Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Have I convinced you that it was a straightforward case?” he said.
You’ll have noticed that I’m going through a bit of an Agatha Christie thing recently. I read maybe half of the total œuvre when was twelve or thirteen, and am fairly sure this was one of them, but I had completely forgotten the details. Poirot is called in to re-investigate a murder of sixteen years earlier (the book was published in 1942, so that would be 1926), by the daughter of the woman who was jailed for the crime. The murder weapon is hemlock, strictly speaking coniine, used to dispatch an unpleasant artist who was flaunting his affair with his latest model in front of his wife and their house guests.
Poirot gets each of the five suspects to write down their memories of the day of the murder. Christie breaks each of those accounts across chapters, which is convenient for keeping up the narrative pace but a bit annoying for the historically trained reader whose instincts are to give each source its own place in the sun. In a dramatic denouement he reveals why the artist’s widow allowed herself to be convicted for a crime she did not commit, and also who the real murderer was, though there is a strong implication that justice will never be served due to the passage of time and paucity of firm evidence.
I have to admit that it did make me go back to the court ruling quashing the prosecution of Soldier F for several of the Bloody Sunday killings, on the grounds, similarly to the witness statements in Five Little Pigs, that the statements of F’s fellow soldiers made at the time and to the Savile Inquiry were not admissible evidence – although the judge condemns Bloody Sunday in the strongest terms. It still doesn’t explain to me why Soldier F was prosecuted for the wrong crimes.
You can get Five Little Pigs here.
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Death on the Nile | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party
