Appointment with Death (20 page)

• Daily Mirror
  : ‘A thundering success…a triumph for Hercule Poirot.'
  

‘The Ravenscrofts didn't seem that kind of person. They seemed well balanced and placid.'

And yet, twelve years earlier, the husband had shot the wife, and then himself—or perhaps it was the other way around, since sets of both of their fingerprints were on the gun, and the gun had fallen between them. The case haunts Ariadne Oliver, who had been a friend of the couple. The famous mystery novelist desires this real-life mystery solved, and calls upon Hercule Poirot to help her do so.
Old sins have long shadows
, the proverb goes. Poirot is now a very old man, but his mind is as nimble and as sharp as ever and can still penetrate deep into the shadows. But as Poirot and Mrs Oliver and Superintendent Spence reopen the long-closed case, a startling discovery awaits them. And if memory serves Poirot (and it does!), crime—like history—has a tendency to repeat itself.

• The Times
  : ‘Splendid.'
  

With his career still in its formative years, we learn many things about how Poirot came to exercise those famous ‘grey cells' so well. Fourteen of the eighteen stories collected herein are narrated by Captain Arthur Hastings—including what would appear to be the earliest Poirot short story, ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball,' which follows soon on the events of
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
. Two of the stories are narrated by Poirot himself, to Hastings. One, ‘The Chocolate Box,' concerns Poirot's early days on the Belgian police force, and the case that was his greatest failure: ‘My grey cells, they functioned not at all,' Poirot admits. But otherwise, in this most fascinating collection, they function brilliantly, Poirot's grey cells, challenging the reader to keep pace at every twist and turn.

Collected within: ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball'; ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook'; ‘The Cornish Mystery'; ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly'; ‘The Double Clue'; ‘The King of Clubs'; ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance'; ‘The Lost Mine'; ‘The Plymouth Express'; ‘The Chocolate Box'; ‘The Submarine Plans'; ‘The Third-Floor Flat'; ‘Double Sin'; ‘The Market Basing Mystery'; ‘Wasps' Nest'; ‘The Veiled Lady'; ‘Problem at Sea'; ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?'

• Sunday Express
  : ‘Superb, vintage Christie.'
  

Captain Arthur Hastings narrates. Poirot investigates. ‘This, Hastings, will be my last case,' declares the detective who had
entered
the scene as a retiree in
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, the captain's, and our, first encounter with the now-legendary Belgian detective. Poirot promises that, ‘It will be, too, my most interesting case—and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent…X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot!' The setting is, appropriately, Styles Court, which has since been converted into a private hotel. And under this same roof is X, a murderer five-times over; a murderer by no means finished murdering. In
Curtain
, Poirot will, at last, retire—death comes as the end. And he will bequeath to his dear friend Hastings an astounding revelation. ‘The ending of
Curtain
is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised,' writes her biographer, Charles Osborne.

Of note: On 6 August 1975, upon the publication of
Curtain
,
The New York Times
ran a front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot, complete with photograph. The passing of no other fictional character had been so acknowledged in America's ‘paper of record.' Agatha Christie had always intended
Curtain
to be ‘Poirot's Last Case': Having written the novel during the Blitz, she stored it (heavily insured) in a bank vault till the time that she, herself, would retire. Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976.

• Time
  : ‘First-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny.'
  

POIROT (1938)

The Mallowans spent what was to be their final pre-war season in the Middle East in 1938, when they moved from Tell Brak ‘because of the blackmailing pressure of the Sheikhs of the Shammar tribe who were obviously bent on inducing our workmen to strike',
⁴⁴
and set up camp more than a hundred miles to the west, in the Balikh Valley, remote marsh-like country but a paradise for the archaeologist. There they spent a profitable and enjoyable few months, until at the beginning of December it was time to pack up and return to England.

In
Come, Tell Me How You Live
, Agatha Christie described her mood of nostalgic regret as she and Max Mallowan left Beirut by ship. She stood looking over the rail at the lovely coastline ‘with the mountains of the Lebanon standing up dim and blue against the sky', breathing in the romance of the scene. Then, suddenly, a cargo vessel crossed her line of vision, its crane accidentally dropped a load into the water, and a crate burst open. The surface of the sea before her was now dotted with lavatory seats. ‘Max comes up and asks what the row is about. I point, and explain that my mood of romantic farewell to Syria is now quite shattered!'

Two crime novels were published in 1938:
Appointment with Death
and
Hercule Poirot's Christmas
.

