“Peril at End House was another of my books which left so little impression on my mind that I cannot even remember writing it.” (Agatha Christie, An Autobiography)

Christie might not remember writing 1932’s Peril at End House because it was relatively easy to write. After the emotional drain of the late 20’s, Christie had put the “sorrow, despair and heartbreak” behind her. Her first Mary Westmacott novel, Giant’s Bread, came out in April 1930, two months after she met her future second husband, Max Mallowan, and was well received. Her debut Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, came out in October, one month after her marriage; it was less well received, but admiration for the book has only grown with time. 1931’s The Sittaford Mystery was a triumph, with The New York Times comparing it to Roger Ackroyd.

By the time she sat down to write End House, Christie was happily settled in her marriage and more famous than ever. According to John Curran, the planning of the novel was succinctly confined to two notebooks, with little to report beyond a mention of “a telling phrase – ‘conversation without having a point’ – referring to the early conversation between Poirot and Hastings in the garden of the hotel.” Conversation plays an important role here, even more than the physical clues that littered the crime scenes in The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder on the Links. The growing emphasis on characterization wouldn’t take hold till the mid-30’s, but there’s something light and fun about this book that isn’t so readily apparent in the Poirot novels of the 20’s. 

Most of this has to do with the relationship between Hercule Poirot and Captain Arthur Hastings. Evidently, those frequent breaks between them when Hastings was living in Argentina increased their fondness for each other – although sometimes they sound here like an old married couple. Maybe saving the world from the Big Four relaxed the pair. It certainly helped shake off the shadows of Holmes and Watson that clung to them in the earlier stories. 

The contemporary critics and public loved Peril at End House, and it jumpstarted a run of twelve Poirot titles through the 1930’s. I would venture to say the book appears on many fans’ list of favorites. If I were to create a list of my top 11 – 20, it might appear there. Yet here is an instance where I tend to agree with Robert Barnard: “A cunning use of simple tricks used over and over in Christie’s career . . . Some creaking in the machinery, and rather a lot of melodrama and improbabilities, prevent this from being one of the very best of the classic specimens.”

This is the final review of my fifteen-book Poirot Project, and I’d like to pat myself on the back for deciding to place all fifteen titles on slips of paper and pick them randomly. Had I taken a chronological approach, we would be ending our year with a discussion of Elephants Can Remember! As it is, we’re going to close out in a much more positive way. 

*     *     *     *     *

The Hook

“The grey cells, they still function – the order, the method – it is still there. But when I have retired, my friend, I have retired! It is finished! I am not a stage favorite who gives the world a dozen farewells.”

Nothing Poirot says here to Hastings on the terrace of the Majestic Hotel in St. Loo could be less true – except, of course, for the perfect working of his brain. It seems like Poirot spent most of his post-police career re-emerging from retirement! Something always catches his interest, whether it be a neighbor getting murdered or a mutilated corpse discovered in a train in France, or a secret society bent on world domination wrecking his afternoon – Poirot is always willing to lend a hand. 

Here, though, he seems committed to a life of leisure. Somehow, the Home Secretary himself has tracked down Poirot at the Majestic in order to beg him to take on a personal matter affecting the good of the nation, but Poirot will have nothing to do with it. “I have retired – I am finished,” he says with a shrug. That commitment lasts another five minutes. A pretty girl walks up the steps towards them, just as Poirot rises and trips, turning his ankle. The girl comes to his assistance, and in payment, the detective – buys her a martini. 

And that is how we meet Nick Buckley. She seems to be a typical party girl: high on glamor, low on cash, the last of her family line and the owner of a crumbling mansion, End House, that sits on the point looking out to sea. It would be a jolly divertissement for Poirot and Hastings, hanging out with this damsel, if it wasn’t for her casual remark about surviving three near brushes with death in as many days, or for the bullet hole Poirot spots in her hat and the spent shell he finds nearby. 

Another busman’s holiday begins!

