Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) is the best-selling novelist of all time and the writer the world calls the "Queen of Crime." Born Agatha Miller in Torquay, Devon, she came to fiction on a dare: her sister Madge bet she could not write a convincing detective story, and the result, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introduced the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Her dispensing work in a hospital pharmacy during the First World War, repeated again during the Second, gave her the expert knowledge...
Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Synopsis
Old, wealthy, and bedridden, Simeon Lee summons his estranged sons and their wives to the family seat at Gorston Hall for Christmas. The reunion is no gesture of warmth: the patriarch delights in needling his children, dangling hints about altering his will and stoking the resentments that have simmered between them for decades. A Spanish granddaughter he has never met and the son of a former business partner arrive to swell the uneasy household. On Christmas Eve, a crash of overturned furniture and a long, dying scream bring the family rushing to Simeon's door, only to find it locked from within. Inside lies the old man with his throat cut, the room drenched in blood and wrecked as though by a struggle, yet no killer to be found. Hercule Poirot, staying nearby, is drawn into an investigation alongside the local chief constable and a dogged superintendent. The puzzle turns on a sealed room, a missing fortune in uncut diamonds, and a family in which nearly everyone had cause to wish the tyrant dead. Sifting old grudges from fresh lies, Poirot weighs each alibi and each inheritance against the character of a man who shaped his children in his own image. The result is a tightly plotted festive whodunit that trades cosy seasonal cheer for something far darker, built on heredity, buried history, and the violence one household can conceal behind a closed door.
Vibe
Genres
Characters
Hercule PoirotSupporting
Staying with the chief constable nearby, he applies his methodical reasoning to a sealed-room killing, paying close attention to the dead man's character and the family he bred.
Simeon LeeSupporting
Cruel and manipulative, he gathers his family largely to taunt them and toy with the question of his will; his throat is cut in his locked study on Christmas Eve.
Alfred LeeSupporting
The son who stayed loyal and managed the household, he remained devoted to his father despite the old man's contempt.
Lydia LeeSupporting
Intelligent and composed, she runs Gorston Hall and observes the family's tensions with a clear eye.
Harry LeeSupporting
Returned after years abroad, his reappearance reopens old wounds and he is among those his father seems to favour.
Subjects
Places
Edition
Hercule Poirot's ChristmasUnknown, 1973
191 pages
Fontana/CollinsLanguage: EnglishISBN: 97800061309015 editions available
