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.