Les femmes, he says, and enfin and très distingué, to make his old friend feel at home.
Familiar French phrases still flavor like garlic his unidiomatic English. His conversation, however, has not much changed. Hastings is sad to see the drive overgrown with weeds and the house needing a coat of paint, sadder still to find Poirot in a wheelchair, crippled with arthritis.
Since we last met him he has married, had four children and become a widower, but he remains unerringly stupid, especially when confronted by a pretty woman. Old Poirot hands will recall that Hastings, the most splendidly obtuse Watson in crime fiction, hasn't appeared in a story for a very long time.
As Poirot tells his old friend Captain Hastings when inviting him down: “Figure to yourself, it is what they call a guest house.” Now we are back at Styles again, and things have changed. The time was World War I, and hardship was expressed by cutting the gardeners down from five to three. That first crime story, published in 1920, was set at Styles Court, a typical English country mansion. The basic idea of “Curtain” is delightful. Rumor says that another story, dealing with the end of her second‐string detective Miss Marple, lies in a safe deposit box awaiting publication. ago but now published for the first time, Agatha Christie has-to put it with a brutality from which the publishers flinch-killed him off. In this book, written 30 yearsīy Agatha Christie. At roughly the age of 120 (in Agatha Christie's first book, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” it was mentioned that he had retired in 1904), the little Belgian detective has hung up his hat, put away his mustache protector, left his patent leather pumps on their trees forever.
Curtain, and a final curtain for Hercule Poirot.
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