Cards on the Table (1936) - featuring Hercule Poirot - written by Agatha Christie

Cards on the Table was a very interesting piece of fiction, taking a unique mix of 4 people who could have committed murders in the past, and combining this with a mix of 4 detectives from Christie's earlier books. The main characters in this book are:
The Four Apparent murderers:
- Dr Roberts, a physician and a hearty man
- Mrs Lorrimer, a well-to-do gentlewoman of middle age and an expert bridge player
- Major Despard, a dashing explorer suspected of killing a rival earlier
- Anne Meredith, a pretty, impecunious and poor young woman
All of them have been brought together by a strange man called Mr. Shaitana, who meets Poirot at a cultural event, and then declares that for a detective such as Poirot, the collection of murderers that Shaitana has (who were never caught) would be much more interesting. In the bridge game, he brings in 4 detectives:
- Superintendent Battle, an officer from Scotland Yard
- Colonel Race, a MI6 agent who had worked with Poirot before
- Ariadne Oliver, writer of popular detective fiction
- Hercule Poirot, the private detective



In the Bridge game the 4 detectives play Bridge separately in a different room, and the other 4 play Bridge in a different room, with Mr. Shaitana in the same room. However, several hours later, at the end of the session, when people go to thank Mr. Shaitana, they realize that he is dead, having been stabbed by a jeweled stiletto; and since none has arrived in the room, it has to be one of the 4 who is the murderer.
Then these 4 detectives start detailing the past history of these characters, trying to figure out who was guilty of which crime in the past. Poirot also tried to figure out from each of the players as to who played bridge in which style, to try to determine from each of the players what they thought of the other's level of playing, as also about what was happening in the room.
And then at one point, one of them confesses to Poirot to the crime, but he does not really believe this and when she is killed the next day, it is even more clear that they need to find the killer soon; and Poirot does eventually deliver.

Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) - starring Hercule Poirot - written by Agatha Christie

The Murder in Mesopotamia was a book published in 1936 by Agatha Christie, and was based on an archaeological excavation set in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), something pretty close to Agatha Christie, since her second husband Sir Max Mallowan was an archaeologist who went for digs in the Middle East, and Christie had also accompanied her husband on some of those digs. At the time at which the novel was set, the state of Iraq was a British protectorate. One interesting point in this novel is that it was released after 'The Murder on the Orient Express', but was set before the actual Orient Express event, since he was returning from Mesopotamia when he came back on the Orient Express. Like many of other novels, this one was also turned into a television movie in 2001, starring David Suchet.
The novel was set on a dig, but did not really have much reference to any findings from the dig, or any treasure hunt, or so on. It was mostly based on a person taking on a different identity, and then finally his original identity being unmasked.



Poirot is in Iraq when a murder happens, and Poirot's friend, Dr. Reilly, who is with the archaeological dig asks him to help by investigating. There is a story behind the murder. The lady who is murdered is called Mrs. Leidner, married to Dr. Leidner, a Swedish-American archaeologist working on the same dig. Mrs. Leidner has a past, since she was married to a person named Frederick Bosner, who was a spy for the Germans while working for the US State Department during the First World war. His betrayal was discovered and he was sentenced to death. He managed to escape, only to finally die during a train crash where his badly mutilated body was found. From time to time, when Mrs. Leidner started getting close to a relationship, she would get threatening letters (supposedly from her dead husband). Given this history, Dr. Leidner had hired a nurse Amy Leatheran to look after his wife on the dig. However, one day they found the wife dead in her room, killed by a blow to the head.
And then soon after, a female associate of Dr. Leidner called Miss Johnson is killed by making her drink acid instead of water, but she manages to say a cryptic 'the window' before she dies; this helps Poirot in the case even though the clue seems very cryptic.

The ABC murders (1936) - featuring Hercule Poirot and written by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie did a lot of experimentation with her books, sometimes confusing her readers by laying red herrings in some of her books that would mislead the users, in another she finally made almost all the characters in the novels as the guilty parties, and so on. In 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd', she experimented with changing the narrator, and tried having the murderer be the narrator, and so on. In The ABC Murders, Christie experimented with having a mix of first person and third person narration (with Hastings trying to also reconstruct the third-person narrative).
Why is this book called The ABC Murders ? Well, because a series of murders is committed with the first person being killed having his name starting with 'A', the second with 'B', and so on. And each time, a letter (a challenge) is being sent to Hercule Poirot and the police before each murder, detailing where the murder will happen, but they are unable to prevent the murders from happening.



However, after 3 murders, there may be a break. The apparent 4th murder ('D') goes wrong, and then a man named Alexander Bonaparte Cust (ABC), who is a stocking salesman, walks in and confesses to the murders (he suffers from epilepsy, has blackouts, and has been near the scene of each of the murders and finds blood on his short cuffs), and the letter have been typed on his typewriter. And the clues that the police have found till now lead them to believe that the man committing the murder is a stocking salesman. But, there is a problem. He has not heard of Hercule Poirot (the wound to the pride of Poirot), and also does not have any idea about the letters. Poirot can soon prove that he has an alibi at the time of the murders and could not be involved.
And then it turns out that the murders are a blind, that innocent people lost their lives because one of the murders was desired for a specific financial purpose, and that the others were just done to set a different pattern. And this was the master planner, who had hired Cust to be near the scene of each crime as a part of each job, had used his typewriter to do the letters, and also put the blood on the cuffs.

