Tag: Agatha Christie

Death of a Gossip vs. Appointment With Death

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently read Agatha Christie’s Poirot novel, Appointment With Death. I was very annoyed with how much it reminded me of the Hamish MacBeth novel, Death of a Gossip. First, because this is entirely the wrong way around. Death of a Gossip was published forty seven years after Appointment With Death. It’s just an accident that I happened to read them out of chronological order. Also, though I didn’t find Appointment With Death satisfying, it was a much, much better book than was Death of a Gossip. (If you’re curious, here’s what I wrote about Death of a Gossip and here’s what I wrote about Appointment with Death.)

(Spoilers follow, of course.)

I doubt that Death of a Gossip was based on Appointment with Death, but it is a weird coincidence that both of them feature the victim being a cruel older woman who likes to torment people with old secrets who is killed by a female American social climber during a private appointment the victim made with the female American social climber in order to taunt the murderer with the secret.

Admittedly, Lady Westholme (the murderer in Appointment with Death) reminded me more of the victim in Death of a Gossip than the murderer. And the murder was premeditated in Appointment with Death while it was… probably spontaneous (even though that introduces a bunch of major plot holes) in Death of a Gossip.

I can’t help but wonder if this similarity made me enjoy Appointment With Death less than I otherwise would have had the similarity to a bad mystery not occurred to me.

Come to think of it, there’s also a minor similarity to the Murder, She Wrote episode Showdown in Saskatchewan. That episode features a former officer of a prison who recognized someone who used to be an inmate there, and paid with his life for his extraordinary memory for faces.

It’s an interesting problem to consider that lesser books which steal from classics may hurt our enjoyment of the classics if we read them out of order.

Appointment With Death

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized, Writing4 Comments

I recently read Agatha Christie’s novel Appointment With Death. Published in 1938, it was the sixteenth novel featuring Hercule Poirot. Despite it being very well done, I find it a strangely unsatisfying book. Curiously, I’m inclined to say that I find it unsatisfying because it does such an excellent job of following play fair rules, and even of following G.K. Chesterton’s (good) advice on writing mysteries. That is, I think it does such a good job as a puzzle that it suffers as a novel. (note: spoilers follow.)

There is the issue that the subject is somewhat intrinsically a downer. A family is tormented by their cruel mother who holds the purse strings and was so heavily manipulated that none of them decided that there are more important things than money and struck off on their own. (To be fair, as one of the characters pointed out, they had no skills and it was during the Great Depression, which was a particularly difficult time to find employment as an unskilled laborer.)

I think that the thing which really made the solution unsatisfying was that it was—basically—unrelated to the main plot. Most of the book was taken up with Sarah King and the Boyntons and their obsession with getting free of Mrs. Boynton. Now, to be fair, this is practically the ideal when it comes to detective-novel-as-puzzle stories. That it turns out that the murder was really about something that was in front of our face but we didn’t notice would be how many people would describe the goal of a detective story, or at least a classic, golden-age detective story. The problem comes down to an unwritten rule of this type of detective story: if a red herring is completely unrelated to the solution, it must be a minor part of the story.

The connection between the red herring and the solution does not need to very strong. It suffices, for example, that the red herring helped to give the murderer opportunity. Another possible connection is that the murderer used the red herring as cover. In extremis, the murderer can even use the red herring as a red herring (the original red herrings were smoked fish dragged across a scent trail to try to fool hounds). This would consist of bringing the red herring to the attention of the detective when he should know that it isn’t related, which would then be evidence that he has some motive, leading the detective to him.

What I find disappointing about Appointment With Death is that most of the book is an unrelated red herring. Nothing that any of the suspects did was in any way related to the murder, which had taken place before all of their actions anyway. Indeed, the victim had specifically gotten them out of the way.

Now, there was a great deal of interesting detection in getting all of the Boynton family out of the way; I very much enjoyed how this culminated in Poirot pointing out how strange it was that a servant went to fetch Mrs. Boynton because none of her family did, suggesting that they all knew that she was already dead and didn’t want to be the one to have to officially find out. It was also a well-crafted inter-relationship of everyone suspecting each other, motivating these actions. This part was all great, but it was really a different book from figuring out who killed Mrs. Boynton. Once it was all cleared away, Poirot them brings out the evidence of who killed her. This, I think, is really my objection. There was no need, story wise, to clear everything else up before bringing out this evidence. So much so, the revelation of all of the evidence related to the killing of Mrs. Boynton was in its own chapter.

This evidence that Lady Westholme was the murderer stood on its own and didn’t need any of the family’s muddling to be cleared away first. It would have worked equally well to have shown the evidence that it was Lady Westholme who killed Mrs. Boynton, then afterwards to explain why everyone lied in giving the wrong time of death. It would have been far more satisfying, I think, if it would not have worked equally well in that order.

In a sense, this gets at the same problem as I discussed in my post about a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine scene. In the scene, one character asks another about what was true in all the things he said. The other replies that it was all true. “Even the lies?”

“Especially the lies.”

Now, Deep Space Nine never paid that line off, but this is a decent way of describing the ideal in a mystery. The evidence should be available and everyone but the brilliant detective should misunderstand it. But they should not completely misunderstand it. The pinnacle of achievement in a mystery story is for the author to come up with a way in which even the lies are true. That, I think, is what makes it a truly human drama and not merely a puzzle.

The way that Appointment With Death was written, it was really two stories that interleaved with each other but did not relate to each other. One is a novel about an unhappy family, the other is a short story about the correct interpretation of an ambiguous statement.

