Hercule Poirot 100 Years (1916 - 2016)

by Mark Place

  They also hear the victim's dying message, just as in Ostrander's novel. Christie's construction of a plot around the "dying message" situation is superb. Christie also includes a minor character named Ostrander in the Mr. Quin tale "The Dead Harlequin", perhaps a tribute.

  "The Case of the Missing Lady". This is a dynamic spoof of Conan Doyles "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax". The burlesque is done more through Christie's brilliant plotting than through stylistic means. It is the cleverest story in the book. Earlier, Christie's Poirot story "The Veiled Lady" also was constructed as an ingenious takeoff on a Doyle story, "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton". This earlier story is less of a parody than "Lady", but it still centers around a twist on the master. The introduction of Hercule Poirot's brother Achille, in The Big Four, also burlesques Sherlock Holmes' brother Mycroft.

  The introduction of the Countess Vera Rossakoff, a recurring character, in "The Double Clue" (1925), is an echo of Sherlock Holmes' meeting with Irene Adler in "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891). The opening of Murder on the Links (1923) also has a Doyle-like feel, in which Poirot is summoned to a remote house in which many conspiracies, plots and counter-plots seem to be occurring, based on hidden events from the owner's past - an archetypal setting and plot set-up for Doyle. Christie eventually subverts these Doyle-like aspects, to the point where this novel too can seem like a twist on Doyle. "Blindman's Buff". Parody of the Thornley Colton stories by Clinton Stagg. Christie's spoof of Stagg's mannerisms is very funny. Christie's parody can be classified as a burlesque; it uses slapstick and other low comedy elements. She picks up on the absurdities of his assistant Sydney Thames, so named because he was found as an orphan near that river, and the "Keyboard of Silence". She also uses the restaurant setting that opens Stagg's story. Stagg's work consists of fair play puzzle plots; Christie's little spoof is a thriller, and confines its parody to his detective characters; it does not seem to take off on Stagg's detection or plotting techniques, unlike her spoofs of Chesterton or Orczy, for example. "The Man in the Mist". The Chesteron takeoff. There is well done atmosphere in the first half of the tale, not quite Chesterton-like, but close enough, and good in its own right. Christie is also sharp about the use of color in Chesterton's scene painting. Christie has also got one of Chesterton's poets in the tale. The solution of the story as a mystery is much more ordinary; it draws on one of Chesterton's most famous tales, but does not augment it. Still, "The Man in the Mist" is a good story.

  "The Crackler". Even the title of this tale sounds like one of Edgar Wallaces series characters. There is some good natured ribbing of Wallace in the early pages. Christie sets the story in the Wallace turf of high living cafe society characters who are also crooks. The finale involves a Biter Bit, a common Wallace plot approach. As a mystery plot, the tale is pretty weak.

  "The Sunningdale Mystery". An astonishing pastiche of the Old Man in the Corner tales by Baroness Orczy. Very close in every way to the originals. Christie has not only caught Orczy's stylistic mannerisms, she is also on to the Baroness' plotting style. Some of the Orczy like characteristics: There is the emphasis on the movement of people around, during a situation involving the last people to see the victim alive. There is the element of financial crookedness in the background of the story. Most importantly there is the way that the various plot elements of the story do not add up to a consistent, coherent picture at first glance. There are many contradictory indications, and the plot as a whole just does not make sense. It is up to the detectives to provide new perspectives, a new way of looking at things, to make the events of the crime at all understandable, and eventually completely logical. This is the essential plotting style of the Old Man stories to a T. Christie's ingenious solution to the mystery also recalls Orczy's ingenious twist answers.

  In 1931 Christie contributed two chapters to the Detection Club round robin novel The Scoop. The most personal thing of Christie's is Chapter 4. In this section, a young crime reporter and his girlfriend come together at a restaurant to discuss the case and analyze the mystery. Their egalitarian relationship and analytical insight recall Tommy and Tuppence in Partners in Crime (1924), especially the story "The Sunningdale Mystery", which involves the couple solving a crime by discussing it in an ABC teashop. Just as in Partners, each builds on the other's ideas, and there is no sign of sexism, just mutual respect and intellectual equality. There is also a sense of light hearted fun and romance.

