An outbreak of kleptomania at a student hostel was not normally the sort of crime that aroused Hercule Poirot’s interest. But when he saw the list of stolen and vandalized items – including a stethoscope, some old flannel trousers, a box of chocolates, a slashed rucksack and a diamond ring found in a bowl of soup – he congratulated the warden, Mrs Hubbard, on a ‘unique and beautiful problem’.
The list made absolutely no sense at all. But, reasoned Poirot, if this was merely a petty thief at work, why was everyone at the hostel so frightened?

I’m working my way through Christie’s novels at the rate of one a month in their order of publication. Most of them are fun and some of them are remarkable but ‘Hickory Dickory Dock‘ is the second book in a row that I’ve set aside halfway through. I could put ‘Destination Unknown’, last month’s disappointment, down to Christie trying to revive her thriller writing and not getting it right but ‘Hickory Dickory Dock‘ is her thirty-fourth Poirot book so I’d expected her to have the hang of them by this time.

‘Hickory Dickery Dock‘ had all the signs of a crank-the-handle offering from a franchise that the author has grown bored with. From the first page, the book plods. The plot is slight and what there is of it is hard to take seriously. The exposition is clumsy and repetitive. The foreigner stereotypes are annoying. There is no tension. Unlike earlier Christie books with a nursery rhyhme title, the plot has little or no connection to the rhyme.

Some of the early character sketches were interesting but they tended towards the stereotypical if not the straightforwardly racist, It was as if Christie had based her characters on newspaper reports of what hostel-dwelling young people from multiple nationalities were like in 1955, rather than basing them on people she’d met. Miss Lemon and her sister were interesting but not interesting enough to stop ‘Hickory Dickory Dock‘ from being too tedious for me to read the second half.

I’m hoping that next month’s book, ‘Dead Man’s Folly‘ (1956), another Poirot book but this time in the more familiar environs of middle-class village folk, will be better.