Hello everyone!
I apologise in advance if some portions of this blog may seem rambly or perhaps a little shakier than usual. I'm trying to fight off the beginnings of the flu so I'm pretty much drinking tea and vitamin C and cold medicine, coupled with a lot of honey and ginger, but my head still kind of feels like I may need a little bit of help lifting it next time I get up.
But anyway!
Yesterday (while I was feeling better than Tuesday and much better than today, being Thursday) I sneakily asked my father if I could steal a book he's currently reading. You're probably thinking GASP SO MEAN.
Not really - I asked before I nabbed it. Also, I'm a fast reader so I finished the book in one afternoon and now it's back where it belongs, waiting for my dad to continue munching through it.
The book I'm talking about is titled Closed Casket, and is the second of the New Hercule Poirot Mysteries, written by Sophie Hannah, who alone of all the writers vying for the honour of continuing Ms Christie's legacy was given that privilege.
Now, as you all know, Agatha Christie is pretty much my all-time favourite author besides Tolkien, and if you've ever read any of her books you'll quickly understand why.
I mean, the woman was simply brilliant (perhaps a tiny bit mental, but brilliant)!
So when news got out that someone was going to continue her work with Poirot, well, I was hesitant.
Not just me, my dad too. We were both giving The Monogram Murders (book one in this series) the gimlet eye and wondering if it could be as good as anything Christie had actually written.
Hint: it's not.
That being said, my dad has the same issue I have, which is if he starts a series he'll continue it in the hopes it may become better - so when Closed Casket was translated, he bought it to put it on the Christie shelf at home.
And boy, are we both glad he did!
Whatever was wrong in TMM, CC fixes it and then some.
The story begins with Edward Catchpool, the Scotland Yard investigator who really didn't make a good impression on me (or anyone else for that matter) back in TMM, mostly because of his squeamishness when it came to blood and just general incompetence.
Here, however, he becomes the kind of protagonist regular Christie readers are used to.
More than that though, Poirot is once again Poirot. In TMM he was ... I don't know, not good, in any sense of the word. He just KNEW. Forget about evidence or anything of the sort. HE KNEW. Which is annoying, and actually when I think about it, if Kenneth Branagh only read these new Poirot books, his movie suddenly makes sense.
But in CC, Poirot is once again the beloved, egg-shapped, mincing Belgian who sees what everyone else misses and connects the dots no one would suspect.
On to the actual story though:
both Catchpool and Poirot are invited to a party at an Irish mansion by one Athelinda Playford - who is a famous children's book author - but neither one of them know just what they're doing there. Other guests include the lady's two children: Harry, with his wife Dorro, and Claudia with her fiancé, Dr. Randall Kimpton; two lawyers: Michael Gathercole and Orville Rolfe; her assistant Joseph Scotcher; and his nurse Sophie.
The other characters in the book are the cook, the maid, the butler (I can safely say that, regardless how the butler seems to look perpetually puzzled/petrified/like he's carrying a secret, he did NOT do it) and the Irish investigator with his sidekick.
Does this sound remotely familiar yet? If you've read any kind of Christie book, you'll know that this is a fairly usual setting for her.
Onward.
Poirot and Catchpool try to figure out what they're supposed to be doing there, when Lady Playford announces she's made a change to her will: instead of leaving everything to her children, she's leaving everything to Joseph Scotcher, who is also, conveniently, dying of some sort of kidney disease.
This provokes different reactions from everybody, including Scotcher who emphatically doesn't want the money, but he does insist on marrying Sophie, apparently the love of his life.
Poirot fears that this dinner announcement might provoke more than just verbal abuse, however, so he and Catchpool are determined to both round everybody up, make sure they know where each individual is, and hopefully prevent a murder that they're pretty much convinced is about to happen.
Minor mention at this point is that Orville Rolfe (who is a rather obese character) has gas problems after dinner and thinks he was poisoned. Kimpton rolls his eyes, pokes his stomach, and solves the problem.
