Appointment With Death (Hercule Poirot 19)

Captain Arthur Hastings narrates. Poirot investigates. ‘This, Hastings, will be my last case,’ declares the detective who had entered the scene as a retiree in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the captain’s, and our, first encounter with the now-legendary Belgian detective. Poirot promises that, ‘It will be, too, my most interesting case—and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent…X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot!’ The setting is, appropriately, Styles Court, which has since been converted into a private hotel. And under this same roof is X, a murderer five-times over; a murderer by no means finished murdering. In Curtain, Poirot will, at last, retire—death comes as the end. And he will bequeath to his dear friend Hastings an astounding revelation. ‘The ending of Curtain is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised,’ writes her biographer, Charles Osborne.

Of note: On 6 August 1975, upon the publication of Curtain, The New York Times ran a front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot, complete with photograph. The passing of no other fictional character had been so acknowledged in America’s ‘paper of record.’ Agatha Christie had always intended Curtain to be ‘Poirot’s Last Case’: Having written the novel during the Blitz, she stored it (heavily insured) in a bank vault till the time that she, herself, would retire. Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976.

Time: ‘First-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny.’

Charles Osborne on

Appointment with Death

POIROT (1938)

The Mallowans spent what was to be their final pre-war season in the Middle East in 1938, when they moved from Tell Brak ‘because of the blackmailing pressure of the Sheikhs of the Shammar tribe who were obviously bent on inducing our workmen to strike’,44 and set up camp more than a hundred miles to the west, in the Balikh Valley, remote marsh-like country but a paradise for the archaeologist. There they spent a profitable and enjoyable few months, until at the beginning of December it was time to pack up and return to England.

In Come, Tell Me How You Live, Agatha Christie described her mood of nostalgic regret as she and Max Mallowan left Beirut by ship. She stood looking over the rail at the lovely coastline ‘with the mountains of the Lebanon standing up dim and blue against the sky’, breathing in the romance of the scene. Then, suddenly, a cargo vessel crossed her line of vision, its crane accidentally dropped a load into the water, and a crate burst open. The surface of the sea before her was now dotted with lavatory seats. ‘Max comes up and asks what the row is about. I point, and explain that my mood of romantic farewell to Syria is now quite shattered!’

Two crime novels were published in 1938: Appointment with Death and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas.

The setting of Appointment with Death, a novel which begins in Jerusalem and moves to Petra, the ‘rose red city, half as old as time’, is one of Agatha Christie’s most exotic, and the 160 characters, the majority of whom are one large family of Americans touring the Holy Land, are among her most colourful. The Boynton family consists of old Mrs Boynton, fat, grotesque and a mental sadist, her four offspring, and the wife of one of them. The party of tourists who make the excursion to Petra also includes a French psychiatrist, a young English woman who is a medical student, and Lady Westholme, a formidable British Member of Parliament described as ‘a big, masterful woman with a rocking-horse face’. It also includes M. Hercule Poirot. Poirot is travelling for pleasure, like the others, but he also has an introduction from his old friend Colonel Race to Colonel Carbury, who is with the British Army in Transjordania. When Mrs Boynton is murdered at Petra, Poirot is asked to help with the investigation.

It was in 1938, the year in which Appointment with Death was published, that Agatha Christie said of Hercule Poirot in an interview she gave to the London Daily Mail,

There are moments when I have felt: ‘Why—why—why did I ever invent this detestabl

e, bombastic, tiresome little creature?…eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustache and tilting his egg-shaped head….’ Anyway, what is an egg-shaped head….? I am beholden to him financially…On the other hand, he owes his very existence to me. In moments of irritation, I point out that by a few strokes of the pen…I could destroy him utterly. He replies, grandiloquently: ‘Impossible to get rid of Poirot like that! He is much too clever.’45

Clearly, the author still had a very soft spot for her famous detective, however much she may have become exasperated with him, and her affection for the childishly arrogant but nonetheless endearing Poirot is evident throughout Appointment with Death. This is an especially well-plotted novel, and the atmosphere of the various places described, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Judean desert, the Dead Sea, the brooding, timeless beauty of Petra, is conveyed with an easy economy.

It was not often that Agatha Christie modeled a character 161 on a recognizable person in real life. However, you are tempted to identify Lady Westholme, the overbearing Member of Parliament in Appointment with Death who is ‘much respected and almost universally disliked’, with Lady Astor. Like Lady Astor, Lady Westholme is an American who married into the English aristocracy and successfully stood for election to Parliament. The French psychiatrist’s comment on Lady Westholme (‘that woman should be poisoned…It is incredible to me that she has had a husband for many years and that he has not already done so’) puts one in mind of the often-quoted exchange between Lady Astor and Winston Churchill:

If you were my husband, sir, I would poison your coffee.

If you were my wife, madam, I would swallow it.

Seven years after publication as a novel, Agatha Christie turned Appointment with Death into a play. In doing so, she made a number of significant changes. Chief among these is the deletion of Poirot from the cast of characters. (She had done this once before, in her dramatization of Death on the Nile.) The investigation of Mrs Boynton’s death is now undertaken alone by Colonel Carbery (formerly ‘Carbury’, but then Agatha Christie was often careless about spelling), but it is one of the suspects, and not Carbery, who discovers what really happened. Also, the ending of the play is different from that of the novel. The character who, in the novel, turned out to be the murderer, is, in the play, perfectly innocent. More than this it would not be proper to reveal, though it is probably safe to add that the play has a new character: not a substitute for Poirot, but a comical local politician called Alderman Higgs (or, as he pronounces it, ‘Halderman ’Iggs’). ‘Ah coom from Lancashire—same as you do’, he says with a chuckle to Lady Westholme. He is, of course, of a different political colour from the Conservative Lady Westholme, and intends to oppose her as an Independent candidate at the next by-elections. The role of the Arab guide or Dragoman has also been built up to provide the conventional comic relief which used to be thought necessary in plays of this kind.

After a short, pre-London tour which opened in Glasgow, 162 Appointment with Death came to the Piccadilly Theatre, London, on 31 March 1945. Mary Clare was greatly liked as the evil Mrs Boynton, and other leading roles were played by Ian Lubbock (Lennox Boynton), Beryl Machin (Nadine), John Wynn (Raymond), Carla Lehmann (Sarah King), Owen Reynolds (Colonel Carbery), Janet Burnell (Lady Westholme) and Percy Walsh (Alderman Higgs). The play was directed by Terence de Marney.

In 1988 a feature film version of the story was released by the Cannon Group, starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot for the third time. Adapted by Anthony Shaffer and directed by Michael Winner, the film was shot in Israel with a big-name cast including Lauren Bacall, Carrie Fisher, Hayley Mills, Michael Sarrazin and Sir John Gielgud.