Cards on the Table

[Keith]

I have just re read this.I think it is still the best trick AC pulled off.There are 4 suspects and it turns out to be the most obvious but you never guess! There is a new adaptation of the Hound of The Baskervilles over Christmas on the BBC.Hasnt it been done enough times before though?

[Dave]

I was looking for a book to read this Christmas. I've read this one years ago but can't remember the plot. Looks like it's a Christie for Christmas again!

[Dave]

I'm currently reading this one. Do I need to know bridge? I tried to learn it about 10 years ago but never really picked it up. Poirot seems pretty focused on it though.

If I had to pick one thing I don't like about a number of Christie's books it would be the format where Poirot (Marple avoids this) interviews the suspects, one after the other. It usually goes something like this:

1. Setup
2. Murder
3. Interview suspect 1
4. Interview suspect 2
.
.
.
10. Solve the case

I find this very tedious and not at all interesting to read. I read this book years ago but I do not remember the details. I hope it breaks out of this pattern soon.

[Keith]

You dont need to know bridge.The solution is one of those where you think the murder has been solved then Poirot turns the case round to an alternative solution.I prefer Poirot to Miss Marple as the problems are more ingenious.With Miss Marple if the victim is married it is usually their partner who has committed the crime.I am currently reading The Department of Dead Ends by Roy Vickers a brilliant collection of short stories not whodunnits but the appeal lies in how the murderer is caught after seemingly committing a perfect crime.

[dr_g_fell]

I've read it several years ago, but I remember it as a tour-de-force in ingenuity.

[Dave]

I finished Cards on the Table and enjoyed it. However, I would argue that you do need an understanding of bridge to be able to solve the case. You certainly need to know that you can "bid" something and then have your partner play the hand without your participation, leaving you to be the "dummy" which leaves you free to do dastardly deeds. Still, a fun read.

[Abe]

I disagree. When I read Cards on the Table, I had no idea how to play bridge. Christie tells you pretty much all you need to know.

[NBooth]

I didn't know anything about bridge either, and understood it fairly well. I was rather proud of myself on this one; I guessed the killer (though knowledge of Ariadne Oliver's literary uses [gleaned from 'The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie'] did help a bit.) It's a great, great book.

[Dermot]

I consider it as one of the best books with Poirot as protagonist.Despite the suspects are only four,the plot is arranged very well and I missed the culprit.

Spoiler

I thought it was Ann Meredith

"Cards on table" can be considered also a good help to learn bridge if one doesn't know it

[awrobins]

I don't know bridge either, but I enjoyed this book. Actually, Christie fooled me on this one. I thought she must have a least likely suspect up her sleeve, so I susp[ected Colonel Race. This was, of course, before I read the other books with Colonel Race. Of course, you never know. John Dickson Carr wrote a novel in which the murderer is a friend of the detective who had appeared in previous stories. And Christie also does it, twice.

Spoiler

In Curtain; and also, the conductor (or whatever he's called) in "Murder on the Orient Express" had appeared as a minor character in "The Mystery of the Blue Train."

[Patrick Gore]

Originally Posted by NBooth

I didn't know anything about bridge either, and understood it fairly well. I was rather proud of myself on this one; I guessed the killer (though knowledge of Ariadne Oliver's literary uses [gleaned from 'The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie'] did help a bit.) It's a great, great book.

I think Dave said you need to know bridge in order to Solve it, not in order to understand what's going on. I think Dave is right. There are really only two clues to the murderer's identity: the bridge scores as a record of teh activity during the game, and the psychological clue of how the murder of Shaitana is the kind of crime so-and-so would commit. Since the latter is hardly a clue at all, but a Marplish kind of intuition (although it is pretty convincing here), if you want to do something other than "guess" whodunit, you do need to know how to interpret the bridge scores.

What made Christie so popular with women readers in her day, I think, is how she made all her murders solvable on the basis of everyday knowledge that a middle-class British lady would possess---her solutions often depend on the arrangement of furniture in a room, the knowledge of what time of year to use central heating, a familiarity with bridge, things like that.

