Mrs. McGinty's Dead

Summary: Superintendent Spence doesn’t think the man he helped convict in Mrs. McGinty’s murder is guilty and asks Poirot’s help.

“Mrs. McGinty’s Dead.” In this case, real life follows the nursery rhyme. But everyone thinks they know who killed her. Specifically, all the evidence was against James Bentley, her out-of-work, depressive lodger who was behind on his rent. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. But Superintendent Spence, who collected the evidence that helped convict him is still not sure. Bentley doesn’t fit the profile of other murderers observed by the experienced Spence. So he asks his friend Poirot to investigate to see if any reason can be found to stay the man’s execution.

Poirot goes to Broadhinny, show more the village where Mrs. McGinty had lived. His plan is to put it about that new evidence suggests someone else murdered Mrs. McGinty, to see if the murderer will show his or her hand. He stays with the Summerhayes. The family goes way back but the current occupants have no idea how to run a guest house. This provides an element of humor as Poirot has to put up with inedible food and a chaotic and messy house. However that mess will later provide key clues–the missing murder weapon and a photo that had not been in a drawer when Poirot previously tidied it.

As Poirot goes through Mrs. McGinty’s effects, he discovers a newspaper with part of a page clipped out from three days before the murder. The story was about four women suspected of but never convicted of murder, accompanied by pictures of them. Furthermore, Mrs. McGinty had purchased ink to write a letter. Poirot concludes she believed one of the women, under a different name, lived in Broadhinny! She’s seen one of the photographs.

It turns out that Mrs. McGinty did domestic work for a number of the families. Guy and Eve Carpenter are wealthy and he is running to become a Member of Parliament. Eve’s background, however, is one she wants to keep quiet. The Weatherbys have manipulated their step-daughter Deidre, who is independently wealthy to stay with them. Robin Upward, a budding playwright seems to fawn over his adoptive mother Laura. Dr. Rendell’s wife seems quite nervous. All employed Mrs. McGinty, and all seem to have something to hide.

Twice, during his investigations, Poirot meets Bentley, who does nothing to help him. He believes he has no friends. Poirot believes otherwise. But it becomes clear someone else connected to the newspaper story is the real party of interest when another murder occurs. Who that is emerges in a climactic scene with the leading villagers.

The other humorous element in all of this is Ariadne Oliver, who happens on the scene because she is working with Robin Upward, the playwright. As always, she thinks she will “help” Poirot with her mystery-writer skills. And she does help sell the reason for Poirot’s visit. But it is Poirot alone who exposes the real murderer.

This one had just the right mix of humor and suspense and red herrings. Most rankings of Christie’s novels don’t rank this one at the top. While not among the very best, I would put it in the category of “very good” with a great setup, setting, and plot twists. show less

‘I should, perhaps, madame, tell you a little more about myself. I am Hercule Poirot.’
The revelation left Mrs Summerhayes unmoved.
‘What a lovely name,’ she said kindly. ‘Greek, isn’t it?’

Now this is a Poirot novel that strays from the script a bit. It's fascinating but there seem to be three parts to this novel and the crime/mystery part is the weakest one. Yet, I really liked the book because first and foremost, Christie made me laugh out loud quite a few times.

Eh bien, let's start with the weakest part - the crime/mystery:

So, Mrs. McGinty is found dead and her lodger has been arrested, is standing trial, and will probably be sentenced to hang, but ... Superintendent Spence is having doubts and is consulting an old show more acquaintance to have a look at the case.

‘I don’t know what you’ll go there as,’ continued Spence doubtfully as he eyed Poirot. ‘You might be some kind of an opera singer. Voice broken down. Got to rest. That might do.’
‘I shall go,’ said Hercule Poirot, speaking with accents of royal blood, ‘as myself.’
Spence received this pronouncement with pursed lips. ‘D’you think that’s advisable?’

From there on, the typical sleuthing adventure ensues, except that there are a lot - and I do mean way too many - characters that are part of the investigation, a few red herrings, Ariadne Oliver - whose involvement in the book has less to do with the plot (I'll get to that later) -, and an ending that seems to have been rather far-fetched.

In fact, by the time the mystery was resolved, I had kinda lost interest in the whodunit part and really enjoyed the characters interacting with each other.

This book is really not about the mystery, which, in my opinion, was rather sub-par. No rather, the book seems to have been a self-reverential celebration of all things Poirot. And this may or may not be to readers tastes. I quite liked it in this case.

