As reported on Sunday, the three top books published in 1923 as measured by ownership on LibraryThing and Goodreads, a barometer of their staying power (in the English-speaking world in particular), are The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie, Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I had not read The Murder on the Links or The Prophet before, and decided to do a triple reading with a welcome return to Whose Body?.
NB that this reviews below includes MASSIVE SPOILERS for a mystery novel published a hundred years ago.
The Murder on the Links was Agatha Christie’s third novel (of 66) and second Poirot novel (of 33). It’s just outside her top ten books on both LibraryThing and Goodreads. The second paragraph of the third chapter, gloriously, is:
“What is that you say? Murdered? When? How?”
Poirot, an elderly retired Belgian detective, and the narrator, the young Captain Hastings, are invited to France by Paul Renauld, a Canadian millionaire who has earned his fortune in Chile and Argentina, and writes that he is in fear of his life. They arrive in France to find that he has just been murdered. The case involves many beautiful women and Renauld’s son. It turns out, after much complex investigation and many false leads, that…
MASSIVE SPOILERS
…Renauld had planned to fake his own murder, but one of the beautiful women decided to kill him anyway. She conveniently dies before being arrested; another of the beautiful women marries Renauld’s son, and another marries Captain Hastings and takes him to Argentina.
The war looms over this book, as over the other two which I will come to. In the very first chapter, Hastings introduces himself to the reader by way of conversation with the girl he has just met (and will marry at the end of the story):
We passed through Amiens. The name awakened many memories. My companion seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of what was in my mind.
“Thinking of the War?”
I nodded.
“You were through it, I suppose?”
“Pretty well. I was wounded once, and after the Somme they invalided me out altogether. I had a half fledged Army job for a bit. I’m a sort of private secretary now to an M. P.”
“My! That’s brainy!”
“No, it isn’t. There’s really awfully little to do. Usually a couple of hours every day sees me through. It’s dull work too.”
All of the dialogue in the book is reported in English, though with a distinctly French idiom to let us know when Christie’s characters are speaking French. It is taken for granted that Hastings, like all properly educated people in 1923, is completely fluent and comfortable in French. No difficulties of linguistic comprehension are reported.
The murder plot is intricate beyond belief, but Christie carries it off by having Poirot show off his talent to the sympathetic Hastings and the unsympathetic official detective from Paris. One feels at the end that the elaborate set-up was just about worth the payoff, and it is a more confident and comfortable book than The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie’s first novel, which also featured Poirot. You can get it here.
