39. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975)

Captain Arthur Hastings narrates. Poirot investigates. ‘This, Hastings, will be my last case,’ declares the detective who had entered the scene as a retiree in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the captain’s, and our, first encounter with the now-leg-endary Belgian detective. Poirot promises that, ‘It will be, too, my most interesting case—and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent…X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot!’ The setting is, appropriately, Styles Court, which has since been converted into a private hotel. And under this same roof is X, a murderer five-times over; a murderer by no means finished murdering. In Curtain, Poirot will, at last, retire—death comes as the end. And he will bequeath to his dear friend Hastings an astounding revelation. ‘The ending of Curtain is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised,’ writes her biographer, Charles Osborne.

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 Dead Man’s Folly

Charles Osborne on
Dead Man’s Folly

POIROT (1956)

At the beginning of 1956 Queen Elizabeth II made Agatha Christie a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). The announcement came on New Year’s Day, in the New Year’s Honours List.

In September, Towards Zero, the play which the author and Gerald Verner had fashioned from her 1944 novel, was staged in London (see p. 201).

A news item in the London Daily Telegraph on 20 November announced that, because of what the newspaper referred to euphemistically as the ‘Suez dispute,’9 the manager of the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, Kent, had decided the previous evening to cancel the production of Agatha Christie’s play, Murder on the Nile, which the resident company had planned to stage the following week. Although there was nothing offensive to anyone’s national or political sensibilities in the play itself, the manager thought its title, in the circumstances, might be considered ‘a little unfortunate’.

The 1956 Christie was Dead Man’s Folly. During the year, The Burden by Mary Westmacott was also published.