The Murder on the Links

Summary

The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie's second Hercule Poirot novel, narrated like the first by Captain Arthur Hastings. Returning from Paris on the Calais boat-train, Hastings meets a pert young actress with black curls who calls herself Cinderella. In London, Poirot receives an urgent letter from Paul Renauld, a millionaire who made his fortune in South America, begging him to come to the Villa Geneviève at Merlinville-sur-Mer on the French coast. Poirot and Hastings arrive to find Renauld already dead: he was stabbed in the back with a paper-knife made from aeroplane wire and his body was found face down in a freshly dug grave on the edge of a new golf course. His wife says that two masked men broke in at night, tied her up, and dragged her husband away demanding a secret. The examining magistrate M. Hautet and the commissary Bex welcome Poirot, but the young Sûreté detective Giraud, whom Hastings admires as a human foxhound crawling for cigarette ends, treats him with contempt, and Poirot wagers five hundred francs that he will find the murderer first. Clues multiply: a love letter signed Bella, the beautiful Madame Daubreuil next door who has been receiving large sums from Renauld, her daughter Marthe, with whom Renauld's son Jack is in love, a quarrel between father and son over Marthe, a changed will, and a second body found in a shed stabbed with the same kind of dagger. Poirot learns that Madame Daubreuil is Jeanne Beroldy, tried and acquitted twenty years earlier for her husband's murder in Paris, and that Renauld was her vanished lover and accomplice Georges Conneau. Giraud arrests Jack. A young woman then confesses to the crime, and Cinderella, who has helped Hastings and stolen the second dagger to protect her sister, turns out to be Dulcie Duveen, twin of Jack's former sweetheart Bella. Poirot shows that Renauld, recognized and blackmailed, had planned with his wife to fake his own death using the body of a tramp who had died in an epileptic fit, and that someone who overheard the plan used it to kill him in earnest. Setting a trap at the villa, Poirot catches the real murderer, Marthe Daubreuil, in an attempt on Mrs. Renauld's life; she dies in a struggle with Dulcie. Jack and Bella are reconciled, and Hastings proposes to Dulcie. The novel was published by The Bodley Head in London and Dodd, Mead in New York in 1923.

Top Lessons

• Method and the mind

  Giraud crawls over the ground collecting cigarette ends and matches; Poirot says that such clues, taken by themselves, never solve a problem, and that a detective must understand the psychology of the crime. The rivalry dramatizes a question about knowledge: facts matter, but they must be ordered and interpreted by thought.

• The past is never quite buried

  Paul Renauld built a new name and fortune in South America, but the Beroldy case of twenty years before comes back to destroy him. Poirot notes that criminals tend to repeat themselves. The novel shows how unrepented wrongs shape the future.

• Love that lays down its life

  Bella confesses to a crime she did not commit to save Jack, Dulcie steals the dagger to protect her sister and risks her life for Mrs. Renauld, and Mrs. Renauld's devotion to her husband and son is real despite her deception. Poirot tells Jack that his love for Bella has been tested in the fire.

• The appearance of guilt

  Jack, Bella and Mrs. Renauld all look guilty at different moments, and Hastings himself is drawn into hiding evidence. Christie shows how easy it is to judge by appearances and how patient reasoning protects the innocent.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine serves the puzzle. Dr. Durand fixes the time of death from the state of the body and prescribes a sedative for the prostrated Mrs. Renauld; the timing of death, and the discovery that the second body had died before it was stabbed, are decisive clues. The tramp is said to have died in an epileptic fit, a natural death that Renauld planned to exploit, which reflects the period's familiarity with sudden death in epilepsy. Mrs. Renauld's collapse at the sight of her husband's body is the genuine grief that tells Poirot she did not intend his death. Poirot's remark that he believes in heredity, and Jack's fear that he carries his father's guilt, touch on early twentieth-century ideas of inherited character, which Poirot answers by pointing to the mother's virtues.

• Chapter 3, At the Villa Geneviève

  Dr. Durand reports that death occurred seven to ten hours before his examination and that the stab could not have been self-inflicted; he has sedated Mrs. Renauld.

• Chapter 5, Mrs. Renauld's Story

  Mrs. Renauld, viewing her husband's body, falls in a dead faint; Poirot later treats the collapse as evidence of real grief.

• Chapters 14-15 and 19

  The examining doctor finds that the man in the shed was already dead when stabbed; Poirot's reconstruction attributes his death to an epileptic fit.

• Chapter 28, Journey's End

  Jack fears that as his father's son no one will marry him; Poirot says he believes in heredity but reminds him that he is also his mother's son.