With the exception of a Prologue set in Paris, the entire action of the novel takes place either en route to, or in South Africa and Rhodesia, and is presented through the diaries of Anne and Sir Eustace. The villain is a master criminal who organizes crime ‘as another man might organize a boot factory’. Jewel robberies, forgery, espionage, assassination, he has dabbled in them all. He is known to his underlings simply as ‘the Colonel’, and it falls to Anne finally to unmask him, with the aid of two or three friends.
Who Anne’s friends are, and who her enemies, is something which Mrs Christie keeps her readers guessing about. Like all Christie thrillers, The Man in the Brown Suit incorporates the puzzle element into its plot as well. Thus it retains a hold on the loyalties of those who prefer the murder mystery to the thriller, for it conceals until the last pages the identity of ‘the Colonel’ (who is, after all, a murderer), while at the same time including all the ingredients of the ‘international crime’ story: action, violence, suspense. Whether or not the charming old rogue Sir Eustace Pedler is at all like Major Belcher, he is one of Agatha Christie’s most convincing and memorable characters, and the author’s underestimated ability to convey a strong sense of place is very much in evidence in her discreet but effective description of the exotic African landscape through which Pedler, Anne and the others move.
It might be thought that to present the narrative through the diaries of two characters detracts somewhat from the suspense, or at least from the list of suspects. But with Agatha Christie you cannot always be certain that anyone is above suspicion. Diaries can also be published posthumously. (This is not necessarily a clue.) In The Man in the Brown Suit Mrs Christie makes use of a device which, to a certain extent, anticipates her tactics in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), though less spectacularly.
It need not impair enjoyment of the novel to know that one of the characters, a strong silent man called Colonel Race, will appear in three later Agatha Christie novels, ageing over forty years in the process. In fact, enjoyment of The Man in the Brown Suit will be impaired only if you take too seriously the African revolution which seems to be trying to foment itself offstage. Mrs Christie, never an acute political observer, rather charmingly recalls in her autobiography that ‘there was some kind of a revolutionary crisis on while we were there, and I noted down a few useful facts.’ Those facts must have got lost somewhere.
The Man in the Brown Suit was produced by Warner Brothers as a TV movie in 1987, starring Tony Randall.
Poirot Investigates POIROT SHORT STORIES (1924)
One of Hercule Poirot’s earliest fans was Bruce Ingram, editor of the London illustrated weekly, The Sketch. Ingram got in touch with Agatha Christie to suggest that she should write a series of Hercule Poirot stories for his magazine, and a thrilled and delighted Agatha agreed. She was not entirely pleased with the drawing of Hercule Poirot which The Sketch commissioned to accompany the first of the stories: it was not unlike her idea of Poirot but it made him look a little too smart and dandified. Agatha Christie wrote eight stories, and at first it was thought that eight would be sufficient. However, it was eventually decided to extend the series to twelve, and the author had to produce another four rather too hastily. When the series of stories began, in the 7 March 1923 issue of The Sketch, it was accompanied by a page of photographs of ‘The Maker of “The Grey Cells of M. Poirot” ’, showing her at home with her daughter, in her drawing-room, on the telephone, at her writing table, at work with her typewriter and so on. The author of ‘the thrilling set of detective yarns’ made it clear to The Bodley Head that she thought they should publish them quickly as a volume of stories, while the publicity from their appearance in The Sketch and from the serialization of The Man in the Brown Suit in the London Evening News was still current. The Bodley Head agreed, and the stories were collected in a volume which, at first, it was intended should be called The Grey Cells of Monsieur Poirot, but which, in due course, appeared as Poirot Investigates. The volume was also published in the United States (by Dodd, Mead & Co, who remain Agatha Christie’s American hardback publishers), but there is a discrepancy between the British and American editions. The British volume consisted of eleven stories while the American edition contained fourteen. (The three extra stories, ‘The Lost Mine’, ‘The Chocolate Box’ and ‘The Veiled Lady’ eventually appeared in Great Britain, along with several other stories, fifty years later in Poirot’s Early Cases. ‘The Veiled Lady’ was also published, together with two other stories, in Poirot Lends a Hand [1946: see p. 212].)
Some, though not many, of Agatha Christie’s short stories are as satisfying as the best of her novels. In general, however, her talent is not suited to the short story, or at least not to the very short mystery story of which she wrote so many. Her plots are, perforce, skeletal, and her characterization at its most perfunctory. The puzzle element is, therefore, given even greater emphasis than in the novels in which it contributes largely to the reader’s pleasure. Many of the stories, including most of the Hercule Poirot adventures collected in Poirot Investigates, are little more than puzzles or tricks given ‘a local habitation and a name’.
Prior to the emergence of Agatha Christie upon the crime writers’ scene, many of the genre’s greatest successes were with short stories. It is generally agreed, for instance, that Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are superior to the Holmes novels, and most of the other mystery writers who flourished at the same time as Conan Doyle, among them G. K. Chesterton (with his Catholic priest-detective Father Brown), Baroness Orczy, Richard Austin Freeman (whose detective was the physician Dr John Thorndyke), the American Melville Davisson Post (whose mysteries are solved by Uncle Abner, a shrewd Virginian), H. C. Bailey with his Mr Fortune stories, and Ernest Bramah, all produced their most successful work in the form of the short story. However, though she wrote more than a hundred and fifty short stories, Agatha Christie’s greatest triumphs were to be achieved with her full-length novels, rather than with short stories or novellas.
That so many of Agatha Christie’s stories are little more than puzzles or tricks might not matter so much were the puzzles more varied and the tricks less repetitive. For instance, the first time that Poirot points the accusing finger accurately at the person who engaged him, the reader is surprised and delighted; but M. Poirot and Mrs Christie connive several times at this particular trick, which is also not unknown in the novels.
The stories in Poirot Investigates are, on their own level, quite entertaining, but it would be as unwise to read more than one or two at a sitting as it would be to consume a two-pound box of chocolates in one go. Occasionally, Mrs Christie’s touch falters, as when, in ‘The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman’ she is snide about Inspector Japp’s French accent and has him refer to the ‘boat train to the Continong’. Why would he not pronounce ‘continent’ as an English word? But usually her social placing is exact. In ‘The Case of the Missing Will’, Poirot’s client, a handsome young woman, explains that her father, who came of farming stock, ‘married slightly above him; my mother was the daughter of a poor artist.’
‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’, in which Poirot investigates a strange series of deaths of people who were involved in the discovery and opening of the tomb of King Men-her-Ra, an event which we are told followed hard upon the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Lord Carnarvon, is interesting as evidence that Agatha Christie was conversant with the science of archaeology some years before she met Max Mallowan. (She had already introduced an archaeologist into her collection of characters in The Man in the Brown Suit.)
One of the best stories in Poirot Investigates is ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’. It is also one in which we learn something more of the author’s political opinions, or opinions which it seems reasonably safe to attribute to the author even though she issues them through the mouths of her characters and not by way of authorial