December 08, 2012

Agatha Christie: Hercule Poirot's Christmas

The result of pretending to be a more amiable, a more forgiving, a more high-minded person than one really is, has sooner or later the effect of causing one to behave as a more disagreeable, a more ruthless and an altogether more unpleasant person than is actually the case! If you dam the stream of natural behaviour, mon ami, sooner or later the dam burst and a cataclysm occurs!

Published in 1938, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas destroys our illusion (or hope) that at one time, Christmas was not the stressful ordeal we get sucked in to today. Of course for Christie, long-buried grievences must end in murder. Thus it is that on Christmas Eve, miser, adulterer and unrepentent swindler, Simeon Lee, after inviting his devoted and prodigal children home, is killed during this most wonderful time of the year. Hercule Poirot happens to be visiting an old colleague who lives in the neighborhood, and both are called in for unofficial assistance.

Although Christmas is essential to the plot — only a funeral would be able to draw family back to an unloved patriarch as does Christmas — Christie otherwise almost completely ignores the holiday. No banquets or sweets are lovingly described. No plot-derailing interludes of seasonal jollity. Christie is interested in the dammed up resentments further put under pressure, and gives us a few quarrels and many scenes of oblique snideness.

Everyone has a motive, even the seemingly most disinterested guests in the house, and, of course, no one has an alibi. False trails are laid. Even the chief constables's "best man" is confused by the whole case.

In the end, Poirot pulls the solution out of thin air. The murderer is so unexpected as to be a bit unrealistic even for Christie. On the other hand, the characters aren't wilfully obtuse or constantly foiled by deus ex machina.