© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
At a New Year’s Eve gathering on the Greek island of Lamperos, Inspector Edward Catchpool finds himself among the guests of a community that preaches peace and forgiveness. The party’s highlight is The Resolution Game, in which everyone writes an anonymous resolution, and the others must guess the author. As Catchpool unfolds one of the slips of paper, he reads a message that chills the room.
We are resolved to murder Matthew Fair,
I have a helper — staunch and sure is she;
Quite as intent am I. Then let this be
At once the last and first death of the year.
That is not the sort of New Year’s resolution one usually hears at a celebration. Of course, some try to dismiss it as a joke — “It is an audacious joke and nothing more…because everyone here is a thoroughly good egg,” says the man named in the verse himself. Of course, it isn’t. Of course, one of the resolution writers ends up dead. And of course (this is the final one, we promise), it is up to the man who brought Catchpool to the island to figure out who has carried this deed so dastardly — the legendary Hercule Poirot.
Agatha Christie may have passed away in 1976, but in Hercule Poirot, she gave literature perhaps its most loved detective after Sherlock Holmes (some might even claim he is more loved than the occupant of 221B Baker Street). The Belgian detective, a former police officer now living in England, appeared in thirty three novels, fifty one short stories and two plays written by Christie over a period spanning slightly more than half a century and became a household name.
He has been portrayed on the silver screen by the likes of Peter Ustinov, John Malkovich, and most recently by Kenneth Branagh, although it is widely accepted that no one quite captured the mystique of the detective with the egg-shaped head, fastidious habits, elaborate moustache and brilliant mind quite as well as David Suchet did in the TV series, Agatha Christie’s Poirot from 1989-2013.
Although his creator might no longer be among us, many authors have tried to add new books to the Poirotverse, but with limited success. In 2014, the Agatha Christie estate chose British mystery author and poet Sophie Hannah to ‘officially’ continue the Poirot series through what have now become known as the “Poirot continuation” novels. Hannah brought the Belgian detective back to our lives (and to bestseller charts) with The Monogram Murders in 2014 and has continued to bear the mantle of being his official storyteller, with The Last Death of the Year being her latest addition to the Poirot lore.
The book is based at the very end of 1932, with Poirot and his friend (and narrator of the story) Catchpool joining a group of people at the rather curiously named and oddly designed House of Perpetual Welcome at the Island of Lamperos. Poirot persuades Catchpool to visit the island as part of a post-Christmas break, tempting him with promises of swimming in the clear ocean. Catchpool, however, senses that something seems amiss at the house.
Its owner Nathaniel “Nash” Athanasiou seems oddly nervous and clearly has never met Poirot, although the detective insists he knows him. Then there are the other residents at the house: Nash’s close friend Matthew Fair, the poet Austin Lanyon, the sisters Olive and Rhoda Hislop, the love birds Charles Counsell and Thirza Davis, the direct Belinde (“Belty”) Rocks and the young and flirtatious Pearl St Germain. All of them stay at The House of Perpetual Welcome, without having to pay a penny and are part of a community where forgiveness matters most.
For all their piety and piousness, they do not pull on well together and beneath the sense of a common purpose are a number of tiny sub-plots and groups – Matthew was engaged to Rhoda but fell for Pearl, Thirza keeps flirting with others in spite of being engaged to Charles, and more.
It is this group that gets together to celebrate New Year’s eve, where Austin comes up with the idea of making everyone write their New Year’s resolution anonymously and then trying to guess who wrote which one. Which is where Catchpool reads a resolution that is laden with intent to murder Matthew Fair.
It is a classic Christie set up – a group of people with divisions and secrets between them, a murderer lurking in their midst, and it is up to Poirot and his famous “little grey cells” to find the perpetrator.
Hannah’s handling of Poirot has received mixed reviews in the past. While many like the way in which she has stayed largely true to Christie’s portrayal of the legendary detective, others have found her plots to be a little too convoluted and her narration a little long-winded. This is largely true of The Last Death of the Year. It spans more than 350 pages and at times moves at a pace that makes a snail seem like a sprinter.
Hannah spends most of the first five chapters introducing that very diverse cast of characters, and describing the surroundings. Some might consider it part and parcel of setting the stage, but we found it a little tedious – she even devotes more than a page to spelling out the rules of the new year resolution game, which are spelled out by Austin in nine bullet points.
Things do pick up once the threatening new year’s resolution is read by Catchpool, and Poirot takes centrestage (he is pretty much in the background initially) but even then, this is not a book that will have you turning pages in feverish anticipation. Some of Poirot’s conclusions and deductions also seem a little too complex. Hannah has said that while she tries to invoke Christie’s style of narration, the plots are very much her own.
The Last Death of the Year reflects this – you feel it is Christie reading out a book written by another author. The prose is a little cliche-ridden at places (“Rhoda, looked horror-struck, as if in possession of terrible secret knowledge that was burning her up from inside.”) and the choice of Catchpool (who is totally a Hannah creation and has appeared in her other Poirot books) as a narrator is an odd one – he seems to be a blend of the prosaic and cynical Japp and the rather more effervescent Hastings.
All of which make The Last Death of the Year a book for absolute diehard Poirot fans, the type that do not want to miss any mention of him, and are patient enough to find out just what he is up to. Classic Poirot fans might however feel a little put out by the book’s sluggish pace, and skip to the parts which have Poirot, which are the highlights of The Last Death of the Year.
Sophie Hannah’s continuation of the Poirot saga is not bad by any means but she does have large shoes to fill. The Last Death of the Year is a pleasant read for those who like their mysteries to be of the cozy type and have plenty of time at hand. It is not a classic Poirot, but it is a new one and captures some of the magic of the brilliant Belgian. Surely that counts for something, n’est ce pas?
The Last Death of the Year (A New Hercule Poirot Mystery)
By Sophie Hannah (Author), Agatha Christie (Creator),
HarperCollins
384 pages
Rs 499
