Tue 2 Apr 2019
AGATHA CHRISTIE – Cat Among the Pigeons. Hercule Poirot #34 (including story collections). Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1960. Pocket, US, paperback; March 1961. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1959. Reprinted many times. TV adaptation: ITV, 2008, with David Suchet as Poirot. (Other versions have also been made.)
At this mid-to-late stage in her career, Agatha Christie’s skills at concocting outrageously clever detective puzzles were showing signs of decreasing, but even so, as a detective puzzle Cat Among the Pigeons would qualify to be in the top 5% of anything written and marketed as a mystery today.
The book opens in impressive fashion. It is the first day of the term for the girls arriving at Meadowbank School, some for the first time, including some of the mistresses. It is a day of happiness and confusion. There are any number of matrons, mothers, girls and the new school secretary to be introduced to the reader. While I can’t tell you how Miss Christie does it, what is true is that each and every one of these is described in such a way that you know them almost inside and out within just the few lines set aside for each of them.
It isn’t going to be a pleasant term, however. Two murders will occur before it has hardly begun, and headmistress Miss Bulstrode, usually calm and collected, has all she can handle as she does her best to keep the scandal from closing the school down. Luckily Hercule Poirot is called in on the case, one that also involves a fortune in diamonds that has somehow been smuggled into the country.
Unluckily, Poirot doesn’t make his first appearance until page 148 of the Pocket paperback I’ve just read, and yet, on the other hand, Agatha Christie also had the knack of keeping her mysteries from sagging as badly as they do in the ones written by so many other authors.
Being a novel taking place in academia, it should not be surprising that Miss Christie has something to say about schooling and education in general, and she does. Or at least her main character here, Miss Bulstrode, does. She’s a very progressive woman, especially for the year of 1960.
April 2nd, 2019 at 4:40 pm
Such a late appearance of the detective is a flaw in so many mystery novels of the classic school, and yet Christie manages in the time Poirot is on stage to balance his humorous aspects with the very real and passionate way he and Miss Marple feel about murder and innocence and the tragedy of both, and she writes well enough and with compassion enough about the various suspects and red herrings that they come across as more than cardboard cutouts in a game if not always as real people.
It has to be expressed anytime we speak of Christie that she is a much better writer than given credit for, not merely a fine constructor of plots, but a good enough writer we feel and involvement with her characters even if they don’t stay with us much beyond the book we are reading.
In any Christie novel there is also a very real moral center, an outrage at injustice and the harm murder does not only to innocents but also to the murderer. Poirot and Miss Marple may be comical to everyone around them for much of any individual book, but in the end it is their moral vision and standing that gives Christie’s works their surprising weight.
April 2nd, 2019 at 7:21 pm
Beautifully said, David. Thank you.