I recently read Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novel, Evil Under the Sun. It contains a very interesting observation about life which I would like to discuss. (This post is not a review of the book, I merely want to discuss one aspect of the story which I find very interesting. Note: spoilers follow.)

This observation is that predators are not, infrequently, prey, and one of the ways that they get caught is by luring them into thinking that they are catching something.

A good example of this in nature is the Iranian spider-tailed viper:

As you can see, the bird thought that it was catching a spider, but in fact the snake was catching it.

One of the curious themes that runs throughout the book is that the women think that Arlena can do whatever she likes with men because she’s beautiful, while Poirot insists that men will tire of her because she hasn’t got any brains. The women can’t believe that a woman’s brains matter to a man, while Poirot insists that, after a while, they’re almost the only thing that do. (To do him justice, he actually says the far more correct, “[The Arlena Stuarts of the world, their] empire is of the moment and for the moment. To count—to really and truly count—a woman must have goodness or brains.”)

What Poirot discovers through detection is that Arlena Stuart was predatory—she didn’t have the decency to leave men alone and loved the affirmation that they gave—but that she didn’t have the brains to be a really effective predator. People assume all virtues where they perceive physical beauty, but they can learn that it’s not true relatively quickly. The young learn this less quickly than the old, but that’s just because the young learn everything less quickly than the old. Men would quickly learn that Arlena’s only virtue was her beauty and tire of her.

Then she came across a predator who was willing to look like prey, so she became the victim.

This is a very real type; you can see it in the sort of fool who blithely says that he’d rather go to hell as the parties will be better there, or the sort of person who wants to throw off Christianity because they don’t like its restraints. Somehow these people always assume that they will be the worst member of their company—that they will be the apex predator. It’s a weird assumption, but perhaps it is an instance of the saying that pride goes before the fall.