Lisa Barger

Hercule Poirot’s investigations end where they began–in the country house of Styles. The Cavendish family is gone now, and the quaint country house is a hotel furnished with modern conveniences. But evil doesn’t sleep and Poirot, now a very old man disabled by arthritis and weakened by a failing heart, must do the unthinkable to stop a murderer.

The Story In Curtain

When Arthur Hastings is invited to spend the summer with his long-time friend Hercule Poirot in the former Styles mansion, he’s excited. Poirot and Hastings have not seen one another for many months and Hastings is still actively grieving the loss of his wife, Dulcie.

Already at the hotel is a small group of acquainted guests, including Hastings daughter Judith, her boss, her boss’s chronically ill wife and the wife’s nurse-companion. Also in residence is a married man who courts Judith (and other young women, reportedly), a former governor of India, a woman whose sister murdered their father, and a middle-aged birdwatcher. Each of them, says Poirot, has some connection to various murders.

Then Poirot drops another bombshell. The murders were all committed by someone he’ll identify only as X.

And X is in the house.

My Thoughts On Curtain

Much is made of the fact that Curtain was written sometime in the early 1940s–a time when most critics agree Christie’s mysteries were at their best–but was not published until 1975, when the quality of her writing had, in many critics’ opinion, declined dramatically. (On the other hand, more than one avid reader has opined that a bad Christie story is still head-and-shoulders above most others from the same era.)

The manuscript was reportedly locked in a vault where it lay, waiting, for around 30 years. But when the novel was published in 1975, it was done so without any obvious recognition that three decades had past. This is perhaps most a problem for readers trying to work out characters’ ages and timelines.

Poirot, for example is already an “old man” in 1916, when The Mysterious Affair At Styles was written. That would make the Poirot of Curtain a very old man, indeed.

Hastings fares no better. He is 30 when The Mysterious Affair At Styles begins but in Curtain, various comments fix his age in Curtain at only fifty or so.

That there appeared to be no attempt to reconcile these various discrepancies was irritating and, if I may be so bold, lazy writing and a serious breach of the author/reader contract. An easy, if imperfect, fix would have been publish Curtain at some earlier date, say, the late 1950s, and let Hastings’s children (or Poirot’s valet or Ariadne Oliver’s editor or … you get the idea) find and publish the later Poirot novels after his death.

But let’s put aside my need for the dates to make sense. What about the story? That left me wanting for more, too. I never understood why Poirot so vehemently refused to disclose X’s identity to Hastings. Why even reveal that there is an X, then?

I also never quite got over the feeling that all but 1 of the families X destroyed were denied justice. Yes, one character does get a degree of closure, I suppose, but it felt inadequate and contrived.

I’m sorry my Poirot Reading Challenge is ending on a bit of a sour note, because I really did come to respect her cleverness, her wit, and her willingness to try new things. And, for perhaps the final time, I offer my heartfelt gratitude to Hugh Fraser, who performed all but a handful of the Poirot audiobooks I “read” this year. Mr. Fraser, you weren’t just a joy to listen to–you were a blessing.

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