By J.E.
I mentioned over on The Fire Pit that I’m planning on taking a short break from reading Agatha Christie. While I do enjoy her novels, I really need to get into something else for a change. Towards that end, I’ve got two completely different books lined up: the first is True Believer by Nicholas Sparks, and the second is All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve. However, I needed to wrap up Dumb Witness before moving on. Here’s my review of Christie’s 22nd novel.
Dumb Witness, also published under the title Poirot Loses a Client, features the famous Belgian detective and his good friend Capt. Arthur Hastings. I almost always enjoy the interactions between these two characters, so I had high hopes for this novel right from the beginning.
The story opens with Poirot receiving a rather unusual letter. It was written by a woman named Emily Arundell, and was dated about two months before. Ms. Arundell’s letter is mostly incoherent, but the gist of it was that she thinks someone attempted to murder her. From her insistence that Poirot be “discreet” in his investigation, it’s clear that she suspects a family member of the crime. Poirot decides to travel to Littlegreen House (Ms. Arundell’s estate) to interview her and find out more about the case.
However, when Poirot and Hastings arrive at Littlegreen House, they’re somewhat shocked to discover that Ms. Arundell is already dead. She passed of natural causes in her sleep approximately two weeks ago. The attending physician didn’t notice anything unusual, so he signed off on the death certificate without any hesitation. Nevertheless, Poirot decides to stick around and ask some questions — just to satisfy his curiosity about why the letter arrived so late.
During the course of questioning some of the servants at Littlegreen House, Poirot makes some interesting discoveries. First, Ms. Arundell apparently changed her will a short time before she died. She cut out all family members and instead left her entire fortune to her paid companion, a Ms. Minnie Lawson. This sudden change could have been cause for murder.
Second, Poirot learned about the incident that precipitated Ms. Arundell’s initial letter to him. Namely, she fell down the stairs after tripping on the dog’s ball. But after Poirot checks out the stairs in question, he discovers a nail that stuck out oddly. He reasons that the nail could have been used to anchor a tripwire, which would give credence to the initial attempted murder theory.
Third, Poirot learns that nearly every one of Ms. Arundell’s relatives had money troubles and were basically counting down the days until the old woman died so that they could get their hands on her fortune. While she was living, almost all of the relatives applied to her for loans, and she turned them down each time. This certainly pointed to sufficient motive for murder, so Poirot decides to continue digging deeper.
The rest of the novel then focuses on the subsequent investigation. We go through the usual rounds of questioning and clue-gathering until Poirot eventually arrives at the answer.
My Reaction: The main plot line of this book — a rich woman gets bumped off so relatives can get their hands on her money — has been done to death (no pun intended), so the story itself wasn’t that intriguing. Nevertheless, this novel was still enjoyable simply because of the interactions between Hastings and Poirot. Those two make such a fun team that I can’t believe this is the last look readers ever get of them until Curtain, which of course is the final Poirot novel of them all.
Anyway, despite the routine plot, Dumb Witness was still pretty good overall. I thought all of the suspects were equally worthy of consideration, whereas with most Christie novels you can rule out one or two people right off the bat. It took a while to see through the characters’ alibis, and then I went back and forth on a couple of people throughout the entire thing. I have to admit that Christie had me leaning the wrong way the entire time, and I didn’t figure out who did it until close to the end.
On the whole, I give Dumb Witness 6.5 stars out of 10. It’s not one of Christie’s best, but it’s still better than average and worth a quick read. Check it out!
It’s Sunday evening now, which means all box office receipts for the weekend have been tallied and it’s time to reveal the No. 1 movie in America for 5/20/07. As expected, Shrek the Third dethroned Spider-Man 3 to take over the top spot. The third installment of the highly successful animated series raked in $122 million — despite generally lukewarm reviews from critics. This total sets a new record for best debut of an animated film, beating its predecessor, Shrek 2, which took in $108 million in its first weekend back in 2004.