There’s also a curious aspect to reading this story now, in the year of our Lord 2023, with it having been published in 1938. Agatha Christie couldn’t have known this but the book was published very shortly before World War 2. It contains an epilogue set five years later, which would place it in the heart of the war. Yet in the epilogue everyone is happy. This could work if the main story was set several years before, say, in 1934. With the Boyntons being Americans, the care-free atmosphere could make sense in 1939 since America was not to (officially) join the war until December of 1941. This would not be unreasonable. And there is precedent for the books being set out of their publication order. In an afterword in Murder in Mesopotamia, published in 1936, which explicitly sets it right before Murder on the Orient Express, which was published in 1934.

Anyway, This is no fault of the construction of the book, of course, but it still makes it a little bit of a weird experience to read it.

Predators Are Frequently Prey

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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.

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized4 Comments

I recently read Agatha Christie’s novel One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. It is the nineteenth novel to feature Hercule Poirot and was written during a very turbulent time. Published in November of 1940, it would have been written mostly during World War 2, or entirely if Christie had started it after the publication of Sad Cypress in early 1940.

It has some vivid, if not always pleasant characters, and among other things deals with the kind of revolutionary socialists who are the counterpart to the German ones who started the second world war. Her portrayals of human beings are at times almost painfully realistic and well done. I’m inclined to agree with the reviewer Maurice Richardson, who in his review in 1940 wrote:

The Queen of Crime’s scheming ingenuity has been so much praised that one is sometimes inclined to overlook the lightness of her touch. If Mrs Christie were to write about the murder of a telephone directory by a time-table the story would still be compellingly readable.

Agatha Christie’s style is so simple it might be easy to miss the subtlety of her observation of human nature in its varied forms.

All of that said, there does seem to be a pretty big plot hole in the story, which I find quite surprising because there are usually no plot holes in Agatha Christie’s work, not even small ones. (spoilers follow.)

I can’t see any way that Alistair Blunt could have arranged for a dentist appointment shortly before Mr. Amberiotis’ appointment which was right after Miss Sainsbury Seale’s appointment. And that’s assuming we were to grant the coincidence of the two men having the same dentist as Mabelle Sainsbury Seale, which seems difficult on its face since she was of a different social class than them. Oh, and also the same dentist as “Mrs. Chapman.” (Mabelle and “Mrs. Chapman” had to have the same dentist because the switching of dental records was an important plot point. [See the second update below for more.])

The coincidences are not insurmountable; coincidences do happen and when they merely shape the result rather than make it possible, it’s not disappointing.

But what I can’t for the life of me figure out is how Alistair Blunt (or “Mrs. Chapman”) ever found out about this coincidence. People—especially foreigners who are only visiting—don’t visit the dentist often enough that one would just call around to all of the dentists asking if they had an appointment for the victim. Even if this coincidence was known, how would Alistair Blunt then get an appointment for shortly before Mr. Amberiotis? Requesting it would be far too suspicious. Not to mention that setting up having been patients would take months, at least.

And there’s no way that the entire thing could be coincidence on the day of the murders, since the murders and switching of the dental records were planned ahead of time, as was the fake telegram getting the secretary out of the way.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s something I’m missing, because this is very unlike Agatha Christie.

UPDATE: A reader brought up the timing of Amberiotis’ making an appointment with the dentist. This, I think, was in advance of the day of his murder. I’m going to quote the section in full since it’s short.

At the Savoy Hotel Mr. Amberiotis was picking his teeth with a toothpick and grinning to himself.

Everything was going very nicely.

He had had his usual luck. Fancy those few kind words of his to that idiotic hen of a woman being so richly repaid. Oh! well—cast your bread upon the waters. He had always been a kindhearted man. And generous! In the future he would be able to be even more generous. Benevolent visions floated before his eyes. Little Dimitri… And the good Constantopolus struggling with his little restaurant… What pleasant surprises for them…

The toothpick probed ungaurdedly and Mr. Amberiotis winced. Rosy visions of the future faded and gave way to apprehensions of the immediate future. He explored tenderly with his tongue. He took out his notebook. Twelve o’clock. 58, Queen Charlotte Street.

He tried to recapture his former exultant mood. But in vain. The horizon had shrunk to six bare words.

“58, Queen Charlotte Street. Twelve o’clock.”

While the text is slightly ambiguous, I think the most natural interpretation of these words would be that Mr. Amberiotis already had an appointment with the dentist, which was why upon feeling the pain, he merely looked at his notebook and there was no mention of making a telephone call.

On the other hand, this text also makes it sound like Mr. Amberiotis had just had his conversation with the real Miss Sainsbury Seale but that had to have happened at least a week before, since that was the length of time that “Miss Chapman” pretended to be Miss Sainsbury Seale.

That said, if the goal is to figure out an interpretation of these words that resolves all plot issues, this section must describe Mr. Amberiotis merely considering the anticipated fruit of having been kind to Miss Sainsbury Seale over a week ago, and then suddenly, by poking the sore place in his mouth, recollecting the appointment he made a while ago with the dentist.

UPDATE: In checking up on something, I came across the fact that Mabelle Sainsbury Seale did, by coincidence, have the same dentist as Alistair Blunt and that’s how they met in London. Approximately three months before the murders, Mabelle was coming out of the dentist’s office as Alistair was going into it and she recognized him and said that she used to be a great friend of his wife’s. So that part was a coincidence which shaped how the murder later took place. Moreover, this coincidence was revealed less than halfway into the book. With the dentist of Miss Sainsbury Seale known three months before the murder, “Sylvia Chapman” had time to become a patient of the same dentist. So there’s no plot hole on how Sylvia and Mabelle had the same dentist in order to make the switch of the records possible.