  "The House of Lurking Death". Christie picks up on the morbid atmosphere of horror, menace, and psychological abnormality in such A. E. W. Mason works as The House of the Arrow. Everybody likes Mason but me. This story is one of a series Christie wrote about ingenious poisonings. They include "The Coming of Mr. Quin" (1924) (from The Mysterious Mr. Quin), "The Tuesday Night Club" (1927) (the first tale in The Tuesday Club Murders), "The Herb of Death", "How Does Your Garden Grow?" (1935) and Sad Cypress (1940). All of these stories' solutions contain features in common, and also new ingenious variations. Most of these poisoning tales are closely linked to the impossible crime tradition, even if they are not strictly impossible crimes.

  "The Unbreakable Alibi" takes off on Freeman Wills Crofts’ alibi stories. The tale disappoints: Christie creates an interesting "impossible to break" alibi, and then resolves it through a spoof solution that would be considered cheating in a non-humorous mystery. I was hoping for one of Christie's brilliant plot devices... Tuppence points this out herself at the end of the story. Christie occasionally wrote excellent straight detective stories in the Crofts tradition, such as "The Sign in the Sky" (1925) from The Mysterious Mr. Quin, and "The Blood-Stained Pavement" and "A Christmas Tragedy" in the Miss Marple book called The Thirteen Problems or The Tuesday Club Murders. "The Unbreakable Alibi" appeared in 1928, four years after most of the other tales were published in magazines in late 1924 (September - December 1924). It was included along with the other tales in the 1929 book publication of Partners in Crime.

  "The Clergyman's Daughter". This is a routine hidden treasure story. A million kid's mystery novels have since been cast in this same mode. Christie's interest in mysteries centered around household economy will later find fulfillment in "How Does Your Garden Grow?" (1935). Christie makes this story be a spoof of Anthony Berkeley’s detective Roger Sherringham, but its plot seems closest to H.C. Bailey's "The Violet Farm". Unlike the other authors parodied, Anthony Berkeley had not started writing mysteries when the stories first appeared in magazines: his first mystery novel debuted in 1925. Perhaps the idea that this tale is a homage to Berkley was added when the stories were collected in book form in 1929. This tale appeared a year earlier than most of the rest of the 1924 stories in Partners in Crime, in December 1923. "The Ambassador's Boots". Christie has noticed H. C. Bailey’s way of having his stories start with small little unexplainable incidents, whose investigations gradually uncover grandiose and sinister conspiracies. This was one of the best episodes of the TV series. Christie used a variation on this story, to provide a subplot in "The Girdle of Hyppolita" in The Labors of Hercules.

  "The Man Who Was No. 16". This story spoofs Christie's own The Big Four. This 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 most interesting character in The Big Four is the disguise expert known as Number 4, and Christie makes her spoof center on a similar master of disguise, No. 16. The calendar incident here is a take-off on the clock clue in Chapter 2 of the book. "The Man Who Was No. 16" has plot elements in common with the later "Miss Marple Tells a Story". Both deal with the intricacies of hotel room floor plans. Both works have links to the impossible crime tradition. "The Man Who Was No. 16" also recalls an era when both the police and the bad guys could afford an unlimited number of agents to go undercover in an immense variety of roles. One sees similar effects in F. I. Anderson’s Book of Murder (1923-1929) and Erle Gardener’s Lester Leith tale "Th
e Bird in the Hand" (1932). Mainly, this tale is an exuberant addition to Christie's spy and thriller fiction, usually the least interesting side of her work. Plot elements in it anticipate Christie's only good book in the spy thriller genre, They Came to Baghdad. Partners in Crime is not the only Christie work of the mid twenties to spoof detective stories. The more serious in tone tale "The Love Detectives" (1926) (from The Mousetrap) also undercuts detective fiction conventions, as does The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1925).

