Agatha Christie: The Murder on the links – review

Ah, Agatha Christie. Try as I might, I can never predict your villains. I can never even predict your red herring villains.

Murder on the Links is Christie’s third novel and marks the return of Hercule Poirot and the indomitable Arthur Hastings. I really enjoyed this one. It’s a rare one where I actually feel, if you reaaaally stop and use your little gray cells, you can figure it out yourself (but I didn’t). But I think all the clues were there, and a little deductive work could have put the pieces together. (With the caveat that some VERY ESSENTIAL BACKGROUND INFORMATION doesn’t become available until halfway through the book. But after that, you can figure it out.)

In Murder on the Links, Hercule Poirot is rooming with his dear friend Captain Hastings when a very mysterious letter arrives one morning: His presence is urgently requested by a monsieur Paul Renauld, who divulges no details but practically begs Poirot to come meet him at his home in France immediately. Intrigued, Poirot and Hastings waste no time departing and take the nearest train. Upon their arrival, they approach his home seeking monsieur Renauld, only to find that he is dead; he was murdered that very morning.

(Spoilers Ahead)

I liked this one; I read it in one day. I had a rare experience of reading via kindle so I actually have no idea how long this book is, but I imagine it’s rather short. Perhaps that is why I’m struggling to find much to discuss about it. Here are some random thoughts:

• I found the part where Hastings and “Bella” (actually, Dulcie) confess their love to each other extremely weird, and I kind of mentally checked out and stopped caring after this point. Which is a shame, because that whole scene was building a red herring and the story would soon take a turn I liked much better. It wasn’t just that I found the love confessions cringy (though I did), but something about Hastings suddenly being an unreliable narrator, when he really wasn’t before this, just didn’t work for me. (He was a DUMB narrator, not an unreliable one!) It was, however, extremely in character for Hastings. Poor Dulcie. No one tell her that she’s the sixth person we’ve seen him confess his undying love to.

• I wasn’t in the slightest a fan of the subplot regarding Bella and Jack Renauld. In case you forget, Jack essentially ghosted his girlfriend (Bella) after meeting his beautiful neighbor, Marthe Daubreuil, who he quickly became engaged to. However, when Jack is suddenly accused of murdering his own father, he barely attests to his own innocence because he mistakenly thinks he is protecting Bella. After Marthe turns out to be the MURDERER and also DIES, Poirot encourages Jack to return to Bella because their love has been “tested and proved”; this being because, though Jack abandoned Bella for a girl he found more beautiful than her, he was still willing to go to prison for her. I’ll just say it: LAME! That was lame. Something tells me Ms. Christie’s thoughts on this matter evolved drastically after her own husband cheated on her three years later, after the book was published.

I’m trying to do a strict chronological read of Christie and avoid spoilers of any kind, so I don’t need an answer to this, but I hope Captain Hastings makes a return. There are some characters who are dumb yet still quite likeable; Captain Hastings is not this kind of character. He is both dumb and also unlikeable. And yet, somehow he grows on you! We need a little humor with all this death.

This review was very lame; my thoughts on it were quite minimal. Ah well. What did you think of Murder on the Links?