Hello everyone!
So a little while ago I had a bit of a Hercule Poirot post in general, or an Agatha Christie one, but I'm back to going through the whole Poirot mystery series (there's almost forty books in that one, it's an accomplishment!) since I go through one book every once in a while, and this blog post will be split in half because I'm about halfway through the book. Sad, right? But real life has been a little bit of a kicker this week so I didn't get that much of a chance to read, and if I did, I read books a bit more light-hearted than a murder mystery, because with Christie, you need to be 200% in if you want to follow her plot line, and have even the slightest chance of figuring out who in the blazes did away with the a) poor old lady (fabulously rich of course, with a plethora of empoverished relatives), b) a dentist who even Hercule Poirot hated (oh, the irony), or c) an eccentric lord (who pulls together would-be murderers just for kicks and giggles; fun, no?). In this particular book, though, it's neither of the above, although at the rate this is going I have a feeling it's going to turn into Midsomer Murders back when John Nettles still played Inspector Barnaby - aka, more bodies lying around than you can count!
(image not mine)
So, we begin the book, as the title goes, right after a funeral, the funeral of one Richard Abernethie, in fact, who was the eldest of his siblings and had helped raised some of them, and who lived in this huge, old-school mansion type that is basically unlivable anymore (I might have made up that word on the spot, oops). His relatives, who include a hypochondriac brother, a batty sister, and a bunch of nieces and nephews who couldn't really put two and two together, gather to hear the will, which leaves the estate and the money equally divided between them. And, furtemore, should any of them die, the portion they received would then be divided, again equally, among the living relatives.
Punch line, though: the batty sister, Cora, asks a rather intriguing question: as in, that the family wants to hush it up, but Richard WAS in fact, murdered?
Cue the poor thing getting murdered with a hatchet herself a couple of days later.
Now, at this point, the family lawyer, an elderly Mr. Entwhistle (and I swear I had to copy/paste this surname because I keep. Getting. It. Wrong.) starts to ask questions and snoops around a little. You have to hand it to the man, considering everything, but as the first third of the book was drawing to a close, I kept on wondering: where's the mustachioed detective?
Thankfully, Entwhistle pays Hercule Poirot a visit and describes the situation to him, engaging the little Belgian in the matter, and by this point I finally relaxed, because a book without Poirot in it to actively solve the crime isn't quite the same.
At this point, Entwhistle has gone through all the relatives with 'suggestions': saying he tried reaching them by phone after the official murder (Abernethie is, for now, death by natural causes; for now), to see their reactions. He has also interviewed the doctor who attended to Abernethie, and Hercule Poirot has arrived on the scene of the crime (being driven around in a Daimler, natch).
So now I have the distinct feeling there will be more would-be murders or murders as a whole ... but more on that next week!
xx
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