  Christie's mystery reading as a whole is somewhat mysterious. In addition to the authors cited in Partners in Crime, her autobiography records inspiration from Anna Green and Gaston Leroux; she refers to writings by Maurice Le Balnc in "Strange Jest", and Mary Elizabeth Braddon in "Greenshaw's Folly"; Praised Rex Stout in an interview (especially Too Many Cooks); and served on a jury that gave a prize to John Sladek’s "By an Unknown Hand". Ragnar Jonasson, who translated The Body in the Library (1942) into Icelandic, has pointed out a witty passage in Chapter 8, where a boy has collected autographs from Dorothy Sayer’s, Christie herself, John Dickson Carr, and H. C. Bailey. This seems to be Christie's homage to her fellow Detection Club members. Carr's and Bailey's detectives are mentioned in "The Flock of Geryon", in The Labors of Hercules. Both The Clocks and Partners in Crime refer to Chesterton and it is tempting to see him as a major love of Christie's. We know from Christie's letters that she read S. S. Van Dine. The opening chapter of Mrs. McGinty's Dead (1952) offers Poirot's negative impressions of what we now know as film noir. At one time Christie considered adapting Dicken’s Bleak House to the screen, but gave up because the book was too complex to allow condensation without artistic damage. Christie's reading in the mystery genre was certainly broad, and she was clearly familiar with the history of the genre, although she rarely wrote about it, unlike many of her other colleagues.

  Christie's favorite characters were the Watsons. She regarded Dr. Watson as Conan Doyle's greatest creation (see The Clocks), and she singled out Archie Goodwin for special praise in her interview about Rex Stout (quoted in his biography by John McAleer). Oddly, her own Watson, Captain Hastings, is one of her least successful characters. Maybe she was impressed with other authors' Watsons because she knew from experience how hard they were to create. All of the stories in Partners in Crime are explicitly comic, and are crosses between the humorous tale and the mystery story. Actually, most of Christie's works have large elements of comedy in them. Her books are extremely funny, and often gentle spoofs of their characters and their social milieu.

  Impossible Crimes

  Christie wrote many impossible crime works. She was not a full-time specialist in impossible crime tales. However, she was a major contributor to the form, both in quality and quantity.

  Double Plot Structure

  An unusual form of plot construction runs across several different kinds of Christie impossible crime stories. "The Blue Geranium" (1929) (starring Miss Marple) is one of Christie's best impossible crime tales. Christie includes two impossibilities in the tale, the "supernaturally" appearing flowers and the murder itself, both occurring behind locked doors. Christie used a similar structural approach in other of her impossible crime tales, such as the Poirot story "The Dream" (1937) in The Regatta Mystery and the Mr. Quin "The Shadow on the Glass" (1924). All three have both a supernatural-appearing impossibility as a subplot, and a locked room murder mystery, too. In all three, there turns out to be a loose connection between how the apparent supernatural events were really worked, and the mechanism of the murder itself. These three stories are among Christie's finest mysteries, with their abundance of imaginative plot. The Mr. Quin "The Dead Harlequin" (1929) also has a similar structure, although the locked room murder problem and the fake supernatural event are less closely linked. The novel known as The Sittaford Mystery or Murder at Hazelmoor (1931), also has a seemingly supernatural impossibility, paired with a murder mystery. But the murder is not presented as a locked room puzzle here. A similar structure appears in the novel called Dumb Witness or Poirot Loses A Client (1937): there is an apparently supernatural subplot, and a conventional main murder mystery that is not really connected to it. "The Blood-Stained Pavement" has both an apparent supernatural impossibility, and a main murder story that is an alibi tale - not an impossible crime.

  Kinds of Impossible Crime Tales

  Psychology. "Miss Marple Tells a Story" (1934) is one of Christie's best impossible crime tales. It seems constructed on different principles from Christie's other stories, although it has links in its use of architecture to "The Man Who Was No. 16" (1924) in Partners in Crime. It ultimately comes from a tradition involving a tale by G.K. Chesterton, but turns them into new and original approaches. Christie wrote some other tales inspired by this same story of Chesterton's. "The Man in the Mist" (1924) in Partners in Crime develops some borderline-impossible features, as does Death in the Clouds (1935). The mystery tale in Chapters 3-4 of The Big Four is a direct imitation of this same Chesterton tale. This was originally a short story "The Adventure of the Dartmoor Bungalow" (1924).

  Locked Rooms. The solution of Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) recalls the second impossibility in "The Dream" (1937), works that show Christie's plot ingenuity. The technique of this series derives from the Chesterton, impossible crimes school, although the cases are not all presented as impossible crimes.

