I Saw Three Sons Come Sailing In: Hercule Poirot's Christmas | 1938

(image from here)

"Mon cher, everyone lies — in parts like the egg of the English curate. It is profitable to separate the harmless lies from the vital ones."
-Hercule Poirot, Hercule Poirot's Christmas, p. 89

The Sum of It:
This week we read, quite out of season, Hercule Poirot's Christmas. Though most of the story takes place on the usually-merry Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day, this story focuses on the all-but-happy Lee Family begrudgingly spending the holiday together, with deadly consequences. Patriarch Simeon Lee is a richy-rich who is wealthy enough to keep piles of diamonds in the house (albeit in a safe, but still…) and has spent his life openly cheating on his wife, treating her and his kids pretty terribly, and generally being a super crank. His son, Alfred, and daughter-in-law, Lydia live at home and try to keep tabs on the old man, but this year Simeon Lee wants his entire family home for Christmas. Enter his "respectable" M.P. son, George and much-younger, gold-digger-ish wife, Magdalene, and the once-banished artist son, Harry and wife, Hilda. But the guest list doesn't stop there. Once upon a time Simeon's daughter, Jennifer, married a Spaniard and their now-orphaned daughter, Pilar, shows up to see if her grandpa can spare any affection and/or money. And the son of Simeon's one-time business partner, Stephen Farr, has traveled all the way from South Africa to look up the Lees for Christmas. With the whole family assembled, Simeon acts in true grumpy grandpa fashion by going to bed early, but not before telling his kids they're the worst and not-so-subtly hinting he is thinking about changing his will. Just like horrible Mama Boynton in Appointment with Death, no one is TOO torn up when he is later found rather gruesomely murdered in his completely trashed room (was there a struggle? Did someone have a major furniture vendetta?).

An Inspector Sugden is quickly on the scene due to a pre-death call from Simeon Lee insinuating one of his family members stole his precious diamonds. Sugden teams up with a Colonel Johnson and his Christmas guest, Hercule Poirot, to solve the crime!  But these three have a tough time of it due to the fact that a.) all of Simeon Lee's family had a motive for killing him because he was #THEWORST, b.) his dying screams led his family to find him in his room locked FROM THE INSIDE and yet, c.) no one appeared to have escaped through the window #MYSTERY.

The YOA Treatment:
One of the supplemental books we have read this year is A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie by Robert Barnard. This is a fascinating read for any Agatha lover. Barnard offers several chapters of smart and often very witty analysis of Agatha Christie as an author, and, more importantly, what made her such a successful one. He spends one chapter giving some extra time to what he calls Agatha's "Three Prize Specimens," including Hercule Poirot's Christmas. One of the things Barnard appreciates about Agatha is that not only was she committed to giving her reader a truly suspenseful mystery, she was also committed to playing fair with her reader when it comes to the solution of the puzzle. Even if you can't guess the ending, when Poirot finally fills that drawing room with the suspects and lays out just how the crime was done, you find yourself hitting yourself on the head and saying "well, duh! All those clues WERE right there in front of me!" and you're not necessarily mad at Agatha for having sprinkled enough red herrings to put you off the importance of the clues, you're more mad at yourself for not having put them together. Or, if we're being totally honest, completely okay with not having guessed because it's kind of more fun to be in suspense the whole time, right!?

This week's read reminds us of what we all love most about Agatha: the puzzle. As Barnard says: "All in all Hercule Poirot's Christmas is a highly superior example of Christie's habitual procedures in her classic phase: the plot is meticulously thought through, not a detail is misplaced or without significance in the total scheme, and above all the reader has that satisfying sense that the clues have all been fairly and squarely placed in front of him—even if he has somehow been induced to look out of the window at the crucial moment of placing" (p. 81).

-A. & E.
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