Book Review: Curtain by Agatha Christie
I have an old, battered copy of this novel that belonged to my mother. She loved a good murder mystery, in a book, on stage or on TV. Maybe that's part of the reason I write murder mystery plays for a living. I have always found Agatha Christie's writing to be very readable: entertaining, clever and involving. She doesn't force feed you her detective work (as I've seen some murder mystery writers do) but instead draws you in paragraph by paragraph. In Curtain , Poirot's last case, we find ourselves at the scene of his first case, a country house called Styles, and his companion, as it was then, is his old friend Hastings. Poirot is elderly, his familiar black hair and moustache augmented by a wig and dye. He is seeing out his final days doing what he has always done, investigating a murder. The inside cover description reads, 'Styles is now a guest-house, and Poirot one of the guests. He invites his old friend Hastings to join him there, and confides th...