 

The setting of
Appointment with Death
, a novel which begins in Jerusalem and moves to Petra, the ‘rose red city, half as old as time', is one of Agatha Christie's most exotic, and the 160
characters, the majority of whom are one large family of Americans touring the Holy Land, are among her most colourful. The Boynton family consists of old Mrs Boynton, fat, grotesque and a mental sadist, her four offspring, and the wife of one of them. The party of tourists who make the excursion to Petra also includes a French psychiatrist, a young English woman who is a medical student, and Lady Westholme, a formidable British Member of Parliament described as ‘a big, masterful woman with a rocking-horse face'. It also includes M. Hercule Poirot. Poirot is travelling for pleasure, like the others, but he also has an introduction from his old friend Colonel Race to Colonel Carbury, who is with the British Army in Transjordania. When Mrs Boynton is murdered at Petra, Poirot is asked to help with the investigation.

It was in 1938, the year in which
Appointment with Death
was published, that Agatha Christie said of Hercule Poirot in an interview she gave to the London
Daily Mail
,

Clearly, the author still had a very soft spot for her famous detective, however much she may have become exasperated with him, and her affection for the childishly arrogant but nonetheless endearing Poirot is evident throughout
Appointment with Death
. This is an especially well-plotted novel, and the atmosphere of the various places described, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Judean desert, the Dead Sea, the brooding, timeless beauty of Petra, is conveyed with an easy economy.

It was not often that Agatha Christie modeled a character 161
on a recognizable person in real life. However, you are tempted to identify Lady Westholme, the overbearing Member of Parliament in
Appointment with Death
who is ‘much respected and almost universally disliked', with Lady Astor. Like Lady Astor, Lady Westholme is an American who married into the English aristocracy and successfully stood for election to Parliament. The French psychiatrist's comment on Lady Westholme (‘that woman should be poisoned…It is incredible to me that she has had a husband for many years and that he has not already done so') puts one in mind of the often-quoted exchange between Lady Astor and Winston Churchill:

Seven years after publication as a novel, Agatha Christie turned
Appointment with Death
into a play. In doing so, she made a number of significant changes. Chief among these is the deletion of Poirot from the cast of characters. (She had done this once before, in her dramatization of
Death on the Nile
.) The investigation of Mrs Boynton's death is now undertaken alone by Colonel Carbery (formerly ‘Carbury', but then Agatha Christie was often careless about spelling), but it is one of the suspects, and not Carbery, who discovers what really happened. Also, the ending of the play is different from that of the novel. The character who, in the novel, turned out to be the murderer, is, in the play, perfectly innocent. More than this it would not be proper to reveal, though it is probably safe to add that the play has a new character: not a substitute for Poirot, but a comical local politician called Alderman Higgs (or, as he pronounces it, ‘Halderman 'Iggs'). ‘Ah coom from Lancashire—same as you do', he says with a chuckle to Lady Westholme. He is, of course, of a different political colour from the Conservative Lady Westholme, and intends to oppose her as an Independent candidate at the next by-elections. The role of the Arab guide or Dragoman has also been built up to provide the conventional comic relief which used to be thought necessary in plays of this kind.

After a short, pre-London tour which opened in Glasgow, 162
Appointment with Death
came to the Piccadilly Theatre, London, on 31 March 1945. Mary Clare was greatly liked as the evil Mrs Boynton, and other leading roles were played by Ian Lubbock (Lennox Boynton), Beryl Machin (Nadine), John Wynn (Raymond), Carla Lehmann (Sarah King), Owen Reynolds (Colonel Carbery), Janet Burnell (Lady Westholme) and Percy Walsh (Alderman Higgs). The play was directed by Terence de Marney.

In 1988 a feature film version of the story was released by the Cannon Group, starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot for the third time. Adapted by Anthony Shaffer and directed by Michael Winner, the film was shot in Israel with a big-name cast including Lauren Bacall, Carrie Fisher, Hayley Mills, Michael Sarrazin and Sir John Gielgud.

About Charles Osborne

This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne's
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie
(1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them
The Complete Operas of Verdi
(1969);
Wagner and His World
(1977); and
W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet
(1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world's leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays
Black Coffee
(Poirot);
Spider's Web
; and
The Unexpected Guest
into novels. He lives in London.

Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

Agatha Christie's first novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.

In 1926, now averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was the first of her books to be published by William Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship that lasted for fifty years and produced over seventy books.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was also the first of Agatha Christie's works to be dramatized—as
Alibi
—and to have a successful run in London's West End.
The Mousetrap
, her most famous play, opened in 1952 and runs to this day at St Martin's Theatre in the West End; it is the longest-running play in history.

Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of her books have been published: the bestselling novel
Sleeping Murder
appeared in 1976, followed by
An Autobiography
and the short story collections
Miss Marple's Final Cases
;
Problem at Pollensa Bay
; and
While the Light Lasts
. In 1998,
Black Coffee
was the first of her plays to be novelized by Charles Osborne, Mrs Christie's biographer.

For more information about Agatha Christie, please visit the official website.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.