Books
The enigma of mythical stories and intense art and dance forms
Agatha Christie’s And Then There were None (November 6, 1939), apart from being the world’s best-selling mystery story (it has sold over a 100 million copies) is also the first of Christie’s novels with a nursery rhyme theme. Her ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, first published in 1935, is a short story.
And Then There Were None tells the story of 10 guilty strangers stranded on an island with a killer dispensing their particular brand of justice. The counting song featuring 10 little soldiers (the original is a racial slur) was an important element of the plot. The isolated island of the Devon coast is called Soldier Island and each guest has a copy of the poem in their room. The centerpiece on the dining table features the soldiers with a figurine removed for each of the deaths. The killings are as described in the rhyme — the first guest is poisoned by cyanide to match the first line, ‘Ten little Soldier Boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine,’ and so on. Christie claims it was a difficult book to write and we can see her inventiveness stretched for the bear hug killing. While there have been murmurings against the gimmicky ending, And Then There Were None has its devoted fans and many iterations on stage, film and television.
One year later came One, Two Buckle my Shoe (November 1940), featuring Christie’s famous egg-headed Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot. The extraordinarily complicated plot is divided into chapters named after the rhyme starting with ‘One, two buckle my shoe’ and ending with ‘nineteen twenty my plate is empty’ when Poirot solves the crime. The book opens with a relieved Poirot stepping out of his dentist’s office (we all know that feeling!) and meeting a woman whose buckle gets ripped off her shoe. The mystery involves a secret marriage in India, scandals in the corridors of power, dental records, a body stuffed into a trunk, angry fascist young men, blackmailing Greeks, the secret service and a cheerful, skilled and very dead dentist.
In Five Little Pigs (May 1942), Poirot is asked to solve the murder of artist Amyas Crale. While Crale’s wife, Caroline, is convicted of poisoning her husband, and dies in prison, her daughter, Carla, is convinced of her mother’s innocence and asks Poirot to prove it. Poirot talks to the five people who were in the house on Amyas’s final day.
The five suspects, or little piggies include Philip and Meredith Blake, Amyas close friends (the piggies who “went to market” and "stayed at home"), Elsa, Amyas’ mistress (the piggy who "had roast beef”), Cecilia Williams, the governess (the piggy who had none) and Caroline’s sister, Angela, (the piggy who cried wee wee wee all the way home). Christie skillfully gets the Rashomon effect of looking at the same event through different perspectives. The solution is tragic and believable and one can only imagine the work Amyas was painting as he was dying—he was painting his murderer…
After World War II, came Crooked House (March 1949). The crooked man, Aristide Leonides, is the benevolent dictator who lives in the crooked house with his extended family. When he dies at the age of 85 poisoned by his eserine-based eye medicine, there is no shortage of suspects including his much-younger second wife, Brenda. Twelve-year-old Josephine, Leonides’ grand-daughter is precocious and obsessed with detective stories and determined to find the killer. The identity of the killer, is a satisfyingly huge shock.
Mrs McGinty's Dead (February 1952), looks at the long shadows cast by old sins. Mrs McGinty is killed and her lodger is accused of the crime. Superintendent Spence is not happy with the verdict and asks Poirot to investigate. Poirot puts his little grey cells to work and discovers McGinty had a cutting of a lurid Sunday paper which looked at old murders and where the suspects were in the present. Detective novelist, Ariadne Oliver, is also in the village to work on the adaptation of one her novels into a play with the stylish playwright, Robin Upward. Oliver provides much of the comic relief as does Poirot’s difficulties in staying at the Summerhayes' guest house.
A Pocket Full of Rye (November 1953) again features murders styled according to the nursery rhyme, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’. The nasty family of suspects featuring the beautiful second wife, a stick-in-the-mud older son and the charming prodigal younger son, cannot pull over the bright, beady eyes of Miss Marple. The last of Christie’s nursery rhyme-themed novels, Hickory Dickory Dock, (October 31, 1955) finds Poirot helping out his super efficient secretary, Miss Lemon, whose sister, Mrs Hubbard, is warden at a student hostel on Hickory Road. A rash of mindless thefts initially draws Poirot’s attention, which quickly escalates to murder.
The short story ‘ How Does Your Garden Grow?’ was first published in Ladies' Home Journal in June 1935. A muddled letter from an elderly woman claiming to being poisoned, brings Poirot to the village of Charman’s Green. When he arrives, the woman is dead leaving all her money to her companion, the mysterious Russian émigré, Katrina. Is she guilty or is it the dead woman’s niece and husband? Shells marking a border in the garden provides a vital clue.
Just like nursery rhymes hide meticulous construction and universal truths in simple lines, so too does the queen of crime cloak her byzantine plots in seemingly straightforward narratives.
