M. Renauld
The man who planned his own death and found a real one beside the golf course.
Paul Renauld is the murder victim of Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Links (1923), the second novel featuring Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings. He asks Poirot for help, but when Poirot and Hastings reach Merlinville-sur-Mer in France he has been found stabbed in the back and left in a newly dug grave beside a golf course.
Lore & Background
His wife, Eloise, claims masked men broke into the villa at 2 am, tied her up and took her husband away. His secretary, Gabriel Stonor, suggests blackmail, as Renauld's past before his career in South America is a complete mystery. Poirot reveals that Renauld was really Georges Conneau, who years earlier had conspired with his lover, Madame Beroldy, to kill her husband - and that his neighbour Madame Daubreuil was Madame Beroldy, blackmailing him over his past.
Reader's Guide
When a tramp died on his grounds, Renauld planned to stage his own death: he would disfigure the tramp's face, bury him beside the golf course and flee by train. Marthe Daubreuil, the neighbour's daughter, discovered the plan, followed him and stabbed him after he had dug the grave. Renauld had changed his will two weeks before his murder, disinheriting his son Jack.
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