Hastings, with his denseness and gullibility and distractibility, is a stand-in for the reader. I say “Hastings-like” because that was something that came through to me very directly this time. And, Hastings-like, I bounced from suspecting this one to that one to a third and fourth and fifth and so on. Let the record reflect that whatever fancies I had about the particular character who turned out to be the killer, I never committed myself to them. In Curtain, set many years later, Styles has become a guest hotel, and Poirot is there on the trail of a serial killer, responsible for five earlier murders for which other people were suspected or arrested.īecause it was four decades ago when I would have originally encountered Curtain, I was never sure while reading the book in 2018 if my suspicions of the characters were influenced by some deeply but vaguely remembered knowledge of the denouement.

In that first book, the matriarch of Styles, a country manor in Essex, was murdered with strychnine. In drafting Curtain, Christie playfully locates Poirot’s last case in the same setting as her first Poirot novel - her first published mystery - The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written in 1916 and published in 1920. It was followed a year later by Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case, also written in the early 1940s - but, by contrast, not involving Miss Marple’s death. Yet, even in death, he solves the mystery, with a particularly unexpected turn.Ĭurtain was published four months before Christie’s death.

Subtitled Poirot’s Last Case, the novel ends with the curtain coming down on the little Belgian detective. It was the last novel published by Christie during her long life, but it had been written in the early 1940s during World War II when she, like many Britons, wasn’t sure she’d survive. So I’m sure I read Curtain, published in 1975 when I was in the midst of all that reading. Throughout my 20s, I read a lot of Agatha Christie mysteries, nearly all of them, I suspect.

Christie curtain