If you belong to the fiercely loyal coterie that extols the inscrutable genius that Hercule Poirot is, Peril at End House (1932) may not feature all the superlatives you would normally employ while raving about the sublime works of Ms. Christie. Set in the Cornish Coast, UK, the book kicks off with the vantage of exotic locales and immense potential for adding an eldritch touch to the ’’End House’’. But the plot conforms to the rather orthodox ’’whodunnit’’ genre where avarice and murder constitute the central motif.
The inimitable Poirot solves a case in which numerous murder attempts are made on the life of a young Miss. Buckley, an ostensibly impoverished lady whose sole possession is a dilapidated house, somewhat eerily named ’’End House’’. The plot thickens with additional characters thrown in and untoward, inexplicable ’’accidents’’ which flummox the great detective. But the scope of the overall scenario for intrigue and guessing-games (which the reader loves to do) is rather straitened because the characters were both quotidian and few in number. They do not linger in your memory long after the book is put down. One possible exception could be the central character Miss. Buckley, but a synoptic view makes one feel that some characters had story lines written for them solely under the duress to convolute the plot a little. This seems a little meaningless when these characters don’t affect the reader at a visceral level.The author probably in an attempt to rationalize the inital sense of uncanniness that we associate with the house, adds a séance scene towards the end, which is brought up too abruptly and written a trifle amateurishly for the reader to vicariously experience it.
Hercule Poirot comes across as a jaded old man and one cannot revel in his customary quirkiness (a little downplayed in this book). The detective is more often baffled than displaying the ingenuity of his ’’little grey cells’’, which leads to a little frustration on the part of the Poirot fan. This could however be a conscious effort on the part of the author to make Poirot come across more as human and less as the infallible repository of brilliance that we have come to recognize him as.
Hastings, the loyal side-kick of Poirot is as delightful as ever and truly mirrors the opinions and assumptions that Ms.Christie wants to beguile the readers into. One cannot miss the synonymy between the duo and the illustrious Holmes and Watson pair. The grand finalé that Poirot stages at the end of every book is an incessant source of pleasure to the reader who chuckles with delight at the rather contrived, but nevertheless magniloquent setting of the scene.
If you are a first time reader of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels, the ending might seem awfully clever to you, but a more au fait reader always senses that what is most indubitable is always the most likely. The newbies would be well-advised to start with the more brilliant works of the same author (featuring Poirot) like ’’Murder on the Orient Express’’, ’’Five Little Pigs’’, ’’Death in the Clouds’’etc.
But the bottom line is that there is a murder and there is Hercule Poirot thrown in the embroil. In that case it will always be worth a dog day afternoon’s read while sipping a tall glass of lemonade.
Voilà! I rest my case...