Mais oui! Our small man with large moustaches and an egg shaped head is back. Does he live in England, speak French, and come from Belgium? Eh bien. It must be Agatha Christie’s famous flatfoot - Hercule Poirot. This is my fifth Poirot mystery, and as customary, I didn’t solve the murder. (I did solve Death on the Nile, so a twenty percent average isn't bad.) In this investigation, even the great Hercule was stumped for awhile as he thought to himself, “Is it possible that I am growing old?” But he must have been doing his job since one of the suspects, Jane Olivera, said to him, “I loathe the sight of you - you bloody little bourgeois detective!” That’s the Hercule that I know and love. Agatha wrote 37 Hercule Poirot mysteries; the final one was Curtain: Poirot's Last Case. She wrote the novel during World War II but didn’t publish it till 1975, a year before her own death. Agatha was a master at writing main plots, creating subplots, and plot twists. Her books usually had around ten suspects, yet Agatha was able to inject "reader’s sympathy" into most of the characters, so the reader was freely empowered to root for the innocence of their favorite hypothetical felon. She certainly achieved that in this novel.
So it’s time for Hercule’s six month oral checkup, and he has the same fears as you and I. The superior Hercule was not himself. On page nine, ”His morale was down to zero. He was just that ordinary, craven figure, a man afraid of the dentist’s chair.” While in the waiting room, our sleuth observes the other patients. There was a military looking man and a seemingly angry young man flipping pages of magazines. Hercule has his appointment with Doctor Henry Morley and prepares to leave after some minor filling work. Hercule learns that the Doc’s assistant, Gladys Neville, is missing, and an important banker, Alistair Blunt, is on his way for his dental appointment. On Poirot's way out, he observes a fierce looking man in the waiting room and outside, a lady leaving a taxi who has torn her buckle off her shoe as she exited. Later that day, Hercule is informed by Chief Inspector Japp (you remember him from previous novels) of Scotland Yard that Doctor Morley has shot himself. How can that be? The Doc seemed normal and trouble free. Hercule Poirot suspects murder and gathers a list of suspects.
The possible perpetrators are: Doctor Reilly, Morley’s partner; Mr. Amberiotis, the last patient; Miss Sainsbury Seale, the taxi lady; Howard Raikes, the American; Alistair Blunt, the banker; Frank Carter, the angry young man; Gladys Neville, the missing assistant; Jane Olivera, Blunt’s niece; and Alfred Biggs, the murdered Doc’s page boy. Then the unthinkable happens - Mr. Amberiotis turns up dead at his hotel from an overdose of adrenaline and novocaine. Was he poisoned by Doctor Morley before the Doc committed suicide, or was he murdered?
Hercule Poirot is stumped. Later in the novel, he is in church with Alistair Blunt, Jane Olivera, her mom, and Howard Raikes, while listening to the morning sermon, the light bulb goes off: “It was like a kaleidoscope-shoe buckles, 10-inch stockings, a damaged face, the low tastes in literature of Alfred the page boy, the activities of Mr. Amberiotis, and the part played by the late Mr. Morley, all rose up and whirled and settled themselves down into a coherent pattern.” Okay, Mr. Poirot’s noggin is working again. Now is the time that you should grab your own copy of this highly recommended mystery.
RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
Comment: What advice did Agatha give to writers? According to Gypsyscarlett’s Weblog: “When you begin to write, you are usually in the throes of admiration for some writer, and, whether you will or no, you cannot help copying their style. Often it is not a style that suits you, and so you write badly. But as time goes on you are less influenced by admiration. You will admire certain writers, you may even wish you could write like them, but you know quite well that you can’t. If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Sparks, or Grahame Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can’t, and it would never occur to me to attempt to copy them. I have learned that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do.”
Agatha on confidence: “You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence. If you are properly modest, you will never write at all, so there has to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start in exercise book buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don’t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later you wonder if it may not be all right after all.”
And finally, Agatha explains why a writer shouldn’t critique another author’s work: ”An early story of mine was shown to a well-known authoress by a kindly friend. She reported on it sadly but adversely, saying that the author would never make a writer. What she really meant, though she did not know it herself at the time because she was an author and not a critic, was that the person who was writing was still an immature and inadequate writer who could not yet produce anything worth publishing. A critic or an editor might have been more perceptive, because it is their profession to notice the germs of what may be. So I don’t like criticizing and I think it can easily do harm.”
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