I was very disappointed with the results of Poirot’s bomb attack on Chinatown.
–Captain Arthur Hastings in Agatha Christie’s The Big Four
If you ask people for their choice for Agatha Christie’s worst mystery, a great many of them, I suspect, would give the nod to some octogenarian folly from late in the author’s career, likely the highly confused (and confusing) Passenger to Frankfurt (1970) or Postern of Fate (1973). Yet others might give the golden raspberry to the fourth Hercule Poirot “novel”: The Big Four (1927). Christie herself was hard on her fourth big Poirot mystery, referring to it bluntly and derisively fifteen years later as “that rotten book.” However, I myself believe that if you can read The Big Four with the context of its time and place in mind and judge it on its own terms, the book is not actually that bad.
I put the word novel in asterisks above because The Big Four, like Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence saga Partners in Crime (1929), is really a collection of loosely integrated short stories, which in the case of The Big Four were originally published a century ago in England in The Sketch over the period January-March 1924. Up to this time that brilliant Belgian detective Monsieur Poirot had appeared in only two novels, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) and Murder on the Links (1923), but he also had graced twenty-five previous short stories in The Sketch, published over the period March-October 1923. Eleven stories from this latter group would appear in book form in Poirot Investigates in 1924. Christie did not actually publish another Poirot novel until 1926, with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Instead, there came two non-series mystery thrillers, The Man in the Brown Suit (1924) and The Secret of Chimneys (1925).
The Big Four was first published in England in January 1927, about eight months after the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and just a few weeks after Agatha Christie’s strange disappearance and reappearance, which for a brief time became a newspaper sensation. Probably The Big Four would not have been published as a novel at all had Christie not been utterly demoralized by the collapse of her marriage with Archie Christie and the death of her believed mother. It was Archie’s brother, Campbell Christie, who suggested to his sister-in-law, who felt unable to write anything new at the time, that she turn to the stories as the source for a new Poirot novel. He also helped her to pull them together into a (semi) coherent whole.
The resulting book tended to underwhelm critics of the day, especially in comparison with the lauded Murder of Roger Ackroyd, an acknowledged landmark in the history of detective fiction; yet, given the attention that Christie’s disordered personal life had been receiving in the press, it ironically did quite well with the public, doubling the sales of Ackroyd. (No publicity is bad publicity, as they say; indeed, some suggested Christie’s vanishing act was just that, a publicity stunt.) Today we look back and tend to see The Big Four, with its criminal masterminds and their plots–rather vague and ludicrous, really—to take over the world, as a desecration of Poirot’s dignity as the world’s greatest detective, but the great Belgian sleuth did not have nearly as much of an established reputation back in 1924, when these stories were first published. So probably those hardy readers of The Sketch back in the day were not mortified to see Poirot battling to the death a fiendish Chinese mastermind and a rapacious American business tycoon, among sundry other villains. (Have these stereotypes changed today?)
To be sure, some reviewers of the novel, which appeared three years after the original stories were published, sensed an incongruity between the peerlessly cerebral Poirot of Ackroyd, an acknowledged masterpiece of detection, and the action hero Hercule in Four, with its absurd global conspiracies. As the reviewer for the London Observer mildly but pointedly remarked of The Big Four, it signaled a pronounced lack of original inspiration “when a writer of detective stories turns to international conspiracies, Bolshevism and worldwide organizations for the overthrow of civilization.” Chiming in something less than enthusiastically as well, the reviewer at the Liverpool Daily Post pronounced that the events in The Big Four did not constitute the sort of “tale we expect from Mrs. Christie.” In the United States an American reviewer with the Philadelphia Inquirer complained: “Agatha Christie is not as sane in her new story…. ‘The Big Four’ requires more credulity than the average reader is prepared to give…. International plots have been worn so threadbare that only a venturesome artist will go in for them anymore.”
Nonetheless, the biggest selling British crime writers of the Twenties in fact were not subtly clever women detective novelists like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers but boisterous male thrill merchants like Edgar Wallace, Sapper and Sax Rohmer, among others. Thus, it is really not surprising that Christie, as she struggled to get her footing in the mystery world in the Twenties and to manage her own traumatic personal problems, published quite a lot of stuff that topples over into the thriller category. With Ackroyd especially, she had shown she had the stuff of a world class detective story writer, but she had not consistently developed her powers as a writer of detection. Christie herself said that for her thrillers were easier to write than detective novels, making them comparatively relaxing work. If hard-boiled American crime writer Raymond Chandler said when in doubt, throw in a man with a gun, the British thriller writer of the Twenties might have said, throw in a sinister Chinaman, identical twins and/or a deadly poison unknown to science. (Notably, the Detection Club, an association of detective novelists founded in 1930, proscribed the use of all of these devices by its members.)
