The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie.
Title: The Murder on the Links.
Author: Agatha Christie.
Genre: Fiction, mystery, crime, detective story.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1923.
Summary: An urgent appeal for help brings Hercule Poirot with unaccustomed haste to France. Alas, he arrives too late. His client, a mysterious millionaire, has been brutally stabbed to death... the corpse flung carelessly into an open grave. But Poirot knows that it's the little grey cells that count. And as he starts to unravel the strange circumstances surrounding this baffling murder, he discovers that the clue to the killer's identity lies in a crime committed more than twenty years in the past.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ Elsewhere, I have described Hercule Poirot. An extraordinary little man! Height, five feet four inches, egg-shaped head carried a little to one side, eyes that shone green when he was excited, stiff military moustache, air of dignity immense! He was neat and dandified in appearance. For neatness of any kind he had an absolute passion. To see an ornament set crookedly, or a speck of dust, or a slight disarray in one's attire, was torture to the little man until he could ease his feelings by remedying the matter. "Order" and "Method" were his gods. He had a certain disdain for tangible evidence, such as footprints and cigarette ash, and would maintain that, taken by themselves, they would never enable a detective to solve a problem. Then he would tap his egg-shaped head with absurd complacency, and remark with great satisfaction: "The true work, it is done from within. The little great cells - remember always the little grey cells, mon ami.
♥ "I know you by name, Monsieur Poirot," he said. "You cut quite a figure in the old days, didn't you? But methods are very different now."
"Crimes, though, are very much the same," remarked Poirot gently.
♥ "Mon ami, a clue of two feet long is every bit as valuable as one measuring two millimetres! But it is the romantic idea that all important clues must be infinitesimal."
♥ "Without doubt she will be very much upset by Monsieur Renauld's death, and we may be fortunate enough to get a clue from her. The secret that he did not confide to his wife, it is possible that he may have told it to the woman whose love held him enslaved. We know where our Samsons are weak, don't we?"
♥ "Why," I cried, "the commissary assured me that she was as good as she is beautiful! A perfect angel!"
"Some of the greatest criminals I have known had the faces of angels," remarked Poirot cheerfully. "A malformation of the grey cells may coincide quite easily with the face of a Madonna."
♥ "Why are you so keen?" I asked weakly. "And what is it you want to see?"
"Oh, everything! The place where it happened, and the weapon, and the body, and any fingerprints or interesting things like that. I've never had a chance before of being right in on a murder like this. It'll last me all my life."
I turned away, sickened. What were women coming to nowadays? The girl's ghoulish excitement nauseated me.
"Come off your high horse," said the lady suddenly. "And don't give yourself airs. When you got called to this job, did you put your nose in the air and said it was a nasty business, and you woulnd't be mixed up in it?"
"No, but-"
"If you'd been here on a holiday, wouldn't you be nosing round just the same as I am? Of course you would."
"I am a man. You're a woman."
"Your idea of a woman is someone who gets on a chair and shrieks if she sees a mouse. That's all prehistoric. But you will show me around, won't you?"
♥ "There is such a thing as the individual touch." Poirot suddenly assumed his lecturing manner, and addressed us collectively. "I am speaking to you now of the psychology of crime. Monsieur Giraud knows quite well that each criminal has his particular method, and that the police, when called in to investigate, say, a case of burglary, can often make a shrewd guess at the offender, simply by the peculiar methods he has employed. (Japp would tell you the same, Hastings.) Man is an unoriginal animal. Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life, equally unoriginal outside the law. If a man commits a crime, any other crime he commits will resemble it closely. The English murderer who disposed of his wives in succession by drowning them in their baths was a case in point. Had he varied his methods, he might have escaped detection to this day. But he obeyed the common dictates of human nature, arguing that what had once succeeded would succeed again, and he paid the penalty of his lack of originality."
"And the point of all this?" sneered Giraud.
"That, when you have two crimes precisely similar in design and execution, you find the same brain behind them both. I am looking for that brain, Monsieur Giraud, and I shall find it. Here we have a true clue - a psychological clue. You may know all about cigarettes and match ends, Monsieur Giraud, but I, Hercule Poirot, know the mind of man."
