This is the one Barzun thought "very dull…substance trivial, skipping irresistible" and Robert Barnard described as "a significant falling-off in standards…a highly perfunctory going-through-the-paces" – in other words, the beginning of the end (although I would date it to either They do it with Mirrors or Destination Unknown). It is certainly true that Poirot has lost much of his power: while in Mrs McGinty’s Dead and After the Funeral he had dominated the book and travelled about to chase up leads, here age has very definitely begun to tell. After appearing in the first few chapters he then makes only one appearance until the very end, leaving all the legwork (and detection) to Inspector Sharpe. His deterioration into an armchair detective (c.f. Cat among the Pigeons, The Clocks and Elephants Can Remember – in fact, every case henceforward except Hallowe’en Party) has begun.
Christie’s plot is competent but little more – gone are the great days of the 1920s and 1930s when bizarre murders committed by villains with unbreakable alibis were the order of the day. In the more mundane 1950s, Poirot finds himself investigating a series of apparently motiveless thefts in a youth hostel and the "suicide" of the thief, followed by two more murders. The solution rather improbably involves drug and jewel smuggling masterminded by one of the students and matricide – workmanlike but humdrum. The suspects themselves are not really worth considering; although the dialogue of the young people is credible, none of them except the murderer and his accomplice have any substance, while most of the foreigners are walking embodiments of English prejudice, although Mr Akibombo is at least sympathetic and Elizabeth Johnston is the most intelligent of the lot. The murderer turns out to be the most likely person whom the reader will suspect despite his cast-iron alibi for the third murder (an obvious dodge) – nobody else is really worth considering.
Nick Fuller
Comments (1)
Jon said
at 8:57 am on Jan 27, 2010
Blurb: ‘Hercule Poirot frowned.
“Miss Lemon,” he said.
“Yes, M Poirot?”
“There are three mistakes in this letter.”
His voice held incredulity. For Miss Lemon, that hideous and efficient woman, never made mistakes.’
And so Hercule Poirot launched into another of his memorable cases to extricate Miss Lemon’s sister, who ran a students’ hostel in Hickory Road, from her troubles. The series of thefts there which had so upset Miss Lemon intrigued M Poirot because of the complete incongruity of the missing articles; he was fascinated and uneasy. Unfortunately his worst fears were fulfilled.
But by putting first things first and by peeling off layers of irrelevance one by one, Poirot was able to perceive, when it occurred, the inevitable mistake that betrays a murderer. At one point Inspector Sharp was inclined to apply to him his own dictum “No one is as clever as they think they are.” But generalisations do not apply to the master mind, and Hercule Poirot—and Agatha Christie—has achieved another masterpiece of detection.
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