PS: Robins, it's Curtain, right? Final Curtain is a Ngaio Marsh novel.

[NBooth]

The complete quote:

Originally Posted by Dave

I finished Cards on the Table and enjoyed it. However, I would argue that you do need an understanding of bridge to be able to solve the case. You certainly need to know that you can "bid" something and then have your partner play the hand without your participation, leaving you to be the "dummy" which leaves you free to do dastardly deeds. Still, a fun read.

(Emphasis mine.)

In the sense that Dave meant, you don't really need an understanding of bridge, since the ideas of "bid" and "dummy" are relatively easy to pick up. However, I see your point, and can only bow my head at my ignorance--not knowing the bridge-scoring system is certainly a detriment.

[Patrick Gore]

Originally Posted by Dave

If I had to pick one thing I don't like about a number of Christie's books it would be the format where Poirot (Marple avoids this) interviews the suspects, one after the other. It usually goes something like this:

1. Setup
2. Murder
3. Interview suspect 1
4. Interview suspect 2
.
.
.
10. Solve the case

Yeah, the "classic" Christie that most fits this description is Murder on the Orient Express, which is why it isn't very filmable, despite the phenomenal commercial and critical success of Sidney Lumet's film. (It is lovely to look at, and the star turns are fun.)

I guess I prefer the spareness of this formula, though, to the rambling narratives of later Poirots and most Marples, where instead of a series of interrogations you get long, tedious conversations with little relevance to the plot and even less intrinsic interest, or worse, you find yourself following the drearily conventional thoughts of one dull philistine after another. ("Shall I prune the rose bushes today? And oh, that gardener looks so familiar -- I know! He looks ex-ACT-ly like the DEVIL!"*) At least in the early Poirots there's very little padding: almost every seemingly gratuitous detail turns out to be significant.

What Christies do you think avoid both of these traps? It's been a couple of years since I read it, but I think The ABC Murders is one of these, thanks to those Cust chapters and the whole chase plot. Ditto, I think, for Ackroyd, where the formula gets broken up by the comic scenes with Caroline Sheppard.

*Read Hallowe'en Party if you think this is far-fetched!

[Dave]

I haven't read much Christie recently so I can't recall which ones avoid that formulaic setup. Although I wouldn't accuse Carr of this type of boring plot construction, in truth I suppose you could say his books are plotted the same way. However, he (and other authors) are more adept at disguising the technique by taking the time to direct the readers attention elsewhere so that you don't realize that what you are actually reading is just a long series of "interviews" chock full of clues.

[Patrick Gore]

Yeah, Dave, you're on to something with this comparison. Christie's formula really only gets disrupted when they find another body, hence the ridiculously high body count in books like Murder in Announced, The Mirror Crack'd, and the otherwise superb Death on the Nile. (When a large number of people are murdered in One Two Buckle My Shoe and The ABC Murders, it is all part of killer's original plan; but in Announced and Death and Mirror there are gratuitous "third act" victims and near-victims who die because they "saw something" and are clearly sacrificed merely to sustain readerly interest.) Maybe the reason so many people prefer Ten Little Indians to other Christies is the promise of a murder on the turn of each page to liven things up.

On the other hand, Carr knew how to keep us engaged with discoveries other than the discovery of a body. The impossible situation, several false solutions pattern is one way he does this. Even better is when a Carr novel offers several mysteries for the reader to solve, and they are solved along the way, a much more enjoyable "sop" for the reader than a strangled widower. Books like The Three Coffins and The Crooked Hinge and He Who Whispers also offer lore about magicians, vampires, and automata, locked-room lectures or clever stories about claimants to a title. And when there is a second murder in a good Carr (Three Coffins, Constant Suicides, etc.) the murder is not perfunctory but offers a fresh impossible puzzle for the reader to solve. (But, oh, how Christie-an is the second death in Wire Cage!)

I guess the upshot is, Christie didn't know how to write good stories, she just knew how to devise good murder plots. Sometimes, when a plot is really, really good, that is enough.