We have a lot of details about Poirot himself:

In his early days, he had seen plenty of crude brutality. It had been more the rule than the exception. He found it fatiguing, and unintelligent.
---
My work has enslaved me just as their work enslaves them. When the hour of leisure arrives, they have nothing with which to fill their leisure.

We have a couple of tips of the hat to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was published 25(!) years before Mrs. McGintys Dead, when Poirot discussed gardening with Spence:

Me, once I decided to live in the country and grow vegetable marrows. It did not succeed. I have not the temperament.’

In many of the details that describe Poirot in this book, Christie seems to take a retrospective stance, It serves as a celebration of his previous adventures, but I also could not help feeling that Christie took the opportunity to have some fun herself and poke her famous character at every opportunity. Not only, does she send Poirot to the country - and we all know how much Poirot hates the country -

It’s not really a Guest House, just a rather decrepit country house where the young couple who own it take in paying guests. I don’t think,’ said Spence dubiously, ‘that it’s very comfortable.’
Hercule Poirot closed his eyes in agony. ‘If I suffer, I suffer,’ he said. ‘It has to be.’

And Christie makes sure of it his suffering. This was one of my favourite parts and I am sure anyone who has ever been exasperated by Poirot's eccentricities would chuckle about the following scene of Poirot taking up lodgings at a country inn:

The room was large, and had a faded Morris wall-paper. Steel engravings of unpleasant subjects hung crookedly on the walls with one or two good oil paintings. The chair-covers were both faded and dirty, the carpet had holes in it and had never been of a pleasant design. A good deal of miscellaneous bric-à-brac was scattered haphazard here and there. Tables rocked dangerously owing to absence of castors. One window was open, and no power on earth could, apparently, shut it again. The door, temporarily shut, was not likely to remain so. The latch did not hold, and with every gust of wind it burst open and whirling gusts of cold wind eddied round the room.

‘I suffer,’ said Hercule Poirot to himself in acute self-pity. ‘Yes, I suffer.’

The door burst open and the wind and Mrs Summerhayes came in together. She looked round the room, shouted ‘What?’ to someone in the distance and went out again.
Mrs Summerhayes had red hair and an attractively freckled face and was usually in a distracted state of putting things down, or else looking for them.
Hercule Poirot sprang to his feet and shut the door.
A moment or two later it opened again and Mrs Summerhayes reappeared. This time she was carrying a large enamel basin and a knife.

A man’s voice from some way away called out: ‘Maureen, that cat’s been sick again. What shall I do?’
Mrs Summerhayes called: ‘I’m coming, darling. Hold everything.’ She dropped the basin and the knife and went out again.
Poirot got up again and shut the door. He said: ‘Decidedly, I suffer.’

As I said I really enjoyed this part of the story but I did keep wondering why Christie took to treating Poirot in such a way. Was it to celebrate him or was she falling out with him as a character that had become so famous that he had a life of his own - just as Arthur Conan Doyle fell out with Holmes?

Which brings me to the third part - Ariadne Oliver. Ariadne is basically Christie's way of injecting a fictionalised version of herself into the Poirot stories, and in this one Ariadne enters the scene - nearly knocking Poirot over with her car - and spends a lot of time agonising over how her own fictional creation - Sven Hjerson - is being changed inappropriately by theatre and film producers.

Robin continued blithely: ‘What I feel is, here’s that wonderful young man, parachuted down—’
Mrs Oliver interrupted: ‘He’s sixty.’
‘Oh no!’
‘He is.’
‘I don’t see him like that. Thirty-five— not a day older.’
‘But I’ve been writing books about him for thirty years, and he was at least thirty-five in the first one.’
‘But, darling, if he’s sixty, you can’t have the tension between him and the girl— what’s her name? Ingrid. I mean, it would make him just a nasty old man!’
‘It certainly would.’
‘So you see, he must be thirty-five,’ said Robin triumphantly.
‘Then he can’t be Sven Hjerson. Just make him a Norwegian young man who’s in the Resistance Movement.’
‘But darling Ariadne, the whole point of the play is Sven Hjerson. You’ve got an enormous public who simply adore Sven Hjerson, and who’ll flock to see Sven Hjerson. He’s box office, darling!’

Yeah, I can see Christie having exactly this sort of conversation with agents and producers about Poirot and Marple, and I can see Christie using this particular book as a dig at people trying to exploit her characters. And given the resolution of the plot, what a dig this is!!! If only it had deterred her estate to employ Charles Osborne to adapt her plays as novels!

