Book review: “Cards on the Table” by Agatha Christie

The central murder in Agatha Christie’s 1936 Cards on the Table is an audacious act that takes place in a closed-door room where a table of bridge players are intent on their cards and play.

It results in the revelation of four earlier murders (and one that probably wasn’t).

It prompts a false admission of murder and then an eyewitness account of a murder that wasn’t what it seemed and then a suicide that wasn’t suicide.

It also leads to two attempted murders by two people acting independently, one of which is successful and one of which ends in the accidental death of the would-be killer.

And, to further complicate matters, all of these many and varied violent crimes are investigated by four detectives including Christie’s idiosyncratic Belgian Hercule Poirot who were in the next room when the murder took place.

That murder is solved by Poirot who, by studying the bridge scores of the four games played, gains insight into the personalities of the players and by a parlor trick hoodwinks the killer into a confession.

Oh, and two people fall in love.

It is amazing that Cards on the Table doesn’t collapse under the weight and complexity of its convoluted plot, er, plots.  Yet, it is a crackerjack mystery, considered by many to be one of Christie’s best.

 

“A most amusing thought”

Mr. Shaitana, overbearing, intrusive and a flamboyant bully, crosses paths with Poirot at a London exhibition of snuff boxes.

The whole of Mr. Shaitana’s person caught the eye — it was designed to do so. He deliberately attempted a Mephistophelean effect.  He was tall and thin; his face was long and melancholy; his eyebrows were heavily accented and jet black; he wore a mustache with stiff waxed ends and a tiny black imperial.  His clothes were works of art — of exquisite cut — but with a suggestion of the bizarre….He was a man of whom nearly everybody was a little afraid.

And with good reason.

Shaitana tells Poirot that he collects murderers — not killers who have been caught but those who have gotten away with their crimes.

“An idea!” cried Shaitana…“A little dinner! A dinner to meet my exhibits! Really that is a most amusing thought.”

 

The guests

Invited to Shaitana’s dinner party are the two men and two women who don’t realize that Shaitana thinks to be murderers — at least, until he lets drop a loaded comment:

• Dr. Geoffrey Roberts, a physician.
• Mrs. Lorrimer, a 63-year-old widow and expert bridge player.
• Major John Despard, an explorer and hunter.
• Anne Meredith, a pretty 25-year-old woman with little money and few skills.

Also present are four people with expertise in crime and its investigation:

• Poirot.
• Ariadne Oliver, a crime fiction writer.
• Superintendent Battle, a Scotland Yark detective.
• Colonel John Race, a Secret Service agent.

Battle and Race appeared in earlier Christie novels and would appear in future ones. Ariadne Oliver (a comic version of Christie herself) was making her debut in Cards on the Table but would have a prominent role in several other books to come.

 

A jeweled stiletto

After an excellent dinner, Shaitana leads his guests into a drawing room where a bridge table is set up and where Roberts, Lorrimer, Despard and Meredith are soon playing.

The crime experts are taken next door to a smoking room where Shaitana insists they too play bridge. They grudgingly agree while he returns to the drawing room to watch his “murderers.”

Some time later, Poirot and the others have finished their cardplaying and go looking for their host — who they find murdered with a jeweled stiletto in his chest, murdered by one of the four “murderers,” apparently while the other three were caught up in their bridge hands.

No one admits to seeing anything.  Or doing anything.

Degree of difficulty

Reading Cards on the Table nearly ninety years after it was published, I can’t help but think that the middle-aged Agatha Christie was starting to get bored with her ability to churn out bestselling mysteries.

In the previous fifteen years, she had published nearly two dozen novels but none like Cards on the Table, her twenty-second.

Here, she increased the degree of difficulty immensely by building into the story from the beginning four people who were believed to have gotten away with murder in the past and then by having four sleuths carry out the investigation.

Each earlier “murder” had to be looked into.  Everything had to be done to get a sense of what went on in the drawing room where the murder took place, even to the point of understanding the bridge scores. And each of the four had to be kept track of in the following days. And, as it turned out, two tried to kill again.

Over the next forty years, Christie would crank out more than fifty novels and would shake up her formula now and again, such as in Toward Zero in 1944 and Five Little Pigs in 1942.  But Cards on the Table was an early example.

 

“Doesn’t seem like work”

Christie’s creation of Ariadne Oliver was a way to write herself — well, a humorously peculiar version of herself — into this book and later ones.  Mrs. Oliver gave Christie a vehicle for commenting on her fame, her story writing and her fans, especially those who liked finding fault with her little lapses in fact.  And those who thought writing was a kind of magic.

In Cards on the Table, Mrs. Oliver is confused when a minor character tells her that “it must be marvelous to write.”  But why marvelous?

“Because it must. It must be wonderful just to sit down and write off a whole book.”

“It doesn’t happen exactly like that,” said Mrs. Oliver. “One actually has to think, you know. And thinking is always a bore. And you have to plan things. And then one gets stuck every now and then and you feel you’ll never get out of the mess — but you do!  Writing’s not particularly enjoyable. It’s hard work like everything else.”

“It doesn’t seem like work,” said Rhoda.

“Not to you,” said Mrs. Oliver, “because you don’t have to do it!”

I suspect that every author who has ever lived has wanted to say something like that to readers.  Christie found a way to do it.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

5.20.25