Sometimes when I can’t decide which new book to read, I opt for a re-read instead, which is why this Christie title is being reviewed today. It is one that I have had on my to-be-re-read list for a while, so it was good to finally get around to doing it. The fact Curtain is set at Styles Court (the setting for the first novel in the series, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)), has always appealed to me, as it gives the series a feeling of being bookended. Moreover, I like how the country house and the state it has been reduced to, is symbolic of time having past and aged the principal characters, namely Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings.
SPOILER WARNING – If you have not read this book before, turn away! Turn back before it is too late, and you accidently read more about the book than you would like to know.
Synopsis
‘A wheelchair-bound Poirot returns to Styles, the venue of his first investigation, where he knows another murder is going to take place…
The house guests at Styles seemed perfectly pleasant to Captain Hastings; there was his own daughter Judith, an inoffensive ornithologist called Norton, dashing Mr Allerton, brittle Miss Cole, Doctor Franklin and his fragile wife Barbara, Nurse Craven, Colonel Luttrell and his charming wife, Daisy, and the charismatic Boyd-Carrington.
So Hastings was shocked to learn from Hercule Poirot’s declaration that one of them was a five-times murderer. True, the ageing detective was crippled with arthritis, but had his deductive instincts finally deserted him?…’
Overall Thoughts
Nostalgia is one of the notes being played through the opening pages of this story. In a matter of a few paragraphs Captain Hastings (who is off to Styles Court to meet Poirot) says more than once how Poirot has ‘moulded’ or shape[d]’ his life. You can almost hear him sighing when he remarks: ‘If I could go back – live life all over again. If this could have been that day in 1916 when I first travelled to Styles…’
Hastings’ response towards the past and change in the present is interesting in how it differs with Miss Marple’s in The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side (1962), which is much more accepting of change, seeing its necessity:
‘One had to face the fact: St Mary Mead was not the place it has been. You could blame the war (both the wars) or the younger generation, or women going out to work, or the atom bomb, or just the Government – but what one really meant was the simple fact that one was growing old. Miss Marple, who was a very sensible lady, knew quite well. It was just that, in a queer way, she felt it more in St Mary Mead, because it had been her home for so long […] Beyond the Vicarage, there had been the stile and the field path with Farmer Gile’s cattle beyond in the meadows where now – now… The Development. And why not? Miss Marple asked herself sternly. These things had to be. The houses were necessary, and they were very well built or so she had been told […] But now she was here, observing the brave new world that was springing up, the world that by all accounts was foreign to all she had known… [yet] the new world was the same as the old… the human beings were the same as they always had been.’
However, I wonder if Hastings copes less well with change due to having been out of the country for so many years (heightening feelings of nostalgia) and because his wife has recently died. Grief perhaps gives Hastings a greater yearning for the things of his youth. Hastings’ sentimentality for the past takes some dents later in the book though when Poirot reminds him of the difficulties they had when they first met.
When Hastings arrives at Styles Court, it seems to be out of kilter with its surroundings (perhaps a little like Hastings himself?):
‘As my taxi passed through the village, though I realised the passage of years. Styles St Mary was altered out of all recognition. Petrol stations, a cinema, two more inns and rows of council houses. Presently we turned in at the gate of Styles. Here we seemed to recede again from modern times. The park was much as I remembered it, but the drive was badly kept and much overgrown with weeds growing up over the gravel. We turned a corner and came in view of the house. it was unaltered from the outside and badly needed a coat of paint.’
Styles Court is depicted as being in a diminished state with the bedroom interiors being in the ‘cheap modern style’, which mismatches with the house exterior. After we learn of the deterioration of Styles Court we hear about the similar state of Poirot: ‘Nothing is so sad, in my opinion, as the devastation wrought by age.’ He is said to be ‘crippled with arthritis’ and therefore uses a wheelchair. Moreover, ‘his once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now.’ This reminded me of the dilapidated green house in Nemesis (1971) and it too hid a dark secret beneath its crumbling surface.
However, Christie sprinkles some humour here and there to help the reader assimilate to the weakened state Poirot is in:
‘“Mercifully, though the outside decays, the core is still sound.”
“Yes, indeed. The best heart in the world.”
“The heart? Perhaps. I was not referring to the heart. The brain, mon cher, is what I mean by the core. My brain, it still functions magnificently.”
I could at least perceive clearly that no deterioration of the brain in the direction of modesty had taken place.’
The poor hospitability is elaborated upon, including the terrible food, the ‘thin’ and ‘meagre’ towels, and the impossibility of getting hot water for your bath. With such amenities, those familiar with Poirot’s love of comfort may be wondering why he is prepared to put up with it all. However, Poirot reveals it is for a ‘good cause’ and those who have read Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952) know that means that a murder has occurred or will do shortly.
Guesthouses seem to be portrayed more negatively in Curtain, with one character opining:
‘That’s the depressing part of places like this. Guest houses run by broken-down gentlepeople. They’re full of failures – of people who have never got anywhere and never will get anywhere, of people who – who have been defeated and broken by life, of people who are old and tired and finished.’
