Appointment with Agatha August 2022
Dame Agatha really relished thinking up unpleasant characters to fill up her novels. This one gives us Mrs. Boynton, a nasty, sadistic lump of a woman who enjoys tormenting her own family. Christie also glories in describing the listless, the weak, and the incompetent. This seems to characterize the entire younger generation of the Boynton family. Yet it seems likely that either one of them or all of them have conspired to murder the old woman. Has the worm turned?
One of M. Poirot's acquaintances asks him early in the novel if bodies tend to show up wherever he goes and he allows that it happens more frequently than he would prefer. By having him travel, Christie avoids creating another little vortex of death like Chipping Cleghorn of Miss Marple fame. (And leading to books like Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village by Maureen Johnson). Christie was a devoted traveler and used her personal experience to provide wonderful settings for her fiction. I've always wondered why Hercule Poirot would travel to these environs, however, where his shoes will get scratched and all of his possessions will become dusty!
As usual, I completely missed all the relevant clues and allowed myself to be distracted by all the emotional drama in the story. As M. Poirot points out, this is all revealed by the psychology of both murderer and victim. I'm getting used to being wrong, indeed I think I would have been disappointed had I come to the correct conclusion. I marvel at how many ways there are to distract and deflect in such brief novels. As usual, Christie manages to deftly pour so much into such economic prose.
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