During the 1920s Christie published, aside from the “Big Four” stories and novel, the thrillers The Secret Adversary (1922), The Man in the Brown Suit, The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929). Even the Poirot novels Murder on the Links and The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) have some “exotic” thriller elements in them. (Both are set in France, which to Englishmen and women of that day was the premier country of illicit thrills.) I think that most Christie fans would admit that there are really only two “classic” Christie detective novels from this period, these being Styles and Ackroyd.
In the Thirties, when Christie had hit her stride, it is astonishingly different. Among the seventeen mystery novels she published in her greatest decade, starting with the first Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, in 1930 and culminating with possibly the greatest mystery novel of all time, And Then There Were None, in 1939, there is only one thrillerish novel in the classic vein, a nonseries one, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (Some people view And Then There Were None as a thriller story, but, if it is, it is a deadly serious one, with none of the jejune antics of Christie’s Twenties thrillers. I would say it is more of a noirish crime novel with strong horror elements.)
All this being as it may, however, it must still be admitted that it just does not feel right for the great Hercule Poirot to be in the sort of novel that is The Big Four, a downright silly Sapperesque/Rohmeresque global conspiracy thriller. Dogged Tommy and plucky Tuppence are right at home in this highly colored. adventurous world, but not our subtly ingenious Poirot of the sober little grey cells. (Hastings, now, as the stolid, dim British sidekick fits right in.)
Personally, I have never been able much to abide Sapper and his brash, bullying public school hero “Bulldog” Drummond, though I think Edgar Wallace is underrated today and that Sax Rohmer is actually quite an imaginative and adept writer of shockers, if one can get past his frequent use of the “Yellow Peril” trope. However, looked at on their faces, these Twenties thrillers are simply, well, silly, as stated above. Silly fun, if you are so inclined, but still silly, like playing a frantic, loud round of the card came Pit. (The impressive thing about Sax Rohmer, I find, is that he makes us take all the nonsense seriously at the time.) And the thing is, if one is an admirer of Hercule Poirot’s impressive deductive feats, Poirot himself emphatically is not silly, his overweening vanity, outsized mustaches and egg-shaped head notwithstanding.
When a television film version of The Big Four was made over a decade ago, the makers jettisoned the whole international conspiracy element as a reality and this time you have to sympathize with them with their change. What else could they have done?
***
In The Big Four it is June and Arthur Hastings has returned to England to visit his dear friend Poirot from his cattle ranch in Argentina, where, it will be recalled, he settled with his lovely, auburn-haired wife (the unfortunately nicknamed “Cinderella,” whom he married after the events in Murder on the Links). Hastings soon becomes enmeshed, over the next full year (!), in Poirot’s desperate, lonely battle against a global conspiracy of four individuals to take over the world by unleashing anarchy in the streets and then picking up the pieces–or something like that.
This “Big Four” is composed of:
Chinese mastermind Li Chang Yen, a blatant rip-off of Sax Rohmer’s notorious Dr. Fu-Manchu, an iconic villain who appeared in a trio of popular novels in the 1910s. Oddly the bad doctor vanished in the Twenties, but he would headline no fewer than six Rohmer novels between 1931 and 1941, as well as three more between 1948 and 1959, the year of the author’s death.
An American multi-millionaire, Abe Ryland. (You know how willful and dangerous they can be.) The American Soap King, he is said the be “the richest man in the world.” When Christie published The Big Four, there was a real-life American Soap King, one Michael Winburn, founder of Cadum Soap, who died in Paris in 1930, but he does not seem to have been involved in any global conspiracies. However, his widow, who remarried three years after Winburn’s death, came to a remarkably bad end in 1935, when the plane on which she was flying with her new husband, Edouard Renard, Governor General of French Equatorial Africa, crashed into the jungle in the Belgian Congo, disintegrating and killing all seven people on board. Much was made in the press of the loss in the crash of Madame Renard’s jewel case, which contained an estimated $390,000 worth of fabulous baubles (about 8.3 million dollars today).
A mysterious French woman scientist, Madame Olivier. (Sacre bleu!) Note a resemblance to the surname of Christie mystery writing alter ego, Ariadne Oliver.
And an insidious Unknown, whose quaint nickname is the Destroyer. (Such drama queens, these guys.) I believe a Sydney Horler thriller villain once used that impressive handle too.
A certain John Ingles, a retired civil servant, knows of the conspiracy and expounds on it to the incredulous Hastings, forebodingly explaining that there is some evil Power behind all of the dreadful chaos in the world: “The worldwide unrest, the labour troubles that beset every nation, and the revolutions that break out in some. There are people, not scaremongers, who know what they are talking about, and they say that there is a force behind the scenes which aims at nothing less than the disintegration of civilization.”
