Book review: Elephants Can Remember

Christie / Poirot again. Not her finest I fear; indeed, as a detective story rather poor; but as a book to read, not bad. Wiki is not kind: According to The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, this novel is one of the "execrable last novels" in which Christie "loses her grip altogether". I don't think it is quite that bad.

I shall not trouble you with the plot, only the flaws in it. The chief one is that there are identical twin sisters in it; in a mystery novel, this inevitably means that they get swapped, and alas "the mad rejected one pushed the nice one over the cliff" is all to obvious a solution. So much so that it is inconcievable that the police at the time didn't consider it. Did they, for example, take fingerprints or consider dental records to establish identity? This isn't even mentioned, because it can't be, because if it was ever mentioned even the dullest reader would find it obvious.

The bit with the dog was better and more subtle. I pat myself on the back that I got that too. I didn't get the "general decides to kill sister in law out of duty and self out of honour" bit, party because that bit is arbitrary. An alternative, darker, and perhaps non-AC motive would have been after the wife's death he decided to have a fling with his sister in law - frightfully attractive filly and all that - and then felt guilt. The finding the wife, having been pushed off and hit with rocks, and her being not quite dead, but instead of rushing for the doctor they stop to listen to her extended dying words, isn't plausible.

The bits - heavily, painfully, frequently repeated - about the four wigs are odd. They were identical twins; the housekeeper was of poor eyesight; did it also really need a wig or two for the diguise? I feel this bit was poorly thought out; possibly even an element not properly worked in; maybe it seemed good at the start and she couldn't be bothered to re-write it.

I think it implausible that our good general would not have left a suicide note - he would have known full well that suicides normally do, and he is trying to make it appear as such; well, in fact it is. I also think it unlikely he wouldn't have left an envelope with his solicitors, to be delivered to the children when they reach maturity.