They go on to sum up that such places are full of: ‘Grey heads, grey hearts, grey dreams.’ Upon reading this I wondered how this corresponded to other guesthouse settings used in mystery fiction. In times of war, such as WW2, guest houses seem to have been places of refuge, but prime locations for some violent espionage. This is something we can see in Christie’s N or M? (1941). In Mrs McGinty’s Dead, the Summerhayes are rather inept at running their guest house, yet as people I would not say they were broken, not yet anyways. Moreover, they are younger than Colonel Toby Luttrell and his wife Daisy in Curtain. The same could be said for Mollie and Giles in The Mousetrap (1952). The younger couples seem to bring a greater level of energy to their hospitality enterprises, but perhaps Daisy Luttrell brings more business sense. In terms of the people who populate guesthouses in mysteries, I would say whilst they can be places of recuperation (see R in the Month (1950) by Nancy Spain) and retirement, they are also utilised by people of working age, who go out to their employment on a daily basis, such as in Murder Underground (1934) by Mavis Doriel Hay and Measure for Murder (1941) by Clifford Witting. Above all I didn’t come away from these books feelings like the guesthouses were a place of a defeat, passivity or stagnation. In some ways that notion does not seem to be so widespread. Had attitudes towards guesthouses changed in the 1970s maybe? That said the book was composed earlier, so perhaps instead the atmosphere of failure is more to do with the aging of Poirot, Captain Hastings, and Styles Court.
Poirot reveals to Hastings, and the reader, the presence of a murderer at Styles court, a murderer who kills in a terrifyingly stealthy manner. Poirot mentions cases he believes the killer was responsible for and he predicts that another murder will occur. This is not unexpected, but the reader is kept guessing as to which event he is referring to. I found this to be a pleasing element of the puzzle.
In keeping with the more sombre mood of the novel, Poirot’s own emotional makeup seems less optimistic and sanguine. This can be seen in the way he talks about the difficulties of preventing a murder. In Evil Under the Sun (1941), it is written that:
‘Hercule Poirot, with a sigh, said as he had said once before in Egypt, that if a person is determined to commit murder it is not easy to prevent them. He does not blame himself for what happened. It was, according to him, inevitable.’
Poirot seems to have greater equanimity there, unlike in Curtain where he appears to be more frustrated:
“You, see? It’s not so simple. There are, in fact, only three methods. The first is to warn the victim. to put the victim on his or her guard. That does not always succeed, for it is unbelievably difficult to convince some people that they are in grave danger – possibly from someone near and dear to them. They are indignant and refuse to believe. The second course is to warn the murderer. To say, in language that is only slightly veiled, ‘I know your intentions. If so-and-so dies, my friend, you will most surely hang.’ That succeeds more often than the first method, but even there it is likely to fail. For a murderer, my friend, is more conceited than any creature on this earth.”
The third method is to know the who, the when and the how of the anticipated crime ahead of time so the murderer can be stopped just before they commit the deed. This latter approach tends to be seen at the end of books when the police or amateur sleuth create a target for the killer and a trap is set. In such scenarios the investigators have much more of an idea of what has been going on, in comparison to the setup of Curtain, where Poirot knows more about the killer than he is letting on, yet equally cannot predict who will be the next victim. Nor is he in a position to make target of his own to lure the killer in.
One thing that I noticed during this re-read was that I really didn’t like Judith, Captain Hastings’ daughter. I found her to be a cold character who is introduced as ‘hard’. As the novel unfolded this sentiment increased to finding her to be something of a repellent brat. I am not sure if Judith is intended to be an echo of the earlier female scientist character, Clemency Leonides in Crooked House (1949), yet weirdly my mind made me think more of Josephine from that story instead. Both Judith and Josephine have a fixed sense of purpose, which creates a level of selfishness and utilitarianism in their nature, which affects how they perceive and treat others. In some ways I would say Judith lacks Captain Hastings’ generous and compassionate heart. For example, at one point Hastings shares that:
‘With pity and scorn Judith made it clear to me that it was not the benefaction of the human race, but the enlargement of human knowledge, that was the only goal worthy of attainment.’
Judith also has a big hangup about the old and sick, who should be put out of the way, so the young and healthy can do what they want to do. Judith tries to make this sound practical and logical, but really it is fuelled by her love for her employer who is married to an invalid. In chapter four Judith and her father discuss the value of the old and infirm:
“Old people, sick people, they shouldn’t have the power to hold up the lives of the young and strong. To keep them tied down, fretting, wasting their power and energy that could be used – that’s needed. It’s just selfishness.”
“The old,” I said drily, “have not got a monopoly of that quality.”
“Oh, I know, Father, you think the young are selfish. So we are, perhaps, but it’s a clean selfishness. At least we only want to do what we want ourselves, we don’t want everyone else to do what we want, we don’t want to make slaves of other people.”
“No, you just trample them down if they happen to be in your way.”
The hollowness of Judith’s argument comes to the fore at the end, as there is nothing ‘clean’ in ‘trampl[ing]’ others in order to get what you want. Although according to her it is apparently okay to trample people, if you don’t do it too much… Perhaps because I have multiple health conditions, this attitude irritates me more, particularly as it is one that has not been irradicated in society.
