Evil Under The Sun – Agatha Christie, 1941 ★★★

Score Another for Monsieur Poirot

Characters who employ multiple secret identities, dialogue scenes that turn out staged for a listener, red herrings, U-turns, left-field clues, secondary characters who portend nothing but offer strategic diversion at critical intervals: These are devices one not only expects but comes to appreciate reading Agatha Christie novels.

The idea behind Christie novels is you are given a puzzle to solve. She provides all the pieces. But if she pulls tricks like a three-card monte player to obscure or even misdirect you, that’s not her kitten. Her job is to befuddle, mislead, and amuse you in the jolliest way possible.

Evil Under The Sun does all three things, and more. An engaging social comedy disguised as a whodunit, the novel employs ample wit and seaside-resort ambiance to give Christie’s usual misdirection ploys a fresh coat of paint. If not the deepest or most engaging mystery, reliant as it is on both coincidence and caricature, it demonstrates her singularly pleasant mastery of an often-utilitarian form.

Poirot himself explains his (and Christie’s approach) to one guest under suspicion of murder at the Jolly Roger Hotel in southern England: “It is a little like your puzzle, Madame. One assembles the pieces. It is like a mosaic – many colours and patterns – and every strange-shaped little piece must be fitted into its own place.”

It’s hard to summarize Evil Under The Sun’s plot without spoilers: The main murder doesn’t occur until about sixty pages in, and its revelation is a highlight. Let’s just say that resorts are havens for the idle rich, as well as for women who love their money. Where there’s money, there’s also jealousy. And when it comes to foxy Arlena Marshall, then cherchez la femme, as Poirot would put it:

“Les femmes,” Poirot leaned back and closed his eyes. “I know something of them. They are capable of complicating life unbearably. And the English, they conduct their affairs indescribably.”

The object of Poirot’s concern here is not Arlena and her husband but another English couple, the Redferns. Patrick Redfern is clearly taken by the married Arlena, who flirts back while her husband pretends not to notice. Christine Redfern silently watches them frolic from the sun terrace, pain written across her pale face. Poirot tells everyone he is on vacation at the Jolly Roger, but it is clear to him, and to us, that he will be back on the clock very soon.

Evil Under The Sun occupies a curious place in the Christie canon. Some rank it near the top of her mysteries, others don’t rank it that high at all. In 1982 it was made into an all-star movie by the producers of a pair of prior Christie film adaptations featuring Poirot, Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile. Both those films were critical and commercial hits, while Evil Under The Sun plummeted like a bottle thrown into the sea, despite featuring Peter Ustinov as Poirot and Diana Rigg as Arlena.

In the 1982 movie version of Evil Under The Sun, transplanted from Devon to sunnier Mallorca off Spain, where Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov, at left) is eyeing a suspect played by Maggie Smith, while hunky Nicholas Clay as Patrick Redfern looks on. Image from https://mountainx.com/movies/reviews/evil-under-the-sun/.

Like the film, Evil Under The Sun the novel may suffer from ambiance overload. As mentioned, it takes a while before any crime is committed. Christie itemizes the quaint layout of the Jolly Roger and its cove-festooned environs, secluded Leathercombe Bay; the variously blinkered mindsets of its guests; and the spectacle of British sun-worship as practiced by its most zealous adherents, lying half-naked and oiled up one bronze morning in a manner duck-suited Poirot terms “deplorable:”

“To remove all the romance – all the mystery! Today everything is standardized.” He waved a hand toward the recumbent figures. “That reminds me very much of the Morgue in Paris…Bodies – arranged on slabs – like butcher’s meat!”

This is not only an amusing piece of dialogue, but a clue to store away for later. Christie salts away a lot of these in the first third of the novel, then buries many deep enough in the story so that their return has an element of revelation.

To keep us divertingly misdirected, Christie has the able support of her most prized character, Monsieur Poirot. Even when he is asking impertinent questions, eavesdropping on his fellow guests, or deliberately riling a chief suspect, he brings so much charm to the show you can’t help but wonder why everyone doesn’t like him as much as you.

However much a nudge the man may be, he reminds you it is all in a good cause: “When a person has been murdered, it is more important to be truthful than to be decent.”

