Here's a lovely little puzzle for you to solve, courtesy of the mistress of misdirection, Agatha Christie. One of the challenges for a mystery author as well as a mystery reader, is how to conceal your villain among a set and relatively small group of potential subjects. In the case of Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table, the number of possible murderers is quite strictly limited to just four people. And if you're not familiar with the book, and don't see how even Christie could keep an alert reader off the track of her culprit...well, just give it a try. And be prepared for the unexpected. I reviewed this on the Classic Mysteries podcast several years ago. Here's the text of that review, slightly edited as always:
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Some games can be deadlier than others. Some hobbies can be extremely dangerous. Consider the story of an Englishman who thought he had created a most amusing entertainment for himself. He had discovered four people, all of whom, he said, were murderers…and invited them to dinner at his home. He also invited four other people with a different specialty – as catchers of murderers. What would happen with this mix of people in the house? There’s a short and not very sweet answer – murder. It all happens in Cards on the Table, a Hercule Poirot mystery by Agatha Christie.
Cards on the Table is a fairly early Agatha Christie novel, first appearing in 1936. The setup is really quite intriguing. Hercule Poirot is talking with a rather peculiar man, a Mr. Shaitana, a man who rather fancies his own ability to ferret out the secrets of other people…and then to arrange for confrontations which may keep him amused. Mr. Shaitana has an idea: he believes he has found four people who have committed murders – and have gotten away with them. Isn’t that amusing? No, says Poirot. It is quite likely to prove dangerous rather than amusing.
But Mr. Shaitana proceeds to set up a dinner party. He invites his four supposedly successful murderers. They are Doctor Roberts, Major Despard, Mrs. Lorrimer and Miss Meredith. He also invites another foursome: police Superintendent Battle, Colonel Race (apparently a secret service officer), Ariadne Oliver, a successful mystery writer, and – of course – Hercule Poirot.
After dinner, Mr. Shaitana sets up two bridge foursomes, with his four supposed murderers at a table in one room and the four who might be called lawful observers playing in the other room. Mr. Shaitana himself sits in a chair in the first room, away from the bridge game, near the fireplace.
And he never gets up. After a couple of hours spent playing bridge, Mr. Shaitana is found to have been stabbed to death, sitting in his chair.
The murderer quite clearly must be one of those four people who had been playing bridge in the room. With next to no physical clues, Poirot and the others find themselves examining the psychology of the bridge players – and of the murderer who must surely be one of them.
Now that’s the basic situation that starts the story. But there’s a lot more going on here that I’d like to point out to you.
First, Cards on the Table gave Christie a chance to show off a bit. After all, it is made very clear that the murderer MUST be one of four people – the four who were playing cards across the room from Mr. Shaitana. But – in the excitement of a closely-fought bridge game – none claimed to have any idea which of them could possibly have committed the murder (presumably while away from the table playing as dummy in a given hand of bridge). It’s amazing the way Christie can take that limited field of possible killers and create a considerable amount of real suspense and mystification.
Part of that, of course, is that it takes a fair amount of research on the part of Poirot and the other detectives to discover whether any of the four suspects really had committed murder in the past and gotten away with it. The book, to be honest, is fairly heavy on dialogue, and there is not a lot of action between the initial murder and a flurry of events much later in the story.
There’s an interesting curiosity, too, in terms of the bridge game. Among the few pieces of physical evidence are the score sheets from the bridge game. Bridge is still popular with a lot of card players today, of course, but, I suspect, it is not as universal a game as it was when Cards on the Table was written. So – although we are given illustrations that show the individual score sheets – and we are told that Poirot drew some of his key clues from those sheets – I suspect that many of today’s readers will fail to get those clues.
But we’re talking about Agatha Christie, whose use of misdirection and surprise twists are still largely unequalled by other authors. And, believe me, her genius is very much at work in this book. I must confess that I didn’t see a lot of the twists coming – and, as was so often the case, just when you think you know where you stand, Christie pulls the rug out from under you.
In her foreword to the book, Christie says that this was one of Poirot’s favorite cases. I would say that Cards on the Table isn’t as good as some other Christies, where there may have been more memorable characters, or a more convoluted plot – but it is still a thoroughly enjoyable, surprising and well-written mystery. Certainly, it’s worth your while.
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To listen to the original audio review, please click here.
Next: Murder by the Book, by Rex Stout.
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