♥ "Yes," I replied thoughtfully, "one cannot mistake these things."
"I beg your pardon, my friend - one can always be mistaken. Regard a great actress, does not her acting of grief carry you away and impress you with its reality? No, however strong my own impression and belief, I needed other evidence before I allowed myself to be satisfied. The great criminal can be a great actor. I base my certainty in this case not upon my own impression, but upon the undeniable fact that Madame Renauld actually fainted. I turned up her eyelids and felt her pulse. There was no deception - the swoon was genuine. Therefore I was satisfied that her anguish was real and not assumed. Besides, a small additional point without interest, it was unnecessary for Madam Renault toe exhibit unrestrained grief. She had had one paroxysm on learning of her husband's death, and there would be no need for her to simulate another such a violent one on beholding his body. No, Madame Renauld was not her husband's murderess."
♥ "..He chances to come to Merlinville. There he finds the woman he has never ceased to love."
"Eh eh! The sentimentality," warned Poirot.
"Where one hates one also loves," I quoted or misquoted.
♥ "Your theory," I remarked acidly, "is doubtless correct as to all the details?"
"My theory is the truth," said Poirot quietly. "And the truth is necessarily correct. In your theory you make a fundamental error. You permitted your imagination to lead you astray with midnight assignations and passionate love scenes. But in investigating crime we must take our stand upon the commonplace."
♥ "Yes, she is a great woman! If she loved a criminal, she loved him royally!"
♥ "I don't believe for a minute that you meant to kill him. But you did kill him, Cinderella!"
She had flung up her hands to cover her face, and in a choked voice she said:
"You're right... you're right... I can see it all as you tell it." Then she turned on me almost savagely. "And you love me? Knowing what you do, how can you love me?"
"I don't know," I said a little wearily. "I think love is like that - a thing one cannot help. I have tried, I know - ever since the first day I met you. And love has been too strong for me."
♥ "Don't be afraid of me, Bella. For God's sake don't be afraid of me. I love you, that's true - but I don't want anything in return. Only let me help you. Love him still if you have to, but let me help you, as he can't."
♥ "I understand," he said. The mocking light had quite died out of his eyes, and he spoke with a sincerity and kindness that surprised me. "It is that, my friend, is it not? It is love that has come - not as you imagined it, all cock-a-hoop with fine feathers, but sadly, with bleeding feet. Well, well - I warned you. When I realized that this girl must have taken the dagger, I warned you. Perhaps you remember. But already it was too late."
♥ He was wearing his most innocent air, and staring meditatively into the far distance. He looked altogether too placid and supine to give me reassurance. I had learned, with Poirot, that the less dangerous he looked, the more dangerous he was. His quiescence alarmed me.
♥ "..The great criminal (as you may remember my remarking to you once) is always supremely simple."
♥ "No one else goes with you?"
Jack flushed.
"You mean-?"
"A girl who loves you very dearly - who has been willing to lay down her life for you."
"How could I ask her?" muttered the boy. "After all that has happened, could I go to her and-Oh, what sort of a lame story could I tell?"
"Les femmes - they have a wonderful genius for manufacturing crutches for stories like that."
"Yes, but - I've been such a damned fool."
"So have all of us, one time and another," observed Poirot philosophically.
♥ "I'm my father's son. Would anyone marry me, knowing that?"
"You are your father's son, you say. Hastings here will tell you that I believe in heredity-"
"Well, then-"
"Wait. I know a woman, a woman of courage and endurance, capable of great love, of supreme self-sacrifice-"
The boy looked up. His eyes softened.
"My mother!"
"Yes. You are your mother's son as well as your father's. Then go to Mademoiselle Bella. Tell her everything. Keep nothing back - and see what she will say!"
Jack looked irresolute.
"Go to her as a boy no longer, but a man - a man bowed by the fate of the Past, and the fate of Today, but looking forward to a new and wonderful life. Ask her to share it with you. You may not realize it, but your love for each other has been tested in the fire and not found wanting. You have both been willing to lay down your lives for each other."