lesley manville agatha christie's poirot cards on the table

If you know about bridge I think they make things too obvious, and if you don’t know about bridge I feel they might be offputting. They feel like a clue from a short story, not a novel. I think the bridge scores are a weakness though. His amateur psychology seems less like homespun hokum than other stories, and unlike, say, Death in the Clouds, it’s reasonable for him to be annoying and enigmatic – he has no real evidence, and he has no reason to think anyone is in any imminent danger. Not only is it a nice break from the standard setup, it plays well to Poirot’s strengths. The overall plot (not just the murder) is clever and Christie does a good job of keeping things moving with such a small cast of characters.Īlways a pleasant surprise to stumble across a book that has improved with (my) age. You could make the case that one of the suspects is a little too clearly innocent from early on, but manages to bounce from reveal to reveal and still manages to pull a surprise (partly due to, for once, having a very short wrap-up, so that the page count doesn’t work against the finale.) The sleuths are given some decent air-time – obviously it’s Poirot’s show, but Race (previously in The Man In The Brown Suit, appearing in the future Death On The Nile and Sparkling Cyanide), Battle (four other appearances, two as the main sleuth) and Ariadne Oliver (six further appearances, five with Poirot) all do themselves justice. This is a very clever mystery, with much more to it than the bridge clues (although I do know a lot more about bridge these days). Things change – this is a genuinely impressive piece of work that probably needs a place in my Poirot Top Five, a post that I wrote a few years ago but really needs to be re-evaluated. The bridge information is a somewhat specialised area of information (although not anywhere near as bad as, say, the topic of the clue in The Finishing Stroke) and to the young Puzzle Doctor, it rather spoiled the mystery. It’s a popular Poirot but when I first read it (years and years ago), I never really liked it much. This my post for Past Offences 1936 Challenge. With no evidence at all, apart from the bridge score cards which fascinate Poirot for some reason, how will it be possible to find the killer and even more, to prove it? But as the murder was silent, nobody witnessed it – and everybody left the table at some point.

And while the four suspects play bridge together while Shaitana watches on, one of them leaves the table and stabs him. Shaitana invites four suspected (by him) murderers and four sleuths – Ariadne Oliver, Colonel Race, Superintendent Battle and a certain M.

That ISN’T a safe thing to collect… especially when you invite four of them to dinner.

Lesley manville agatha christie's poirot cards on the table