Unfortunately, the provokingly percipient Ingles is soon bumped off by the Big Four and Poirot simply cannot get the dull-minded English authorities to credit his outlandish conspiratorial notions. Sure, on hand as ever there is old Inspector Japp, who continually calls Poirot Moosior. (Poor Japp!) However, Japp is even more hopeless than Hastings, who for much of the book seemingly is left in it all alone with the great Belgian detective in combatting the forces of global anarchy and worldwide economic mishap. (Again, sound familiar today?) Cinderella, left sitting home in the Argentine for a year, must be an incredibly patient woman to let her husband traipse off for a whole year to fight criminal masterminds with Poirot—or perhaps she was glad to get Hastings out of the picture!
For much of the book there are feints and jabs between the Big Four and the Decidedly Mixed Two (the Dazzling One and the Dim One). Poirot gets captured, bound and gagged twice, Hastings thrice (he finally excels Poirot at something in these books), while “Chinese devils” threaten Cinderella if Hastings does not fall in with their plans. (“Remember the price of failure…. your wife dies by the Seventy Lingering Deaths!”). Yet somehow, they all escape unscathed time and time again.
Personally, I found the “Big Four” kind of incompetent in this regard. Perhaps they should have emulated contemporary American gangsters and just machine-gunned Poirot and Hastings as they exited Poirot’s apartment building? There is something to be said for good old American efficiency! By the way, Poirot’s address is 14 Farraway Street here; when did he move into Whitehaven Mansions? He also has a landlady named Mrs. Pearson, which is not the only thing therein which reminded me of the gaslit world of 221b Baker Street.
Embedded within this farrago of nonsense, however, are a few nice little cases of actual detection. One of them has been anthologized separately on occasion, under the title “A Chess Problem.” In it, Poirot investigates the death from heart failure of a brilliant young American chess player during a match. But there are two other clever little stories, or episodes, in the book as well. The first of these could be anthologized, after tweaking, as “The Murder at Granite Bungalow” and the second as “The Yellow Jasmine Mystery.”
The first one concerns the case of jade collector Jonathan Whalley at the Dartmoor village of Hoppaton, who was found dead at his home with his throat cut. His manservant, an ex-con, has been arrested, but Poirot of course has other notions of culpritude. This is an enjoyable little affair with more than an echo of G. K. Chesterton. I almost thought for a few minutes that it was going to anticipate an infamous macabre story by Roald Dahl, but alas no.
The other “story,” the yellow jasmine one, concerns the death of retired globetrotter Mr. Paynter at his small place in Worcestershire, near the village of Market Handford, where he lived with his nephew, Geoffrey, and his Chinese manservant, Ah Ling. The elder Paynter was discovered in his study, fallen forward into the gas fire, his face horribly charred beyond all recognition. Then there are the matters of the master’s poisoned curry and his mysterious dying message about “yellow jasmine”….
The events in the book finally work up, in rather an abrupt fashion, as if Christie was anxious to get it all over with, to Poirot’s and Hastings’ big showdown with the Big Four at their mountain fastness in the Italian Dolomites, which is oddly reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s kehlsteinhaus. Christie was obviously inspired by the Master’s Sherlock Holmes short stories “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House,” but she comes up with some amusing, if outlandish, wrinkles on them.
Poirot’s own Irene Adler, red-haired Russian jewel-thief Countess Vera Rossakoff, pops up a couple of times in The Big Four. I believe the Countess had three appearances in all in the Poirot canon: here, originally in 1924; in the short story “Double Sin,” originally published in 1923; and then finally in “The Capture of Cerberus,” which first appeared, in the version with Vera Rossakoff, in 1947 in the collection The Labours of Hercules (the original 1940 version of the story having been rejected and subsequently gone unpublished). It is nice to see the character again, although I have to say I think the countess makes some rather damnably unadmirable crime career decisions in The Big Four. Had I been Papa Poirot I would have taken a sterner view of this wicked adventuress’ flights of felonious fancy.
All in all, I would sooner read The Big Four again than, say, the dullish Elephants Can Remember (1972), the last, rather listless Poirot mystery which Agatha Christie wrote, nearly a half century after The Big Four. And, really, is the concept of the “Big Four” any more ridiculous than our own modern-day “Q,” so beloved by commenters on “X”? Grand conspiracy theories may be absurd, but seemingly they will always claim a following among the more credulous members of the credulous human race (including even former American presidents), so naturally crime fiction will make use of them. As long as the tongue is kept in cheek, I do not see harm in it. Even if it is not worth four stars, I would still say that The Big Four, ludicrous as it may be, is far from fourgettable.
