Christie Catchup: Poirot's Early Cases

Poirot’s Early Cases 

published 1974

The Affair of the Victory Ball

I have embarked on a Christie catchup programme – I realized that I have blogged on almost all of Agatha Christie’s books (and there are many other posts not keyed to a single book, see tab above) and I thought for completism I should try to do all of them.

The stories in this collection are very early – her first stories seem to have been almost randomly assigned to Poirot Investigates, 1924, and to this book, published 50 years later (at least in the UK). And Victory Ball was, I think, the first published Poirot short story, so I have pulled this collection up…

(There is an excellent giant omnibus edition of all Poirot stories, which a v clever member of my family gave me as a present, which gives all the details and publication histories of all the stories, as well as the stories themselves.)

In my recent talk on clothes in Christie I said:

Christie does like the occasional costume party – and there are also occasional mentions of something that is called The Three Arts Ball or similar – which is obviously the Chelsea Arts Club ball, a real life classic event of the 1930s held every year. There is a whole post these balls in fiction here,  I always enjoy this from Tuppence, trying to persuade Tommy to go to the ball:

“When I was a nice young girl,” said Tuppence, “I was brought up to believe that men – especially husbands – were dissipated beings, fond of drinking and dancing and staying up late at night. It took an exceptionally beautiful and clever wife to keep them at home. Another illusion gone! All the wives I know are hankering to go out and dance, and weeping because their husbands will wear bedroom slippers and go to bed at half-past nine…”

In this case it is the Victory Ball: in the words of Inspector Japp, ‘As all the world an dhis wife know, on Tuesday last a grand Victory Ball was held. Every twopenny-halfpenny hop calls itself that nowadays, but this was the real thing, held at the Colossus Hall, and all London at it – including young Lord Cronshaw and his party.’

Very specifically this is a ball where many people are dressed in commedia dell’arte costumes, a matter that has arisen frequently on the blog – for example here.  

I love finding pictures of people in fancy dress, luckily, so can enjoy the article of faith in Golden Age fiction that everyone is completely unrecognizable when in fancy dress.  Best not to question it. The top picture - isn't it wonderful? - is from the NYPL.

There are some other good solid Christie stories in the book. In one, The Adventure of Johnny Waverly, there is  a butler called Tredwell. This was obviously a name that struck Christie as particularly appropriate for the job, as the butler in The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery is also called Tredwell. And there is yet another butler of the same name in the play Black Coffee. (In case something is poking at your memory – this happened to me - the butler in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is Tressilian, which is also the name of the posh aristo in Towards Zero, Lady Tressilian)

The story The Double Clue has the first appearance by the Countess Vera Rosakoff, who also has a role in The Big Four, and turns up running a nightclub in The Labours of Hercules. She is a rather surprising Irene Adler to Poirot: The Woman, the only one that he ever shows any real human interest in, and one who gives him as good as she gets.

Here is also The Plymouth Express – soon to be changed round and expanded into The Mystery of the Blue Train. (Christie claimed this was the worst of her books – most people would find better nominations, and for my particular purposes I loved the entries I was able to do on the clothes in it.) And also The Chocolate Box – the story where Poirot admits that he was ‘completely deceived’. He admits that he does not ‘figure well’ in this story.

The Submarine Plans is the absolute ur-text of a great blog favourite: the country house late at night that turns out to be a hotbed of activity. As I said in my talk, a propos of dressing gowns and negligees:

Anyone visiting a country house during the Golden Age of crime fiction has to be aware of the importance of wandering round the house in the middle of the night – in search of, perhaps, a new book, or something to eat or drink. Or of course in search of the top-secret submarine plans that threaten world peace and would be very valuable to a foreign power. So should you be wearing something practical, comfortable, warm and cosy?

This one has a French maid called Leonie, a ghost sighting, ‘the women were in becoming negligees’, a stolen kiss, French windows opening out onto the terrace, a woman of dubious antecedents, Poirot summonsed in the middle of the night to solve the crime. And all fitted into 12 pages! Chapeau (in the French mood). This brevity is the reason I prefer it to the later expanded version, The Incredible Theft, which has extra details: more book-fetching, footprints (or not) on the wet grass, a white dress and a russet sports suit. Also, the plans are for a bomber rather than a submarine.

Negligees from the NYPL

Altogether a splendid collection, with a wide variety of settings, and the introduction of some now-recognizable tropes that hadn't yet become cliches.