One solution for how Mr. Amberiotis had the same dentist as Blunt and Sainsbury Seale would be what the ITV version of the story starring David Suchet did, which was to have Mabelle recommend her dentist to Mr. Amberiotis. I don’t remember this being in the novel, but neither was there anything which contradicted it.

This still does not explain how they found out about Mr. Amberiotis’ appointment in order for Alistair to get an appointment on the same day. The fake Mabelle’s appointment does not require an explanation since the dentist, himself, said that it was made the day before as an emergency appointment. But how on earth did they know for which day Mr. Amberiotis had an appointment?

Miss Marple Short Stories vs. Novels

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, UncategorizedLeave a comment

In the year of our Lord 1932 the first thirteen Miss Marple stories were collected into a book, The Thirteen Problems. The 1953 edition of this book contained a forward by Agatha Christie in which she said that Miss Marple is better suited to short stories (unlike Poirot, who does better with novels). I find this quite interesting:

I enjoyed writing the Miss Marple stories very much, conceived a great affection for my fluffy old lady, and hoped that she might be a success. She was. After the first six stories had appeared, six more were requested, Miss Marple had definitely come to stay.

She has appeared now in several books and also in a play—and actually rivals Hercule Poirot in popularity. I get about an equal number of letters, one lot saying: “I wish you would always have Miss Marple and not Poirot,” and the other “I wish you would have Poirot and not Miss Marple.” I myself incline to her side. I think, that she is at her best in the solving of short problems; they suit her more intimate style. Poirot, on the other hand, insists on a full-length book to display his talents.

These Thirteen Problems contain, I consider, the real essence of Miss Marple for those who like her.

This may contain something of an explanation for why Miss Marple is so little in her own books. She is more in them than she is in her short stories—she’s often only in a page or so of the short story—but the belief that she is better at solving short problems may shape the novels so that other people do the long work and it is presented to her as only as a summary, such that for her it is a short problem.

I can also see what Agatha Christie has in mind. Miss Marple does a little investigating in A Caribbean Murder and most of the investigating in Nemesis, and as much as I liked both I have to admit that it didn’t quite feel right. People should come to her, rather than the other way around. In some sense I think that the essence of Miss Marple is not precisely that she is intimate, but that she is domestic. This relates to how Sir Henry Clithering would always tease Miss Marple about how the people in a crime remind her of people from the village; the whole point is that the public world was not really larger than the domestic world. When Miss Marple does the investigating, she ventures outside of the domestic sphere. It is right, in a sense, for someone else to do the investigating in the public world then bring it to her, where she uses her knowledge of the domestic world to solve the problems of the public world.

That said, the way she does the investigation in Nemesis does not violate this; one of the parts of the domestic world is visiting other domiciles. Old ladies visit each other, and pay calls, and chat about local and family things, and Miss Marple mostly solves the mystery in Nemesis using these tools.

All that said, of the short stories and novels, I’m inclined to say that The Body in the Library was the best of the Miss Marple stories. So I suppose I must respectfully disagree with Dame Agatha, though I will say I think that she’s right when she said that the Thirteen Problems contain the essence of Miss Marple. They give you a clear sense of who and what Miss Marple is, but I do not think that they are her at her best.

At Bertram’s Hotel

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized8 Comments

Published in 1965, At Bertram’s Hotel was the second-to-last Miss Marple novel written, though the third-from-last published. (Like with the final Poirot novel, Curtain, Agatha Christie had written the final Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, in the 1940s and put it in a safe with her lawyers to be published after her death.) It is a strange story, more a light thriller about a police detective who on the trail of an organized crime syndicate than a mystery. Miss Marple, as is often the case, does not feature heavily in the story, but when she does it’s as a witness, rather than as a detective. (Spoilers below.)

In fact, we don’t even get a murder until a few chapters from the end, and there isn’t much of a mystery in the story until the murder comes along. I suppose that there is a bit of mystery about what the deal is with Bertram’s Hotel, but it seems plausible that it’s simply an expensive hotel with an old-timey gimmic. It’s not that expensive to have a dozen varieties of tea, to make real muffins with lots of butter, and to have real seed cake. Granted, these things would have been more expensive in England 1965 than in America in 2022 (which I’m used to), but food rationing had been over for 10 years by then. It doesn’t require astonishing amounts of money to have these things and old furniture.

The idea that the whole thing is a front for organized crime, and that’s where the real money comes from, is also a bit far-fetched. Crime does pay, but it rarely pays well. It has large ongoing costs, but can only opportunistically generate revenue. That revenue tends to be a small fraction of the value of the goods stolen, too, since the pool of people who will buy stolen goods is fairly small, and will tend to insist on a huge discount for the risk that it’s taking.

Crime also has higher costs than legitimate business since it has a limited labor pool and can’t outsource contract enforcement to the courts and the police. That limited labor pool also tends to have few highly talented people, since highly talented people can probably make more money through legitimate businesses. The entire labor pool—high or low talent—also has issues with reliability. Carefully planned robberies that require a dozen people or so to all do what they’re supposed to, when they’re supposed to—you can’t use just ordinary criminals for that.

When you put it all together, it makes more sense for Bertram’s Hotel to be able to run because it is expensive and serves a niche who will pay for it than because it is a front for a criminal organization. Moreover, what good did the hotel actually do for the criminal organization? They weren’t using it to store stolen goods until the heat cooled down. As far as I could tell, the mastermind more-or-less lived there, and they had a very strange habit of having character actors impersonate recognizable guests who were staying at the hotel.

