Cards on the Table- by Agatha Christie

Detective stories unfortunately invlove the following ingredients:

• A lot of suspicious looking characters
• Silly background music taken from Pink Panther movies.
• Practically imbecile policemen who seems to know absolutely nothing about his job
• An eccentric detective with two assistants: one of them is a buffoon as good as a policeman and another a female, added for all obvious (and wrong) reasons.
• An absurd murder which has been done for no rhyme or reason.

Based on above ingredients, people have written enough stupid novels, made idiotic films and TV serials.

As a die-hard fan of Agatha Christie, I am writing about a novel, which has an excellent plot and is also representative of her style.

The novel Cards on the table was the first novel written by Agatha Christie which I had read and I rate it as one of the very best written by this great mystery writer. In-fact this was one of the few novels, that Agatha Christie wrote a foreword warning her readers as to the different treatment of this novel.

Plot

Mr. Shaitana, a collector of different items, invites a strange group of people to a party in his house.

Four of them are murderers (one an army man, one a doctor, one a widow, and another a young girl). Each one of them had committed murder at least once, and each one is now living a life very different from their past.

The second group comprises of sleuths. All of them have been Christie's characters with proven record as "non-murderor". It includes Supeintendent Battle (the formidable police Superintendent), Colonel Race (the Secret Service Man), Mrs. Araidne Oliver (a detective story writer), the inimitable Hercule Poirot.

The party begins, and subtle hints are dropped by Mr. Shaitana about each of the four murderors. In presence of the sleuths, the murderer strikes again and Mr. Shaitana is killed. All this happens in first two chapters of the book.

What happens next is really a mastery of art of detective fiction personified. You have only four suspects. I repeat only four sure suspects. No chance of an outsider jumping. Well tried and tested Christie characters (who have appeared in other novels as well) are the other four persons and so there is no chance of a hidden fifth murderer. There are no coffee stains, no bullets, no poison, no broken bottles and no secret phone call. It is the detective story genre at its best. The reader is completely mesmerised by the ingenuity of Agatha Christie as she develops her masterpiece, which portrays the ’’Christie style’’.

Here digressing from a topic a bit, I would like to remind the informed readers about Christie’s first novel ’’The mysterious affairs at Styles’’. An excellent novel no doubt and not to be missed, the novel actually shows the effect of Arthur Conan Doyle. A detective with supreme intelligence with a subordinate of mediocre IQ who narrates the novel. In that novel, Hercule Poirot, her Belgian detective is seen, noting coffee stain, drawers, papers, etc. in line with Sherlock Holmes. But in "Cards on the Table", we have a Poirot, who appears in most of Christie’s novels.

His friend and narrator, Hastings is not in the scene. There is no searching for clues here and there, no frantic movement. Poirot simply sits and reflects. His ’’little grey cells’’ are at work when he reviews situation with a cup of ’’hot chocolate’’. He is no Perry mason, he is not a man of action, he is a man of thoughts, logical, sensible and absolutely methodical.

And does he succeed?? Well read the novel to find it!