Fri 15 Jul 2016
AGATHA CHRISTIE – Murder at Christmas. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1939. Originally published in the UK as Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (Collins, hardcover, 1939). Reprinted many times, including under the title A Holiday for Murder.
What could be a better book to read on a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles than a beat-up copy of an good old-fashioned Hercule Poirot murder mystery? None I can think of, I say, and that it’s a locked room mystery is only icing on the cake.
And why murder at Christmas? Let M Poirot tell us:
Dead with his throat cut is an old man who has been disappointed in his offspring and has told them just that only hours before. He also told them, with deliberate malice, that he intends to change his will immediately after Christmas. But does he live that long? You should know better than to ask.
Here’s the problem, though. The door to the dead man’s room is locked from the inside and must be broken down to get to him, and the windows do not open. The servants cannot have done it and there is no homicidal maniac on the loose anywhere around. It must be one of the family, but which one? And how?
Poirot claims the solution must come from the personalities of each of the possible suspects, and even more importantly that of the victim himself. How true! Any reader who dares to ignore such a challenge to the reader will make absolutely no headway in solving this case before Poirot does, and even then, only those readers who are already familiar with the tricks that Agatha Christie invariably had up her sleeve will stand a chance. As for myself, I have given up trying. To my mind, this is an amazing piece of work.
One thing still puzzles me though. The story does take place over the course of seven days between December 22nd through the 28th, but besides the gathering together of the old man’s sons and their wives, plus a surprise guest or two, there are no festivities planned, no grand meals, no decorations, no gifts, no snow, none of the usual Yuletide trappings. The story is fine without them, but I kind of missed them.
July 15th, 2016 at 6:15 pm
One of my favorite writers. Steve, there’s a missing word in the second sentence in your last paragraph.
July 15th, 2016 at 6:42 pm
Christie may have gone out of fashion for some modern mystery readers, but they really don’t know what they’re missing. She’ll always be one of my favorites, too, Randy.
PS. Goofed again, did I? Thanks for the tip.
July 19th, 2016 at 1:37 am
I never tire of Dame Agatha. She remains one of the great entertainers in the genre, whose skill is hard to fault. Rereading her I’m often surprised how good a writer she was. Something too often left out of discussions of her work.