Speaking of which, why did they bother with the impersonations of recognizable people who were all staying at the hotel they ran their criminal empire from? Some sort of costume makes sense, but why impersonate a specific person? Moreover, why impersonate a specific person who was staying at the headquarters of the criminal organization? They didn’t need to keep exact tabs on the whereabouts of the people being impersonated. All it did was serve to point to their headquarters by giving the police a weird and unexplained coincidence. I could see the point if they had selected some other hotel from which to choose the people impersonated; this would serve to send the police on a wild goose chase if they noticed the odd coincidence.

(I do suppose that impersonating people from Bertram’s allowed them to borrow the actual clothing of the people in question, but this is a very curious sort of cost-cutting measure.)

Also very strange is that Miss Marple is on vacation in this novel, both literally and in many ways, figuratively. She was given a two week stay at the hotel by her niece-in-law as a treat, and is in the plot mostly because her various reclinings in high backed chairs and shopping expeditions put her in places to witness things relevant to the plot. She does make deductions, of course, but no earlier than the police make them; her only assistance to them is telling to them what she saw.

I can’t help but wonder why this novel is the way that it is. It is always possible that Mrs. Christie had gotten bored and wanted a change, or else that her life was busy and she wanted to write an easy novel. In her autobiography she said that thrillers were much easier to write than murder mysteries since you could make things up as you went along in thrillers.

It is also the case that tastes change, over time. Agatha Christie wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916 and it took her three years to find a publisher. Detective fiction was wildly popular at the time, and still quite new. Detective fiction is still extremely popular, though it is not nearly so new. The 1960s, however, were a very strange time. The mystery stories written during the inter-war period knew that they were at the end of an era and stories written in the 1950s (and set then) seem to know that they are at the transition point. In the 1960s people knew that they were at the beginning of something else, but not really of what, because it was completely unsettled. Nothing old was really appropriate, but nothing new was really any good. (You can tell this, in part, because of how bad—by which I largely mean nihilistic—popular culture became in the 1970s.) Truth be told, things haven’t really settled down even yet. If you look closely at popular culture, it’s still a rebellion even though it is in many ways a successful rebellion and should have moved on to being conservative. Bishop Barron once described it as modernity needing to constantly tell its founding myth, but I think it’s actually more that the fundamental nihilism at the core of modernity requires an enemy in order to give it a framework to define itself. (Hence, incidentally, why so many moderns are busy trying to re-tell older stories, badly. They need enemies.)

The 1960s must have been a strange time to write a murder mystery in, and Agatha Christie wrote in order to please her audience, so she would have been at least partially sensitive to the times. Especially since she wrote during the golden age of detection fiction, she would have been in a difficult place to keep writing the same kind of things. It is relatively easy for young people to look back at a golden age and say, “I want to write that kind of thing” since we will never have a sneaking suspicion that we’re simply stuck in our ways. For us, to write the good old stuff is to swim against the currents, and as G.K. Chesterton once observed, while a dead thing can go with the flow, only a live thing can swim against the current. Agatha Christie was not quite in this happy position; she must have had doubts that people still wanted the classic stories when so much else of their tastes have changed.

I don’t want to exaggerate this, of course. Nemesis, the next Miss Marple story, published in 1971, was in many ways a classic detective story, or at least much more of a classic detective story. Still, after almost fifty years, it’s not shocking that she should try something a bit different. I guess what I wonder is why Agatha Christie put Miss Marple in At Bertram’s Hotel if she didn’t intend to make it a Miss Marple story. She was quite willing to write stories which had neither Poirot nor Miss Marple in them.

This story reminds me a bit of the Dorothy L. Sayers story Murder Must Advertise. There aren’t many direct parallels, but both are quasi-thrillers about about the police taking down a massive crime syndicate. Lord Peter is far more in Murder Must Advertise than Miss Marple is in At Bertram’s Hotel, of course, but he spends a lot of his time under cover as Death Bredon and his personality is significantly shifted when he does, especially when he goes further undercover. I don’t really remember it because it’s been many years and I don’t really care for the story. It’s another mostly-action story where the murder is solved almost as an afterthought, a bit like The Maltese Falcon. For some reason the part of the story that stands out to me the most was when Lord Peter, in whatever alias he was in at the time as an underworld criminal, dives off of a statue into a shallow pool of water. I suppose Lord Peter might have picked up the skill of shallow diving at some point. To be fair, there’s really no reason that he shouldn’t. It just felt so random and out of character, and certainly never came up before or since.

A problem that I have with both is that I really don’t like the thriller genre. As such, I have no good way of determining if these are mediocre examples of it, or if they’re quite well done and I just don’t like this kind of story.

The Immodesty of Hercule Poirot

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized1 Comment

One of the things which comes up in Poirot novels and short stories is how immodest Poirot is. He is very willing to say that he is the greatest detective ever, since it’s an indisputable fact and is often relevant to clients. Hastings, whose ideas of modesty are more English, frequently teases Poirot about this. I find this aspect of the stories very interesting, especially because Agatha Christie seemed to think it was funny enough to include quite often.

It is also curious to consider the contrast: Poirot was immodest but humble. Captain Hastings was modest but not humble.