So, while the mystery plot is rather mediocre, the context this novel provides for Poirot as a character that has developed a public persona outside of the books is just marvelous. show less

'Mrs. McGinty's Dead' was described to me as "A lesser Christie" and I think that sums it up. It's good enough to read to the end but it's not going to linger in the memory or be a book I'd want to re-read.

The plot is twisty in a way that stretches credibility. It's one of those Christie books that is all puzzle and no personality. The mystery is a sort of 'Find The Lady' card trick. There is a very limited pool of suspects who are all, like the cards, hidden face down and any one of whom could the murderer. Like the card trick, Christie keeps switching attention around from card to card and like the card trick the whole purpose is to distract and tempt. It was fun in its way but I felt that it plodded a little and that too much time show more was spent discussing which card hid the Lady without turning any of them over.

I've never liked Poirot and, at the start of 'Mrs. McGinty's Dead' it seemed to me that Agatha Christie no longer liked him much either. He came across as a sad little old man who missed Hastings because he now has no one to show off to or belittle, whose main regret in life was that one can only eat three times a day, who was blind to his declining celebrity and who had no compunction about lying to everyone he meets. Unexpectedly, Christie's depiction of the dissonance between Poirot's faded fame and his self-perception made me feel sorry for him for the first time.

For me, the most enjoyable and memorable thing about the book was the crime novelist, Mrs. Oliver, a recurring character who seems to be an avatar for Christie herself. I loved how Chrisie used Mrs. Oliver to voice her own frustrations about screen adaptations of her novels that largely ignore the original text. My favourite part was when Mrs. Oliver was talking about the central character in her books Sven Hjerson, a Finn who loves crudités, cold winter baths and solving murder mysteries and who is clearly meant to be an avatar for Poirot. She declares that she regrets ever creating him and wonders why she made him a Finn when she knew nothing about Finland and why she made him so odd. Her ambivalent relationship with him is summed up when she says, "Of course he’s idiotic, but people like him".

I listened to Hugh Fraser narrating the audiobook. He did his usual solid job but even he couldn't stop the prose from feeling mechanical at times. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/harpercollinspublishers/mrs-mcgintys-dead-by-agatha show less

Alas, Mrs. McGinty; we hardly knew you.

Really. I mean that. She was a widow, a woman who cleaned houses and took in lodgers to make ends meet; had a niece whom she saw at holidays, and was perhaps a bit of a nosy parker; nothing extraordinary to fill the obituary. When Inspector Spence visits the retired Poirot, he shares his troubling concern that the man he arrested for murdering Mrs. McGinty, and who is now facing the death penalty, is not truly guilty. Yes, yes; the circumstantial evidence was damning, but James Bentley’s milquetoast personality seems so wrong for the deed. Could dear Poirot perhaps put his little grey cells to work? But the clues won’t be found in McGinty’s past; as Hercule Poirot points out “For, you see, show more Mon cher Spence, if Mrs. McGinty is just an ordinary charwoman–it is the murderer who must be extraordinary.”

It is true; the murderer is a bit extraordinary. The plotting has an interesting premise, albeit perhaps hard to understand in the modern age. A second murder (because there always is one, isn’t there?) was unsurprising. Overall, the book reminded me more than a bit of [b:A Murder Is Announced|16298|A Murder Is Announced (Miss Marple, #5)|Agatha Christie|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348508635s/16298.jpg|2288775], so perhaps take a break between if you are on a Christie binge, or perhaps visit one of her more exotic locales in between.

For once, Christie leads with Hercule instead of consulting him later, providing an enjoyable stroll down nostalgia lane. Poirot laments the loss of Hastings as a sounding board and audience, but since Poirot’s investigative strategy is to stir up the village, he ends up ‘confiding’ in a number of people. We are treated to Christie’s standard cast of the post-war English village: a penniless but connected couple with a shabby family manse, a overly dramatic woman who enjoys her own tales of woe, the dutiful but repressed daughter, a bold young woman emblematic of the new age, an insecure, unsmart woman attempting to climb the social ladder, a postmistress with a penchant for gossip. All standard in many Christies, along with the semi-invalid elderly woman and her playwright son, echoes of Marple’s nephew Raymond.

“Mrs. Sweetiman imparted all this information with relish. She prided herself on being well informed. Mrs. Weatherby whose desire for knitting needles had perhaps been prompted by a desire to know what was going on, paid for her purchase.“

Tone seems on the playful side, which self-referential remarks on writing, appreciation and performance. When Mrs. Oliver and her apples make an appearance, it becomes quite clear that Christie is taking an authorial aside to muse on readers who obstinately prefer troublesome characters and playwrights who take license with an author’s characters. “‘How do I know?’ said Mrs. Oliver crossly. ‘How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad!… Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got? These things just happen. You try something–and people seem to like it–and then you go on–and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life.”

