Tag Archives: Hercule Poirot

I Try to Solve an Agatha Christie Mystery | Dumb Witness (Hercule Poirot)

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I began 2024 by trying to solve an Agatha Christie mystery (After the Funeral), and so fittingly, the year comes to a close with another attempt to outsmart the Queen of Crime. Best part: this story has a dog!

First and foremost: I’m having an absolute ball (pun intended) reading Dumb Witness! The set-up is fantastic: Miss Emily Arundell’s family comes to her home for Easter weekend. All of them have their reasons for needing money, and make valiant attempts to charm her into giving them some. But Miss Emily is a sharp woman, and has little patience for her nieces’ and nephew’s obvious sucking up.

Late one night, she trips at the top of the staircase, and only barely escapes serious injury. Her family members are quick to pin the blame on her dog Bob, a little terrier who loves to play by rolling his ball down the stairs and having someone toss it back up, but Miss Emily has her doubts. Sure, Bob’s ball was found at the spot where she tripped, but something about the scene doesn’t sit right with her, and she pens Hercule Poirot a letter asking for help.

Except Poirot doesn’t get the letter till a few weeks later, and by that point, Miss Emily is dead, and seemingly from natural causes. Even more puzzling, sometime between Easter weekend and her death, Miss Emily changed her will and left everything to her companion, Miss Wilhelmina Lawson, instead of the family members previously named in it.

Did Miss Emily truly die of natural causes, or was she murdered? Was her fall down the stairs another murder attempt, and did that culprit succeed in their second attempt? And if so, who killed her?

I admit, this was a head scratcher for me. I spent most of the book fixated on a single suspect, and was almost 100% confident in my suspicions. The one snag is that this person just seemed too obvious to be the killer, but then maybe Christie was just being extra devious in trying to make me second guess myself.

Fortunately (or maybe not?), later on in the book, another suspect emerged as being possibly a better fit for the killer. And again, I was almost completely confident I’d gotten it this time, with the only snag being that perhaps Christie was just being extra, extra devious and making me look at this new suspect when my original guess was right all along.

Either way, armed with hot coffee and plenty of holiday spirit, I’m at Chapter 25 and believe I’m ready to lock in my answer, and make my accusation. Typing it below the spoiler tag…

Update: Chapter 28, and I doubt myself. Could I be wrong? I’ll make my edits to the below, and then lock in my guess again.

Did I Solve It?

I did!!! I actually got most of the details right, with only minor gaps in terms of specifics and some minor errors in my theories about the details. But I totally got the killer’s identity, and the broad strokes of their motive and method. I’m especially proud of myself for not falling for the big red herring Christie dropped into the mix. Hah!

Best of all, the book ends with Hastings adopting Bob the dog! He and Bob had lots of fun playing together during the investigation, so this is the happiest of all happy endings indeed!

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

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I Try to Solve an Agatha Christie Mystery | After the Funeral (Hercule Poirot)

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AfterTheFuneral

New year, new Christie! For my first case in 2024, I’ve decided to try to solve After the Funeral. My sister and I had lunch together to celebrate New Year’s Eve’s Eve, and then treated ourselves to a bit of book shopping afterwards, and this was my year-end treat.

I usually prefer Poirot’s earlier cases, but this turned out to be really good! Wealthy patriarch Richard dies suddenly, and his relatives all gather in his mansion after the funeral for the reading of his will. At the reading, Richard’s sister Cora carelessly comments, “He was murdered, wasn’t he?” The next day, Cora herself is murdered, and the family solicitor turns to Hercule Poirot for help.

I’m having an absolute blast with this story. There’s lots of family drama, and it’s all filtered wonderfully through Christie’s sly wit. There’s a whole cast of suspects — all of them have strong motives, and none of them have a solid alibi. There’s a great moment where a private investigator tells Poirot all he’s found about each of the suspects, and their respective motives and alibis. When they get to the final name, Poirot says, “And it was quite impossible for her to have left Enderby that day without the servants knowing? Say that is so, I implore you!” Alas, that particular suspect also had her whereabouts unaccounted for at the time of Cora’s death.

“Il ne manquait ça!” said Poirot with strong feeling. [p. 154]

I pretty much suspected every character at one point or another. In fact, I’d just settled on one suspect, simply because they seemed the least suspicious, only for them to be almost killed themselves. For another suspect, I decided on their innocence based on something I now fear is a red herring.

Still, Poirot is gathering the characters for his big reveal, and so it’s time to make my final accusation. Am I confident? Oddly, yes, but also, this is the kind of confidence that, from experience, often comes before the fall. So I’m locking in my answer and looking forward to learning how much I’ve gotten it wrong.

Did I Solve It?

YES I DID! YES I DID! AHHHHH!!! There was a delightful detail I did not at all guess, and a couple of clues I didn’t pick up on, but the whodunnit, as well as their motive and method, I totally did figure out!