I’m not really sure what to make of this; sometimes Agatha Christie seemed to hold it against Poirot and other times she seemed to side with him. Poirot has asked, quite reasonably, why it is considered better for a man who is good at something to lie and say that he is not. At other times Poirot seems to stray out of merely stating relevant facts and becoming boastful. I suppose to some degree we cannot expect a character written over the course of more than forty years to be entirely consistent. For that matter, real people are not always consistent even within a day, to say nothing of being consistent in many different circumstances over the course of forty years.

(Actually, the duration of Poirot stories is not really calculable; as Agatha Christie observed in her autobiography, given how she made Poirot of retirement age in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, he must have been well over 100 by his later cases, since they were all—or at least, mostly—set contemporaneously.)

A curious contrast to this is Miss Marple, who is extraordinarily modest. In a most Victorian style, she will not allow anyone to say anything positive about her without some sort of disclaiming it; the closest she comes to acknowledging the truth is a qualification to her disclaimer (“though it is true that I’ve been of some little assistance once or twice…”).

Modesty can, of course, be an enormously useful social grace. Being boastful can come at enormous social cost. That said, there is a danger of these things being confused with the far more important moral virtue of humility. Captain Hastings, in the books, frequently thought himself far more clever than he was, though he never said so except in his memoirs. In consequence he made all sorts of mistakes and occasionally made situations worse. In contrast, Poirot’s boasting was always in service of a practical point; he wanted clients to trust him because it was to their benefit to trust him. He wanted police inspectors to trust him, because their cases would go better if they trusted him. He never boasted of his abilities for his own benefit, but only for the benefit of those to whom he boasted.

Agatha Christie was, in her temperament, closer to Miss Marple than to Poirot, though based on her biography she was not greatly like either. Still, I do wonder how much she was actually able to see Poirot’s point of view. Authors cannot give characters what they do not have, but authors can give characters what they do not know that they have. It would be curious to know how much this is a case of that.

Miss Marple

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So far I’ve read 13 Miss Marple short stories (the first thirteen) and the novels Murder at the Vicarage, The Body in the Library, and A Murder Is Announced. These span 23 years (from 1927 to 1950), and while the environment of the mysteries changes quite considerably (especially in A Murder Is Announced, which is clearly set after World War II), there are some strongly consistent elements throughout.

The consistent element which strikes me the most is the degree to which Miss Marple stories are not about her. If it is the case that in Poirot stories Poirot emphasizes that he does not get down on his hands and knees to look for clues because that is the work of others, who bring what they find to Poirot so that it may be understood, nevertheless Poirot features quite heavily in Poirot stories. If he’s not in every chapter, he’s certainly in most of them.

Miss Marple is far less prominent in her stories.

The short stories, I suppose, are not so surprising in this regard. In the golden age of detective fiction short stories were quite frequently meant—and read—as decorated logic puzzles. It was common enough for them to be a recounting of the events to the detective, followed by the detective giving the solution, and these were most of the Miss Marple short stories.

Novels, however, are different. Detective novels are stories about a detective, or at least stories that involve a detective, in which the problem and its solution makes up only one thread of the story. In these, it is far more common for the story to be about the detective, to at least some degree. Miss Marple stories are not about her; in fact she’s not even the primary detective in her stories. I don’t mean that there is, technically, a police detective in charge of the case. I mean that the police detective does most of the work, and, more to the point, most of the time in the novel is spent with him (while he does it).

I find this very curious. It’s not bad, and doesn’t make the novels less enjoyable—though it does rob them of the comfort of having familiar characters. Murder mysteries necessarily involve new people in each novel—you can’t keep killing off the same victim, after all—but there is something very comforting in getting back together with familiar characters. This may be most pronounced in my experience in the Cadfael series, where after a few novels we have the familiar characters of Cadfael, Hugh Berringar, Abbot Rodulphus, Prior Robert, Brother Jerome, and several other brothers such as Edmund the infirmarer and Petrus, the cook. These characters are not only familiar, but form a community.

Part of what I find curious about this is that Miss Marple is, herself, an extremely settled character. She has spent nearly her whole life in the village of Saint Mary Mead. She has even lived in the same house during the entire time she’s been there. She is a Victorian who is well settled in her ways—though not so much that she can’t adapt to changing circumstances. It is also significant that she is a spinster. The life of a parent changes very greatly over time—there is marriage, then a child, then children; the children start out as young children and grow, their needs constantly changing with their size and age. Eventually they become adults and may well give their parents grand-children, which is yet another set of changes in the grandparents life. A spinster’s life, by contrast, changes far less, or at least has far fewer necessary changes of such direct magnitude. In short, Miss Marple, the character, is a very settled character.

I wonder whether part of this is that Miss Marple is a feminine character. Agatha Christie very much wrote Miss Marple as a woman, not merely a gender-swapped man. A great many female characters, especially in modern times, are very masculine women, or more often characters that were written as men and then cast with a woman playing the part of the man. Agatha Christie tended to write genuinely female characters for her women, and I think that this is true of Miss Marple, who has the feminine characteristic of liking to be unobtrusive. This is not at all the same thing as liking to be passive—Miss Marple is most certainly not a passive character. Like a great many women, however, she does have a marked preference for not being noticed by people too far outside of her social circle, and for not drawing too much attention to herself within it. This is a difficult thing for males to understand because people are so much less interested in us than they are in women. We like when people pay attention to us because it happens so rarely. We are also trained from a young age to be used to the downsides of publicity, because women like to use males to shield them from public interactions that they don’t want. Miss Marple was raised as a lady and thus would want her privacy; Miss Marple books being largely about others may, in a subtle way, be related to this.