It’s a simple but effective hook that leads our two friends into a world of jaded young things, secret drug use, and murder. The opening conversation between Poirot and Hastings is delightful: they allude to world affairs, to past cases, and to Poirot’s avowed retirement – and they snipe lovingly at each other. I’m sure those who love Captain Hastings are happy to have him back after a five-year break. Inwardly, Hastings complains about Poirot’s ego, but the good Captain has a strong sense of himself as the perfect helpmate to the sleuth – a confidence that Poirot is happy to puncture:

“What I particularly missed was your vivid imagination, Hastings… One needs a certain amount of light relief. My valet, Georges, an admirable man with whom I sometimes permitted myself to discuss a point, has no imagination whatever.”

And with that, we plunge with admirable efficiency into the mystery proper. 

Score: 8/10

The Closed Circle: Who, What, When, Where, Why?.

Who? 

Many of Agatha Christie’s 1930’s novels revolve around a “big trick” – usually some method whereby the villain garners our sympathy by seeming to be either a victim or a hero – and the problem for me in these stories is that the side characters are often simply not very interesting. Here’s a quiz: try and name the three young men in Murder in Mesopotamia, or the party guests in Three-Act Tragedy, the passenger list in Death in the Clouds, or all the daughters-in-law in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. (Funnily enough, I can easily name every character in Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, and the ten victims on Soldier Island are indelibly etched in my heart. These casts are even larger – but the books are better.)

End House provides a half dozen suspects revolving around a trick victim/heroine/murderess. It works well enough that Christie will turn around and repeat the same basic pattern in her next book, Lord Edgware Dies; personally, I find the characters in Edgware more compelling, but that might have something to do with its London theatrical setting. The people we find in St. Loo are not a likeable bunch, which is necessary to supply motivation since motive itself is rather muddy here. Still, these characters have never interested me much, and I pondered the reason for this during my re-read. 

It might have something to do with the fact that these characters are filtered through Captain Hastings’ perception of them, and his ineptitude at judging character is so complete that it provides an all-too easy shorthand to the savvy reader as to what these people are about. Poirot himself has celebrated his friend as the perfect barometer of incorrectness, something Hastings didn’t suffer from in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (because he knew the family) but came to master so well that it becomes a comic bit between them. It’s not that Hastings isn’t observant! His descriptions of characters are spot on; he just never seems to know what to do with the information he has gleaned about them. 

Perhaps I’m being unfair: despite the fact that Hastings likes Commander Challenger and Mr. Crofts on the spot (and they turn out to be two of the more villainous characters), he acknowledges to Poirot that any assumption that Challenger is a “good fellow” must be made “so far as one can tell by a cursory glance.” Challenger is a good villain – his kind will appear again in N or M – and perhaps the best red herring of the bunch. The Crofts are less effective to me, maybe because the Australian villain not new to Christie (it will be put to better use in an early 40’s novel.)

The good Captain’s inherent prejudice against what he sees as louche young men makes him dislike Jim Lazarus on sight, which isn’t fair but is understandable. And he is charmed by Nick Buckley but, in fairness, so is Poirot. Hastings can also recognize true goodness when he sees it: he is immediately drawn to Maggie Buckley, a woman who will reappear again and again as a heroic figure in Christie but who here is sadly too good to live.

Nowhere is Hastings’ thick-headedness more apparent than when he meets Frederica Rice, “She was an unusual type – a weary Madonna described it best. She had fair, almost colorless hair, parted in the middle and drawn straight down over her ears to a knot in the neck. Her face was dead white and emaciated – yet curiously attractive. Her eyes were very light gray with large pupils. She had a curious look of detachment.” Hastings never recognizes that Freddie is a drug addict until Poirot tells him point blank eighty pages later. But it’s a fact that probably hasn’t escaped most readers – her coloring, the “large pupils,” the mood swings. It’s important that we know Freddie uses drugs right away because it means we will be less accepting of her opinions of Nick – most of them negative, all of them true. 

As often happens in early Christie, the murderer is by far the most captivating character in the novel. Nick is a fully-fleshed representation of the younger generation trying to survive and thrive after riding the bumpy social and financial carnival of the 1920’s. She’s pretty and intelligent and charming, but she has inherited the worst traits of her monstrous grandfather, including, one suspects, a big dose of sociopathy. She lives a crazy life, and her murder scheme is crazy, but I can accept the endless succession of risks Nick takes to fulfill her plan. What I don’t buy is her doing it all in order to retire to St. Loo and live in this ramshackle mansion. I think that, had she succeeded, she would have found herself bored as hell in a trap of her own making and used her newfound fortune to return to the high life. 

