Elephants Can Remember (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.’
  

Elephants Can Remember
POIROT (1972)

In March 1972, Dame Agatha was approached by the ment of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London, wished to add her to their collection of wax figures. She herself to be measured with tapes and calipers, and in due a life-size figure of the author took its place in the Museum

In the summer a revised version of the previous year’s play was presented, as
Fiddlers Three
, and in November
The Mousetrap
celebrated its twentieth birthday.

A new Poirot novel,
Elephants Can Remember
, was published in time for Christmas. The impresario Peter Saunders published his memoirs,
The Mousetrap Man
, and Agatha Christie wrote a friendly Introduction in which she recalled the many occasions on which they had collaborated.

*  *  *

Elephants Can Remember
, although no one realized this at the time of its publication, was to be Poirot’s penultimate case. It was, in fact, the last Poirot novel that Agatha Christie wrote, for the final Poirot,
Curtain
, which would appear in 1975, was one which she had written during the Second World War with the intention that it be published posthumously as the final case of Hercule Poirot.
Elephants Can Remember
also marks the last appearance of Ariadne Oliver, who plays a leading part in the investigation.

Mrs Oliver is at her most delightful, and most scatty, in this, her farewell appearance. Her similarity in some respects to her creator has been mentioned several times: like Dame Agatha, Mrs Oliver is no conventional feminist, for she is relieved when a luncheon in honour of celebrated female writers, which she is obliged to attend, turns out not to be confined to female writers. She is as vague as Agatha Christie, too, concerning Hercule Poirot’s address. Dame Agatha has given it in the past both as Whitehaven and as Whitehouse Mansions. Miss Oliver thinks it might be Whitefriars Mansions. Now we shall never know for certain. (Mrs Oliver complains of her new secretary, Miss Livingstone, and bewails the loss of Miss Sedgwick, of whom we have never heard until that moment.) Max Mallowan, in his memoirs, mentions that Mrs Oliver was ‘a portrayal of Agatha herself ’, and adds, somewhat mischievously, that a pretended scattiness was one of Mrs Oliver’s assets.

This is one of those stories about crime committed in the past. In this case, a girl’s father murdered her mother, or perhaps it was the mother who murdered the father. All that is certain is that both parents died, the murderer having committed suicide immediately afterwards. Twelve years later, when the girl is now a young woman engaged to be married, her prospective mother-in-law thinks it important to know who killed whom. The elephants of the title are people whose memories of the events of twelve years earlier are accurate. Mrs Oliver goes on rather tiresomely about elephants never forgetting: it becomes a dreadfully winsome joke between her and Poirot, and at least five of the nine references to it ought to have been deleted.

This is one of the more meandering Christies. Elephants may never forget, but the author who is now over eighty frequently does. Her publisher ought to have provided her with an editor to help her deal with dates, ages and calculations, for these frequently go awry in
Elephants Can Remember
. At one point we are told that a man is twenty-five years older than his wife; later we learn that ‘as a young man’ he had been in love with his wife’s twin sister. How young a man was he? If he was under forty, then she was under fifteen! No one is ever quite certain whether the deaths of Celia Ravencroft’s parents occurred ten, twelve, fifteen or twenty years in the past. Poirot reminisces with his old friend Superintendent Spence about cases on which they have collaborated in the past, and gets an important detail about
Five Little Pigs
wrong. But then Poirot, too, is getting old. Even his author realizes this, and wittily reminds us of the fact:

Young Celia is made to say that she knows very little about the family tragedy, never having read any account of the inquest, and then two pages later says, ‘I think about it nearly all the time’, and reveals that she is by no means ignorant of the details. These narrative weaknesses, infrequent in the earlier novels, make themselves particularly noticeable in the late Tommy and Tuppence adventures,
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
and
Postern of Fate
, as well as in
Elephants Can Remember
.

The story is actually an ingenious one, and the pace is not quite as leisurely as when the elderly team of Tommy and Tuppence amble into action. Also, it is enjoyable to encounter again such earlier colleagues of Poirot as Superintendent Spence and Mr Goby, the latter still gathering information for Poirot, forty-four years after his first appearance in
The Mystery of the Blue Train
. A certain premise is repeated from a story, ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’, which appeared in the volumes
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
(UK: 1960) and
Double Sin
(USA: 1961). A final query: Why should a hand be covered with blood when all it has done is to push someone over a cliff?

Elephants Can Remember
was fortunate to collect some highly favourable reviews on its initial publication in London. ‘A quiet but consistently interesting whodunnit with ingenious monozygotic solution,’ wrote Maurice Richardson in
The Observer
, adding cryptically, ‘Any young elephant would be proud to have written it.’ ‘A beautiful example of latter-day Christie,’ said the
Birmingham Post
, while the
Sunday Express
thought it ‘a classic example of the ingenious three-card trick (now you see it, now you don’t) that she has been playing on her readers for so many years’.

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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Christie Crime Classics

The Man in the Brown Suit

The Secret of Chimneys

The Seven Dials Mystery

The Mysterious Mr Quin

The Sittaford Mystery

The Hound of Death

The Listerdale Mystery

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?

Parker Pyne Investigates

Murder Is Easy

And Then There Were None

Towards Zero

Death Comes as the End

Sparkling Cyanide

Crooked House

They Came to Baghdad

Destination Unknown

Spider’s Web
*

The Unexpected Guest
*

Ordeal by Innocence

The Pale Horse

Endless Night

Passenger To Frankfurt

Problem at Pollensa Bay

While the Light Lasts

Hercule Poirot Investigates

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Murder on the Links

Poirot Investigates

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Big Four

The Mystery of the Blue Train

Black Coffee
*

Peril at End House

Lord Edgware Dies

Murder on the Orient Express

Three-Act Tragedy

Death in the Clouds

The ABC Murders

Murder in Mesopotamia

Cards on the Table

Murder in the Mews

Dumb Witness

Death on the Nile

Appointment with Death

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas

Sad Cypress

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

Evil Under the Sun

Five Little Pigs

The Hollow

The Labours of Hercules

Taken at the Flood

Mrs McGinty’s Dead

After the Funeral

Hickory Dickory Dock

Dead Man’s Folly

Cat Among the Pigeons

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

The Clocks

Third Girl

Hallowe’en Party

Elephants Can Remember

Poirot’s Early Cases

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

Miss Marple Mysteries

The Murder at the Vicarage

The Thirteen Problems

The Body in the Library

The Moving Finger

A Murder Is Announced

They Do It with Mirrors

A Pocket Full of Rye

4.50 from Paddington

The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side

A Caribbean Mystery

At Bertram’s Hotel

Nemesis

Sleeping Murder

Miss Marple’s Final Cases

Tommy & Tuppence

The Secret Adversary

Partners in Crime

N or M?

By the Pricking of My Thumbs

Postern of Fate

Published as Mary Westmacott

Giant’s Bread

Unfinished Portrait

Absent in the Spring

The Rose and the Yew Tree

A Daughter’s a Daughter The Burden

Memoirs

An Autobiography

Come, Tell Me How You Live

Play Collections

The Mousetrap and Selected Plays

Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays