Christie Catch-Up: The Big Four

The Big Four by Agatha Christie

published 1927

 

My oh my, The Big Four is a terrible book. There is nothing to match it in awfulness till very late on in Christie’s career: I find it close to unreadable. Every so often throughout my life I have tried again, wondering if it had got better, but it never has.

I have read it one last time for my Complete Works of Christie idea, so this is for the sake of the blog and never again. I get tired even trying to think about describing the plot, if you can call it that. The Big Four is a group of supercriminals. I guess they want to take over the world. Poirot has to fight them, with some help from Hastings. There are a few other crimes along the way -  it is quite repetitive. Abe Ryland is the richest man in the world, and I thought that was quite similar to Abner Rymer, a very rich (& dead) man in one of the Parker Pyne stories. Hastings is still susceptible to auburn-haired women.

I quite like the story of the chess match, at least it is slightly original and memorable.

There is very little else to say about it – one saving grace was the Countess Vera Rosakoff, ‘exquisitely dressed in black with wonderful pearls’. (She came up in my entry on Poirot short stories a few days ago, and you can see her in a red dress in this blogpost on The Labours of Hercules). A shame she didn’t feature more in the Poirot books, but I think this was her last appearance, though Poirot remembers her once or twice more in later books. Here there is a plotline that faintly foreshadows an element of Smiley’s war with Karla in the John Le Carre books of the 1970s.

The other plus from my point of view is that there is a splendid woman scientist:

Madame Olivier was a very tall woman, her tallness accentuated by the long white overall she wore, and a coif like a nun’s that shrouded her head. She had a long pale face and wonderful dark eyes that burnt with a light almost fanatical. She looked more like a priestess of old than a modern Frenchwoman… she had shut herself away from the world and plunged with fiery energy into the work of scientific research.

I was happy to see this because the Smithsonian Institute in the US has a wonderful collection of photos of women scientists, so this was a good excuse to have a rootle through them. This picture shows Elizabeth Crosby, an expert on the anatomy of the brain, and (of course) there are no implications/no offence about what Madame Olivier’s specialities might be. I just thought it was a great picture.

The Big Four should be laid to rest. Poor Agatha was going through a terrible time in her personal life: she cobbled together some short stories to make a book to get her publishers off her back and earn some money. If that worked for her, great. But we shouldn’t bother reading it…  Mind you, if you have some line of defence for it, please tell the rest of us. (I assume most Christie fans share my view, but perhaps I am wrong)

Adolph de Meyer took the photo of the woman in black. He was Vogue’s first fashion photographer,