Poirot Retrospective #13 - Black Coffee

 

Poirot Retrospective #13 - Black Coffee

This was a weird one.

Turns out it was originally a play Christie wrote in 1929. It was performed in London a year later at a smaller theater - her agent had told her it was no good and she was hesitant about putting it out there, but it was reasonably successful - enough so that she later wrote two rather well-known plays, The Mousetrap (which ran from 1952 until the pandemic closed it in March of 2020) and Witness for the Prosecution.

After her death, an Australian opera essayist named Charles Osborne "converted" it (and a few others of her works) into a novel with the blessing of her estate. Well, let's get this out of the way: his conversion is terrible. It's just a play with the stage directions written out as transitional sentences instead.

It reads something like this (I'm making this section up, but the actual book is all very similar):

"I do not think that is true," said Poirot. Poirot walked across the library, looking left and right as he approached the bookcase. The bookcase was ten feet tall and stocked with an array of leather-bound editions. Slightly to the right was an old armchair." (etc etc etc) - just descriptions of what the set looked like and the directions for the actors, and so on.

It's pitiful writing indeed. If anything, it made me want to just read the original play and not this awful transplanted version. I strongly strongly suspect this was some kind of cash grab by the Christie estate. If any of you ever undertake to read Black Coffee, don't read the novelized version.

As for the plot - it's interesting in two regards. One, it's an absolute distillation of everything that makes a Poirot story unique - the drawing room full of suspects, the sudden and overly dramatic death by convenient poison, Poirot pushing everyone's buttons, sussing things out, asking his maddening questions, then zeroing in on the actual killer using keen psychology. 

The story is spare and sleek to allow for this - in that way it's almost archetypal. But it moved very fast - I read this in one day - and it's extremely easy to follow. There are quite few suspects, all in all. The murder is committed over another one of Christie's weird science MacGuffins - this time "nuclear secrets! The formula that will unlock the explosive power of the atom!" ... she really seems taken with these bizarre world-shattering comic-book-level scientific ideas. 

The OTHER notable thing here is that Poirot is center stage from very early on, and very rarely relinquishes it (and does so only for sidekick Hastings and his comedic relief). Usually in these books Poirot appears only gradually and often not until the story is well underway and there has been quite a lot of setup first.

And even then, he often doesn't monopolize the plot but instead sort of wanders in and out of it until the end, when he pulls everyone together for The Big Reveal. So it was amusing (and odd) to see him soaking up all the attention. 

All in all, it's not bad, terrible conversion notwithstanding. This would be a good "introduction to Poirot" for many people, especially as Christie deliberately inserts many Poirot-isms, like his fussy dressing, his outrageous mustaches, his quotes about the little grey cells, etc.