The Hollow: Agatha Christie’s Poirot Mystery of a Murder by the Swimming Pool That Looks Staged
Dr John Christow is shot dead beside a swimming pool, and that is where his body is found. Hercule Poirot, invited to lunch at the house, at first thinks the scene has been set up as a joke for his benefit; everything is confusing, and the "joke" turns into a tragedy.
Author: Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
Title: The Hollow (1946)
Format: English paperback (HarperCollins), 320 pages
Scope: Hercule Poirot novel
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0008129584 (ASIN 0008129584)
Henrietta
The dying man’s last word is "Henrietta", the name of his lover. His wife, Gerda, is seen standing over him with a revolver in her hand. Everyone at the house party has handled and fired guns, so the guests’ fingerprints are everywhere. Nobody expected complications.
A Mystery Out of the Ordinary
Poirot finds himself caught up in an unsolved mystery; he stays close to Gerda during the investigation, and the result is anything but ordinary. It is a case in which he must use all his intellect to rule out suspects, find motives and uncover the truth.
The Angkatells
The house is The Hollow, home of Sir Henry and Lady Angkatell, and the weekend guests are mostly members of their extended family. Lucy Angkatell, vague, charming and alarmingly unpredictable, is one of Christie’s great comic creations: she drifts from thought to thought, says the most disconcerting things and yet seems to see more than anyone else. The other relatives, each with their own disappointments and loves, form one of the richest casts in all of Christie.
Henrietta and John
Henrietta Savernake, a sculptor, is John Christow’s mistress, and she is one of the most fully drawn women in Christie’s fiction: intelligent, independent and torn between love and her art. Christow himself is a brilliant, self-centred doctor whose charm has bound several women to him. His death sets off a chain of reactions that reveal how deeply each character’s life was entangled with his, and the mystery becomes a study of love in its many forms.
A Poirot Christie Regretted
Christie later said she thought she had ruined the book by introducing Poirot, because the story worked so well as a novel of character. When she adapted it for the stage in 1951, she left him out altogether. Readers often disagree with her, since Poirot’s outsider’s eye adds a welcome note of detachment, but it is easy to see what she meant: the Angkatells are so vivid that he sometimes feels like a guest who wandered into the wrong play.
A Title From Tennyson
The title echoes the opening of Tennyson’s poem Maud, "I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood", a line quoted in the book, and its gloomy associations suit a story in which love and grief run deeper than they first appear.
On Television
The novel was adapted for Agatha Christie’s Poirot in 2004, with David Suchet, and was published in the United States in a later edition as Murder After Hours.
Before You Start
Do not expect a fast-paced plot. The pleasure is in the characters, and it repays patient reading.
Why It Lingers
Many readers say The Hollow stays with them longer than most Christie novels. The final pages, in which Henrietta faces the consequences of everything that has happened, are among the most poignant she ever wrote, and the solution, while clever, matters less than what it reveals about love and loyalty.
It is worth rereading.
Why Read It
The Hollow is one of Christie’s richest novels in terms of character: a portrait of a close-knit, eccentric family gathered at a country house, where everyone seems to be protecting someone. The solution is clever and quietly moving.
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