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Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case! (So since major things happen in this book, don't 1) read this is as your first book first, and 2) try to reading spoilerish reviews like this one. But read a few others from the series, then read this one, for sure.

“Nothing is so sad, in my opinion, as the devastation wrought by age”—Hastings, on Poirot

I’m done, whew, having read all of 38 Christie Poirot novels (and a couple short story collections) in order of publication, over the past 2-3 years. I’ll listen again to And Then There Were None and will not read Christie again for awhile, I am sure.

Christie, fearing for her life during WWII, wrote the last Poirot and Marple books in the early forties, and sealed them in a vault until just a couple years before her death, intending them to be the last novels, the last word, for her respective detective heroes. She much preferred Marple to Poirot, who in the sixties she had truly grown tired of, calling him "an egocentric creep". However, unlike Conan Doyle, Christie resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and the public liked Poirot.

Christie made a mistake in 1920 in introducing her Belgian detective as already retired, and then writing him as a main character for fifty more years!! So are we to surmise he retired at 40? 21?! Poirot returns to Styles in this one, where the first Poirot novel is set, written in 1920 when Christie was 30. Curtain was published in 1975, less than a year before she died, at 85, in 1976!! 55 years of writing Poirot!! Poor (and very rich, especially for an author) woman! Good for her and us, though, on the whole, as she emerged as the best selling author of all time.

And no matter how old he is, we need our main man with the marvelous moustaches to be in full possession of his “little gray cells�� right up until the end. Is this realistic? Well, either way he seems undiminished in speech and cognition without fail. The erosion of memory is a theme in this and many of the last books for the eighty-something Christie, but not for Poirot! He solves the crime, as always, though it is complicated and interesting how it happens and how it is revealed; I can’t exactly say how without spoilers.

This book also features the return from the early Poirot-books Captain Hastings, a buffoon who again tells the story, clueless every step of the way.

Keyholes figure in, amusingly.

Since Curtain is the title, Christie frames her last book in terms of her major love, theater, and performance, and disguises. We even discover Poirot has been disguising himself for years, in a way. And Othello’s Iago figures in, so Shakespeare is her darling right to the end for inspiration.

This may not be one of the very best of Christie's books, but it is clever, with better writing than we have seen for many years from Christie (because she wrote it in the forties!). She also doesn’t bother to pull it from the vault to revise it for continuity, grr. For instance, the supposedly older Poirot here has more problems with colloquial English than he has had in decades, consistent with a forties Poirot, not a seventies Poirot. But overall, it was good to bring back Hastings, and to end as we began, in Styles. And the killer—a serial killer—and how he kills, is original and interesting. It is a very good book in the Christie canon and because of the nature of the killer and because of the series of Big Surprises in the plot, I am going to bump it from 4.5 to 5 stars.

A SPOILER ALERT about something very sweet that had never before happened, hidden in this link to the historically stuffy The New York Times, 6 August 1975, following the publication of Curtain:



My five star Poirots:

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Peril at End House
Murder on the Orient Express
Curtain

My four star Poirots:

Lord Edgeware Dies
Three Act Tragedy
The A.B.C. Murders
Murder in Mesopotamia
Cards on the Table
Death on the Nile
Sad Cypress
Evil Under the Sun
Five Little Pig
The Hollow
After the Funeral