The Queen of Crime brings down the curtain on life and work of Hercule Poirot in this melancholy finale that does give her most famous creation a dramatic and memorable send-off.
When I embarked on my Christie re-readathon in earnest, I just knew that I was going to put off Curtain for as long as I could; I can still remember being absolutely devastated by this book back when I first read it as a teenager. Re-visiting it years later in my forties, with a more adult perspective, I didn’t find it quite as unbearably sad and Poirot’s ending didn’t feel as bitter. Most importantly, after battling through some middling-to-awful novels Dame Agatha wrote in her last years, I was left feeling grateful that Poirot’s swan song was penned in the early 1940s, well before the decline set in.
There still remains an aura of sadness about Curtain, narrated once again by Poirot’s faithful friend Arthur Hastings, who finds himself adrift and without purpose after the recent death of his wife Cinders. With their four grown-up children now scattered across the globe, Hastings feels very much alone. He thus readily answers the call of his old friend Poirot, reuniting the duo at Styles, the scene of their first murder case.
Time and age have left their devastating mark on both Styles and Poirot. Styles, once a proud country home, is now run as a guest house, with its drive overgrown with weeds and the house needing a coat of paint. Poirot meanwhile has shrunk to a thin little man, crippled with arthritis and bound to a wheelchair. Only two things remain unchanged: his jet-black moustache and hair (which Hastings refers to as now painfully obvious dye job), and his brain, still shrewd and incisive as ever.
Poirot has summoned Hastings for their last hunt together, but this case is a challenge unlike anything else they faced before. Poirot is convinced that one of the guests at Styles is a murderer who is connected with at least five known unrelated cases, and managed to avoid suspicion every time. Poirot believes that the killer he refers to as X will strike again, but he has no idea who the next victim might be. To Hastings’ great annoyance, Poirot flat out refuses to disclose the identity of X, on the legit grounds that Hastings’ guileless face will give him away; instead, he asks Hastings to be his eyes and ears. In the other stories, it’s not uncommon for Poirot to hide his deductions from his friend, but here poor dense Hastings is in the dark from the very beginning.
Restricted by his failing health and his knowledge of the murderer, Poirot remains in the shadows while Hastings conducts his investigation and his suspicions jump from one person to the next. Needless to say, he draws spectacularly wrong conclusions from the things he observes and hears, which at times puts him in a very real danger. Poirot’s frustrations with Hastings’ lack of ordered thinking is nothing new, but here his open derision is borderline cruel at times.
But there’s also a tremendous amount of affection, especially in Poirot’s last letter to Hastings which replaces the traditional drawing room denouement. Overall I’m happy that Christie shipped Hastings off to Argentina and used him sparingly in Poirot novels, but their last adventure is undeniably emotional and their friendship feels very real.
Upon the re-read, most of the book’s melancholy comes from Hastings’ frame of mind: nostalgic about the past, still reeling after the death of his wife, saddened by the prospect of losing his friend to sickness and old age, feeling the weight of the haunted, unhappy atmosphere at Styles. The inclusion of Judith, one of Hastings’ children who coincidentally also stays at Styles as a research assistant to a scientist, is an inspired touch. Fiercely independent, stubborn and prickly, Judith has a loving but tense relationship with her father, which further illuminates Hastings’ many flaws and insecurities and brings in another layer of emotion and stakes.
As for the plot, after a streak of poorer novels it was a pleasure to dive back into vintage Christie, with a carefully constructed mystery, cleverly hidden hints, well-drawn cast of characters and an ending that knocks the chair from under the reader’s feet. I had a teensy bit of doubt whether X could really have carried out the schemes just so, but there’s no doubt that Christie devised a truly diabolical, pernicious and elusive kind of murderer quite unlike any other villain she’s written before or since. There’s also an interesting dilemma as to how exactly one would deal with this kind of evil.
Though it didn’t depress me anywhere near as much this time, I still teared up in the last few pages of Curtain. However this re-read definitely made me feel better about the ending for one of my favourite fictional characters.
yggdrasille.com 