What? 

“To hunt down a murderer after a crime has been committed – c’est tout simple! . . .The murderer has, so to speak, signed his name by committing the crime. But here there is no crime – and what is more we do not want a crime. To detect a crime before it has been committed – that is, indeed of a rare difficulty.”

Someone is trying to kill Nick Buckley. Although she shrugs off each incident, the narrow escapes are numerous: a falling picture, a rolling boulder, cut brakes, a bullet! What luck that Hercule Poirot happens to be vacationing nearby, that Nick accidentally meets him, and that he becomes aware of the situation and is determined to protect her. He suggests that Nick bring a trusted friend into her sordid menage, and tragically it is that friend – Nick’s cousin Maggie – who is killed in Nick’s stead. 

The first third of the novel, leading up to Maggie’s death, sparkles. Then things slow down considerably, as Poirot and Hastings continue to search for a motive amongst these unpleasant people and try to protect Nick from another murder attempt. This leads to Poirot’s ruse of pretending that Nick has died, in order to lull her murderer to reveal themselves. The trick includes a reading of the will and even a séance (!), lending this section of the book an air of hokum. 

If some of the book feels tired to a modern reader, one should at least give it kudos for being among the first to use plot strands and tricks that Christie will employ again and again. I would venture to say that End House, Lord Edgware Dies and Three-Act Tragedy are three of a kind. (SPOILERS ahead.) All of them center around an attractive, charming but mentally unsound person who uses similar trickery to knock out the person who stands in the way of their undeserved happiness. In typical Christie fashion, she dresses up the essentially same situation so that it looks different: Nick appearsto be the intended victim,  Lady Edgware appears to have been framed for murder, and Charles Cartwright appears to be the amateur sleuth du jour in the case. All three murderers utilize impersonation of a sort to forward their plan: Maggie is supposedly killed because she resembled Nick via her clothing, Carlotta Adams, a skilled Jane Wilkinson impersonator, became her dupe, and Sir Charles played the role of his best friend’s butler. 

In fact, there are tons of things in Peril at End House that you will find repeated in the books that follow. Rather than spoil everything for you, I’ll list some of them here without naming where they are repeated. (Feel free to ask me for a title in the comments below if you’re stumped!)

• A dashing aviator is the focal point of a tragedy that initiates the crime.
• The vagaries of names and nicknames becomes a telling clue. (Christie uses this a lot!)
• The killer’s motive hinges on duplicity over a will. 
• People from Australia are dishonest!
• An angry husband shows up in the background to threaten a character, providing a strong red herring.
• A killer lucks out by being “exonerated” through the murder attempt made by another. 
• A box of poisoned chocolates is sent to a patient in an asylum. 
• Poirot stages a fake murder in order to rattle the suspects (and ends up accusing the fake victim of the crime!)

Have I missed anything?

When and where? 

Although the novel takes place in Cornwall, it’s inspired by Christie’s beloved Torquay. The Majestic Hotel stands in for the Imperial (where you can still stay for the Agatha Christie Festival if you want to!) That opening section is the most charming in the book and an evocative setting in Christie’s hands.

Score: 7/10

The Solution and How He Gets There (10 points)

If I haven’t made myself clear as yet, Nick Buckley is not the intended victim but a murderer. She conceived of a plan to convince those around her that someone was trying to kill her. She invited an impeccably honest person – her cousin Maggie Buckley – to stay with her as a sort of guarantee of protection. In reality, though, Maggie was the intended victim. Nick had fallen for wealthy aviator Michael Seton, whose affections were soon transferred to the much more wholesome Maggie. He made out a will leaving his fortune to his beloved Magdala. 

But Magdala is also Nick’s true name! (What lunacy on Nick’s part to reveal that fact to Poirot!) She decides to murder Maggie and doctor the evidence to make it seem that Nick was Michael’s fiancée and intended heir. And then, after Maggie is killed, Nick continues the attempts on her own life, even to the point of swallowing poison, in order to make it seem that she is still the rightful intended victim.