Poor Dame Christie. She seems to have had at least a gastronomic sort of revenge on Poirot at least, by boarding him at the worst guest-house possible: "I thought I would open a bottle of those raspberries I put up last summer. They seem to have a bit of mould on top but they say nowadays that that doesn't matter... --practically penicillin." If it is any post-humous consolation, in my old age, I prefer Miss Marple to the conceited Poirot, but I enjoy them both. Mrs. McGinty's Dead is one worth adding to the library.

Three and a half self-referential stars. show less

"I can't help it," said Mrs. Oliver obstinately. "He's always been a vegetarian. He takes round a little machine for grating raw carrots and turnips."
"But Ariadne, precious, why?"
“How do I know?" said Mrs. Oliver crossly. "How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got? These things just happen. You try something–and people seem to like it–and then you go on–and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life. And people even write and say how fond you must be of him. Fond of him? If I met that bony gangling vegetable eating Finn in real show more life, I'd do a better murder than any I've ever invented."

Yes, Ariadne Oliver, Agatha Christie's apple-munching alter-ego is back, but that's only one of the things I love in this book. Dame Christie has decided to torture her own literary creation with a guesthouse of horrors:

“I didn’t get to that pudding in time. It had boiled dry. I think it’s really all right—just a little scorched perhaps. In case it tasted rather nasty I thought I would open a bottle of those raspberries I put up last summer. They seem to have a bit of mould on top but they say nowadays that that doesn’t matter. It’s really rather good for you—practically penicillin.”

But I get ahead of myself...

Before Poirot finds himself in the tiny village of Broadhinny, a somewhat elderly "charwoman" is murdered, apparently for the money she hid under her floorboards. Her tenant, who was late in his rent, has been found guilty of the crime, but Poirot's old acquaintance Superintendent Spence -- responsible for producing the evidence that was used against the man -- doesn't believe he is.

Of course, Poirot discovers some small clues that the police have overlooked, starts making connections, and eventually identifies the actual murderer (but not before another murder is committed). Oh, yes, and Ariadne Oliver just happens to be in this tiny hamlet collaborating on a stage production for one of her books, which the young playwright wants to change drastically, making Sven Hjerson into more of a James Bond character.

Solution: It was the PLAYWRIGHT, Robin Upward, who was actually the son of a rather notorious woman. His real mother had died, he was "adopted" by Mrs. Upward and assumed her dead son's name. BUT Mrs. McGinty had seen a photograph labeled "my mother" while cleaning the Upward's home, and thought Mrs. Upward was the notorious woman. "Robin" found out and killed her. Then when Mrs. Upward realized what was going on, he killed her, too. All the other odd villagers were just there as red herrings.

Overall, a very entertaining mystery, although a little convoluted. The real criminal gets their oughts in the end (no suicide, illness, or accident to save them this time!), which makes me happy. show less

I think this is one of my top 10 favorite Christie novels, though it is hard to pick my top favorites. I love the grumbly Poirot, suffering in his miserable rented room to investigate this already solved murder to find the real murderer and save an innocent man. Poirot is so funny, always just a bit flustered at how few people in this backwards small town have ever heard of him, and not sure how to react when people don't believe he is a famous detective. Without Hastings along to help him deal with people, his personality really stands out.

Mrs McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie is a Hercule Poirot mystery in which he solves a village murder and saves a young man from hanging. There is a brief appearance of crime novelist Ariadne Oliver as well as more than a few other characters to keep the mystery bubbling along. It is up to Poirot to delve into the village’s secrets, solve the murder of cleaning lady, and, of course, keep us all guessing until the last chapter.

Hercule Poirot is brought into the case by Police Superintendent Spence who is not entirely convinced that the young man who has been tried and sentenced to be hung is, in fact, actually guilty. Even though this young man is quite unlikable, Poirot agrees that he shouldn’t have to hang if he didn’t do it. show more Poirot quickly sorts out the actual reason why Mrs. McGinty was killed. The larger part of the job is for him to narrow down the suspects and find who turned to murder in order to keep their secret hidden.

As always I enjoyed Agatha Christie’s writing, especially Ariadne Oliver’s rant about how she dislikes being chained to a particular character and how her fans are quick to jump on any discrepancy she slips in. This was the first time I have read this particular book and it was well worth the wait as she delivered the story with wit and humor. show less