Curtain

So Poirot finally breathed his last in Curtain, an outstanding performance by David Suchet, added and abetted by Hugh Frazer. 

To tell the truth, it’s not my favourite book.  I’ve read it, of course, but it’s painful to see the jaunty, confident Poirot old and ill and – finally – dead.  I hate the hero dying!  I remember how traumatic it was when, at the age of eleven or thereabouts, I first read The Final Problem where Sherlock takes a dive off the Richenbach Falls.  I didn’t know what was coming and I remember my sense of absolute shock, made the more intense by the fact there wasn’t anyone who could understand how upsetting it was.  I mean, when The Final Problem was published, there was an outbreak of shocked grief, but I was about eighty years too late for the funeral.  Ho hum.  Sherlock sprang back from his watery grave but there’s no return for Poirot.

Apart from HP’s departure though, there’s other reasons why Curtain misses the bus.  Agatha Christie wrote it in the Second World War, together with Miss Marple’s final outing, Sleeping Murder, but neither book was published until the 1970’s.  Of the two books, Sleeping Murder, with its genuinely creepy, claustrophobic opening, as Gwenda, the heroine, finds the house she’s brought by chance becomes eerily familiar, is the most successful.  There may be odd anachronisms in the book, but they don’t hit you in the eye as they do in Curtain, where the action staggers uneasily between the late 30’s and the 1970’s.  Apart from anything else, how old is Captain Hastings?  Granted that he was wounded on the Somme in 1916, he must be at least ninety and, even if we turn a blind eye to the question of age, I just can’t see him wanting to poison Allerton, however protective he felt of his daughter, Judith.  It’s just not dans son character, as Poirot said on numerous occasions in other circumstances.  The Hastings we know – decent, impetuous and with a bit of a temper – would have wanted to knock Allerton’s block off, not poison him.   And Poirot as a murderer?  After having been assured, many times, that he “Does not approve of murder” I can’t help feeling that’s not dans son character either. 

I think the truth of the matter is that Agatha Christie was fonder of Miss Marple than Poirot.  In her autobiography she testifies to the importance of two elderly ladies, her Granny and her “Aunty Granny” as she was called in her upbringing.  There’s also a letter she wrote, on finding some carefully stored household goods – linen and pins and so on – saying, “You can see where Miss Marple comes from.” 

Poirot, on the other hand, she often found exasperating.  This feeling is turned to great comic effect when she has her alter-ego, Ariadne Oliver, go off on one about her detective, Sven Hjerson, in the brilliant Mrs McGinty’s Dead.

“How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man?  I must have been mad!  Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland?  Why a vegetarian? Why all these idiotic mannerisms he’s got?  These things just happen. You try something – and people seem to like it – and then you go on – and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life.  And people write and say how fond you must be of him.  Fond of him?  If I ever met that bony, gangling  vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than any I’ve ever invented.”

Robin Upward, to whom these remarks are confided, stares at her in reverence.  He suggests that it would be a marvellous idea to have a real Sven Hjerson murdered by Ariadne.  He suggests (watch out for the Curtain reference!) that she could make a Swan Song book of it, to be published after her death, to which Ariadne stoutly replies, “No fear! What about the money?  Any money to be made out of murders, I want now.”

The truth of the matter is that Curtain is a very good idea, but (even the best of writers have weak spots) Agatha Christie wasn’t the right author to make it live.  And I don’t like Poirot dying. Sad times.