Death in the Clouds (1935) - starring the detective Hercule Poirot - written by Agatha Christie

Death in the clouds was a novel written by Agatha Christie, and released in 1935. Agatha Christie had based most of her stories on the ground, and this was probably her first story that was written about a murder on an aircraft. The book again stars her favorite detective, the proud Belgian detective with a head shaped like an egg, Hercule Poirot, with the book also featuring the constant police companion, Chief Inspector Japp.
Hercule Poirot is on a flight from Paris to Croydon Airport (an airport that used to service South London before it was replaced by the more modern airports of Heathrow and Gatwick). On this flight, one of the passengers, a moneylender by the name of Madame Giselle. There is initial speculation that she was killed by the bite of a wasp, but the sharp Poirot noticed that she was killed by a poison-tipped dart (the kind that are fired from a blowpipe). Which means that the death was not an accident, but was actually a murder, and hence Poirot is the chief person to do the murder investigation.



However, using a blowpipe on such a closed and intimate environment such as an aircraft would not be an easy task with the probability of being seen by somebody very high. More likely that the murder would be done through the use of another instrument such as a flute or some other pipe. And the murder victim, Madame Giselle, is not a very friendly person, since she was not above using blackmail to get her money back, so there would be a number of people who could have a possible motive if the pressure of the blackmail proved to be too heavy.
Suspicion can fall on many persons in the flight, turn by turn. For example, it turns out that some of the people are not who they were, or were linked to the victim in some way; and was there the question of passing of money also involved ? Was this a murder for financial gain ?

Three Act Tragedy (1934) - a book starring Hercule Poirot - written by Agatha Christie

Another book in the line-up of Hercule Poirot books written by Agatha Christie. This book is also another of those books that had a different name in Great Britain ("Three Act Tragedy"), and a different name in the United States (Murder in Three Acts). In addition to Hercule Poirot, this was the Poirot novel featuring Mr. Satterthwaite (who featured in other books starring Mr. Harvey Quinn). The movie has one of those mysteries of Christie where there is some amount of misdirection to confuse the readers; the story is that of a dinner party with 13 people at dinner. And one of them dies - he is the vicar Reverend Stephen Babbington, dead after choking on his cocktail; yet an analyis of the drink does not reveal any poison, so maybe the death was accidental after all. And he was mild-mannered, with no ostensible enemies, and so no motive for anybody to murder him. Yet, this happens again, and again. So, there are murders happening.



One problem with this particular book is that this does not entirely seem to be Poirot's book; he does not seem to present in some parts of the books. The investigation is carried out in large stretches by a trio - an ageing actor, a young admirer of his, and the third man. They try to speak to witnesses, do the discussion and try to resolve the murders. In the end, when everything starts to come together, Hercule Poirot does the final bit of putting together of the various pieces of evidence along with the evidence arising from a third murder.
However, this is also a novel where you find Hercule Poirot doing something that he normally does not do, which is give an explanation about why he speaks in a way that people consider him very proud of himself, and his English is also a bit formal (his reason is that this makes people consider him more of a buffoon, not somebody very skilled, and there is a greater chance of under-estimating him and thus being less on their guard).

Murder on the Orient Express (1934) - A murder mystery starring Hercule Poirot - a complex mystery

By the time that this book was published (in 1934), Hercule Poirot had a big fan base and people would wait for a new novel to be released by Agatha Christie. The book is extremely famous, and has also been converted into a movie. The base plot of the book is seemingly based on the Lindberg baby kidnapping where the baby son of the famous aviator Charles Lindberg was kidnapped. Tragically, the child was murdered, and this was a very famous case (since Lindberg was extremely famous after doing a solo flight across the Atlantic). And the book has a similar case, where the person who was murdered was revealed to be behind a similar crime, something that gets revealed during the course of the investigation of the murder. The ending is a bit surprising for those who have read many of the other Hercule Poirot novels (and just for that, in this review, I will not reveal the ending - so if you have not read the book, try and get it).
Hercule Poriot is returning from Syria in the Orient Express in Istanbul, and has had to take help from a friend who is a director on the train company Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits; he gets a berth when another traveler fails to show up.



And like many other mysteries, Poirot just happens to be on the scene when a murder happens (something which scares the perpetrators of the crime, since in the normal course of things, this would not have been a crime that would have been easily solved). In the course of a night near Belgrade, Poirot seems to hear a sound outside his door more than once, and does not encounter anybody. Further, a lady Mrs. Hubbard seems to believe that somebody was in her apartment. However, nobody is to be found.
The next morning, they find one of the passengers, Mr. Ratchett, to have died, rather been murdered. He was killed by many stab wounds, some from left handers, some from right handers, and some much deeper than the others. The train is stuck in a snow-storm, so it would seem that the murdered is still on the train. Poirot is the only one who can investigate, and he starts his investigation. He finds a number of clues, but many of them point in different directions. And then he discovers the past of Mr. Ratchett, who was actually a fugitive from the US called Cassetti. And he was behind the kidnap and murder of a young heiress, Daisy Armstrong, and had then fled from the country. Her parents died from the shock (her mother died from the shock, and her father killed himself).
And as he investigates, he realizes that other passengers on the train all had connections to the Armstrong family in the past, and thus any of them could have a motive, so who was the actual killer ?