Whilst this book does not feature the first time Hastings has doubted his sleuthing friend, I think it depicts Hastings’ doubt at its most intense, as in chapter four he contemplates whether Poirot has imagined this killer. Yet it is Hastings’ steadfast faithfulness which means that he chooses to accept what Poirot says, nevertheless. However, Poirot and Hastings’ relationship is not without friction. Again, it is not new for Hastings to get ‘tired’ of Poirot’s joking and chafing over his inability to keep a secret, but I think Hastings’ articulation of his annoyance is more direct and explicit on the page in this novel. In addition, Poirot’s feelings of irritation are equally more pronounced in Curtain. This is arguably because Poirot needs to rely on Hastings more, a reliance that he hates and this causes a lot of strain between them at times, such as when Hastings refuses to ‘look through keyholes’:
‘Poirot closed his eyes. “Very well, then. You will not look through keyholes. You will remain the English gentleman and someone will be killed. It does not matter, that. Honour comes first with an Englishman. Your honour is more important than somebody’s life […] You are obstinate and extremely stupid and I wish that there were someone else whom I could trust, but I suppose I shall have to put up with you and your absurd ideas of fair play.”‘
I think if our best friend ever said that to us, we would probably feel quite hurt. It is intriguing that Hastings spends quite a bit of time in this book not in Poirot’s company.
Despite his aversion to keyholes, Hastings is our eyes and ears, and the lens through which we see the other guests. It is interesting that Hastings identifies the murderer, only to then dismiss him as a suspect:
‘It seemed unlikely. He appeared to be a pleasant fellow, rather ineffective and lacking in vitality. Of course, I told myself, many murderers have been small insignificant men – driven to assert themselves by crime for that very reason. They resented being passed over and ignored. Norton might be a murderer of this type. But there was his fondness for birds. I have always believed that a love of nature was essentially a healthy sign in a man.’
Who knew bird watching was a way of putting detectives off the scent? Miss Marple probably, as in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) she mentions how bird watching is a good form of camouflage: ‘Gardening is as good as a smoke screen, and the habit of observing birds through powerful glasses can always be turned to account.’ Miss Marple’s own intentions are for good, but that does not mean everyone else’s are, as Norton’s deployment of binoculars is certainly used for murder inducing purposes.
It is via Judith that we see the first hints of how Norton operates, when Hastings exclaims at her: “Who’s been putting these ideas into your head?” He throws this question out when Judith has been talking about how some people ‘really ask to be murdered.’ The way Norton conversationally bumbles through awkward social moments, in order to plant the idea of killing someone into another’s head, is truly diabolical. Conversation is a powerful thing in Christie’s mysteries, and in the main this is because of the clues they contain for the sleuth and the reader to spot. However, in Curtain conversations can now kill, which feels quite innovative.
It was interesting to note that Poirot’s physical frailty changes his sleuthing style:
‘Wherever he might be, someone or other was sure to come and sit with him and talk, but this was not the same thing as if Poirot could have selected for himself his pattern in the tete-a-tete. He could no longer single out the person he wanted to talk to.’
Furthermore, Poirot’s ill health results in him not being on the page so much and he is therefore far less involved in events. This is understandable, but it may affect some readers’ enjoyment of the book.
I think it is only in retrospect that the reader can appreciate that the first 130 pages of the mystery chart Hastings’ own journey towards nearly becoming a murderer. This is a reality, which is only prevented by Poirot drugging Hastings’ hot chocolate before bed. This shocking possibility reinforces the idea that anyone can become a murderer and I liked how it was not easy to anticipate too early.
Due to the lack of a specific victim to watch over or a specific corpse to investigate, the narrative of Curtain, can feel like it involves a great deal of waiting. This is something Hastings experiences himself, remarking at one juncture that: ‘The days passed. It was an unsatisfactory time, with its uneasy feeling of waiting for something.’ These lines held an almost WW1 trench vibe for me. Hastings also gets rather frustrated by the lack of action saying: ‘And what were we doing about it? Practically nothing.’ This need for action is something Hastings experienced during other cases with Poirot, such as The ABC Murders (1936).
Christie does a good job of depicting Hastings’ response to Poirot’s death:
‘I don’t want to write about it at all. I want, you see, to think about it as little as possible. Hercule Poirot was dead – and with him died a good part of Arthur Hastings. I will give you the bare facts without embroidery. It is all I can bear to do.’
The short sentences and even the slightly balder prose actually helps us to feel his pain and bewilderment better. A long flowery eulogy would have been far less effective.
One disadvantage of the plot structure of Curtain is that it requires Poirot to keep more cards up his sleeves and for him to conceal these sooner in the narrative. Consequently, in order for these cards to be revealed at the end, Poirot has to write a long document to be read after his death, to explain what happened. Upon finishing the book the question, I asked myself was: Did this ending need some dialogue? Could Hastings have read the document with someone else like his daughter? Or is this unnecessary, as what the character could say would be rather obvious? If you have read the book let me know what you think!
Rating: 4/5