The characters do feel like Christie’s usual suspects, albeit sprinkled with less than their usual seasoning. There’s a crusty retired major with meandering stories about service in the Raj, an overbearing American and her docile spouse, an athletic spinster, an unbalanced parson, and a “self-made” character who rails about how uptight everyone else is:

“The sailing’s alright and the scenery and the service and the food – but there’s no mateyness in the place, you know what I mean! What I say is, my money’s as good as another man’s. We’re all here to enjoy ourselves. Then why not get together and do it? All these cliques and people sitting by themselves and giving you frosty Good-mornings – and Good-evenings – and Yes, very pleasant weather. No joy de viver. Lot of stuck-up dummies!”

More interesting is the social commentary Christie employs, not only as above in terms of class distinctions (still very important in 1941, though becoming much less so as World War II heated up) but more pointedly, the role of women in male-dominated society. Being a woman, you’d expect Christie to have some ideas on the topic that jibe with modern feminism, and sometimes she does in a way, yet Christie was a complicated person who eschewed easy answers, both in life and in her detective fiction.

Author Agatha Christie, surrounded by some of her favorite instruments of murder. She wrote over 70 novels in her lifetime, nearly half of which feature Hercule Poirot. Image from https://www.fantasticfiction.com/c/agatha-christie/. 

SPOILER ALERT – Since both the victim and several suspects of the crime are female, this aspect of Evil Under The Sun carries more central weight to the story. The medical examiner’s report sets up this angle well: “Neasdon’s pretty confident that she was strangled by a man. Big hands – powerful grip. It’s just possible, of course, that an unusually athletic woman might have done it – but it’s damned unlikely.” As a spoiler, it’s less than the back jacket of my Pocket paperback reveals, so don’t worry, I’ve saved you several corking surprises. – SPOILER ALERT ENDS

Poirot, being a man, follows this train of thought to a point. But he’s very aware of the evil that lurks in the hearts of humankind, and how it makes one capable of superhuman feats. Many times he discusses this with other characters, offering up several gem-like quotes in the process:

“There is no such thing as a plain fact of murder. Murder springs, nine times out of ten, out of the character and circumstances of the murdered person. Because the victim was the kind of person he or she was, therefore was he or she murdered!”

“…a manner does not make a murderer.”

“To count – really and truly to count – a woman must have goodness or brains.”

I like Poirot’s choice of sentential connective in the last quote: It tell us all we need to put the facts at hand in the proper light, without calling the slightest attention to itself.

In my earlier review of And Then There Were None, a Christie novel published just two years before and set on the same Devon coastline in a place largely (though not as much so here) isolated from the mainland, I posited the notion that the earlier novel’s harrowing tone was influenced by the fast-approaching war. Here, in the shadow of the Blitz, during a period where Christie’s own mortal fears had gripped her to the point of writing a final Poirot novel, Curtain, in case she did not survive the struggle, we get an almost bucolic yarn of upper-class characters lounging about, bantering idly and almost idyllically. Did Christie use this opportunity to provide readers and herself with a needed break from the madness around them? The quiet manner in which Evil Under The Sun unfolds suggests so.

Evil Under The Sun is heavily-laden with coincidence, a common trope of mysteries, even some of Christie’s. You have multiple instances of people coming together at Jolly Roger Hotel, only one of whom is actually preordained by the requirements of the mystery as revealed in the resolution. Also, there is a subplot involving a hidden cache which suggests one of the characters is operating with criminal motives. Alas, Christie either didn’t resolve this matter, or did in such a roundabout manner that I didn’t notice, even when I went back and looked for it.

The most problematic aspect of the story is the way it requires the central crime to be carried out, in a way that manages to avoid all possible detection except that of Poirot’s. The way he pulls out the final clues to solving the mystery put me in mind of Truman Capote’s Lionel Twain in Neil Simon’s Christie send-up Murder By Death:

You’ve tricked and fooled your readers for years. You’ve tortured us all with surprise endings that made no sense. You’ve introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before. You’ve withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it.

Christie is guilty of all the above here, to some degree, yet it all matters less than you think it should. Not a farce, yet not a terribly serious murder story, either, Evil Under The Sun plays engagingly with its period conventions and keeps you wrapped in its puzzle to the very end. A nice job, that.