Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie
The Lee family’s Christmas celebrations at Gorston Hall are interrupted by a loud crash of furniture and a piercing scream. The oppressive patriarch Simeon Lee is found dead in a pool of blood, his neck cut, upstairs in a locked bedroom.
When Hercule Poirot tries to help, he discovers a mood of mistrust rather than grieving. Everyone seemed to loathe the elderly guy for their own reasons, but who among them transformed a joyous event into a justification for murder? The suspects will definitely be awake on Christmas Eve.
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie
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Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is a superb illustration of the traditional “whodunnit” with an underlying “impossible crime” theme. It isn’t the story’s primary theme. It doesn’t have to be the novel’s central theme or conclusion. In my most recent book, which isn’t the main subject of the narrative, there is a locked chamber conundrum. I find writing it to be a lot of fun, but a novel may be used for things other than the locked room aspect.
In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, Christie carries out that action. She has a pretty strong plot that includes some excellent clueing and deception. It’s a good mystery set at Christmas in a country mansion. What else would you need but commit murder? That murder includes a seemingly impossible situation.
This story differs from the ones we’ve discussed because the locked room isn’t the primary subject of the narrative, but it does show how it may be applied in a wide range of contexts.
