Cards on the Table (1936)
Blurb:
My review:
Agatha Christie's twentieth novel is a landmark, for this is, to quote Gillian Gill, "the detective novelist's detective novel". The plot is deceptively simple: there are only four people, all of whom are murderers, and one of whom is the murderer—and yet the reader will find it almost impossible to spot the murderer. The look at the background and psychology of a murderer is fascinating, recalling Christie's 1939 classic Ten Little Niggers, and, from other authors, Anthony Berkeley's Panic Party and John Dickson Carr's Death in Five Boxes. All the clues (including a pair of silk stockings and a superb clue in the form of bridge scores) are psychological / character-based—the suspects' reactions, how they play bridge, how they notice a room, how they may think, and, by extension, how they would commit a murder—and it is natural that the mystery be solved by the amateur psychologist Hercule Poirot, aided by his fellow guests at Mr. Shaitana's dinner-party, Superintendent Battle, Colonel Race, and that amusing and intelligent self-parody Mrs. Oliver.