Mrs McGinty died from a brutal blow to the back of her head. Suspicion fell immediately on her shifty lodger, James Bentley, whose clothes revealed traces of the victim’s blood and hair. Yet something was amiss: Bentley just didn’t look like a murderer.
Poirot believed he could save the man from the gallows – what he didn’t realise was that his own life was now in great danger…

‘Mrs. McGinty’s Dead‘ was described to me as “A lesser Christie” and I think that sums it up. It’s good enough to read to the end but it’s not going to linger in the memory or be a book I’d want to re-read.

The plot is twisty in a way that stretches credibility. It’s one of those Christie books that is all puzzle and no personality. The mystery is a sort of ‘Find The Lady’ card trick. There is a very limited pool of suspects who are all, like the cards, hidden face down and any one of whom could the murderer. Like the card trick, Christie keeps switching attention around from card to card and like the card trick the whole purpose is to distract and tempt. It was fun in its way but I felt that it plodded a little and that too much time was spent discussing which card hid the Lady without turning any of them over.

I’ve never liked Poirot and, at the start of ‘Mrs. McGinty’s Dead‘ it seemed to me that Agatha Christie no longer liked him much either. He came across as a sad little old man who missed Hastings because he now has no one to show off to or belittle, whose main regret in life was that one can only eat three times a day, who was blind to his declining celebrity and who had no compunction about lying to everyone he meets. Unexpectedly, Christie’s depiction of the dissonance between Poirot’s faded fame and his self-perception made me feel sorry for him for the first time. 

For me, the most enjoyable and memorable thing about the book was the crime novelist, Mrs. Oliver, a recurring character who seems to be an avatar for Christie herself. I loved how Chrisie used Mrs. Oliver to voice her own frustrations about screen adaptations of her novels that largely ignore the original text. My favourite part was when Mrs. Oliver was talking about the central character in her books Sven Hjerson, a Finn who loves crudités, cold winter baths and solving murder mysteries and who is clearly meant to be an avatar for Poirot. She declares that she regrets ever creating him and wonders why she made him a Finn when she knew nothing about Finland and why she made him so odd. Her ambivalent relationship with him is summed up when she says, “Of course he’s idiotic, but people like him”.

I listened to Hugh Fraser narrating the audiobook. He did his usual solid job but even he couldn’t stop the prose from feeling mechanical at times. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.