The Sweet Sleuth Gone

By Martha Duffy

CURTAIN by AGATHA CHRISTIE 238 pages. Dodd, Mead. $7.95.

This is the book that Agatha Christie wrote 30-odd years ago in which her legendary detective, Hercule Poirot, dies. She had wanted it published after her death but recently changed her mind. The reason, according to her publishers, was the box office success of the film Murder on the Orient Express, which created a huge demand for Poirot that the author was too frail to meet with a new book.

Nonsense. What is far more likely is that at 85, Dame Agatha decided to enjoy one more triumph. If Curtain is not quite the revolutionary mystery that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was in 1926, it is a major tour de force. Once again Christie has twisted the classic form in which she writes, and has come up with something new. Curtain is a shocker. It will cause intense, benign controversy and become an enormous bestseller. It is to be hoped that Queen Elizabeth has more ribbons in her closet to decorate this enduring and lonely symbol of British vitality.

As even doornails must know by now, the murderer in Ackroyd is the narrator, a genial village doctor. No one had ever pulled that trick, and there are purists who still argue that the author cheated. But if the device came as a revelation, the source should not have. Six years earlier, Christie had broken ground modestly in her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles; the villain was the first and most obvious suspect, from whom attention had long since been diverted.

Christie quickly became mistress of complex, cerebral plotting. Though she once wrote a book based on the Lindbergh kidnaping (Murder on the Orient Express), she would probably have been powerless even in her prime to turn the Bronfman case into fiction. It was too badly bungled. Among the 65 thrillers she has written in a 55-year career are several classics: The ABC Murders is a fiendish triple trap, Murder in the Clouds, a sleek variant of the locked-room ploy set in the cabin of a small airplane, What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw, a neat bit of one-upmanship on Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair.

In the past decade or so, Christie's plots have become slacker and there has been a tendency toward capriciousness, which always lay just behind her virtuosity. Curtain turns back time to her great days. For a setting it goes all the way back to Styles St. Mary, where she and Poirot, her most famous creation, started out. The manor, which was once occupied by gentry, has become during World War II a rather meanly run "guesthouse," but in other respects, it is positively miraculous how little has changed since 1916. Then, as later, the action begins with the arrival of Captain Hastings, easily the most blockheaded tribute ever paid to Dr. Watson. His virtues are decency and loyalty to England and Poirot, but as the latter notes, he has a flair for the obvious and "a speaking countenance."

Poirot was arthritic even then, and Hastings, himself the picture of ruddy health, notes each time how his idol has "failed." Christie has never bothered changing her detective. He is always a badly bespoke would-be dandy. (He wilts in Poirot Loses a Client when someone observes that he is foreign. "And yet my clothes are made by an English tailor," he protests.) He fractures the language of Shakespeare -"Figure to yourself then" -until the time comes to explain his feats of detection. Then he speaks perfectly well. His considerable vanity is centered in his great waxed mustache -"the finest in London." In Cards on the Table, there is a man whose mustache compares with Poirot's; the fellow dies within 20 pages.

Unlike the busy Holmes, Poirot is an armchair detective. His "little grey cells" and his dispassion are more powerful than any magnifying lens. "There is nobody and nothing I do not suspect," he says. "I believe nothing I am told."

Confined to a wheelchair and suffering from serious heart trouble, Poirot is facing his greatest challenge in Curtain: a pathological murderer whose greed for death increases with each new victim. This person is at Styles. Poirot, though rich, resigns himself to the watered soup and the brussels sprouts and invites Hastings to be his legman.

Grey Cells. For most of its length, the book is typical first-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny about the British. At the end there are two jolts. In retrospect, the story seems less "typical." Hastings is as fuzzy as ever but there is a new hardness in Poirot. He almost never lapses into silly English, and he is even snappish with his friend: "If you cannot use your grey cells as you do not possess them, use your eyes, your ears and your nose if need be in so far as the dictates of honor allow."

Honor is the theme here -Poirot's and Christie's, because once again she breaks another rule of her exacting genre. By way of preparation, there is talk about Iago as the perfect plotter and the notion that every man may be a murderer. As announced, Poirot dies at the end, but the reader can safely be assured of at least one thing: Hastings comes through all right. Christie no longer gives interviews. Like Poirot, she has arthritis and heart trouble. She and her husband, the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, are still passionately fond of the theater, but their appearances in the West End are rare now. They live in a Queen Anne house near Oxford, where Dame Agatha supervises gardens that meander down to the Thames. Her publishers say that she has tired of Poirot (she also has a novel in the vault that kills off her other sturdy creation, Miss Marple), and it is easy to see how his popularity out stripped her interest in him. He was never much more than a device and an amusement. But Curtain will certainly cause a new explosion of interest in Poirot, now that he is dead. The last time a similar situation came up, a bored Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, but the public demanded his resurrection.

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