Literary Treats 1, Agatha Christie 0. Fantastic victory to start the new year!

***SPOILERS BELOW***

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2023 Recap: My Year with Christie

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In 2023, inspired by booktuber emmie’s mission to solve The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and the dozens of other similar booktuber videos since, I decided to try my own hand at outsmarting the Queen of Crime. Based on my blog recaps, I’ve done 10!

And how did I fare? Ahem…

  • The Moving Finger (Miss Marple) – no, not even close, alas
  • At Bertram’s Hotel (Miss Marple) – kinda? I figured out whodunnit, and parts of the howdunnit and whydunnit, so a half-victory rounded up to a win?
  • Cards on the Table (Hercule Poirot) – LOL no. But at least I was close. And honestly, this was so much fun to try to solve!
  • Murder in Mesopotamia (Hercule Poirot) – LOL, not even close. But kudos to Dame Agatha; this big reveal made me yell so loud I scared my cat away.
  • A Caribbean Mystery (Miss Marple) – nope, and this made me shake my head because the key clue seemed so obvious after the fact. This has also become one of my favourite Marples and overall Christies, because of how deliciously twisty it is.
  • Peril at End House (Hercule Poirot) – YES I DID!!! FINALLY!!! And not even in a half-victory-I-kinda-figured-stuff-out way, but in a full-blown YES I GOT IT victory! Woohoo!
  • Five Little Pigs (Hercule Poirot) – YES I’M ON A ROLL!!!! I must say, solving one of these is such a fantastic high!
  • Evil Under the Sun (Hercule Poirot) – And so my streak ends. No, I was not even close on this. Bah. How the mighty have fallen…
  • Hallowe’en Party (Hercule Poirot) – Yes, but this victory felt more puzzling than victorious for some reason. Poirot turns a bit philosophical in this one, and some of his meanderings threw me off.
  • Honourable Mention: A Haunting in Venice, the movie (very loosely) adapted from Hallowe’en Party – I watched that in the theatre, and I DID solve it before the big reveal. So there! (Maybe that’s why solving the book version felt more puzzling than victorious? Because possibly some of the elements from the movie played a role in my solving the book?)
  • A Pocket Full of Rye (Miss Marple) – kinda, yes. I got the whodunnit and their motive, but the method was all wrong, and my guess about an accomplice was totally off-base. So yet another half-victory rounded up to a win?

And there we have it! Out of the 10 Agatha Christie books I tried to solve, I got 3 fully right, and 2 partially (mostly?) right. Plus I did solve the movie adaptation. And honestly, that’s actually far better than I thought I did! Woohoo!

Christie Finale for 2023

My final Christie book for 2023 was, fittingly, none other than Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. I last read it over a decade ago, and couldn’t remember whodunnit, so I started taking notes to try to solve it. But as I kept reading, I realized I knew a couple of key elements, including the significance a key clue from the crime scene. So I figured I remembered the story more than I thought, likely from seeing the Suchet adaptation, and the more the clues started to point towards a particular suspect, the more confident I became that I remembered the story in full.

Did I Know Whodunnit?

LOL, no, as it turns out, the person I was so sure was the killer turned out to be innocent, and the killer was someone who I never even suspected. So Christie managed to get a final knockout blow in and secure her utter and undisputed dominance as Queen of Crime and mystery puzzler extraordinaire before the end of the year.

But 2024 is a new year! And there are many, many more mysteries for my little grey cells to solve!

Honourable Mentions: Japanese Honkaku Mysteries and Dorothy L Sayers

  • New case, new writer, new detective notebook!
  • Ready to solve this case!

In an attempt to branch out beyond Agatha Christie (and really, soothe my ego by solving potentially simpler puzzles), I also tried my hand at solving Golden Age-inspired detective fiction from Japan and Christie’s Golden Age contemporary Dorothy L Sayers.

And how did I fare? Well…

  • The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji – LOL, no. My gut did lean towards the right answer, but my rational mind got in the way. I went with the answer that made sense but turned out to be wrong, so well done, Yukito Ayatsuji.
  • The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo – no, I didn’t, and worse: this mystery takes pride of place as the first story where I didn’t even realize the reveal was about to happen. I just kept reading and then accidentally learned the big reveal without meaning to. Still a good mystery, and I have a copy of another book in the series, The Inugami Curse, on standby for 2024.
  • Whose Body? (Lord Peter Wimsey) by Dorothy L Sayers.- yes, I did, but it didn’t carry the same thrill as solving a Christie. Sayers is pretty transparent about Lord Peter’s thought processes throughout, including all of his theories, so the big reveal was pretty obvious. That being said, I’ve since learned that Sayers was a very different kind of writer: she was less interested in creating a puzzle to be solved than in exploring / reflecting the social mores of her time. She’s an incredibly skilled writer, and while I didn’t enjoy this as much as Christie’s books, a blog commenter convinced me to try one of the later Wimsey books. So I have Gaudy Night on standby for 2024.