Poirot Retrospective #16: Peril at End House

 

Poirot Retrospective #16: Peril at End House

This was a quick read - I finished it in 1.5 days - and a pretty good one.

Poirot and Hastings are vacationing down in Looe, a small tourist trap on the Cornish coast. They run across a woman whose life has been threatened several times, and Poirot vows to help her before the would-be assassin succeeds.

This is another quintessential Christie novel: group of shady characters gather at a spooky old manor house ("It's a ... bad house" says the maid) in remote England, a murder occurs, motives are slowly peeled back one by one, Poirot asks his innocuous questions, Hastings likes the women and the blue collar dudes, and nothing is quite what it seems.

I am proud to relay that I guessed the solution here 100% right - only the second time in all these books! I even got the subplots right. Whether this was because I've read a million of these, or because they were unusually heavily telegraphed, I'm not sure.

Why isn't this in my "best of the best" grouping, then? Some very thin characters (although the good ones are quite good) ... some very convenient Deus Ex Machina plot devices that defied logic and seemed shoehorned in to make things fit ... the setting could have been deployed better ... some mild racism against Jews ("Atypical of his race" says Poirot at one point when an art dealer offers too much money for a painting) ... and a weird pacing issue near the end where things speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down for reasons I couldn't figure out. Wonky writing, in other words.

Still, fun stuff, and recommended. A very good example of Poirot. Also, it avoids Cabot Cove Syndrome in the same way a couple of the other novels do: the murders happen BECAUSE Poirot is there, not despite it. In other words, the murderer is counting on fooling him as an element of the crime.