Anyway, Poirot, thinking someone might actually try and poison another (though he and I are both thinking about the wrong person for some reason), sets up a watch, and falls asleep in an armchair in the hallway.
Meanwhile, a murder IS committed: Sophie starts shrieking like a banshee and everyone and their mother come running to find that Joseph Scotcher has been murdered - aka so bloody murdered that his entire head's been bashed in by a bat.
Whodunit?
Well, conveniently, Sophie points her finger at Claudia, whom she says she saw doing the deed, but as Claudia's white dressing gown is, well, white, that statement is hard to swallow. Still, the most likely suspects are, and remain, the children with their partners because of the will, and so Poirot and Catchpool set out to establish just where, exactly, everyone was at any given point in time.
Of course by now I've read enough of this genre to know that EVERYONE is lying, because why would anyone tell the truth?
So you take nothing at face value and determine that you need to cross-reference everything, and be done with it.
The more they investigate, however, the more do they discover curious things:
apparently, Sophie isn't lying about seeing Claudia, but she also heard JOSEPH pleading for his life, which is medically impossible since the doctor pronounces he'd been dead by strychnine poisoning. So who was the one talking?
Poirot eventually puts two and two together: if there WAS someone talking, it wasn't Scotcher.
Meaning there was A THIRD PERSON IN THE LIBRARY.
Yes, it's always the library. WHY IS IT ALWAYS THE LIBRARY?
Anyway, moving on, details begin emerging about the victim: he was not, in fact, dying. Actually, he was as healthy as a horse. But why was he pretending then?
Kimpton tells an interesting story (paradoxed against the maid saying that Kimpton always copied Scotcher): that he had known Scotcher back at school at Oxford, that they both studied Shakespeare, that he noticed how Scotcher was copying him and telling his stories forward, and that there was a girl, Iris, who ended up saying yes to Scotcher and not Kimpton. The liaison didn't last, but she married someone else in the end and, unfortunately, died soon afterwards.
But Kimpton also reveals that Scotcher at one point pretended to be his own brother for reasons unknown (to spread the illness rumours?), and the person was also seen on the site of Iris' death.
Eventually, Poirot sleuths around some more, and deduces this: it was Kimpton who murdered Scotcher.
How?
Well, Kimpton was royally pissed at the man from their days at Oxford, and even then believed that the illness was a lie (truth be told pretty much nobody at the Playford estate believed the illness, but, as you do), though no one wanted to believe him. So he made the decision to become a doctor - and to see an open casket, which, in this case, taken from Shakespeare, actually means an open body. The only way anyone would ever believe Kimpton was telling the truth and not Scotcher (who was a willy thing lying to everyone and managing to make everyone like him) was if he had concrete proof in the form of healthy kidneys.
The only way to get THOSE was a post-mortem.
So he waited, and planned, and poisoned the man after the dinner announcement, pouring the poison into water. But his fiancée Claudia knew of this, and was angry at him, so she went and bashed Scrotcher's head in, thinking this might prevent a post-mortem.
As for Sophie, she actually saw Claudia - but in her evening dress, and was too shocked to scream until after Claudia and Kimpton (who'd been pleading with Claudia, natch) rushed off to get her changed. By the time the shrieks began, Claudia was wearing pristine white and no one was the wiser about what happened.
Kimpton confesses - and drinks the last of the poison.
Poirot and Catchpool leave the estate and its eccentric land-lady behind, who's actually sad that she never got to the bottom of WHY Scotcher had to lie so much.
But I mean, some people just lie. It's in their nature.
This was a truly enjoyable book for an afternoon or beach read; it had suspense, it had characters that made sense, some that were just for show, and some that said the funniest things. Most of all, Catchpool was actually intelligent in this book, and Poirot minced about the way he usually does, and solved the case by pulling the proper clues together.
If you've read TMM and disliked it, I highly, HIGHLY recommend CC. It's so much better.
xx
*image not mine
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