Catching Up to Poirot: Agatha Christie – “Lord Edgware Dies,” “The Blue Train,” “Peril at End House”, “Three Act Tragedy”

We let Hercule Poirot go on a couple of Holidays, but it’s time to catch up with him.

Reading Lord Edgware Dies after Halloween Party is a balm. This is archetypal Agatha Christie, none of that latter-day bitterness. A dinner with 13 guests goes superstitiously wrong- and anyone who doesn’t have cooks, maids, butlers, and other staff wonders why anyone would plan a dinner with 13 guests.

The Mystery of the Blue Train is considered one of Christie’s worst Poirot novels- by Christie herself. It’s mostly a contractual obligation churned around the time of her divorce, her mother’s death, and her notorious disappearance. At Christie’s high level of chug-along competence, nothing goes off the rails, except you will be thinking about other excellent train trips that both Poirot and Miss Marple have taken. Also, you might guess the killer for once- and then instantly forget who they are or what happened. There’s a Blue Train, a Red Ruby, a Purplish Strangulation…

While vacationing in Cornwall’s St. Loo Hotel, Poirot meets a woman, Nicky Buckley, who has had four weird accidents in as many days. The heavily-framed painting over her bed fell; her brakes failed on a car ride; she almost got squished by a dislodged boulder- and now apparently a bullet has been shot through her hat! WEIRD, right? It’s not like there’s anyone who would like to kill Nicky! But Poirot is skeptical of disconnected accidents, and so should be the readers of  Peril at End House. Once more Christie got me. I will go so far as to say that the clue to this novel lies in that line: “BE SKEPTICAL OF DISCONNECTED ACIDENTS.”

Three Act Tragedy, another tribute to Cornwall’s coast, is one of the Christie novels that grows richer for me in reflexion: the richest of this batch, and Christie’s biggest best-selling hit to that point.

On the surface, this is one of the most guessable of her whodunits. I spotted the obvious, outstanding culprit very early on- and I think so could most experienced Christie readers- because it is clearly one of the three characters who sideline Hercule Poirot in his own, “Hercule Poirot” novel. In short, the “twist” on the theme is that as soon as murder announces itself at a cocktail party in Cornwall, three of the guests decide to play detective: mature, leading actor Charles Cartwright; infatuated, “modern” girl Hermione “Egg” Lytton Gore; and observant, confirmed bachelor Mr. Satterthwaite.

They go around asking questions in three dramatic acts, and Poirot, playing the idle retiree, only reluctantly makes exercise of the little grey cells at the end.

I still got lucky in my guess. Christie’s secret is that even if you ‘get’ everything, there is, until the very last chapters, a second possibility. Here there are, as I have hinted, three, (one of which might have ruined an entire OTHER Christie book, The Mysterious Mr. Quin.)

So I had the WHO-dunit. It was the WHY-dunit that eluded me, and here’s the brilliance of this one: We are plainly told the “WHY,” the motivation, at least three times throughout. And it’s tragic. The American edition changed the name to Murder in Three Acts– it may be that the editorial motives were lurid, but it detracts from a certain specific mood that Christie was aiming for. A proper tragedy, after all, is about a hero (or heroine) consumed by a salient flaw. 

The characterizations here are unusually heart-felt for a Christie novel. The last couple of Poirots, for instance, had featured sassy modern girls, but there is something about the relationship between Charles and “Egg” that suggests Christie actually cared for her actors this time around.

Incidental to the plot, Christie was a big fan of Alfred, “Lord” Tennyson, and ‘The Lady of Shalott” features here; Christie also borrowed from that poem in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side). 

Hermione “Egg” is frequently compared to Elaine, Tennyson’s Arthurian Lady, seeing the world through the magic deformation of romantic mirrors. But Egg is also  one of 1934’s “modern girls”. It’s her modern language, not the murders, which provides the most shocks here.

Here she is, speaking of Sir Charles: “I like a man who’s had affairs, proves he’s not a queer or anything.” 

Later, when her jealousy arises: “Which of those bitches got to him?” 

When she’s mildly scolded for the repeated usage of the B-word, Egg replies: “I can think of worse words for what they are!” 

(So can I, but I didn’t know that AGATHA CHRISTIE could!)

• Mystery