Captain Hastings in Dumb Witness

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Dumb Witness (originally titled Poirot Loses a Client), published in 1937, is the seventh and penultimate appearance of Captain Hastings in a Poirot novel. (The last would be the final Poirot novel, Curtain, which was written in the early 1940s and put in a bank vault until 1975, when Agatha Christie knew she would write no more novels.) The portrayal of Captain Hastings, in Dumb Witness, represents something of a strange development of the character.

The Wikipedia article on Dumb Witness has a quote from an E.R. Punshon, in a review of the novel, who said that Poirot, “shows all of his usual acumen; Captain Hastings – happily once more at Poirot’s side – more than all his usual stupidity…” This seems an adequate description. His stupidity is only slightly more pronounced than it was in the previous novel with him, The A.B.C. Murders. In fact, I wrote about this aspect of the portrayal of Hastings in it. In both, Hastings seems to have had a turn for the worse, compared to his earlier portrayals. I find myself wondering all the more why he did.

One thing I will say for Hastings in Dumb Witness over The A.B.C. Murders is that he does not, at least, lose his head over pretty women. This may be that Christie only put one beautiful woman in Dumb Witness and she was engaged, but happily Captain Hastings at least behaved like a married man. he seems to have become even dumber, though.

Hastings’ stupidity in Dumb Witness seems to be channeled primarily into one action—complete certainty that Emily Arundel died of natural causes. Why he is so certain is given no explanation whatever. He at first bases this certainty on the casual word of a real estate agent—and one who only got his news from local gossip, at that. Each person who had no better knowledge of Miss Arundel’s death thinking it was natural causes would have strengthened this conviction if it didn’t start out as complete certainty, but it certainly didn’t weaken it. This feels like it is here to serve some practical purpose, but I can’t imagine what that practical purpose is.

Hastings started off as a Watson, that is, as a character of ordinary intelligence who narrated the stories, was impressed by the detective, and asked questions which gave the detective an opportunity to explain clues to the reader. As a mild variation, the Watson can have an intelligence very slightly below the average reader, as commanded in the decalogue of Fr. Ronald Knox.

Hastings seems, here, to be a complete idiot. He is, until about three quarters of the way through the book, unable to consider the possibility that Emily Arundel might have been murdered. He holds as absolutely certain, for no reason whatever, that a rich old woman, upon whose life one attempt had been made, must have died of completely natural causes. This might have served some literary function if it prompted Poirot to explain why there is doubt, but it long-since lost that purpose after the first such explanation. Especially since Hastings’ doubts were often in the narrator’s commentary, it took on the character of a simple monomania.

I suppose that this might have been meant to produce a contrast when Poirot turned out to be right, except that we already knew that. There is not going to be a Poirot novel in which Poirot turned out to be wasting his time and there was nothing whatever to discover. This is as implausible as a Poirot novel in which Poirot doesn’t appear, or shave his mustache, or dies on the first page. So why spend so much time and effort suggesting such a thing?

Even stranger, this seems to be at odds with the character’s function as a Watson. Watson admires Holmes. He all but worships Holmes. He doesn’t bemusedly play chauffeur all the while thinking his friend is senile and wasting his time. This is all the more the case given that this is a late case of Poirot’s and Hastings should, by now, have an ample store of experience to draw on that Poirot’s instincts are usually right. What’s the point of bringing a character back if he isn’t the same character from the previous stories—or acts like he wasn’t in them. What’s the purpose of a close friend of Poirot’s who grows to trust Poirot less and less as time wears on?

I think that there must be an answer because Agatha Christie was an intelligent, thoughtful woman. I don’t think that writing Hastings this way was a good choice but it seems very likely that it was at least an intelligible idea. Of course, given that this was his last appearance before the final Poirot novel, I suspect that Mrs. Christie also came to think that it wasn’t a good choice. But what on earth was the goal with him that didn’t work out? She did, after all, pack him off to Argentina in Murder on the Links. Bringing him back was a choice.

I’m in some danger of repeating myself, but I find the whole thing very perplexing. Approximately every character but Hastings has a reasonably consistent psychology to them. Hastings, alone, seems more a collection of a pointless literary devices than a character. Even Poirot seems to tire of him. Since Hastings refuses to think, Poirot doesn’t explain anything to him. His function even as a literary device seems to be lost.

Perhaps Hastings was merely meant as comic relief? There is some possibility here, except that for the most part he isn’t funny.

Perhaps I’m merely biased because Hugh Frasier’s portrayal of him in the David Suchet Poirot is so compelling. It just seems like such a pity. Captain Hastings had the potential to be so interesting but he simply wasn’t used. Perhaps Mrs. Christie thought that he was beloved by the fans and so brought him back for their sake, but reluctantly, and that’s why she didn’t make any use of him. If so, it’s a great pity. It is an explanation which explains, at least.

I hope it’s not true, though.

Murderers Call In Poirot a Lot…

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized8 Comments

As I’ve been reading the Poirot short stories and novels, it’s struck me that it’s not just once or twice that it was the murderer who called Poirot into the case. I don’t want to go into a list, since merely to name them would consist of spoilers, but off the top of my head I can think of at least four novels and a short story in which the murderer called Poirot into the case and two more short stories about robbery rather than murder in which the thief called Poirot in. I’m confident that this is not an exhaustive list. I’m really not sure what to make of this.

If it happened merely once, it would be an interesting twist. Happening so often, it feels like something else. What, I’m not entirely sure. A few possibilities recommend themselves.

