Cards on the Table, Agatha Christie

The Book

Mr. Shaitana, a man of middle years, rich and a somewhat eccentric collector of oddities, decides to host a dinner and bridge party. His guest are: four detectives, Superintendent Battle, Colonel Race, Ariadne Oliver, and of course, Hercule Poirot;  and four murders who got away unspected of their crimes, Dr. Roberts, Mrs. Lorrimer, Major Despard, and Miss Anne Meredith. When each set, murders and detective retire to different room to play bridge, Mr. Shiatana seems happy, bouncing between the rooms and the play, keenly observing his party. He leave the detectives, seeming happy and goes into the room with the murders. 

When the detectives finish up their play, they go to tell their host goodbye, and but instead of taking their leave, they find he has been murdered with a stiletto. Superintendent Battle takes charge, but not before Mrs. Oliver declares that Dr. Roberts is the murderer, owing to her woman's intuition. She is ignored. From there each of the other three detectives takes a fancy to try to solve the crime in their own way. Mrs. Oliver tries to help out Miss Meredith, Colonel Race defends Major Despard, and Poirot puts his little grey cells to work and declares that Mr. Shaitana had it wrong in at least one case, one of his supposed murderers is innocent of the crime, the other three are guilty. He then sets out to see which of those four did it. He examines the one unbiased clue the detectives are give, the scores of the bridge game. Colonel Race completes his assignments in record time and mysteriously disappears again. (Ah Colonel Race, just popping in and out of stories randomly is so your thing.) 

A few days later, Battle convenes the detectives again, and Poirot unmasks the killer. 

My Thoughts

This is a solid outing by Agatha Christie. Unlike a lot of Christie's she's kept the suspect list short and their individual motivations clear. She helpfully tells us at the beginning of the book that there are no tricks in the book, it is pure psychology that will solve the crime. 

This is a bread and butter staple of the Poirot novels. We are told by her in the foreword that Hastings found this case to be quite dull in the end. So, if you read this book and don't solve it, can you really say that you are smarter than Hastings? Is she trying to redeem that poor, put upon fellow? 

The story is fun, if more than a bit chilling. And like many Christie novels, is a bit "stuck in it's time" with the racist portrayal of our victim. However, there are at least two ruthless killers, both of whom are ready to kill at the drop of a hat, killing more than one person each. And it turns out Poirot is correct when he says that one of the group is not a murderer. 

The story gets a bit loose at the end, and a bit stretched out. Ariadne Oliver spends a lot time complaining about how she writes a book, thinking that there are more than enough words, only to get to the end and be tens of thousands of words short. As a writer, I find this to be relatable for a lot of reasons. 

I believe that each story has a natural length, that once polished and put together, it just supposed to be a short story, a novelette, a novella, a novel or a piece of epic, long form fiction covering over 150,000 words. What just is, is. 

So I don't think the looseness of the plot at the end is all that surprising. First of all, there are not a whole lot of suspects. Secondly, Christie is not a lush writer. Her sentences are straightforward and without pretense. While they are simple, using every day language, they are not the boiled down, hard prose of other writers, perhaps ones that are just beginning to come on the scene. So description is not her key purpose. (I would say it's lacking, except it's perfectly easy to imagine what Christie is driving at.) So where another author might have wandered past the roses and told us what they smelled like, Christie is content to keep in only that which is relevant and expand the plot instead of padding the description. 

All and all, this turns out to be a difficult little puzzle if you don't know which clues mean what. And if you don't play bridge, you might be at a disadvantage, but she does do it honestly. And the correct play is given to you in the novel. So with a bit of discipline, the reader stands a fair of shot of solving the puzzle before the end of the book. 

How Much My Library Card Saved Me

This book was shipped to me from the Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District. The stamp in the book indicates it entered their library system in April of 2022. Ah Pandemic Money. As such, this is a good investment. The books are well loved and this book has been read more than once in the 18+ months that they have had it. The book is holding up well, as most library users are gentle readers. Nobody has corrected this book.  The cover says the book cost $15.99 that is the number we will use. 

This Book                                                 $15.99

Items Reviewed This Year                    $959.32

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