Agatha Christie in publication order #10: Peril at End House

 

First published: 1932. The seventh outing for Poirot, if we include the short story collection, and Christie's tenth book overall. (The play Black Coffee was first produced in 1930 - but I'm not including that. It was published as a novel in 1998, so I'll maybe do it whenever I get that far, in about five hundred years time.)

Title: I like it. "Peril" isn't used often enough. It's a more dynamic departure from the "Mystery of", "Murder on" etc type of titles... and I think the first of Christie's novel titles not to begin with "The". I'm not quite sure what Person with Lantern on the original cover is about, though.

Plot: We're back with Hastings' first person narration - hurrah! He and Poirot are in Cornwall, and Hastings is lamenting about how he unfortunately missed out on the Blue Train adventure. (He shouldn't be too sad about it.) Poirot is still allegedly retired, though his "retirement" is surely the longest and least successful - in terms of leaving behind his profession - in history.

Anyway, the two friends are relaxing in a nice hotel garden when a chance encounter sparks a new mystery. Nick Buckley (real name Magdala - no wonder she doesn't use it), owner - last of her family line - of the nearby End House, is a lively, fun-loving young woman who apparently has no idea of how much peril she's actually in. Somebody, it seems, wants Nick dead - but her house is both heavily mortgaged and highly dilapidated, and she has no other assets and doesn't seem to have obviously annoyed anyone to the point of murder, so there's no obvious reason for that.

Nevertheless, murder is in the air, and it's not long before tragedy strikes. 

There's a nice range of suspects - the friends, the cousin, the lodgers, the maid. I did kind of work things out, though not properly, at the same time as Poirot did - so maybe my little grey cells are working better than I thought. (Or maybe I subconsciously remembered something from having read it many, many years earlier.)

Poirot-isms:

"They say of me: 'That is Hercule Poirot!- The great- the unique!- There was never any one like him, there never will be!' Eh bien - I am satisfied. I ask no more. I am modest."

Brilliant as he is, self-awareness is perhaps not his strong point.

Acceptable in the 30s? "He's a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one," says Nick, of her friend Jim Lazarus. So that's nice. 

Also, Frederica Rice's ex-husband is described as "a queer of the worst description", but given the context and era, I think this just means a very disreputable character rather than any reference to sexuality. 

Verdict: I really enjoyed it. A clever plot which does play fair with the readers, and a nice cast of characters. Not an international jewel thief or shadowy world power in sight, which is a nice relief. 

Next up: Lord Edgware Dies.