CBR Bingo Square: Camel/Adaptation
“Poirot,” I said. “I have been thinking.”
“An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
Alright, it’s not all just highfalutin’ theme reading over here (but the summer of Irish fiction rolls on), I am also
cramming in books that are simply and purely for fun. Most of my Golden Age crime fiction reading for the past year or two has been working through Ngaio Marsh’s back catalog, but I’ve also been dabbling in some Christie here and there. And I really liked the adaptation of this novel, starring David Suchet, so I figured I’d give it a go.
Poirot and Captain Hastings are on holiday in the English resort town of St Loo (yes, I giggled), when they meet a feckless young heiress, Magdala “Nick” Buckley, whose life has been threatened by several recent apparent accidents. Mademoiselle Nick, as Poirot calls her, is initially quite cavalier about these incidents, but when Poirot realizes someone shot at her (and missed, merely putting a bullet through her hat) while she was speaking to the detective himself, he undertakes the task of saving her life with vigor. Nick’s companions seem none to reliable or reputable themselves, and so he urges her to call her dull but steadfast cousin Maggie down from Yorkshire to stay with her…only it’s Maggie who then winds up dead, apparently murdered by a killer who mistook her for Nick. And there in the background are the mentions of a famous young aviator who has gone missing…
That’s it, sir…Evil. Bad thoughts and bad deeds too. It’s like dry rot in a house, sir, you can’t get it out. It’s a sort of feeling in the air. I always knew something bad would happen in this house, someday.
Now, yes, I did know how this was going to pan out, having seen the Suchet adaptation. But nonetheless, reading it is a different experience, largely because this is one of the Poirot novels (among many) that is narrated by Captain Hastings, the Watson to Poirot’s Sherlock. Having that touch of narrative distance, as well as Hastings’s amiable perplexity when surrounded by these bright young things, still lends a freshness to a story whose ending I already knew.
In particular, I enjoy the small foibles that Christie gives her detective. Is Poirot almost too clever and too fussy to be tolerated? Certainly. But he is also a sentimentalist, to some degree: he has such a soft spot for young lovers, and for young women in particular who lack a trustworthy circle and companions who don’t seek to take advantage of them (I think especially of how he is drawn to Katherine Grey in The Mystery of the Blue Train). This is in part what draws him to Nick’s case: her friends all seem so dodgy, each with their own motive to perhaps want her dead–and then when a completely different, but gentle and kind, young woman winds up dead, Poirot takes it hard, and doubles down on his investigation (despite being supposedly retired). But this case has a neat twist to it that, while it doesn’t quite rival The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is still sufficiently surprising, and delightful to see unfold even when you know it’s coming. (Note: the twist in Ackroyd really only works in the print edition, so if you haven’t seen an adaptation yet, read it first, for your own delight.) This novel is also a reminder that Poirot is absolutely not a tortured soul, though many adaptations position him that way (especially adaptations of Murder on the Orient Express): Poirot is really a bit of a situational ethicist, and what troubles us at times troubles him far less. Evil will indeed be punished, and as long as that is the case, he is not necessarily bothered by who does the punishing (as long as he knows the truth).
All in all, a delightful bit of Christie to serve as a palate cleanser from whatever else one might be reading at the moment.