Hickory Dickory Dock

I found this in my area's newly-reopened Little Free Library. It'll be going back there as soon as I muster the nous to go out onto the boardwalk *early* in the morning when it's not crowded with unmasked future plague victims.

This entry into Dame Agatha's nursery-rhyme titled mysteries (eg, A Pocket Full of Rye; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe) is only mildly related to the rhyme in question...the action centers on Hickory Street...and it's also a Poirot-lite tale. It does, unusually, feature Miss Lemon (the Ubersecretary with Major Filing Chops), previously only seen in short stories. Her family connection to the Hickory Street Ménage, the ickily-title Warden of the boarders being her sister, is the only entrée Poirot has to the case. In show more fact, it seems like an absurdly minor matter for Poirot to do more than merely acknowledge with a wintry little smile as Miss Lemon hands him her typo-riddled assignment.

Miss Lemon? Typos?!

And thus is Poirot engaged in what seems to be, but isn't, a wildly inappropriate chase after the thief of some boracic powder, a stethoscope, and some random weirdness like a single shoe. This is 1955's Dame Agatha, so there are quite a lot of baroque connections among the various players. Many of them, comme d'habitude, are ridiculously overdone...one boarder is a murder victim's unacknowledged child, oh really now!...but they serve to distract from the weird and fraught central relationship of killer and crime.

At the end, I was diverted, amused, and irritated in equal measures by the resolution. A corking Dame Agatha experience? Mm...on balance no, but made me seek out the forty-years-newer TV adaptation. show less

I’ve been slowly re-reading Agatha Christie when I come across her books in used bookstores or library sales; "Hickory Dickory Dock" came from the latter a few weeks ago. In it, Hercule Poirot is asked by his secretary to look into a problem at the youth hostel/boarding house that her sister is running: it seems one young person there has been stealing from the others. The items that are stolen are quite worthless, and there seems to be no sense to it. With Poirot recommending that the police be called in, a young woman confesses and offers to make amends, but she is found dead the very next day, an apparent suicide. However, having just become engaged and behaving in a supremely happy manner, no one can quite believe that story…. show more This was published in 1955 and it has all the earmarks of that era, including all the young female characters being called “girls” while the males are always “men” no matter their age, and some casual stereotyping of West Indian and African characters. The fact that there *are* West Indian and African characters in the book at all is quite amazing, however, given the period, and two of them at least provide substantial information at critical moments. So, a plus overall. show less

Not one of Poirot's more rousing tales. Set in a boarding house for students at 26 Hickory Road, this is a story of lies, deceit, theft and murder. Plus we get Mrs. Lemon (who's characterization in the book is nothing like the TV impersonation) and her sister Mrs. Hubbard, who everyone calls "Ma". The various characters are well drawn and interesting, though the clues are a mess at the beginning, making little to no sense. But that's where Poirot puts his "leetle grey cells" to work.

On the whole, not bad, but it nearly put me to sleep at one point, which is not something you want when you're driving ...

I'm working my way through Christie's novels at the rate of one a month in their order of publication. Most of them are fun and some of them are remarkable but 'Hickory Dickory Dock' is the second book in a row that I've set aside halfway through. I could put 'Destination Unknown', last month's disappointment, down to Christie trying to revive her thriller writing and not getting it right but 'Hickory Dickory Dock' is her thirty-fourth Poirot book so I'd expected her to have the hang of them by this time.

'Hickory Dickery Dock' had all the signs of a crank-the-handle offering from a franchise that the author has grown bored with. From the first page, the book plods. The plot is slight and what there is of it is hard to take seriously. show more The exposition is clumsy and repetitive. The foreigner stereotypes are annoying. There is no tension. Unlike earlier Christie books with a nursery rhyhme title, the plot has little or no connection to the rhyme.

Some of the early character sketches were interesting but they tended towards the stereotypical if not the straightforwardly racist, It was as if Christie had based her characters on newspaper reports of what hostel-dwelling young people from multiple nationalities were like in 1955, rather than basing them on people she'd met. Miss Lemon and her sister were interesting but not interesting enough to stop 'Hickory Dickory Dock' from being too tedious for me to read the second half.

