Curtain: Poirot's Last Case
Back at Styles, an old detective, a widowed friend and a murderer called X.
Curtain: Poirot's Last Case is a novel by Agatha Christie, first published in the UK in September 1975, the last novel she published before her death. It features Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings in their final appearances and returns them to Styles Court in Essex, the setting of her first novel. Christie wrote it during the Blitz and kept it in a bank vault to be published after her death.
Quick Facts
- Author
- Agatha Christie
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Crime novel
- Publisher
- Collins Crime Club
- Released
- September 1975
- Format
- Print (hardback & paperback)
- Pages
- 224 (first edition, hardcover)
Lore & Background
Poirot, now old and infirm, calls the recently widowed Hastings to Styles, which has become a guest house. He suspects that a person there, whom he calls only X, was involved in five earlier murders with seemingly indisputable culprits, and that another murder is about to take place. Colonel Luttrell injures his wife with his shotgun; Hastings, fearing that Major Allerton is after his daughter Judith, tries to poison him; Barbara Franklin dies of poisoning and the death is ruled a suicide; Stephen Norton is found shot dead in his locked room.
Reader's Guide
Poirot dies, apparently of a heart attack, and four months later a letter explains everything to Hastings. X was Norton, a man skilled in the power of suggestion who manipulated others into murderous acts for which he could never be prosecuted. Seeing no other way to stop him, Poirot drugged Norton, locked him in his room and shot him, then left his ampoules of nitrate out of reach. The novel was adapted for television in 2013.
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