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.’

Charles Osborne on
The ABC Murders

Having been absent from the three most recent Poirot novels, Hastings is allowed to make a reappearance in The ABC Murders, which in fact he narrates in his capacity as occasional chronicler of the adventures of Hercule Poirot. He begins by explaining that in June 1935 he came home from his ranch in South America for a stay of about six months: ‘It had been a difficult time for us out there. Like everyone else, we had suffered from world depression. I had various affairs to see to in England that I felt could only be successful if a personal touch was introduced. My wife remained to manage the ranch.’ This is by no means the first time, nor will it be the last, that Hastings has persuaded himself he has business in London, and stayed away from home for months on end. This is ‘staying late at the office’ carried to extraordinary lengths.

Hastings finds that Poirot has moved from the rooms they used to share in Farraway Street, and is now installed ‘in one of the newest type of service flats in London’ which Hastings accuses his old friend of having chosen entirely on account of its strictly geometrical appearance and proportions. Poirot, who does not deny that he was influenced by ‘the most pleasing symmetry’ of the apartment block (whose name, we learn later, is Whitehaven Mansions), admits that he is ‘like the prima donna who makes positively that farewell performance’. That farewell performance repeats itself an indefinite number of times.

In a Foreword ‘by Captain Arthur Hastings, OBE’, the narrator explains that he has departed from his usual practice of relating only those incidents and scenes at which he himself was present, and that certain chapters are written in the third person. He assures his readers that he can vouch for the occurrences related in those chapters. He is referring to his descriptions of the thoughts and actions of Mr Alexander Bonaparte Cust…

The plot of The ABC Murders is positively brilliant in its imagination and originality, and its characters are splendidly brought to life in what is one of Agatha Christie’s masterpieces. The apparently motiveless murders certainly perplex Hercule Poirot, but it is he alone who arrives at the truth, and he does so through the application of logic to the problem, and through the exercise of the little grey cells of the brain.