I'm hoping that next month's book, 'Dead Man's Folly' (1956), another Poirot book but this time in the more familiar environs of middle-class village folk, will be better. show less

Summary: Poirot’s secretary’s sister is warden at a student hostel subject to a baffling string of petty thefts.

Miss Lemon never makes mistakes. So when Poirot’s secretary makes three mistakes on a routine letter, Poirot deduces there is something wrong. It turns out Miss Lemon’s sister, Mrs. Hubbard is dealing with a troubling string of thefts. Mrs. Hubbard is the warden at a student boarding house. Men live on one side, the women on the other, and students from many countries as well as England live there. There seems no rhyme or reason to the thefts: a shoe, a stethoscope, a bracelet, a powder compact, a cookbook, some lightbulbs, some old flannel trousers, a box of chocolates, a rucksack, a silk scarf, some boracic powder, show more some green ink, and a diamond ring.

As it turns out, the baffling character of the list intrigues Poirot, and he agrees to investigate. Under the pretense of a talk on crime, Poirot meets the students, and at the end recommends calling in the police. While Mrs. Nicoletis, the hostel owner, tries to stall, Poirot’s recommendation gets results. One of the girls, Celia Austin, confesses to some of the thefts and promises restitution. Later that evening, she announces her engagement to another resident, Colin McNabb, a psychology graduate student.

However, this apparently happy ending quickly turns more serious. Celia is found dead of a morphine overdose, apparently a suicide from the scrap of a note left behind. But the authorities quickly see through this. Someone in the house murdered Celia. The murder reveals the problems beneath the placid appearances, and many of the students are plausible suspects.

Only one is the killer and before this is over, two more will die. As Poirot aids in the investigation, the thefts and incidents Celia wasn’t responsible for, and the order in which they took place, become important. Things as baffling as a cut up rucksack and missing lightbulbs are key. In the process, it is apparent that much more than petty theft is going on.

In addition to serious crime, it turns out the murderer got away with murder in the past. But not with Poirot!

This is the first mystery I can think of to take place in a student boarding house. What an ideal setting for a household full of suspects. Not only that, Christie creates an interesting cast of characters and a liberal number of red herrings. It was fun to try to unravel this one! show less

When Hercule Poirot's perfect assistant Miss Lemon is distracted by her sister's troubles managing a youth hostel, the Belgian detective steps in to assist. The "hostel" (mostly housing for international students) has been plagued by a series of thefts: some valuable items and others of no consequence. When Poirot suggests bringing in the police, one resident confesses to kleptomania and then winds up dead.

While far from the worst of the series, it's not one of the best, either. The plot is convoluted with too many shallow characters and too many coincidences. Poirot makes wilder than usual postulations that are, of course, correct.

Solution: Two of the lodgers are involved in a drug smuggling ring: importing cheap backpacks with show more drugs hidden in them. All of the additional thefts were designed to distract attention from the destruction of a backpack that might have had traces of drugs. Three murders are committed to eliminate people who know too much: two lodgers and the landlady. The mastermind (Valerie) ends up being the crazy foreign landlady's daughter and is pissed when her accomplice (Nigel) murders her mom. show less

When his paragon of a secretary makes several mistakes on a single page of typing, Hercule Poirot is concerned. As it turns out, Miss Lemon is worried about her sister and the student boarding house she manages, which has been plagued by a string of petty thefts and other mischief. Since Poirot is at loose ends, he pays a visit to the boarding house, where he senses something very wrong beneath the surface. When one of the students dies, apparently by her own hand, Poirot deduces it was murder. Poirot serves as a sounding board for Inspector Sharpe as he investigates the sudden death.

I wish Christie had given readers more of Miss Lemon when she had the chance in this novel. I did enjoy meeting her sister, who shares some of the same show more no-nonsense qualities that make Miss Lemon such a valuable secretary. Unusually for Christie, this book also suffers from a surfeit of characters who share too many similarities of age and circumstance. I do enjoy the audio recordings of this, and other Poirot novels, read by Hugh Fraser, who played Hastings in the British TV series. David Suchet is the definitive Poirot for my generation, and Fraser seems to model the voice of his Poirot on Suchet’s portrayal. show less