Lisa Barger

It’s another vacation mystery for Hercule Poirot and this time he’s at a small seaside hotel. But murder doesn’t take holidays.

The Story In Evil Under The Sun

Hercule Poirot is spending what he hopes will be a restful holiday at a small cliffside hotel in Devon. But things get off to a rocky start when former actress Arlena Marshall flirts openly with her lover, Patrick Redfern, in plain view of their families and the other hotel guests. When Arlena is strangled on a secluded beach, Poirot investigates. In the process, he compiles a list of suspects–all of whom harbor closely guarded secrets.

My Thoughts On Evil Under The Sun

When I began Evil Under The Sun I was haunted by the distinct sensation that I had read this story before. We have a beautiful, glamorous step-mother, a somewhat ugly duckling of a step-daughter, and a spineless husband and father in between them. There’s also a boorish American woman who’s just a bit too loud and talks just a bit too much, a less-than-feminine spinster and, of course, a clueless house maid who can be encouraged to remember just about anything.

When the glamorous but flirty woman is murdered after publicly flaunting her affair, I was immediately reminded of the story Triangle At Rhodes, which was both a 1937 Poirot short story and, decades later, a particularly good episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Perhaps that was what made this story especially difficult to get into. Or, perhaps, It was the fact that I found myself going back over chapters, trying to remember which individuals belonged to the Redfern family and which belonged to the Marshall clan. I also had trouble keeping track of which investigating officer was the investigator in charge.

But about two-thirds of the way through, things finally clicked for me and I found myself really enjoying trying to figure out the importance of those candles and identifying which guest indulged in a mid-day bubble bath–and why they did.

Critics of the day were overwhelmingly positive in their reviews, although one reportedly called the novel “undercharacterized”. Personally, I loved the characters–even if I had seen them all before.

The solution to the who-done-it was, in my opinion, one of Poirot’s best. I had to read it twice to make sure I understood exactly who did what, but once I got it, I thought it was ingenious.

I also appreciated Poirot’s attitude toward the victim. In a story that could have easily slipped into stereotyped victim-blaming territory, Christie once again demonstrated her ability to challenge the status quo by allowing Poirot to reframe the crime (and the murdered woman) in a way that keeps the story as relevant today as it was 80 years ago.

My one and only complaint with Evil Under The Sun is with the way Poirot recognized that a particular character was in danger but distanced himself after his offer to help was rebuked. The result was a near tragedy. We’ve seen similar instances of Poirot’s moral ambiguity in other stories but this one felt especially egregious. (I can’t say more without giving away a character’s deepest secret.)

My audiobook of Evil Under The Sun was performed by David Suchet. My ebook was a scan of the 1941 edition.

###