One possibility is that by frequently having the person who called Poirot in be the criminal it keeps the reader more on his toes. I’m not sure this really works, though; there’s a certain foolishness in calling in the world’s greatest detective to investigate your crime. It becomes more foolish still after reading about his cases in the newspaper (or in Captain Hastings’ records of them) and seeing how often he’s willing to accuse the person who hired him. If I murdered someone in the 1930s and I was determined to call a detective in to investigate the case, I would far rather call in Giraud than Poirot.

Another possibility is that this was merely a solution to the problem that all mystery writers face of how on earth you get your detective in on the case. It is, of course, possible to go the Jessica Fletcher route and simply have the astonishing coincidence that the detective just happens to be around murders ten to twenty times per year. Those who want a little more realism need to be more creative. The problem with calling a detective in before the crime is committed is that, in general, there is only one person who knows that the crime will be committed—the criminal. The major alternative I can think of is a person who suspects that attempts have been made before against his life calling in the detective. This works, but requires either a remarkably incompetent murderer or slow poisoning. The murderer calling in Poirot does open the field a bit.

The tradeoff is that it is mostly not in the murderer’s interest to call the world’s greatest detective in, which makes it very hard to make this plausible. Of all the times that it happened with Poirot, I’m inclined to say that the A.B.C. Murders was probably the most plausible. The murderer had a legitimate (from his perspective) reason for it to be Poirot and not someone less well known. The murderer also produced a very clever series of murders, complete with a scapegoat who believed that he did it, so it was plausible that Poirot might have been fooled, or else that he would have been overruled by the police.

As for the other times, the criminal calling in Poirot seems far less excusable. It was mostly pretty gratuitous. Granted, Poirot tries to be underestimated by criminals, but it seems odd for so many criminals to take such an unnecessary risk. Especially because it’s usually with very little gained by bringing him in.

Which leads me to suspect that it really is done merely as a way of bringing Poirot into the story. I’m hesitant to believe that’s the case, though, since Agatha Christie is such a master of plotting. Overall, I’m not sure what to make of it. All I’m sure of is that it’s strange.

Captain Hastings In the ABC Murders

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized1 Comment

Having recently finished reading The A.B.C. Murders (and I must remark, in passing, that the David Suchet adaptation was remarkably faithful to the book, in this case) I find myself confused by the character of Captain Hastings. As I mentioned before, he started out as a near-clone of Dr. Watson. In only the second Poirot novel, Agatha Christie gave him a wife and sent him off to Argentina. She then used him in more than twenty short stories and another dozen short stories that would become the novel The Big Four. He then periodically showed up in the novels a few more times, the second-to-last of which was The A.B.C. Murders. He’s an odd character, there.

Captain Hastings is an odd character in The A.B.C. Murders for two reasons:

  1. He’s changed in ways that don’t quite make sense.
  2. He’s stayed the same in ways that make no sense at all.

To give an example of the second one first, Captain Hastings still hankers after beautiful women. It’s natural enough that he would notice them, or even to be a bit weak-minded about them. What isn’t natural is the way he does so exactly as if he was still twenty years old and unmarried. He never mentions his wife. He openly wants to escort the young and pretty Miss Thora Grey when he should, in fact, be actively avoiding her. Now, it’s no good to say that Hastings was always weak for a pretty face, because he was so in the context of being a completely decent and honorable man. That’s what made it charming. Moreover, that’s what drew Poirot to Hastings. Hastings had a beautiful nature which Poirot admired. He really should have been on the point of refusing to accompany Miss Grey.

Further, he really should have mentioned his wife when Poirot was teasing him about being weak-headed to Miss Grey’s pretty face. “I’m off the market, old chap” or some such line really should have come to his lips. So, for that matter, should some talk about how wonderful his wife is and how happy they are together. That’s just the sort of man that Hastings was.

Similarly, Hastings has learned next to nothing in all of his years with Poirot. That’s not quite 100% true, as he does mention on some of Poirot’s more strange actions that he’d learned that when Poirot was least explicable was when Poirot was hunting down an especially important clue. Still, you’d think that after so many years following the great detective around, he would have learned a little bit. He might have occasionally made a prosaic guess just because Poirot had so frequently told him that he went wrong by being too romantic in his imagination. It’s hard to take the age of their relationship entirely seriously when it seems to have had no effect whatever on Hastings.

The changes that don’t quite make sense are, perhaps, stranger. In some sense they are related to Hastings not changing with his changing circumstances, but he no longer has that beautiful nature which Poirot so admired in Hastings’ youth. His instincts are no longer pure, if for that reason frequently misleading. To some degree I suppose Hastings is merely out of his element. The murderer being presumed to be a madman, the inordinately sane Hastings has nothing really to say. But that brings me to my main question: why on earth did Agatha Christie bring Captain Hastings back for this story? He doesn’t really seem to have a place in it.

The thing that Captain Hastings has to contribute to a story that he’s in is common humanity. He’s a thoroughly decent man. He’s honest, honorable, and generous. He is also romantic. To Poirot, he gives two things. The first is that, never being cynical, he counterbalanced Poirot’s own cynicism. Poirot sees through everything; Hastings sees through nothing. Hastings, therefore, reminds Poirot of the value of the surface. This is related to the second thing he offers Poirot: the perspective of an ordinary person. It is something that Poirot, in his brilliance, is apt to miss on the rare occasions when he forgets to take it into account.

We do get a little bit of that in The A.B.C. Murders. It is Hastings who wonders whether the third note might have had the wrong address written on it intentionally. It’s not much, though, and the story seems to barely notice it.

