And Now His Watch Is Over: Curtain | 1975 [SPOILERS]

(image from here)

"I should have known.

I should have foreseen...

'Cher ami!' Poirot had said to me as I left the room.

They were the last words I was ever to hear him say." 

-Captain Arthur Hastings, Curtain, p. 237

The Sum of It:
My dear friends, I have come to my final Agatha Christie book for this year. As if that in and of itself wasn't slightly emotional enough, I had forgotten that something rather jarring happens in this particular novel.

FRIENDLY REMINDER THIS POST DOES INCLUDE SPOILERS!

Captain Hastings has returned to Styles. Yes, Styles! Remember where the Poirot/Hastings bromance first started wayyyy back in the day when Agatha was just a cool dispensary gal who wanted to try her hand at writing a murder by poison book? Hastings and Poirot are still old friends, and yet also literally getting on in years. Styles has been turned into a sort of boarding house/country hotel where Poirot has taken up residence. Hastings arrives to visit and is quite startled by how Poirot's health has deteriorated. In place of Poirot's faithful manservant, Georges, he now has a quasi nurse named Curtiss who has to carry the poor feeble Belgian detective around - #poorestPoirot! And also #poorestHastings because his wife has passed away and his daughter, Judith, who is also residing at Styles (more on that shortly) is kind of a jerk to him (YOUR DAD IS SWEET HASTINGS, BE GRATEFUL PLZ!)

Poirot is delighted to have Hastings around once again so they can do what they do best: solve crime! Poirot lays before Hastings a series of deaths that all seem a bit odd. In each case there was a clear murderer with a motive...and yet, also in each case a certain individual, "X" to Poirot, was either acquainted with someone involved, or was in the area at the time of the crime. And this "X" was now at Styles! Poirot is CERTAIN someone is meant to be murdered and is determined to stop this "X" once and for all!

Styles is once again full of characters only Agatha Christie can do justice. There is a retired military man painfully embarrassed by his nagging wife, an unattractive scientist and his mysteriously ill wife, Hastings' daughter, Judith, who won't stop flirting with a man her father thinks is TROUBLE, and, of course, Hastings himself, somewhat subdued in his later years, and yet never too old to have his head turned by a woman with auburn hair.

The YOA Treatment:
So, elephant in the room and #spoiler, Poirot dies in this book. I remember reading this novel back when I was a teenager and thinking "well good grief, this one seems a bit slow" and then finding myself at the end of chapter 17 and bursting into tears. I don't even think I finished the remaining chapters. I barely could this time around!

When reporting on the death of his dearest friend, Hastings says:
"I don't want to write about it at all. I want, you see, to think about it as little as possible. Hercule Poirot was dead - and with him died a good part of Arthur Hastings."

(image from here)

Nearly as heartbreaking as those lines is David Suchet's description of his feelings on playing the death scene of Hercule Poirot in the television adaptation:

"I am about to breathe my last as Agatha Christie's idiosyncratic Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, who has been a part of my life as an actor for almost a quarter of a century...it is, quite simply, one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.
This is the death of a dear friend. For years it has been Poirot and me, and to lose him is a pain almost beyond imagining." -Poirot and Me

(I'M NOT CRYING, YOU'RE CRYING!)

Poirot is and always will be my first Agatha Christie love. He was my gateway into her vast wealth of delicious mysteries. Curtain serves as a fitting farewell for Hercule Poirot. Though this book was published right before Agatha's death, she wrote it in the 1940s, spiriting the manuscript away to be kept top secret until the time was right to off her irksome little Belgian. Curtain has all the delightful hallmarks of Christie in her prime. Though you do spend several chapters wishing Hastings would stop just chatting people up and make something happen (!!), you can't help but gasp at her nearly-Roger-Ackroyd-esque conclusion.

Farewell, cher ami Poirot: I am so happy to have ended this Year of Agatha with your final chapter.

-A.

PS: *what is dead may never die* #themonogrammurders #closedcasket