A review of Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie – 240523
The fifteenth novel in her Hercule Poirot series and the third in her Superintendent Battle series, Cards on the Table, originally published in 1936, is considered to be one of Christie’s finest novels. It features an impossible murder, the host of a party, Mr Shaitana, being murdered in a room containing four other people playing bridge and yet no one sees who did it.
The victim, Mr Shaitana, is an intriguing character, a self-confessed admirer of murder as an art form, a sinister Mephistophelian character – Shaitana is a term used to describe the devil in Hindi – who delights in collecting things. Perhaps his finest piece of collecting proves to be his undoing, assembling a bridge party consisting of four sleuths, Poirot, Colonel Race, Ariadne Oliver, who is to feature in several of Christie’s novels, and Superintendent Battle, and four gusts whom he believes to be murderers but who have not been convicted, Dr Roberts, Mrs Lorrimer, Anne Meredith, and Major Despard.
During the meal Shaitana taunts the suspects, making remarks designed to make one of them believe that not only does he know that they are a murderer but that he may well reveal the fact in front of Battle. This fear prompts one of them to take action and silence their host, but which one?
In a spirit of fair play, Battle invites the three amateur sleuths to help him get to the bottom of the who, why, and how. By allowing the sleuths to tease out the histories of the four suspects using radically different methods, Christie brings variety to the investigative process. To the astonishment of them all, Poirot concentrates on the bridge playing styles of the suspects, believing that the way they play the game gives psychological insights into their character and whether they would be capable of murder that could only have been spontaneous as the weapon of choice, a stiletto, was taken from Shaitana’s collection lying on a table.
Poirot is also fixated on the score cards, trying to determine whether there was a change in playing style of any of the players during the course of the game, indicative of some mental disturbance which might give a clue to their guilt. He is helped by Mrs Lorrimer who has an excellent retentive memory, convincing him that she would prefer a premeditative approach to murder over spontaneity.
Inevitably, Shaitana’s suspicions about four of his guests turn out to be well-founded. The sleuths establish in their various ways that each had killed someone, but this does not really narrow down the field. Apart from some digging into past histories, Race and Oliver do not really contribute much and Battle’s conventional approach to investigation does not take the case much farther. It is left to Poirot, using a combination of psychology and trickery, to cut through the Gaudian knot and reveal the truth in a surprising and brilliant twist.
Laced with humour, this is a compelling and engaging story that allows Christie to showcase her storytelling abilities. The set up is masterful, the ending is brilliant and while there might be too many convenient coincidences for the purist and some of the attitudes exhibited might offend the more sensitively attuned, I will lay my cards on the table; this is one of Christie’s best.
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