Cards on the Table

[cornerofmadness]

Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sometimes, since we so often see Christie's work adapted to movies and tv shows we forget the time period when she wrote these was a deeply racist one. The movie/tv shows edit this out but when you read the book it tends to slap you in the face and you aren't expecting it. The anti-Italian sentiment in the first chapters made me set this aside (for years if I'm honest) and I only picked up again for a reading challenge.

Mr. Shaitana is an Italian man with theatrical presence, sort of a Mephistophelian presentation. He tells Poirot about a party he plans to host, a bridge game with four sleuths in one room and four potential murderers who got away with their crimes in the other and how he was going to one up Poirot and expose their crimes. Oddly enough everyone agrees to this (but only Poirot is in on that secrete I think, but maybe the other sleuths too)

So on the crime solving side we have Poirot, Inspector Battle of Scotland Yard, Secret Service Agent Colonel Race, mystery author Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, and on the potential murderer side there are Dr. Roberts, Mrs. Lorrimer, Major Despard, and Miss Anne Meredith. Shaitana sits out the game and by the end, he is dead with a dagger to the heart.

The sleuths all agree to pool their resources and help each other solve this crime, even allowing the amateur Ariadne to play along because she might be more trustworthy in the eyes of the other two women. In fact I loved that both Mrs. Lorrimer and Oliver are very capable women in no need of a man to help them (Anne less so but her friend Rhoda is a 'modern woman' in the parlance of the times and a fun character)

So we drop in to each detective's point of view (not so much Race's) and we follow along as they try to find the killer. Shaitana's reason to be dead seems almost as much to do with being a swarthy, shifty Italian (you know how they are with women, wink wink, nod nod) as it is the fact someone fears being exposed as a murderer.

Was Shaitana right? Did Dr Roberts kill a patient? Did Despard murder a man in the Amazon? Did Lorrimer take out her husband? Did meek little Anne kill a few along the way? All interesting questions and Christie keeps you bouncing back and forth between the four. All had good reasons to jab a knife into Shaitana's heart.

All and in all a good mystery with plenty of fun twists (and oh the other bits of racism which at the end of the day were only a few lines, dark skinned people were seen as untrustworthy by some of the characters (Africans and Indian) and oddly there's a line about of course he's not a killer, he's white, strange for anyone to believe/say that especially since almost all of Christie's killers are).



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