Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Anne Hart

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ From there he was summoned to the country by a recent widow, Lady Astwell, who, against all evidence, was convinced that her husband had been murdered by his inoffensive secretary. To uncover the truth Poirot subjected a large household to a reign of terror:

      ‘For two weeks now I have played the comedy, I have showed you the net closing slowly around you. The fingerprints, footprints, the search of your room with the things artistically replaced. I have struck terror into you with all of this; you have lain awake at night fearing and wondering; did you have a fingerprint in the room or a footprint somewhere?’

A strange little story is ‘Wasps’ Nest’¹⁸ in which Poirot took as his mission the solution of a murder before it even occurred. The setting is charming:

      John Harrison loved his garden, and it had never looked better than it did on this August evening, summery and languorous. The rambler roses were still beautiful; sweet peas scented the air.

      Two months later the stock markets crashed around the world. We can be sure, however, that Poirot, that canny practitioner of Flemish thrift, continued to sip his tisanes with equanimity. By the end of the 1920s he was a very rich man and remained so for the rest of his life. ‘I like not the sensational. For me the safe, the prudent investment … what you call the gilded edge.’

      NOTES

1 Later collected into books, sometimes with minor changes, many of these stories first appeared in magazines such as The Sketch (1923) and Blue Book (1923–25).

2 Also published under the title ‘Mr Davenby Disappears’.

3 Also published under the title ‘The Mystery of the Plymouth Express’.

4 A much expanded version of this story was published in 1937 under the title ‘The Incredible Theft’.

5 Also published under the title ‘The Mystery of the Clapham Cook’.

6 Also published under the title ‘The Curious Disappearance of the Opalsen Pearls’.

7 Also published under the title ‘By Road or Rail’.

8 Also published under the title ‘The Adventure of the King of Clubs’.

9 Also published under the title ‘The Dubious Clue’.

10 Also published under the title ‘The Kidnapping of Johnnie Waverly’.

11 Also published under the title ‘The Million Dollar Bank Robbery’.

12 Also published under the title ‘The Case of the Veiled Lady’.

13 The history of this delectable story is complicated. The first version appeared in The Sketch, 12 December 1923, and made other appearances under the title ‘Christmas Adventure’. In 1960 a much expanded and updated version, set in the 1950s, appeared under two titles: ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ and ‘The Theft of the Royal Ruby’.

14 Though first published as a book in 1927, The Big Four is a somewhat expanded collection of twelve stories which appeared serially in The Sketch in 1924.

15 In 1929, in Partners in Crime, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, actors in another corner of the Christie arena, parodied the exploits of Poirot and Hastings in The Big Four in their adventure ‘The Man Who was No. 16’.

16 Presumably in defending the existing social order against the Big Four. It was probably at this time, for his share in the victory, that Hastings received an OBE. We are never told what Poirot thought of that.

17 Also published under the title ‘In the Third Floor Flat’.

18 Also published under the title ‘The Worst of All’.

       4 THE 1930S

      ‘Monsieur Poirot here,’ said Japp. ‘Quite a good advertisement for a hair tonic, he’d be. Face fungus sprouting finer than ever. Coming out into the limelight, too, in his old age. Mixed up in all the celebrated cases of the day. Train mysteries, air mysteries, high society deaths – oh, he’s here, there and everywhere.’

      —THE ABC MURDERS

      For many the 1930s were disturbing years. Even among Poirot’s clients it was understood that most people were not as well off as before. Complained Elinor Carlisle in Sad Cypress: ‘Everything costs so much – clothes and one’s face – and just silly things like movies and cocktails – and even gramophone records!’ Some people actually became poor. ‘Darling,’ confided the Hon. Joanna South-wood in Death on the Nile,

      ‘if any misfortunes happen to my friends I always drop them at once! It sounds heartless, but it saves such a lot of trouble later! They always want to borrow money off you, or else they start a dressmaking business and you have to get the most terrible clothes from them. Or they paint lampshades, or do Batik scarves.’

      In Poirot’s world the uncertain political times – the ‘question’ of India, the ‘troubles’ in China, agitation against the Establishment, ‘Bolshies, Reds, all that sort of thing’ – were spoken of over cocktails and at tea. Towards the end of the decade a Europe under the shadow of war brought talk of armaments, the race for Supremacy in the Air, Hitler and Mussolini, the Spanish Civil War, ‘days of crisis’.

      In Chelsea flats Poirot was apt to encounter chairs made of webbing and chromium, and in country drawing-rooms even elderly hostesses made concessions to ‘modernity’ by allowing guests to smoke. Egypt in winter was expensive, Majorca was cheap, and ‘Paris doesn’t cut any ice nowadays. It’s London and New York that count,’ cried Jane Wilkinson in Lord Edgware Dies. Bottles of mouthwash could turn out to hold liquor instead, and gold-topped perfume bottles might hide cocaine. People now flew regularly across the Channel, and in one of Poirot’s cases air travel made possible the appearance of a surprise witness from New Zealand.

      In the younger generation people of fads and crazes might aspire to be ‘all S.A. and IT’, and in the older – СКАЧАТЬ