Poirot Retrospective #11: Murder in Mesopotamia

 

Poirot Retrospective #11: Murder in Mesopotamia

This is the immediate prequel to Murder on the Orient Express in terms of Poirot's career, the final pages have him boarding the train for Syria (where he solves an off-screen crime of some sort and then boards the Orient Express).

I have read enough of these by now to have some inkling as to how Christie's mind works, and I figured out the murderer fairly early on - but not the method (which is clever, even if I'm unsure it could really happen that way), nor the ultimate motive.

Which is basically a way of saying that there is a certain formula, or structure, to these books which can clue you in as to some aspects of the crime, but it takes a really astute reader to put everything together (if that's even possible!). Apparently I am getting better, but not really that astute yet.

One of Christie's particular talents is stacking the deck subtly against the reader, yet making it SEEM like you're in possession of everything you need to solve the crime. So you blunder into the final pages sure of yourself, only to be astonished by her cleverness. It's a nice touch.

Nevertheless, this one was towards the bottom of the middle of the pack for me. The setting - Iraq of the 1930s - was strangely underused. Christie's second husband was really an archeologist, and she traveled to Iraq and knew what she was talking about here, but in this book it's just a sandy setting for a murder.

The lone moment when the setting gets underscored is when Poirot opens his final explanation of the crime with an Arabic quotation, and a few random artifacts are mentioned here and there - that's really it. The Iraqi porters and helpers are (predictably) third-class human beings here, barely worth noticing, with no agency or voice. A real shame and waste of possibility.

The book also suffered a bit from too many characters/suspects, spreading them out rather thin in terms of personality and characterization. I didn't really develop a strong feeling for any of them. Her usual eye for social class and education level and so forth was also not as sharp in this one - with the sole exception of the narrator, who is a plain-speaking nurse from what seems the lower middle class, and sometimes makes little asides about the other characters from that viewpoint - that worked well for me.

It also suffers rather seriously from Cabot Cove Syndrome; it's rather ridiculous that as Poirot just happens to be traveling through a remote corner of Iraq, a fancy multi-suspect murder with an elaborate solution just HAPPENS TO OCCUR THE DAY HE ARRIVES. Like, come on. I know there has to be some set up to get him on the scene, but this was very threadbare. It's also ridiculous that he immediately proceeds to the Orient Express following this. It feels very forced.

This is an OK read, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone new to Poirot or Christie in general. The main pleasure is seeing the structure work itself out as the reader has come to expect from many other novels of the same type. There is the expected Big Twist at the end, and two Mini Twists, but none of them were very shocking this time around. Indeed, I felt she telegraphed it to an unusual degree, and the twist in this one was very guessable.

This was written and published in between two much, much better books: ABC Murders and Cards on the Table - all three from 1936. I guess they can't all be winners...