Christie, Agatha - Mrs McGinty's Dead / Blood Will Tell (1952)
Review by Nick Fuller
5/5
James Bentley was condemned to death for the murder of his landlady, elderly charwoman Mrs. McGinty; but Superintendent Spence, who arrested Bentley, does not believe him guilty, and turns to Poirot for help. Poirot, aged and bored, jumps at Spence's request, and travels to Broadhinny (one of Christie's few working-class backgrounds) to provoke a reaction in the murderer. Unfortunately, the reaction he provokes is that someone tries to push him under a train. Apart from the physical attempts on his life, there is a great deal of humour arising from the attempts on his digestion Poirot suffers at the ghastly inn at which he stays, and from the attempts on his morale caused by Bentley's lack of interest in his fate. Despite these calamities, Poirot shines, despite assistance from Mrs. Oliver; a bottle of ink leads him to the conclusion that Mrs. McGinty was killed for recognising one of four "Women Victims of Bygone Tragedies", any one of whom could still be alive. The suspects and dialogue are entertaining, and the management of suspicion superb. The book boasts one of Christie's best surprise solutions, in which she plays a devilishly ingenious trick with the reader's assumptions.
Comments (1)
Jon said
at 8:55 am on Jan 27, 2010
Blurb: Mrs. McGinty was dead. She was hit on the back of the head with some sharp, heavy implement and her pitifully small savings were taken. Her lodger was hard up and had lost his job; his coat sleeve had blood on it. In due course he was arrested and tried, found guilty and condemned to death. Yet Superintendent Spence of the Kilchester Police, who had been instrumental in bringing about James Bentley’s conviction, did not believe the man was guilty—for no tangible reason other than that he did not think Bentley to be the type. Rather shamefacedly he took his problem to his old friend Hercule Poirot, and Poirot did not laugh—instead, he said he would help.
If Mrs. McGinty was not killed by Bentley for her savings, why did she die? She was, it seemed, just an ordinary charwoman, with no secrets and no coveted possessions; she minded her own business and nobody else’s. Impossible, one would think, to get a lead; but “somewhere,” said Poirot to himself, indulging in an absolute riot of mixed metaphors, “there is in the hay a needle, and among the sleeping dogs there is one on whom I shall put my foot, and by shooting the arrows into the air, one will come down and hit a glass house!”
The inimitable Poirot, with his slightly comic aspect, his “little grey cells” and his genuinely warm heart, returns in an ingenious detective novel that once again earns for Agatha Christie the justifiable epithet of “incomparable”.
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