Second paragraph of third chapter:
“He had a nasty cold,” said Hercule Poirot, “and no doubt, in spite of the remedies that I have handy here, he would probably have given it to me. It is better that he should not come. Tout de meme,” he added, with a sigh, “it will mean that now I shall pass a dull evening.”
A late Agatha Christie novel, set in a dormitory village in the 1960s. The young people are awful, with long hair and drugs, and the moral fundament of society has been undermined by the abolition of the death penalty (this is mentioned several times). Meanwhile a ten-year-old girl is drowned in a tub at a Hallowe’en party, and Poirot is called in to solve the mystery. Bear in mind that Poirot was already an old man in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written fifty years earlier. But his moustaches endure.
The murderer’s identity is established by a massive clue which we are given at quite an early stage, and at first I felt that this made it a fair puzzle. but having said that, the hapless police had access to the same information, and could surely have put the pieces together a bit more quickly; and the connection of the crime to other recent murders and disappearances leads us to an improbably convoluted plot, with secret identities a plenty.
As well as casting aspersion on the moral decay of the 1960s, there’s quite a lyrical passage describing the Italian sunken garden on Ilnacullin island in Bantry Bay. It obviously inspired one of the strands of the overall plot.
A book that is interesting for reasons the author may not have considered. You can get Hallowe’en Party 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
