Cards on the Table: Mr Shaitana’s Last Party, Four Suspects and a Game of Bridge
Mr Shaitana is famous as a party host, yet he is a man nobody trusts. At an exhibition of snuffboxes, Hercule Poirot meets this mysterious foreigner. Shaitana teases Poirot about his visit to the exhibition and claims he has a better ’collection’ that Poirot would love: people who have got away with murder.
Author: Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
Title: Cards on the Table (1936)
Format: English paperback (HarperCollins), 272 pages
Series: Hercule Poirot, with Ariadne Oliver, Superintendent Battle and Colonel Race
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0008164894 (ASIN 0008164894)
A Dinner Party
Despite his misgivings, Poirot accepts an invitation to a dinner at which Shaitana will show off his collection. On arrival, Poirot joins the crime novelist Ariadne Oliver, Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, Colonel Race of the Secret Service and four other guests. Over dinner, Shaitana steers the conversation towards possible motives for murder, hinting at crimes whose culprits have gone unpunished. During the conversation several guests react nervously.
Murder at the Bridge Table
A game of bridge after dinner ends with Shaitana’s murder: stabbed in the chest with a jewelled stiletto. There are only four suspects, each with something to hide... Can Poirot solve this baffling mystery while competing with the other distinguished criminologists present at the scene of the crime?
Four Detectives, Four Suspects
The setup is deliberately symmetrical. Shaitana has invited four people who, he hints, have each got away with murder, and four people who investigate crime: Poirot, Mrs Oliver, Superintendent Battle and Colonel Race. After dinner the two groups play bridge in separate rooms, and Shaitana sits by the fire in the room where the suspects are playing. By the end of the evening he is dead, and only those four could have done it: a fashionable doctor, a cool, elderly widow who plays superb bridge, an explorer and big-game hunter, and a timid young woman who lives with a friend in the country.
Christie’s Challenge
In a foreword, Christie tells readers that this is a purely deductive puzzle: with only four suspects, any of whom could have committed the crime, the solution must come from the psychology of the characters. Poirot studies the bridge scores, asking each suspect what they remember about the room and the hands they played, and draws conclusions about character from the way each one plays. Readers who play bridge will enjoy the detail, but it is not necessary to know the game to follow the reasoning.
Mrs Oliver
Ariadne Oliver, a crime novelist who eats apples constantly, despairs of her own Finnish detective and believes a woman should run Scotland Yard, is Christie’s affectionate parody of herself. She had appeared earlier in a short-story collection about Parker Pyne, but here she meets Poirot for the first time, and she would return in several later novels. Her impatient, intuitive approach contrasts delightfully with Poirot’s method.
Past Crimes
Each investigator takes on part of the inquiry into the suspects’ pasts, and each past crime turns out to be a story in itself. Christie layers solution upon solution, so that the final chapters overturn the reader’s conclusions more than once. It is one of her most intricate plots, and the ITV Poirot adaptation of 2006 with David Suchet changed several elements, so the book still surprises.
Who Will Enjoy It
Puzzle lovers and bridge players above all; readers who prefer atmosphere may find it a little dry.
Why Read It
This is a pure puzzle in which the clues are psychological, and the bridge scores play a part in the solution. It also marks the first appearance of Ariadne Oliver, Christie’s amusing self-portrait as a crime writer, in a Poirot novel.
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