Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie

 

Mr Shaitana was a person of dubious character. He was attending a snuff box exhibition when he ran into Hercule Poirot, the detective. Shaitana was quick enough to invite him for dinner and lured him to meet some strange invitees.

There was something peculiar about the invitation. A collector of many strange things, Shaitana also nurtured a macabre habit of extracting dark hidden secrets from people. Some of the invitees to the dinner invitation also had one. They were murderers who had gotten away easily.

 Finally, the fateful day had come. After the dinner, the guests decided to play bridge and divided themselves into two groups.

When the first group consisted of Dr Roberts, Major Despard, Mrs Lorrimer and Miss Anne Meredith, the second group consisted of Hercule Poirot, Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, detective fiction writer Mrs Adriane Oliver and Colonel Race, a retired secret service operative.

Both of the groups sat in two different rooms while Shaitana, the host did not take part in the game but sat in the first room by the fire, observing the players.

When they approached their host to bid goodbye, after the bridge, to their utter shock, they found him murdered in his chair. He was stabbed in the neck with a stiletto.

In no time, Superintendent Battle took charge of the situation. It was then, the players in the second room realised that Shaitana had carefully picked his guests. While the guests in the second room were associated with investigation and authority, his choice of guests in the first room was a hint from Shaitana that they were possibly murderers who had gotten away after committing it. Shaitana had suggested the same thing to Hercule Poirot when they met at the snuff box exhibition.

Never in the wildest of his dreams, he might have thought that by inviting such people he was inviting his own death.

According to Christie, this was Hercule Poirot’s favourite case though Hastings, his companion, found it dull. For a change, she had come up with three other sleuths along with Poirot to nab the culprit from among the four possible murderers. It’s not mostly the clues which had helped the four detectives in their sleuthing but pure psychology.

Though I understood the basic plot, the reading became a bit strenuous when Poirot decided to analyse the suspects from their bridge scores. I don’t know how to play bridge. Besides, there were many twists and turns.