Dumb Witness: Poirot Receives a Letter from a Woman Who Is Already Dead
An elderly spinster has been found dead in her country house. Everyone blamed Emily’s accident on a rubber ball left on the stairs by her playful terrier. But the more she thought about her fall, the more convinced she became that one of her relatives was trying to kill her. On 17 April she wrote her suspicions in a letter to Hercule Poirot, who, mysteriously, did not receive it until 28 June... by which time Emily was already dead.
Author: Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
Title: Dumb Witness (1937)
Format: English paperback (HarperFiction), 335 pages, A-format print-on-demand edition
Series: Hercule Poirot, narrated by Captain Hastings
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0008256012 (ASIN 0008256012)
A Will and a Fall
After the accident on the stairs, the old woman no longer feels safe and decides to change her will. Poirot and Hastings arrive at Market Basing long after the event, with nothing to go on but a letter and a house full of relatives who had every reason to want Emily’s money.
Poirot Against a Natural Death
One by one, Poirot rules out most of the relatives, despite suspicions and witnesses to unusual or hard-to-explain events. The doctors are satisfied that Emily died of natural causes, the result of the liver complaint she had long suffered from. Poirot does not have enough proof, but he does everything he can to unmask the culprit and shows that it was a poisoning, committed to obtain her inheritance.
Emily Arundell and Her Heirs
Emily Arundell is a formidable Victorian spinster who has outlived her sisters and keeps her money firmly under control. Her heirs are an unappealing lot: the charming, broke Charles Arundell and his cool sister Theresa, and their cousin Bella, married to a Greek doctor, Jacob Tanios, whom the family distrust. When the will is read, everything has gone to Emily’s timid companion, Minnie Lawson, which sends the relatives into a fury and gives every one of them a motive.
A Letter Two Months Late
The setup is unusual. Poirot receives Emily’s letter, dated 17 April, only at the end of June, by which time she is already dead and buried. He has no client and no official case, and he and Hastings have to invent pretexts, at one point pretending to be interested in buying her house, to ask questions. Along the way Christie introduces a pair of eccentric sisters who hold séances, and a strange detail they describe from one of them turns out to matter.
A Dog in a Thousand
Bob, Emily’s wire-haired terrier, was clearly drawn from life. Christie dedicated the book "To dear Peter, most faithful of friends and dearest of companions, a dog in a thousand": Peter was her family’s own wire-haired terrier, who appears on the cover of the first edition. Hastings’s affectionate rivalry with Poirot over Bob, whom Hastings ends up adopting, gives the novel much of its warmth.
Editions and Adaptations
In the United States the book was published as Poirot Loses a Client. It was adapted for the ITV Poirot series in 1996, with David Suchet; the adaptation changes the setting, so the book still holds surprises for viewers.
Who Will Enjoy It
Dog lovers first of all, and readers who like Christie’s village and country-house novels, with their sharp eye for greed inside respectable families. It is slower than some Poirots, since the crime is in the past and the investigation is mostly conversation, but the solution rests on a clue that is in plain view from early on.
Why Read It
Bob the terrier nearly steals the show, and the book is a treat for dog lovers. It is a classic country-house Christie, with a cast of unpleasant heirs and a clever clue hidden in plain sight.
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