One would like to think that, if her press cutting service landed this news item on the author’s desk, she read it with a smile, and murmured, ‘Look who’s talking!’

The 1959 Christie, a new Poirot mystery called Cat Among the Pigeons, is one of the best of the later novels. Agatha Christie is not a writer whose work can be neatly divided into the usual three periods of promise, maturity or achievement, and decline; nevertheless her creative output did alter throughout the years. The thrillers became less light-hearted, while the structure of the mysteries loosened up somewhat, and occasionally to a perilous degree. The plotting of some of the Poirot and Miss Marple novels which Agatha Christie wrote in the last fifteen years of her life is more than a trifle lax. When this happens, there is usually a compensation in the form of especially convincing characterization. Cat Among the Pigeons, however, is quite strongly plotted, and its characters, even its minor characters, are more than usually vivid.

The novel is set, for the most part, in a girls’ school in England, which has led some critics to compare it to a murder mystery published in 1946 by one of Mrs Christie’s rivals: Josphine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes, in which certain events in a girls’ physical education college lead to a death. The school background apart, however, there is little similarity between the two novels. Agatha Christie’s school, Meadow-bank, is said to have been based on her daughter Rosalind’s school, Caledonia. The school and its staff are certainly described very convincingly, and the crotchety illiberality of outlook which occasionally creeps into the pages of late Christie is completely absent. In fact, the liberal commonsense of the headmistress and founder of the school, Miss Bulstrode, is presented in such a way as to suggest it has the author’s wholehearted approval.

The skill with which the summer term at Meadowbank is combined with a revolution in Ramat, a small but rich Arab state in the Middle East, is masterly. Hercule Poirot is required to discover who is busily murdering the staff of the school, and it is not long before a plethora of motives is revealed. Elements of the domestic mystery and the thriller are combined, and two characters whom we shall later meet in the thrillers are first encountered in Cat Among the Pigeons: Colonel Pikeaway, who seems to be in charge of intelligence, and is given to remarking ‘We know all about things here, that’s what we’re for’ (he will say it again in Passenger to Frankfurt and, as a old man in retirement, in Postern of Fate): and the enigmatic financier, Mr Robinson, ‘Fat and well-dressed, with a yellow face, melancholy dark eyes, a broad forehead, and a generous mouth that displayed rather over-large very white teeth’. Mr Robinson will make an appearance in Postern of Fate and a Miss Marple adventure, At Bertram’s Hotel.

For some years, Hercule Poirot has lived in an apartment in Whitehaven Mansions, London, W1. We learn in Cat Among the Pigeons that the number of his apartment is 228, but the block of flats is now called Whitehouse Mansions. Mrs Christie’s carelessness again? Or simply a misprint in certain editions? Or has Poirot moved without telling even his creator?