Reviewing “Dead Man’s Folly” by Agatha Christie

As I neared the end of Agatha Christie’s Poirot mystery, Dead Man’s Folly, I was reminded of another mystery writer, Rex Stout. Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels tend to be named in similar ways—for instance, including numbers (especially 3) such as Three Doors to Death, Curtains for Three, Triple Jeopardy, etc.  One of the other common titling “habits” was the title “Too Many ____”: Too Many Cooks, Too Many Women, and Too Many Clients.

It’s of this latter titling habit I thought of when reading Dead Man’s Folly, because there are too many suspects.

It’s pretty predictable in the setup. Hercule Poirot is pulled into the plot by Mrs. Ariadne Oliver. Mrs. Oliver is one of my favorite recurring characters in Poirot. As a mystery novelist I like to imagine her as a sort of avatar for Agatha Christie herself—certainly she uses Mrs. Oliver to complain about the issues with writing mysteries, from constructing the perfect crimes to where to lay out clues that won’t be too obvious and yet at the same time not too obscure. Although Christie always seems to me to be a bit introverted, however, Mrs. Oliver is flamboyant, often changing her hair and wearing outrageous outfits so that from one day to the next she looks almost like a different person.

In this story, Mrs. Oliver’s fame has not been enough to keep her in purple dresses and wacky wigs, apparently, because she’s taken the job of constructing a Murder Game for a country fair. The Game is supposed to be like a Treasure Hunt, except the object is to figure out the murderer (much like “Miss Scarlet in the Observatory with the Candlestick”). The only thing is, once she’s put together the elaborate crime, Mrs. Oliver has the sneaking suspicion her criminal genius is being manipulated for evil purposes. She calls on Poirot to come and figure out whether her intuition is right or not.

Dead Man’s Folly is a respectable installment for the Poirot stories, but it isn’t a stellar contribution. The “guest” cast of characters—anyone aside from Poirot and Mrs. Oliver—is pretty flat: either they’re unlikeable, or they’re so bland the reader forgets to form an opinion of them at all.

The obstacle to my figuring out “who did it” was not red herrings or plot twists; it was the sheer number of suspects. There were too many characters to keep track of, much less form any emotional attachment to.

In her original “briefing” of Poirot, Mrs. Oliver rattles off ten people living in the country house where all this is taking place. An additional seven people are introduced before the crime is committed. And then there are the “off screen” characters. One woman tells of how her husband and two sons are killed in the War…but we only have her word on that, and in a Christie novel nobody is above suspicion! Another woman in the neighboring village is one of ten children…might one of these siblings turn up as the mystery unfolds?

Christie usually has a lot of characters in her mysteries, but the ones in this case have very little development, so there’s little opportunity for the reader to become invested in any of their subplots or even get a good handle on who might have a motive for murder.

In the end, this mystery starts out as the usual puzzle, using smoke and mirrors to disguise the solution, but it ultimately turns into a matter of hiding a needle in a stack of other needles.