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Old 01-10-2014, 08:39 AM   #18594
HarryT
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Just finished "Cards on the Table", by Agatha Christie. This was her 27th book, and was originally published in 1936.

Mr. Shaitana holds a dinner party to which he invites four detectives, and four people he suspects of being murderers. After dinner, the four murderers play bridge in a room with Mr. Shaitana watching; after the game is over Mr. Shaitana is dead. One of the four must be the murderer, but who?

This is a wonderful book - one of my favourite Christie novels. The four detectives have all appeared in earlier Christie novels: Hercule Poirot, of course, together with Superintendent Battle (who appeared in "The Secrets of Chimneys" and "The Seven Dials Mystery"), Colonel Race (a secret service agent, who appeared in "The Man in the Brown Suit"), and the wonderful bumbling crime writer, Ariadne Oliver, who Christie wrote as a caricature of herself, and who would go on to feature in 5 more of Christie's novels.

The book is worth reading just for Ariadne Oliver alone. She is a famed writer of detective stories, and curses the fact that she invented a Finnish detective, "Sven Hjerson", to solve her crimes, because she knows absolutely nothing about Finland and is always getting letters from Finland telling her all the things she got wrong (the parallels with Christie's own Belgian detective, Poirot, are obvious!). Interesting enough, one of the books that Ariadne Oliver is said to have written is "The Body in the Library" - a title that Christie was to use for a Miss Marple novel a few years later!

The story is predicted in Christie's book, "The ABC Murders" which she'd published earlier that same year. In that book, Poirot is having a conversation with his friend, Captain Hastings, about what sort of murder he'd most like to solve, and he says the following:

Quote:
‘Supposing,’ murmured Poirot, ‘that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four, while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?’
This is precisely the plot of "Cards on the Table", so Poirot didn't have to wait long to get his "perfect" murder to investigate!

A wonderful book with a real "twist in the tale" ending. HIGHLY recommended.

Note: Poirot gives away the solution to "Murder on the Orient Express" in this book, so be warned!

Last edited by HarryT; 01-10-2014 at 09:14 AM.
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