Overall, I don’t know what to make of it. There was no need to bring Hastings back from Argentina for this story, but little use seems to have been made of him. The problem seems to me that anything which explains the second part will run aground of the first. If there was some reason not to make use of Hastings, why not just leave in him Argentina? He was made much better use of in Peril at End House, and that was written before The A.B.C. Muders. Perhaps Mrs. Christie was so preoccupied with the clever plot that she forgot the good captain. In favor of this hypothesis, she didn’t seem to pay that much attention to the other characters, either.

Murder On The Links: Sniffing For Clues

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery1 Comment

Murder On The Links is the second novel featuring the detective Hercule Poirot. Published in March of 1923, it came very slighty after the first few Poirot short stories published in The Sketch magazine. However, publishing schedules being what they are, it was probably written before they were. It’s a very interesting story both in its own right and for its place within the history of detective stories. (If you haven’t read it yet and dislike spoilers, go read it now.)

One of the very curious elements of the story is the rivalry between Poirot and Giraud, the famous detective from the Sureté of Paris. Giraud focuses with single-minded determination on finding minute clues, like remnants of footprints and a match discarded in the grass. He painstakingly combs every inch of every crime scene on his hands and knees, looking closely at every surface. This is in strong distinction to Poirot, who lets others find the small clues while he remains standing and contents himself with figuring out what the clues mean. There is a wonderful section of dialog with Hastings in which Poirot defends his method (Hastings, who narrates the story, begins):

“But surely the study of finger-prints and footprints, cigarette ash, different kinds of mud, and other clues that comprise the minute observation of details—all these are of vital importance?”

“But certainly. I have never said otherwise. The trained observer, the expert, without doubt he is useful! But the others, the Hercules Poirots, they are above the experts! To them the experts bring the facts, their business is the method of the crime, its logical deduction, the proper sequence and order of the facts; above all, the true psychology of the case. You have hunted the fox, yes?”

“I have hunted a bit, now and again,” I said, rather bewildered by this abrupt change of subject. “Why?”

“Eh bien, this hunting of the fox, you need the dogs, no?”

“Hounds,” I corrected gently. “Yes, of course.”

“But yet,” Poirot wagged his finger at me. “You did not descend from your horse and run along the ground smelling with your nose and uttering loud Ow Ows?”

There is another section, in which Giraud discounted a two foot section of lead pipe because it did not fit into his theory of the case, but scoured the ground for other clues such as an unburnt match. Poirot remarks:

Mon ami, a clue of two feet long is every bit as valuable as one measuring two millimetres! But it is the romantic idea that all important clues must be infinitesimal!

You also see this in the much later Five Little Pigs, where the client uses this very fact that Poirot does not crawl on his knees in the dirt for clues to persuade him to take a seventeen year old case. He objected that after so much time there would be no clues to find, and she pointed out that he doesn’t use those clues anyway. (He had just boasted of that when she was taken aback by how old Poirot was.)

The context of all of this disparagement of physical clues is interesting to consider. Sherlock Holmes started the detective crazy in 1891 and was known for his magnifying glass, chemical analyses, and sharp eye for detail. He was, perhaps, more known for it than was entirely fair; he certainly did consider psychology, at least on occasion. That said, he was famous for his monograph on cigar ash, for being able to distinguish the tread of every make of bicycle tire, etc. And in 1923 the Holmes stories were by no means complete. Holmes Short stories were published in the 1920s until the last one was published in 1927.

There is also the at-the-time popular detective Dr. Thorndyke, whose entire stock-and-trade was careful observation, extensive medical knowledge, and for-the-time high tech experiments. (The for-the-time high tech may in part explain why he was enormously popular in his day and has had very little staying power after it.) He was relatively early on in his career at this point, having started in 1909 and appearing in five novels by the end of 1922.

I should also mention that from things I’ve read in the time period, there was something of a flood of works that have not generally been remembered but which imitated Sherlock Holmes to greater or lesser extents (often greater). These often, I get the impression, focused on physical evidence to seem clever. Imitation frequently involves exaggeration, especially when it is imitation by writers who are not extraordinary.

Standing against this context, however, is G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. Father Brown did not crawl about with a magnifying glass any more than Poirot did, and he started solving cases in 1910. Father Brown was immensely popular in his day (and is still beloved at least by fans of Chesterton). I am not certain of the history but I believe that Father Brown formed the other end of the spectrum from Sherlock Holmes, being primarily a psychological sleuth.

What, then, should we make of Poirot’s looking down on the gathering of minute physical evidence? I think it is probably best classed as a preference among the existing spectrum of detective stories, rather than as anything new, even though it is presented as something of a novelty to the people in the story. Detective stories have something of a tradition of commenting on detective stories as a genre. Especially during the golden age, it is common for detectives to do this by discussing their “theory of detection”. Another common approach was what we see here—for some character to have a rival theory of detection. I think it was most often the Watson character, but police detectives also commonly would clash with the brilliant detective over the right way to go about solving a case.

This commentary had two main purposes, but I think that the second was far more important than the first. The less important purpose was as a commentary on the genre. The more important purpose was to make the brilliant detective seem brilliant. He could not, after all, be all that brilliant if he went about things in the same manner as everyone around him but was merely luckier. Or to put it another way: in order to achieve magical results, one must have some magic. The detective’s commentary on the theory of detection provides this magic; it is his unique theory of detection which is the key to his success.

I think, therefore, the rivalry between Poirot in Giraud should be taken primarily in this light. Instead of as commentary on other fictional detectives, it is meant primarily to be a humorous way to make the brilliance of Hercule Poirot shine. It just happens to be funny, too.