Cat Among The Pigeons

This is one of the later Poirot books and was published in 1959. 

The plot involves a revolution in a middle Eastern country, Ramat, espionage, jewels hidden in a tennis racquet and a girls school in England.

It is a very curious book, the opening chapters set in the school have odd echoes of St Trinians and you could be forgiven for believing that this was going to be a humorous novel involving mistaken identities and a crime caper. You could just imagine Alastair Sim as Miss Bulstrode and the wonderful Joyce Grenfell as a hapless mistress sidekick. 

However, the novel takes a dark turn. Firstly, the ruler of Ramat, Prince Ali is killed as he flees a revolution and his stache of jewels become the focus of competing organisations. Then, a series of murders take place at the girls' school as these organisations close in on the jewels.

Poirot eventually makes an appearance quite late in the novel and in the great tradition of classic crime fiction gathers everyone together to unmask the killer in the closing chapters of the book. There are plenty of twists and turns and Agatha drops clues throughout the novel - including a very odd one surrounding knees.

Just as with The Clocks that comes after this novel, Christie has moved into the territory of espionage and the theme of people not being as they appear. This is quite possibly because this was written at the height of the Cold War.

The late appearance of Poirot in this novel and many of these later novels would suggest that Christie was beginning to tire of her creation. His contribution to this novel seems very meagre and one can't help but think that inspector Kelsey and his special branch assistant Adam Goodman could have wrapped things up between them without Poirot's help.

Espionage aside, there are some other interesting aspects of this book. Agatha Christie appears to be drawing upon  the experiences of her younger self when describing the intrepid travel adventures of Mrs Upjohn in her bus tour of Anatolia. Agatha had undertaken a journey with similar facets when she had fled Britain after her marriage breakdown and gone to the Middle East. A journey that involved difficult bus journeys across the Middle East.

Even the revolution in Ramat might be drawn from personal experiences. In her autobiography Christie mentions the hazards of working in the Middle East and the dangers that arose when competing factions sought to gain the upper hand. She mentions having to flee to safety until events had calmed down.

And then there is the school and the modern philosophy it espouses. It is never clear exactly what that philosophy is other than being "modern". However, the intention is to clearly differentiate it from more traditional English girls schools. It should be remembered that Agatha herself never had a formal education herself in part because of her mother's idiosyncratic views.

One interesting, part of this book relates to a very liberal (for the time) attitude to one of the mistresses being an unmarried mother albeit one who loses the child she carries. Christie was a Victorian with very traditional views BUT you can see from this book that her views are evolving with those of the country around her.

The book does contain views and language that would have the woke clutching at their pearls BUT these were the views that were held at the time and that was the language used at the time. Someone once said that the past was a foreign country and as such there would be elements that would feel alien to us today and possibly not appealing; it doesn't make people from the past bad people. We should remember that when we are long dead there will be people from the future peering into our World perplexed by our own views and attitudes.

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