  The locked room aspect of "Dead Man's Mirror" (1937) is basically a gimmick, although a pleasant one. Most of the interest of the tale is in its non-locked room aspects, both mystery plot and storytelling. The same is essentially true of of the locked-room puzzle in Hercule Poirot's Christmas / Murder for Christmas (1938), although here the gimmicks are much more imaginative.

  Impossible Disappearances of Objects. "The Capture of Cerberus" in The Labors of Hercules is one of several stories Christie wrote about the Impossible Disappearance of an object. These include "The Affair of The Pink Pearl" (1924) in Partners in Crime, "The Pearl of Price" (1933) in Parker Pyne Investigates. All three of these tales have solutions (SPOILER WARNING) that involve "clever hiding places" for the vanished objects. The Impossible Disappearance in "The Capture of Cerberus" recalls Ellery Queen in general, and Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933) in particular. "The World's End" (1926) in The Mysterious Mr. Quin and the Poirot "The Veiled Lady" (1923) are related to such stories, although not fully Impossible Crime tales.

  Two other Impossible Disappearance of object tales, "The Million Dollar Bond Robbery" (1923) in Poirot Investigates and "Have You Got Everything You Want?" (1933) in Parker Pyne Investigates have essentially the same solution as each other. The earlier story, "The Million Dollar Bond Robbery", is the more satisfying version. This plot idea is also related to the more developed solution to the the Impossible Disappearance in "The Regatta Mystery" (1936), one of Christie's finest works. These three tales are different, in that none of them involve "clever hiding places" for the vanished objects.

  Many of these tales involve framing someone else for the theft or disappearance - a frame that is particularly ingenious in "The Affair of The Pink Pearl", forming a complete other subplot in the tale. A hiding place for humans is found in "The Man Who Was No. 16" (1924) in Partners in Crime. Christie used a similar idea in They Came to Baghdad (1951). Neither is an Impossible Disappearance.

  Impossible Disappearances of People. "At the Bells and Motley" (1925) in The Mysterious Mr. Quin is a seminal work of Christie's, influencing many later stories of hers. The influence extended in several different directions. It is closest to the Miss Marple "The Case of the Perfect Maid" (1942), which seems like an inventive variation on it. Both of these tales involve a disappearance, one that eventually defies an intensive police manhunt. In this they can be seen as impossible crime tales - and "At the Bells and Motley" was treated as such in Robert Adey's definitive history, Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes.

  This aspect is even more pronounced in the more traditional Impossible Disappearance story, "The Girdle of Hy
ppolita" in The Labors of Hercules. This tale draws on broadly similar approaches to "At the Bells and Motley". The detectives in each story refer to the crime as a "conjuring trick".

  An early version of the same idea can be seen in "The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim" (1923) from Poirot Investigates. This is not as gracefully done as the later tales. "The Kidnapped Prime Minister" (1923) from the same book, also uses similar ideas - it is especially close to "The Girdle of Hyppolita".

  All of these tales perhaps have roots in Doyle’s "The Man With the Twisted Lip" (1891) from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

  Alibi Stories: Related to the Impossible Disappearance of People tales. "The Sunningdale Mystery" (1924) in Partners in Crime, "The Blood-Stained Pavement" (1928) and "A Christmas Tragedy" (1930) in the Miss Marple book called The Thirteen Problems or The Tuesday Club Murders, and "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" (1940) in The Mousetrap, also develop ideas in "At the Bells and Motley", in a different direction. These are stories of perfect alibis. The techniques used to create the alibis are similar to the techniques used in the impossible disappearance stories like "At the Bells and Motley". One might note, that the alibi tale in general has links to the impossible crime story: an alibi makes it look impossible for someone to have committed the crime - when they actually did so. "The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge" (1923) in Poirot Investigates, is an ancestor of these tales. It is a bit more awkwardly done.

  Christie's amazing impossible crime masterpiece, And Then There Were None (1939), also has links to these alibi stories. It uses their alibi techniques, to create a full-fledged impossible crime. The alibi tale "Problem at Sea" (1935) from The Regatta Mystery has some relationship to tales like "The Sunningdale Mystery" and "A Christmas Tragedy", but is a bit further away from "At the Bells and Motley".