It’s an audacious plan, carried out by someone desperate for money in order to secure the house she and her grandfather (from whom, I bet, she inherited some of that kinky mentality) both loved. An additional motivation – although this one has no foundation – Poirot suggests that Nick was angry that Michael threw her over for Maggie (who wasn’t even pretty!!) Poirot also deduces without foundation that Nick framed Frederica Rice for the final “attempts” on her life because Jim Lazarus had thrown Nick over for Freddie! 

Nick’s audacity extends to her involving Poirot in her schemes. Since she had no way of knowing he would come down there, much of this had to have been improvised, and the amount of luck Nick needed to have Poirot fall in line with every step of her plan stretches credulity. In the end, his eyes are opened by one small but solid clue. 

“Mademoiselle Nick made one mistake. She was too clever. When I urged her to send for a friend, she promised to do so – and suppressed the fact that she had already sent from Mademoiselle Maggie. It seemed to her less suspicious – but it was a mistake. For Maggie Buckley wrote a letter home immediately on arrival and in it she used one innocent phrase that puzzled me. ‘I cannot see why she should have telegraphed for me in the way she did. Tuesday would have done just as well.’”

It’s a clumsy mistake – but it fooled me the first time I read the book. Point to Christie!

The solution is perfectly fine, a classic of its kind. It certainly isn’t original: many authors have made “the trusted client” or the intended victim their killer. Two years earlier, Sam Spade fell in love with his client in The Maltese Falcon; it didn’t get him very far. And Christie was already a master at manipulating her audience’s sympathies with her killers. Frankly, it was more daring of her to make her killer the least sympathetic, most likely suspect, as she also often did. 

Score: 7/10

The Poirot Factor

“Eh bien, – I confess it – I was fooled – fooled completely and absolutely. The little Nick, she had me where she wanted me, as your idiom so well expresses it. Ah! Madame, when you said that your friend was a clever little liar – how right you were! How right!”

At least Poirot has the good grace at the end to admit to Freddie Rice what an idiot he has been through most of this case. And that, for me, is the problem with this plot – and, if you get down to it, with Lord Edgware Dies, as well: both cases requires Poirot to wholeheartedly believe the false line he’s been handed long enough for Christie to get a novel written. Poirot never considers the easiest answer: that Nick herself could have contrived the fake murder attempts for an ulterior motive. He does not do so because he can’t – there would be no book!  And when Poirot finds the newspaper in Nick’s drawing room open to the page that announces his arrival in St. Loo, he completely misconstrues its significance. Never once does he ask himself if it was Nick who read this and contrived to meet Poirot and spill the beans about all these murder attempts! That would be the easiest solution of them all, but it doesn’t cross the sleuth’s mind – because it can’t! Not even Freddie, a drug addict, was fooled by Nick. 

(If anyone wants to fan the flames of the “Poirot or Marple?” debate, compare his handling of this case with Miss Marple’s in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. It doesn’t take long for Miss Marple to figure out that the supposed victim is anything but – and she never gets to meet the killer in that book! She also doesn’t prevent two subsequent murders; that point goes to Poirot.)

Poirot is charming here, as always, and his interactions with Hastings are a comic delight. Not only that, but whenever Poirot works with Hastings, we get much deeper insight into the way his mind thinks. This time, however, I’m shocked to find my sympathies align more with Hastings. Poirot calls his friend a “faithful dog.” Nick echoes this sentiment: “Who is the dog, by the way? Dr. Watson, I presume.” But Hastings has an excuse for not seeing through the ruse until the end; his mind is simply not built this way. For someone who crows at the start that his little grey cells are in perfect working order and always at the ready, Poirot is easily fooled for a shockingly long time. 

Score: 7/10

The Wow Factor

The Times review from April 14, 1932, which was a rave for Peril at End House, includes the following telling statement: “This is certainly one of those detective stories which is pure puzzle, without any ornament or irrelevant interest in character. Poirot and his faithful Captain Hastings are characters whom one is glad to meet again, and they are the most lively in the book, but even they are little more than pawns in this problem. But the plot is arranged with almost mathematical neatness, and that is all that one wants.”

I agree wholeheartedly with this, and I think it will color how a reader feels about the book. Many people read Golden Age detective fiction primarily for the puzzle. End House is clever in that regard, although one might not feel it is as adequately clued as Christie’s other 20’s and 30’s novels. I myself appreciate more attention to the characters, the dialogue, the elements of the book that complement the puzzle. Here, I feel that End House is a bit lacking, with the emphasis here clearly on function rather than form. 

