Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Cards on the Table

Cards on the Table, Poirot #15

“Real life’s a bit different,” said [Scotland Yard Superintendent] Battle.
“I know,” said [mystery novelist] Mrs. Oliver. “Badly constructed. . . . I could make a better murder any day than anything real. I’m never at a loss for a plot.”

Not a household name, Cards on the Table, yet it has things to recommend it. First, it involves a—first time—introduction by “Agatha Christie,” speaking for Hercule Poirot as a “real person,” whose case we will read as one of his favorites. The core of this case is the murder of a mysterious “foreign” (always exoticizing the other, this Christie) snuff box collector, a Mr. Shaitana who organizes a bridge party to exhibit yet another “collection”—of murderers—(four people he knows who have committed murderers and gotten away with it. Shaitana also invites Scotland Yard Superintendent Battle, Colonel Race of the Secret Service, Ariadne Oliver, a famed mystery novelist, and Hercule Poirot, a semi-retired Belgian detective.

“It is impossible not to give oneself away—unless one never opens one’s mouth! Speech is the deadliest of revealers”—Poirot

The presumption is that between the four of these latter types we will see who is the best sleuth, and though we already know the answer to this one, the four actually work together pretty well. Battle in particular is a more than able participant in the solution to the crime, not a joke like former Poirot sidekick Hastings, and I like this arrangement better. It's less insulting to the Scotland Yard. That the mystery novelist Oliver is also in the hunt is a kind of joke Christie plays on herself in a homey, self-deprecating way. She’s the comic relief in the story, and sort of a star of the show, a really memorable character.

Shaitana is killed with a knife during the bridge game, so it is clear one of the invited murderers (wait! was that a good idea, inviting four murders to dinner, or not?) have done him in. Poirot’s primarily psychological analysis (the mind at times can see more clearly than the heart) focuses on bridge moves, the extent to which each suspect recalls items in the room, and the past—did the suspects actually kill someone, and if so, how? People reveal who they are to Poirot, and they rarely surprise him, finally, after he figures them out. Logic rules. You will not figure this one out, but if you want to stay close to a solution, pay attention to what Poirot pays attention to, and largely ignore the rest. The rest isn't boring, but it is a fair number of pages you know are not completely relevant, of course, but necessary detective work.

One feature of this one is that a confession takes place roughly fifty pages from the end (250 pages into it), a confession I completely buy, but that is just the beginning of a series of crazy surprises and pretty ingenious reversals. This is a pretty average Christie tale, for the most part, but the way it turns out reveals that “average” for Christie is spectacular for most mystery writers. I might nitpick that it goes on too long as they will often do, but in the end, mais oui!

Some interesting features:

*Shaitana is referred to as Mephistophelean by several characters, with his flair for the dramatic.
*As is often the case characters are racist about Jews, but here “Dagos” are in for their share of abuse.
*But white men? Colonel Race dismisses Major Despard of suspicion: “He’s a white man, Battle.” “Incapable of murder, you mean?” “Incapable of what I’d call murder, yes.” [by which he means justifiable homicide isn’t murder, and white men usually have perfectly good reasons for killing people. This is Race's racist view, not necessarily Christie's view.] !!!

Writer Oliver, at the (apparent) moment of Poirot’s revelation of the murderer: “Least likely person! It seems to work out in real life just the same as in books. . .” and later, when she sees it is now someone else, she says, quite untruthfully, “I always said he did it!”

Fun times, 3.5, rounded up to 4 for the last, 5-starred, fifty pages, for the puzzle-maker non pareil. Funny and head-shakingly clever. And I had never even heard of this one!