Last Poirot Reading Update

I'm just going to save the non-Poirot books (and an overall retrospective of this entire Poirot endeavor) for another post, and get these out of the way.

Double Sin and Other Stories

A collection of Christie's short stories that isn't limited to Poirot - there's a couple of Marples and standalones. None of the Poirots stood out for me, though The Wasp's Nest is fun. I'd already read The Double Clue, which introduces Countess Vera Rosakoff, who Poirot has giant hearteyes for. The standalone doll story creeped me out, I Did Not Like That, but for the seance story I called the ending from the start and so couldn't feel too bad for the happy couple getting their lives ruined this way. Take better seance precautions bro.

The Clocks

Poirot mysteries are less fun when they involve international spy shenanigans, and that holds true in this novel. The titular clocks did not have a satisfying explanation for my taste, and there were a few more coincidences than I like.

Third Girl

Ariadne Oliver taking over from Hastings as Poirot's investigative buddy in these later novels has been very fun, as is the changes in the times. The latter demonstrated by the very basis of the novel, which is three young women living in a new flat, one of them a "third girl". One of those novels where someone disguises themselves as someone else and my problem isn't the believability of it - it's believable in this context - but I cannot tell what on earth is the motivation except to cause extra torment to one (1) sad kid. You could've pulled off the whole scheme without disguises!

Hallo'ween Party

The rare Poirot novel where the murder victim is a child. The murder of a child has been relevant before (see: Poirot's most famous novel) but here it is the main thing to be investigated. I like the mechanics of the mystery here, and the way Christie once more provides an astute reader the way to connect the dots on who saw what if you remember the proclivities of the characters. But it is weirdly unsympathetic about the dead kid. Like yes, she was an annoying young teen, but still a kid who got murdered at what was meant to be a fun halloween party. Sometimes Christie can be quite moving about the tragedy of a life cut short - Lord Edgware Dies has one of my favourite examples of that - but this is not one of those times.

Other side-notes:
* There's an underlying anxiety about crimes from strangers and the recent increase in them
* The first (and only) Poirot novel to contain the word "lesbian", when two young adults try to impress Poirot with their theories about who could be a murderer and suggest perhaps one female teacher murdered the another
* Look I understand that Haunting of Venice is a very loose adaptation that basically reuses character names to tell another story, but I knew Michelle Yeoh was in it and the whole time I read this book I kept thinking that she would make a very good Rowena Drake. She instead plays a psychic, which I guess makes sense given the time period, but I prefer my imagination instead

Elephants Can Remember

Oh boy, this one dragged on. The previous novel had some repetitive conversations, but this one took it to another level. It had its moments despite that - I've become fond of Ariadne Oliver and Poirot's friendship where he has gotten used to her complaining to him about all sorts of things, and I must assume Oliver's thoughts on the embarrassment of not knowing what to say when people say nice things to you about your books come from the experience of her creator. The mystery is....it's okay, but Christie has done "investigate a murder from years ago" much better before, in Five Little Pigs. The puzzle itself is fine, but that they take so long to know of the death that happened two weeks before the main murder is very silly.

Also some weirdness about adoption in this one.

Poirot's Early Cases

Very fun to return to an earlier era of Poirot - all great cases, including the only mistake by the great Hercule Poirot.

Curtain

The final Poirot novel, written back in the Blitz when Agatha Christie was like "hmm, might die in this war, would like my detective to have an ending" and had it locked in a vault. It was meant to be published posthumously, and she'd given the book rights to her daughter as a sort of inheritance in that respect, but after Elephants Can Remember, her daughter thought it would be better for Curtain to be published than for Christie to write a new book, and Christie agreed to that. She would pass away the next year.

We're back in the late forties, perhaps even the fifties, and I, for one, found it a satisfying conclusion to Poirot. Seeing Hastings and Poirot together again, back in the house where they first solved a murder together, was nostalgia-inducing, and I liked the way a widowed Hastings both indulges in and questions that nostalgia. Hastings' daughter, Judith, is a big presence in this novel as well, and calls Poirot "Uncle Hercule" <3.

I think people take issue with either the methodology of "X" or Poirot's final set of actions, but I don't know, I found all of that believable and in-character in context.