Doug Bolden's Reviews > The Murder on the Links

This novel is a song whose notes sometimes clash and sometimes harmonize and all the instruments on stage are kind of doing their own thing but are largely in tune. Poirot's major novels are still in this novel's future but we already have a character established enough for this novel to play at being a middle-arc self-parody.

The fact that the plot has too many developments, that there are too many love stories, that there are too many French policemen, too many femme fatales, and too many times in which Hastings drops the ball is all besides the point. It's a delightful novel because it barely makes sense. The crime that kicks it off makes no sense. The attempts to solve it make no sense. Folks just basically teleport from place to place by train or car or boat. Clues brew up and then are later mostly discarded for more interesting twists. There are some hotels and some estates, sure. Some stage acts. It is a work accidentally surreal just trying to do its day job.

I love it.

Fascinating exhibit one: The Murder on the Links has the flavor of attempting to break Poirot out of a Holmesian mold (while simultaneously making Hastings more a stereotypical Watson than Watson ever was in the original stories). When you look through the suggested reading order provided by the back of this very novel, even, virtually all the stories this novel is meant to comment on are recommended to be read after you read the novel. In fact, while you can find quite a few bits about how The Mysterious Affair at Styles was written in 1916 but then slightly edited and published in 1920, it is surprisingly hard to figure out exactly how the reading public had tracked these early developments of Poirot. A fandom site shows there were around ten Poirot stories published, on a weekly basis leading up to the UK publication of this novel (which was after the US publication?).

Reading these in order nowadays means you have Christie being a bit done with Hastings and wanting to do something new with Poirot and then nearly immediately going back to stories involving Hastings and Poirot being Watson and Holmes all over again (probably written before but some were definitely published after either edition of this novel).

Fascinating exhibit two: The opening line is about how some new writers try to make their writing forcible by dropping the line "'Hell,' said the Duchess" and then has a character do the same thing a couple paragraphs later which ones more is Christie engaging in self-parody despite this being her third damned novel. It also opens up a strange split where early on in the novel there is a lot of commentary, spoken by various men, around the weak nature of women and the way women should behave and then later the novel is largely about the actions of women driving the plot forwards — even with a gender-swapped gothic staple of a male character fainting from emotion. I do not think Christie was really trying to tongue-in-cheek any feminist commentary here but it feels like there is some sort of joke being told, maybe one intended largely for Christie herself.

Fascinating exhibit three: Detective Giraud is a delightful parody of the self-important, quirky, socially-off-putting detective. Which means that Giraud is a parody of the very genre of detective that Poirot himself inhabits. There is such a missed opportunity here for Poirot to have dumped Hastings and moved in with Giraud. Which brings me into...

Fascinating exhibit four (aka, three-point-five): There is much early juxtaposition between physical evidence — the new way of solving crimes and also a jab at Sherlock Holmes — and Poirot's preferred method of using psychology. While some of the commentary about how physical evidence can be manipulated rings true, which is a plot point here and there, it is funny to think about this novel as a justification of ignoring evidence and instead of going on feelings. That's some Inspector Morse behavior, there: "Your honor, never mind the fingerprints, think about April 12th's *crossword* clues!" Of course, that is partially the point, right? This is a literary mystery. The reader cannot engage with finger prints or cigar ash but can very much engage with a third love affair involving a twenty-year old scandal.

Again, a delightful novel full of jabs and odd commentary and a whirlwind nonsense romance between a grown man and a seventeen-year-old acrobat that occasionally has some mediocre mystery butting in. I am a huge fan.