Agatha Christie’s Poirot - Anne Hart

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in which a diabolical host, the fashionable Mr Shaitana, who ‘existed richly and beautifully in a super flat in Park Lane’, invited to dinner four people he was convinced were secret murderers, and four others well known for detection: the celebrated Hercule Poirot, the venerable Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, the popular detective fiction writer, Ariadne Oliver, and a distinguished veteran of the Secret Service, Colonel Race.17 After dinner Mr Shaitana arranged two tables of bridge. The four famous sleuths were sent to the smoking room:

      ‘Five diamonds. Game and rubber,’ said Colonel Race. ‘Good for you, partner,’ he said to Poirot. ‘I didn’t think you’d do it. Lucky they didn’t lead a spade.’

      ‘Wouldn’t have made much difference, I expect,’ said Superintendent Battle, a man of gentle magnanimity.

      He had called spades. His partner, Mrs Oliver, had had a spade, but ‘something had told her’ to lead a club – with disastrous results.

      Meanwhile in the drawing-room, alone with his four suspected murderers, something much more disastrous was happening to Mr Shaitana. While seated by the fire he was deftly slain with a jewelled stiletto. Which of the four did it?

      With only the bridge scores as a tangible clue, with three fine collaborators in Superintendent Battle, Mrs Oliver and Colonel Race, and with the removal, by Mr Shaitana’s untimely death, of ‘the only moustache in London, perhaps, that could compete with that of M. Hercule Poirot’, it is no wonder that Agatha Christie observed, in a foreword to Cards on the Table, that this was one of Poirot’s favourite cases.

      A year later, far from Mr Shaitana’s drawing-room, Poirot encountered Colonel Race again on a steamer on the Nile. Poirot was once more in pursuit of a holiday. (‘This winter I shall visit Egypt, I think … One will escape from the fogs, the greyness, the monotony of the constantly falling rain’), and Colonel Race, a man ‘usually to be found in one of the outposts of Empire where trouble is brewing’, was in pursuit of a political agitator; but these goals were forgotten in the excitement of three murders committed in quick succession as the Karnak churned toward the Second Cataract.

      Poirot’s next case, Appointment with Death, unfolded in Palestine and Jordan. As it follows on the heels of Death on the Nile, it is fair to assume that both cases occurred on the same eventful holiday, and that Poirot proceeded from the Karnak on the Nile to the Solomon Hotel in Jerusalem and thence to Amman. With him he brought a letter of introduction from Colonel Race to Colonel Carbury, an administrative ‘power’ in Transjordania. Raising his eyes from Race’s letter, Colonel Carbury, a devotee of detective fiction, smiled hopefully upon his guest:

      ‘Tell me, d’you ever find your own special job has a way of following you around?’

      ‘Pardon?’

      ‘Well – to put it plainly – do you come to places expecting a holiday from crime – and find instead bodies cropping up?’

      ‘It has happened, yes – more than once.’

      ‘H’m,’ said Colonel Carbury, and looked particularly abstracted.

      Then he roused himself with a jerk.

      ‘Got a body now I’m not very happy about,’ he said.

      The body was that of an American tourist, the autocratic Mrs Boynton – ‘a distorted old Buddha – a gross spider in the centre of a web!’ – whose life had been universally pronounced as ruinous to all around her, and whose sudden death, while surrounded by her family in a tourist encampment at Petra, now raised a most disagreeable question: had someone slain the dragon?

      In the course of his investigations Poirot enjoyed fulfilling Colonel Carbury’s every expectation of how a detective should behave:

      ‘You desire to know, do you not, Colonel Carbury, who killed Mrs Boynton? (That is, if she was killed and did not die a natural death.) Exactly how and when she was killed – and, in fact, the whole truth of the matter?’

      ‘I should like to know that, yes.’ Carbury spoke unemotionally.

      Hercule Poirot said slowly:

      ‘I see no reason why you should not know it!’

      And promising a solution within twenty-four hours, Poirot commenced to unravel the tangled web at Petra, thereby encountering a ménage of tourists who, when their minds were not on Mrs Boynton’s death, tended to discuss questions of the day: the League of Nations, the enmity of the Arabs toward the Jews, the menace of white slavers and drug dealers, and the benefits or otherwise of psychotherapy.

      But Colonel Carbury was only concerned with the whodunit writing itself before his very eyes:

      ‘I suppose you couldn’t do the things the detective does in books? Write a list of significant facts – things that don’t seem to mean anything but are really frightfully important – that sort of thing?’

      ‘Ah,’ said Poirot kindly. ‘You like that kind of detective story? But certainly, I will do it for you with pleasure.’

      He drew a sheet of paper towards him and wrote quickly and neatly: SIGNIFICANT POINTS.

      Inevitably, an alarming distraction soon came to hand. ‘Damn it all!’ cried the Chief Constable. ‘Case of murder! On Christmas Eve too!’ This led to Poirot’s posthumous introduction to a neighbouring millionaire, the tyrannical Simon Lee, whose neck – cut neatly through the jugular vein – had suffered a far greater misfortune than Poirot’s that Christmas Eve.

      The surviving members of the Lee family, as described by Colonel Johnson, were of a mode familiar to Poirot from many an earlier case:

      ‘All the same, it’s incredible, you know. Here’s a particularly crude and brutal murder – and whom have we as suspects? Alfred Lee and his wife – both charming, well-bred, quiet people. George Lee, who’s a member of parliament and the essence of respectability. His wife? She’s just an ordinary modem lovely. David Lee seems a gentle creature and we’ve got his brother Harry’s word for it that he can’t stand the sight of blood. His wife seems a nice, sensible woman – quite commonplace. Remains the Spanish niece and the man from South Africa.’

      Well, there they all were. As Poirot commented, as he set to work, on Christmas Eve there is apt to be ‘a great amount of strain’ in families.

      Two cases of this busy period,

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