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
Cat Among the Pigeons

Poirot (1959)

On 15 March 1959, the cast of The Mousetrap gave a performance of the play at Wormwood Scrubs prison in London. The set and furniture did not have to be transported to the prison as these were provided, the prisoners having constructed the décor from designs supplied by Peter Saunders. An audience of three hundred prisoners, all men serving long sentences, enjoyed the play and applauded warmly at the end. Or rather, two hundred and ninety-eight of them applauded, for two had taken the opportunity to escape during Act II.

During the year, UNESCO released the information that the Bible had been translated into one hundred and seventy-one languages, Agatha Christie into one hundred and three, and Shakespeare into ninety. The statistics concerning numbers of copies of volumes sold revealed the Bible and Shakespeare to be ahead of Agatha Christie, who came third with something like 400,000,000 copies.

Mrs Christie may have been translated into only one hundred and three languages by 1959. Forty years later the number is higher (and the sales figures are considerably higher!) but she was not necessarily admired uncritically in all of them. Under the heading, ‘A Slight Case of Poison, Agatha’, the London Daily Express published this story by its Moscow correspondent on 20 May 1981:

Crime writers in general came under heavy fire at the Soviet Writers’ Congress today. And, in particular Agatha Christie who ‘reflects the poisoned air which exists in bourgeois society’.

Seventy-year-old Kornel Chukovsky, a translator, said of her: ‘She has talent—but what a waste. If she had written six or seven books in her life instead of seventy they might have been good. As it is, she has become a virtuoso in extermination.

‘She makes no attempt to build up pity for her victims—for the child who died because of licking a poisoned postage stamp. She only creates admiration for the murderer’s technique. Human interest is excluded from her work. She concentrates on only how to conceal crime, on plot and intrigue, on the intellectual ability of the murderers and the technical excellence of their crimes.

‘The extent of inhumanity of the crime writer is frightful. There is a mass psychosis for crime stories. They have poisoned people’s brains to such an extent that they cannot absorb normal literary food. People have become incapable of reading books in which there are no ingenious murders.

‘Agatha Christie’s great stunt is to throw suspicion on everyone. Readers are not allowed to believe in noble virtues like honesty, sincerity, and friendship, in unselfish motives or feelings. She fosters feelings of suspicion, fear, hate, and disbelief in the goodness of people.’