Hercule Poirot 100 Years (1916 - 2016)

by Mark Place

  The Body in the Library (1942) has links to "A Christmas Tragedy". All the Christie stories about bad guys in disguise or in deceptive roles, from The Big Four on, also have a plot relationship to "At the Bells and Motley".

  "The Affair at the Victory Ball" (1923) is an early story in the alibi tradition. It is not as ingenious as the later tales.

  Impossible Poisonings. Christie wrote several first-rate tales of poisonings, that have links to the impossible crime tradition. These include "The Coming of Mr. Quin" (1924) (from The Mysterious Mr. Quin), "The House of Lurking Death" (1924) in Partners in Crime, "The Tuesday Night Club" (1927) and "The Herb of Death" (1930) from The Tuesday Club Murders, "How Does Your Garden Grow?" (1935) from The Regatta Mystery, and the novel Sad Cypress (1940).

  "The Yellow Jasmine Mystery" (1924), which forms Chapters 9-10 of The Big Four, has some borderline-impossible poisoning features. Later writers, such as Erle Gardener and Edmund Crispin, would sometimes build stories around Christie's approach.

  Strange Events - with Similar Solutions. As an impossible crime, "The Blue Geranium" has links with "Motive v. Opportunity" (1928) in the same collection The Thirteen Problems - but is richer in plot. There is no murder mystery in "Motive v. Opportunity"; there is just an apparent impossibility, whose explanation somewhat resembles the "supernatural" subplot about the flowers in "The Blue Geranium".

  The "supernatural" subplot in Dumb Witness / Poirot Loses A Client (1937) also has a puzzle and a solution, broadly linked to the stories above. The Pale Horse (1961) has links to this tradition, although it is not strictly speaking an impossible crime tale.

  Impossible Knowledge. Christie wrote a few tales, in which the impossibility was knowledge: access to another person's mental processes, in a seemingly impossible way. "The Voice in the Dark" (1926) from The Mysterious Mr. Quin and the first of the two impossibilities in "The Dream" (1937) are outstanding examples. The two have drastically different solutions, both clever.

  The heroine's "psychic" knowledge at the start of Sleeping Murder forms a third approach, also nicely done. Here the heroine simply seems to "know" things, in an impossible way, rather than being able to reach into another person's mind. The strange tale, "The Companion" (1930) in The Tuesday Club Murders, reworks plot ideas from "The Voice in the Dark" - but to create a regular mystery, with no impossible crime. "The Companion" also has links to the alibi tales, especially "The Blood-Stained Pavement" (1928).

  Christie created a light-hearted variation on "The Companion", as "The House at Shiraz" (1933) in Parker Pyne Investigates, that essentially reuses the same plot. "The Companion" and "The House at Shiraz" involve neither alibis nor impossible crimes. Years later, Christie would employ a variation on these tales' plot, in "The Harlequin Tea Set" (1971).

  Witnessed, but Not Understood Crimes. The Mr. Quin "The Shadow on the Glass" (1924) has people seeing alleged supernatural events, and misinterpreting them. And "Finessing The King" (1924) in Partners in Crime has a solution subtly related to that of "The Shadow on the Glass". "Finessing The King" is not at first glance an impossible crime, but it does ultimately present reality contradicting a witness to a crime, in a way that seems impossible.

  Other. Christie also wrote a number of excellent impossible crime tales, that seem to stand alone within her work. So far, I have not been able to relate them to each other, or anything else Christie wrote. These include the Miss Marple tales "Ingots of Gold" (1928), with its impossibly behaving truck, and "The Case of the Caretaker" (1941). One can also mention The Sittaford Mystery / Murder at Hazelmoor (1931). There are also borderline impossibilities in "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb" (1923) in Poirot Investigates, and in Sparkling Cyanide (1945).

  The Miss Marple "The Idol House of Astarte" is also an impossible crime. But it is a recycling of a well-known gambit that goes back to Israel Zangwill.

  Experimental Mysteries

  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the most famous novel that experiments with variations on standard detective story structure. Christie wrote a number of such works. They are among her most important stories.

