Curtain: Poirot's Last Case (20 page)

• Sunday Express
  : ‘Superb, vintage Christie.’
  

39.
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
(1975)

Captain Arthur Hastings narrates. Poirot investigates. ‘This, Hastings, will be my last case,’ declares the detective who had
entered
the scene as a retiree in
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, the captain’s, and our, first encounter with the now-legendary Belgian detective. Poirot promises that, ‘It will be, too, my most interesting case — and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent... X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot!’ The setting is, appropriately, Styles Court, which has since been converted into a private hotel. And under this same roof is X, a murderer five-times over; a murderer by no means finished murdering. In
Curtain
, Poirot will, at last, retire — death comes as the end. And he will bequeath to his dear friend Hastings an astounding revelation. ‘The ending of
Curtain
is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised,’ writes her biographer, Charles Osborne.

Of note: On 6 August 1975, upon the publication of
Curtain
,
The New York Times
ran a front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot, complete with photograph. The passing of no other fictional character had been so acknowledged in America’s ‘paper of record.’ Agatha Christie had always intended
Curtain
to be ‘Poirot’s Last Case’: Having written the novel during the Blitz, she stored it (heavily insured) in a bank vault till the time that she, herself, would retire. Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976.

• Time
  : ‘First-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny.’
  

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
POIROT (1975)

As her publishers had feared, Agatha Christie was no longer able to sustain the effort and concentration necessary to complete another novel. She had, of course, no need to. She had gone on writing for as long as it remained not too difficult a task, but for many years now her income had been such that it was pointless for her to earn any more. A company, Agatha Christie Ltd, set up as long ago as 1955 to handle incoming royalties on all her works after that date, had been reorganized in 1968 when the firm of Booker McConnell bought a fifty-one per cent stake for an unspecified sum. Later, some pre-1955 Agatha Christie titles were taken under the wing of the company, and Booker McConnell extended its holding to sixty-four per cent. It was now by far the major shareholder, the remainder of the company being partly owned by Agatha Christie’s daughter and grandson and partly vested in various family and charitable trusts. In June 1998 Booker sold their shares to Chorion plc, the company that also owned and managed Enid Blyton’s works.

With royalties from books, films and plays for the year ending 31 December 1974 totalling £366,000, Agatha Christie and her family may have had no need of a new ‘Christie for Christmas’ in 1975, but her publishers, understandably, felt differently. Remembering the two crime novels (one featuring Poirot and the other Miss Marple) which their author had written during the Second World War and salted away for posthumous publication, her publishers, in the person of Sir William Collins, approached Dame Agatha with the request that she release one of the two novels for publication in 1975. She was at first reluctant to do so, but eventually agreed that
Curtain
, the earlier novel of the two, and the one in which Poirot conducts his final investigation, could appear in time for the Christmas season.

Agatha Christie had already assigned the author’s rights in
Curtain
to her daughter Rosalind (and those in the Miss Marple novel,
Sleeping Murder
, to Max Mallowan). (‘I thought it a useful way of benefiting my relations,’ she explained to an interviewer. ‘I gave one to my husband and one to my daughter – definitely made over to them, by deed of gift. So when I am no more they can bring them out and have a jaunt on the proceeds – I hope!’)

Rosalind was able to have, or at least to begin, her ‘jaunt on the proceeds’ in her mother’s lifetime, for the amount of money earned by
Curtain
was remarkable, even by Agatha Christie’s standards. A first British edition of 120,000 sold out quickly, American hardback rights were sold for an advance of 300,000 dollars, and American paperback rights for one million dollars. No doubt Agatha Christie had not realized how generous she was being when she assigned those rights away in the forties; but her own earnings in 1975 were close to £1,000,000. (In the United States, the success of the film version of
Murder on the Orient Express
had resulted in sales of 3,000,000 copies of a paperback reprint of the novel.)

In
Curtain
, whose sub-title is ‘Poirot’s Last Case’, Hastings returns as narrator for the first time since
Dumb Witness
in 1937 (except for a few short stories written earlier but not collected into volumes until the sixties), and immediately the problem of chronology arose. To some extent, Hastings’ place as Poirot’s colleague had been taken over in the post-war years by Ariadne Oliver. Now, at the end, Hastings comes back to visit his old friend Poirot, who is staying at, of all places, Styles, the country house which had been the scene of their first case,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, published in 1920. But when is this end, when must this last case, in the course of which Poirot dies, be presumed to happen? We know that
Curtain
was written during the war years of the forties, but there is, of course, no reference to the war in the novel, for Agatha Christie had to remain vague as regards the year in which Poirot was to die. She had determined that it would be shortly after her own death, and she was, at the time of writing
Curtain
, a healthy woman in her early fifties.

