Hercule Poirot’s Christmas – Agatha Christie (1938)

This is surely just the perfect kind of book to curl up with on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. I last read this about five years ago – and I am pretty sure I had read it before then. However I soon found that I had remembered virtually nothing about it.

In this novel old Poirot takes a bit of a back seat – the other characters featuring much more prominently, in fact he doesn’t even appear until page 73 but of course Poirot does have the most important bit at the end – the bit I always love – whether I have worked out whodunit or not. In this one the family of old Simeon Lee gather for Christmas at the family mansion. These include the son and daughter in law who live with old man, rather slavishly and dutifully, two more sons who have been invited, another daughter in law, one of the sons Harry is something of a returning prodigal. Also staying for the season are Simeon Lee’s granddaughter; Pilar and the son of Simeon Lee’s former South African business partner who turns up unexpectedly. Agatha Christie is particularly good at portraying the strains and petty jealousies of a dysfunctional family Christmas. Simeon Lee – is of a course a tyrant, so many Christie victims seem almost deserving of their grizzly fate – and Simeon Lee is wonderfully awful. Typically there is of course an elderly butler and a slightly sinister valet who slides in and out of rooms with the stealth of a cat.

“It is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violences for the reason that when their control does snap, it goes entirely”

Meanwhile Poirot has come to stay nearby with his friend the chief constable, and so is therefore on hand when a couple of days before Christmas Simeon Lee is found behind a locked door with his throat cut. Of course several people have a motive, and more than one person is harbouring a secret. All good Christie stuff, locked rooms, piercing screams, missing uncut diamonds as well as a body, and yes Christie does cheat a bit (this is what people often accuse her of), sometimes, things and people turn out to be not as you thought them, and so the reader never has all the facts – but so what – they still make for a good old read.