  Tales with Strange Mystery Construction. "The Augean Stables" in The Labors of Hercules, one of Christie's best tales, seems to work in reverse ideas present in the Miss Marple tale "The Affair at the Bungalow". It also is even more closely related to plot ideas in Witness for the Prosecution. All of these stories also resemble "A Pot of Tea" (1924) in Partners in Crime. All of these tales have a similar, brilliant construction, one hard to analyze here without spoiling the tales. The stories all have a common basic design of plot, that seems like an experimental or avant-garde variation on the traditional mystery construction.

  In addition, "The Augean Stables" is unusual in terms of genre. It is not a conventional mystery, with a crime to be solved. Instead, it presents an odd, somewhat thriller-like situation, one that has both unexplained and often surprising features. By the end of the story, the reader knows all about the events of the tale, with a full explanation in the story. This explanation is logical, just like the solution in a traditional mystery. So it can in fact be regarded as a "fair play mystery" tale, albeit one of strange construction. "The Market Basing Mystery" (1923) in The Under Dog and Poirot's Early Cases is related to the above tales. Christie would go on to re-use the clever main plot ideas of this story in a longer Poirot case, "Murder in the Mews" (1936).

  "The Market Basing Mystery" is sometimes listed as one of Agatha Christie's impossible crime tales. This seems misleading. The body in this tale is indeed found inside a locked room. But as Inspector Japp immediately points out, the explanation is obvious. Christie makes no attempt to present the locked room as some sort of impossible puzzle, and this aspect of the tale is downplayed in the story itself. Far more important are the main ideas of the solution.

  The off-trail "Wasp's Nest" (1928) also has links to the above stories. It shares mystery plot ideas with "The Market Basing Mystery", and a temporal architecture with "The Affair at the Bungalow".

  Subverting Mystery Traditions. "The Third-Floor Flat" (1929) in The Mousetrap is one of the best Poirot short tales. It subtly subverts detective fiction conventions, the way The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1925) did. And like that novel, it is full of clues to its killer - if the reader would only start thinking in those directions (I did not). The story exhibits the architectural interest found in Golden Age detective fiction. John Dicson Carr pointed out, that the experimental ideas in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had previously been used by Christie in The Man in the Brown Suit (1924). And that she employed them there, in a variation that was more fair play. The Man in the Brown Suit is also an unusual hybrid of the adventure thriller, and the detective story.

  Other Kinds of Christie Tales

  Writing. "The Four Suspects" (1930) with Miss Marple recalls the Poirot tale, "The Double Clue" (1923). Both stories have exactly four suspects, in a non-murder mystery. Both tales have an international background, and both involve as their main clue, the detectives scrutinizing a piece of writing for its hidden significance. There is much in both stories about suspicion, and about the effects of detectives and police attentions to suspects, and the effect it has on the suspects' lives. In both tales, the social class of the suspects has considerable impact on this suspicion, and its effects. The verbal clues in these tales somewhat resemble Christie's treasure hunt stories, which also often require the detectives to understand hidden clues in a piece of text.

  "In the House of the Enemy" (1924) in The Big Four seems ancestral to "The Four Suspects". Its mystery plot is simpler, but it has some engaging thriller elements as compensation. Christie would return to this sort of writing puzzle, as a subplot in Murder on the Orient Express. This novel too involves both social class among the suspects, and an international background. Christie depicts the United States as an Utopian realm, that can melt down the distinctions of class and national origin, that so obsess people in Britain.

  Twins and Doubles. "The Adventure o
f the Western Star" (1923) is an ingenious story about twin diamonds. The tale also contains a human double, in the second crime. The material about Hercule Poirot's twin brother Achille in The Big Four (1924 - 1927) uses related ideas (Chapters 15, 18). These plots have solutions related to Christie's Impossible Disappearances of People.

  Alibis. Christie would write some alibi tales, that have nothing to do with the techniques used in her Impossible Disappearance of People works. "The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan" (1923) is an early alibi tale. "The Sign in the Sky" (1925) from The Mysterious Mr. Quin is a gem. The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) is a complex alibi story. It has maps and floor plans, and involves Miss Marple herself as a witness. The Murder at the Vicarage incorporates as an opening gambit, the ideas in the Mr. Quin tale, "The Love Detectives" (1926) (from The Mousetrap). "The Love Detectives" was the only early Mr. Quin story not included in the collection The Mysterious Mr. Quin. One suspects it was because Christie wanted to use its plot as an ingredient in The Murder at the Vicarage. The Miss Marple "Death by Drowning" (1931) has a clever alibi idea. Like "The Love Detectives", it can be said to be a "conceptual" approach to the alibi story, rather than a matter of time tables or maps. Death on the Nile (1937) turns on alibis. Towards Zero (1944) has a simple alibi concept.

  Find a Suspect; No Fair Play. "The Thumb Mark of St. Peter" (1928) with Miss Marple is one of a series of tales Christie wrote, in which suspicion of poisoning falls on a spouse or relative after a mysterious death. These include "The Cornish Mystery" (1923) in The Under Dog and Poirot's Early Cases, "Death on the Nile" (1933) in Parker Pyne Investigates, "The Lernean Hydra" (1939) in The Labors of Hercules, and the novel Crooked House (1949). These tales are often gripping as storytelling, with Christie investigating many suspects, and going through several stages of suspicion and investigation. But most hardly succeed as fair play, puzzle plot mysteries: it is hard to see how a reader could deduce their solutions from any sort of facts or clues in the tales. So they have to be regarded as among Christie's lesser works. "The Chocolate Box" (1923) resembles these other poisoning tales - but it does have a simple fair play clue to the identity of the killer. Christie also includes what is essentially a burlesque of such tales, as the second half of Chapter 15 of The Big Four (1924). Stories like "The Lemesurier Inheritance" (1923), "The Under Dog" (1926) and the pair of related tales "The Submarine Plans" (1923) / "The Incredible Theft" (1937) seem quite similar in structure, even though they do not focus on poisoning. They are non-fair play tales which look for which of a group of suspects is guilty of a crime. So is the one-act play, The Patient, in Rule of Three (1963). Despite reservations about this approach, The Patient did manage to fool me about whodunit!

  Framing. Several Christie tales involve a bad guy framing an innocent suspect. Such framing can be a subplot, in a mystery whose main plot is of a different kind. The ABC Murders (1936), "The Affair of The Pink Pearl" in Partners in Crime, and Chapter 4 of The Big Four are examples.

  Treasure Hunts. Also weak is the Miss Marple "Strange Jest" (1944), a buried treasure hunt story in the tradition of Partners in Crime's "The Clergyman's Daughter" (1923), Poirot Investigates' "The Case of the Missing Will" (1923) and "Manx Gold" (1930) in The Harlequin Tea Set. Most of these hidden treasure pieces are strictly minor works in Christie's canon, although "Manx Gold" is charming. Their closest literary ancestor that I know of is "Lord Chizelrigg's Missing Fortune" in Robert Barr’s The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont. Valmont has often been cited by critics as a possible literary ancestor of Hercule Poirot. Hidden treasure tales go back to Poe’s "The Gold-Bug", and perhaps it is just expected that every mystery author will write one. "The Case of the Missing Will" seems close to Poe's "The Purloined Letter". "Strange Jest" also has elements that recall "The Purloined Letter", although it is not as close.

  Learning. Some Christie tales have sequences in which the sleuth learns something hidden, through a clever scheme. Two such good passages occur in otherwise minor thrillers: Bunch's monitoring a meeting of the secret organization in The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) (Chapters 13, 14). And Tuppence's involvement in the opening of N or M? (1941) (Chapter 1 and start of Chapter 2). These sections occur fairly early in the novels, and are not either book's central mystery. Both involve plucky women amateur sleuths.

  Romances. Christie wrote a number of romance tales. "The Lonely God" (1926) and "The Arcadian Deer" (1940) in The Labors of Hercules have related plots. These have twists that link them to the mystery story, unlike several of Christie's pure romances or adventures. These tales are also related to "The Listerdale Mystery" (1925).

  During the 1940's Christie wrote some novels, which are basically romances with a brief coating of mystery. She also turned some of these into plays. The play versions of The Hollow (1951, based on the 1946 novel) and Go Back for Murder (1960, based on the 1942 novel Five Little Pigs) are surprisingly absorbing. Both of these deal with self-centered male intellectuals, an artist in Go Back for Murder, a medical research doctor in The Hollow, and the suffering women in their orbit, including a famous woman sculptor in The Hollow. They once again show Christie's interest in writing about the intelligentsia. Go Back for Murder has a clever if simple mystery plot twist solution. This solution focuses almost entirely on the romantic and personal relationships of the characters. It avoids the alibis and impossible crimes so important elsewhere in Christie. And The Hollow is almost pure romance, with only the simplest of whodunit features, and few mystery ideas. Both works show Christie's skill with romance.

  Scientific Detection

  The 1923-1927 flirtation with the scientific murder story was just a passing phase in Christie's work. It looks as if, for a time, Christie was considering joining the R. Austin Freeman School, then at the height of its prestige in British crime fiction:

  One can see its traces in such scientifically based Poirot Investigates stories as "The Tragedy at Marsden Manor" (1923), and "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb" (1923). In the first of these stories, Poirot is even brought in by the insurance company to investigate, just like Dr. Thorndyke. The latter also has the Egyptology background beloved by Freeman. "The Tragedy at Marsden Manor" and "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb" involve mysterious illnesses, that at first have no known cause. Thomas W. Hanshaw had included such tales in his The Man of the Forty Faces in 1910: see "The Riddle of the Ninth Finger", "The Lion's Smile", and "The Divided House".

  The Big Four is a 1924 story sequence that Christie in 1927 "fixed-up" to look like a novel; the stories appeared during the first half of 1924, just a few months before the magazine appearance of Partners in Crime. The Big Four is one of Christie's weakest works. The only story widely reprinted from it is "A Chess Problem". That story turns on a mechanical murder device, reminiscent of Ernest Bramah, and anticipating the Coles to come.

  Christie would create another murder device in her Mr. Quin story, "The Face of Helen" (1927), one that recalls not just the Coles, but Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897).

  The use of hypnotism to bring to light "hidden memories" of witnesses, by Poirot in "The Under Dog" (1926), also belongs here. Christie was perhaps the first to use such a device in fiction.

  Even the doctor narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1925) might reflect Freeman's doctor narrators. (There - I've managed to say something original about Roger Ackroyd.)

  "The Adventure of the Clapham Cook" in The Under Dog, concentrates on that Freeman central subject, the disposal of the body.

  Christie would soon revert to "herself", and abandon the Freeman school. A lifelong interest in poisons would remain, but one involving highly ingenious puzzle plots, not purely scientific methodologies. Also, Christie's interest in Egypt would grow from a fashionable fad to a deep personal involvement in the archaeology of the Middle East. In The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) (Chapter 14), Doctor Haydock gives a speech about how in the future, criminal behavior might be discovered to be just a form of disease. He backs up his ideas with statistics ab
out criminals. In both The Murder at the Vicarage and The Thirteen Problems (1927 - 1931), Miss Marple solves crimes partly by uncovering parallels to other crooked situations she knows. Both ideas involve a systematic look at human nature. In Parker Pyne Investigates (1932-1933), the hero makes his living by his statistical knowledge of human types and situations.

  The Mysterious Mr. Quin

  The Mr. Quin stories are mystery stories with a large element of fantasy. They perhaps were influenced by the Solange stories of F. Tennyson Jesse, which reportedly appeared in British magazines in 1918-1919. The Solange tales also mix the fantastic with detection. In both series, a character is "sensitive", and picks up on supernatural vibrations that other human beings do not perceive. Both series have large doses of romance mixed in with their detection and fantasy. Both series also frequently use Mediterranean settings, and feature Englishmen abroad. Both also have characters among the arts community, such as painters. There is a "sophisticated" tone to both series, a setting among the highly cultured.

  The Mr. Quin stories also seem influenced by A.E.W. Mason. The Watson figure in the stories, Mr. Satterthwaite, seems derived from Mason's Watson in his Hanaud tales, Mr. Ricardo. Both are middle aged, refined, cultured, unmarried men, who live for socializing. Both are aesthetes who watch others live their lives, instead of living their own. Both are knowing about such feminine matters as women's clothes and jewelry. However, both Mr. Satterthwaite and Christie seem much more knowledgeable about the arts than do Mason and Mr. Ricardo, who merely pay lip service to them. The casino scenes in "The Soul of the Croupier" remind one of those that open Mason's At the Villa Rose (1909 - 1910). And Mason's novella "The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel" (1917?) opens at that Christie favorite, a masquerade ball, and goes on to scenes at the opera, also a subject that runs through Christie. It includes a pair of bright young lovers, on the fringes of London Society - also frequent Christie characters. Christie's writing style in general often resembles Mason's, not so much in plot or mystery technique, as in such matters as characters, storytelling, and prose style.