This plays havoc with the ages of the characters in the novel, and not least with that of Poirot and Hastings. It must be assumed that the events in
Curtain
take place after those in
Elephants Can Remember
, Poirot’s penultimate case in 1972. Hastings mentions that their earlier Styles adventure had been in 1916. He and Poirot are therefore fifty-six years older than they were in Agatha Christie’s first novel. This would make Hastings eighty-six years of age, and Poirot at least one hundred and twenty! From what is often called internal evidence, however, the reader can work out Hastings’ age in
Curtain
as being just over fifty, while the description of Poirot is of a man close to death, but nearer to eighty-five than to one hundred and twenty. We should simply be grateful that Agatha Christie, while the bombs were falling on London, had given thought to the rounding-off of Poirot’s career, and refrain from looking a gift detective in the mouth.

Curtain
is a sad, muted and nostalgic book. Sad, in that Poirot dies, and apparently without having brought the murderer to justice; muted, in that the inhabitants of Styles, no longer a country manor house but a private hotel or guesthouse not unlike the one in
The Mousetrap
, are, with one or two exceptions, people who are old or disappointed or embittered; nostalgic, in that Hastings is continually aware of the wheel having come full circle, of Poirot and himself ending their long and productive collaboration in the house in which they had begun it. Hastings learns, or is at least momentarily aware, that nostalgia for the happy past is a snare and a delusion. The past, after all, is happy mainly because it is past, because it has been endured.

Hastings’ wife has died in Argentina, but one of his four children, his daughter Judith, is among the guests at Styles. It is because of a problem concerning Judith that Hastings is driven to contemplate, and even to take steps to commit, murder. Poirot, during the course of events, fulfils a prophecy made jokingly by Inspector Japp forty years earlier in
The ABC Murders
.

Confined to a wheelchair, his face thin, lined and wrinkled, though with moustache (dyed) and hair (a wig) still as black as ever, Poirot has to rely more than ever on his little grey cells. ‘This, Hastings,’ he is forced to admit, ‘will be my last case. It will be, too, my most interesting case – and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent, that arouses admiration in spite of oneself. So far,
mon cher
, this X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot! He has developed the attack to which I can find no answer.’

X, the murderer, does indeed operate in such a manner (a more than usually improbable manner, it must be confessed) that the law cannot touch him. Nor, it seems, can Hercule Poirot. It is only four months after Poirot’s death, when Hastings comes into possession of a manuscript bequeathed to him by his old friend, that the truth is revealed. A knowledge of Shakespeare’s
Othello
and of the character of Iago, in particular, has helped Poirot considerably. In fact, he leaves Hastings, as clues, copies of
Othello
and of the play
John Ferguson
by St John Ervine, an interesting playwright of Agatha Christie’s generation who is now almost forgotten.
John Ferguson
(which Christie misspells) is Ervine’s finest play.

The ending of
Curtain
is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised. If it somehow fails to make the effect that it ought to, this may be because the character of the murderer has been too lightly sketched throughout the novel, and his motivation not made sufficiently convincing. The basic idea behind
Curtain
had been adumbrated in one chapter of the 1932 novel,
Peril at End House
; had its characters been more fully developed, Poirot’s last case could have become Christie’s finest novel.

If
Curtain
is not Agatha Christie’s finest, it is, surely, her saddest novel. Who among her readers could fail to be affected by the death of the lovable and infuriating Hercule Poirot? What other character of fiction has had his obituary published on the front page of the
New York Times
?

H
ERCULE
P
OIROT
I
S
D
EAD
:
F
AMED
B
ELGIAN
D
ETECTIVE

Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous, has died in England. His age was unknown.

Mr Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904. His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, was one of the most illustrious in fiction.

At the end of his life, he was arthritic and had a bad heart. He was in a wheelchair often, and was carried from his bedroom to the public lounge at Styles Court, a nursing home in Essex, wearing a wig and false moustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity. In his active days, he was always impeccably dressed.

The news of his death, given by Dame Agatha, was not unexpected. Word that he was near death reached here last May.

Dame Agatha reports in
Curtain
that he managed, in one final gesture, to perform one more act of cerebration that saved an innocent bystander from disaster. ‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it,’ to quote Shakespeare, whom Poirot frequently misquoted.
¹⁶

About Charles Osborne

This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie
(1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them
The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World
(1977); and
W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet
(1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays
Black Coffee
(Poirot);
Spider’s Web;
and
The Unexpected Guest
into novels. He lives in London.

Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

Agatha Christie’s first novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.

In 1926, now averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was the first of her books to be published by William Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship that lasted for fifty years and produced over seventy books.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was also the first of Agatha Christie’s works to be dramatised — as
Alibi
— and to have a successful run in London’s West End.
The Mousetrap
, her most famous play, opened in 1952 and runs to this day at St Martin’s Theatre in the West End; it is the longest-running play in history.

Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of her books have been published: the bestselling novel
Sleeping Murder
appeared in 1976, followed by
An Autobiography
and the short story collections
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
;
Problem at Pollensa Bay
; and
While the Light Lasts
. In 1998,
Black Coffee
was the first of her plays to be novelised by Charles Osborne, Mrs Christie’s biographer.

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