April 2022 Appointment with Agatha
In this novel, Nurse Leatheran fulfills the role of Hastings, becoming the confidante of Poirot and giving the reader insight into his thought processes. Unlike Hastings, she is able to follow his reasoning more easily, although not completely. But then she isn't being distracted by attractive women or overly impressed by people's social class. She is a nurse, so she is used to seeing everyone as a potential patient, a great leveler. She is similar to Hastings in her very ingrained Englishness, persisting in seeing people in Iraq as “foreign” despite the fact that she is the foreigner in Iraq. (She also displays a certain judginess concerning Poirot’s self confidence that Hastings frequently expresses).
It was only four years ago that I first read this novel and the identity of the killer had been purged from my memory banks. It was the setting and the atmosphere that had stuck with me. At the point that this book was published, Christie had been married to Max Mallowan for six years. She had been accompanying him to dig sites in the Middle East, giving her first hand experience to inform her fiction. No wonder the archaeological setting is so well realized.
Well worth a second reading, as are so many of Dame Agatha's mysteries. I continue to be amazed at how she accomplished so much in such short novels.
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