Peril at End House serves as an admirable starting point for the Poirot boom of the 1930’s. It also feels like a definite transition into a new, more assured era for Christie as a writer. Throughout the decade, her puzzle plots will dazzle us, and the “extra bits” – the characters and social comedy – will get better and better. 

Score: 6/10

FINAL SCORE FOR PERIL AT END HOUSE:  35/50

This gives us our second tie! Both Peril at End House and Death in the Clouds have scored 35 points. I think that, in terms of both quality and importance to the canon, End House just edges out Clouds, and so I will place it above Clouds in the rankings.

THE POIROT PROJECT RANKINGS SO FAR . . . 

1. Death on the Nile (49 points)
2. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (48 points)
3. The A.B.C. Murders (46 points)
4. Three-Act Tragedy (42 points)
5. Cards on the Table (36 points)
6. Peril at End House (35 points)
7. Death in the Clouds (35 points)
8. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (34 points)
9. Murder in Mesopotamia (30 points)
10. Hallowe’en Party (29 points)
11. Hickory Dickory Dock (29 points)
12. Dead Man’s Folly (28 points)
13. The Mystery of the Blue Train (26 points)
14. Elephants Can Remember (22 points)
15. The Big Four (21 points)

I say “so far” . . . because as I look at this list, there is one placement that bothers me. Cards on the Table was the first novel I ranked here, and I think I was too hard on it. I think it is a more clever book than Three-Act Tragedy. It has better drawn characters by far, and, frankly, I enjoy it a lot more. Thus, I’m going to exercise my prerogative to revisit the rankings and change them!!!

Having done so, here are . . . 

THE FINAL POIROT PROJECT RANKINGS

1. Death on the Nile (49 points)
2. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (48 points)
3. The A.B.C. Murders (46 points)
4. Cards on the Table (43 points)
5. Three-Act Tragedy (42 points)
6. Peril at End House (35 points)
7. Death in the Clouds (35 points)
8. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (34 points)
9. Murder in Mesopotamia (30 points)
10. Hallowe’en Party (29 points)
11. Hickory Dickory Dock (29 points)
12. Dead Man’s Folly (28 points)
13. The Mystery of the Blue Train (26 points)
14. Elephants Can Remember (22 points)
15. The Big Four (21 points)

What a joy it has been to revisit Hercule Poirot in this way and fill in a hole in the blog. Of course, there are eighteen other cases that I had already reviewed but not ranked. On the spur of the moment I created two lists and merged them together to create a ranking of all thirty-three titles.

1. Death on the Nile (49 points)
2. Five Little Pigs
3. After the Funeral
4. The Hollow
5. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (48 points)
6. The A.B.C. Murders (46 points)
7. Cards on the Table (43 points)
8. Mrs. McGinty’s Dead
9. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
10. Evil Under the Sun
11. Murder on the Orient Express
12. Three-Act Tragedy (42 points)
13. Cat Among the Pigeons
14. Lord Edgware Dies
15. Sad Cypress
16. Taken at the Flood
17. Curtain
18. Peril at End House (35 points)
19. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
20. Appointment with Death
21. Death in the Clouds (35 points)
22. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (34 points)
23. Murder in Mesopotamia (30 points)
24. Dumb Witness
25. Hallowe’en Party (29 points)
26. Hickory Dickory Dock (29 points)
27. Dead Man’s Folly (28 points)
28. The Mystery of the Blue Train (26 points)
29. Third Girl
30. The Clocks
31. The Murder on the Links
32. Elephants Can Remember (22 points)
33. The Big Four (21 points)

This was a totally off-the-cuff deeply personal and emotional response, and of course the added titles have not been carefully and totally objectively assigned points. Obviously, this list would probably change every time I revisited it, so perhaps one day I will rank the others and create a more official list.

Next year, though, I’m taking a break from reviewing Christie novels. Instead, I plan to write about her in a different way. (More about that at the start of the year!) For now, a Joyeux Noel to all from Poirot, Hastings, Mrs. Oliver, George, Miss Lemon, Inspector Japp, Superintendent Spence, Mr. Satterthwaite . . . and some of the most fiendish killers the Queen of Crime has ever devised!