract quoted below read ‘Belgian’:

… I regret only one thing – making my detective a Finn. I don’t really know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said or done. (page 55)

And this must be from her own experience too:

I’m always getting tangled up in horticulture and things like that. People write to me and say I’ve got the wrong flowers all out together. As though it mattered – and, anyway, they are all out together in a London shop. (page 110)

And this about writing?:

One actually has to think, you know. And thinking is always a bore. And you have to plan things. And then one gets stuck every now and then, and you feel you’ll never get out of the mess – but you do! Writing’s not particularly enjoyable. It’s hard work, like everything else. …

Some days I can only keep going by repeating over and over to myself the amount of money I might get for my next serial rights. That spurs me on, you know. So does your bank-book when you see how much overdrawn you are. …

‘I can always think about things,’ said Mrs Oliver happily. ‘What is so tiring is writing them down. I always think I’ve finished, and then when I count up I find I’ve only written thirty thousand words instead of sixty thousand, and so then I have to throw in another murder and get the heroine kidnapped again. It’s all very boring.’ (pages 110 – 111)

But back to the mystery, Mr Shaitana is murdered whilst his guests are playing bridge. Two games were set up – one made up of the four people he considered were murderers and the other in a separate room made up of the four detectives or investigators of crime. Mr Shaitana sat by the fire in the room with the murderers. When the four detectives finished their game they return to the other room where they find the game still in progress and Mr Shaitana still sitting by the fire – stabbed in the chest with an ornamental dagger.

What follows is that each detective carries out their own investigations and as I read I swung from one suspect to the other, but I was never really sure who the culprit was. Poirot is his usual brilliant self even though at one point he is astonished and upset at the possibility that he might be wrong: