AGATHA CHRISTIE – Cards on the Table. Hercule Poirot #10. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1936. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1937. Many reprint editions, both hardcover and soft, including: Dell, paperback, 1967; Berkley, paperback, 1984. TV movie: Granada, UK, 2005, Season 10 Episode 2 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, with David Suchet (Hercule Poirot), Zoë Wanamaker (Ariadne Oliver).

   Another absolute gem of a detective mystery, but you should have known that already without my saying so. After all it is by Agatha Christie and the year it came out was 1936, when the grandest dame of detective fiction of all time was at the peak of her writing ability.

   It is stagey, one of those books in which one of the characters must cry out, “But we’re not in a detective story,” even though they all know they are. Or they should.

   A mysterious man with a Mephistophelian look about him tells Poirot at a dinner party that while the latter collects artifacts of cases he has solved, he, Mr. Shaitana, collects killers who have gotten away with it. To prove his statement, he invites M. Poirot to another dinner party, one designed in advance to display and show off (the implication is) his collection.

   The total number of guests: eight. Half the group are detectives, each in their own way: Poirot, Mrs Oliver, the detective writer, Superintendent Battle, and Colonel Race. The other four, all murderers who have never been caught, nor even suspected. But Shaitana’s game, whatever it is, is disrupted when he is found murdered himself while everyone else has been playing bridge, the first four above in one room, the second four in another while Shaitana has presumably been watching.

   Supt. Battle’s approach is the usual solid police work, Mrs. Oliver’s that of woman’s intuition, while Poirot’s is that of people watching. Conversation and psychology. (Col. Race does not make much of an appearance; he is there, one presumes to make up a fourth.)

   Personally I find that Poirot’s approach is not only the successful one, but it is the one that is most fun to read. The painstaking hunt for physical clues he leaves for the police. He asks the suspects to describe instead what they remember seeing in the room and looks at the scoring pads as they were filled in while the games of bridge were going on. (Something called rubbers.)

   It helps, unfortunately, if you the reader know something about bridge yourself, but I don’t, and I managed just fine. Each of the suspects takes his or her turn as the prime one and is either eliminated or placed lower down on the list as the investigation goes on — only to emerge again later as the most obvious killer, at least for the time being. And not only does Agatha Christie do this once, but at least twice. If not more.

   Utterly amazing.