Elephants Can Remember, by Agatha Christie
Published in 1972, Elephants Can Remember was one of Agatha Christie’s last books. She died in 1976, and her sterling reputation as a murder mystery writer has survived ever since. I’ve read that her books have sold in the billions, including English and many foreign languages. I must confess this is the first Hercule Poirot novel I’ve ever read; I enjoyed it immensely, and I’m so glad it fell into my hands as a used book. If you look at the photo I’ve posted, you’ll see the price was only a little over a dollar back then!
The book’s title sounds silly as a nursery rhyme, but it refers to a group of people who remember details from the past rather well, which helps Christie’s characters—Hercule Poirot and Mrs. Ariadne Oliver—solve a crime that occurred more than twenty years prior. The novel starts out slowly, in comparison to mystery novels of today, with an innocent scene between Mrs. Oliver and her personal assistant regarding the wearing of a hat to a literary luncheon. Because this is a British novel, the personal assistant behaves very much like an old-fashioned lady’s maid, which may strike modern readers as off-putting and more than a little dull. But Christie’s writing style engaged me nevertheless, and I found myself wondering which hat Mrs. Oliver would wear, and how the luncheon would turn out. Sure enough, at the luncheon, a bossy woman approaches Mrs. Oliver to ask an unusual question about a long-ago crime regarding Mrs. Oliver’s goddaughter: “Did her mother kill her father or was it the father who killed the mother?”
The reader wrestles with this question along with Mrs. Oliver and Hercule Poirot as they attempt to discover the answer. It’s an entertaining experience. To give you a sample of the charm of Christie’s prose, consider this excerpt. Mrs. Oliver is speaking, and she says: “…the way people up to a point would resemble elephants. There are some people who do remember. In fact, one does remember queer things.” And she goes on to repeat a number of odd little memories, all disconnected and random, for an entire page. At the end of this rambling speech, Poirot says crisply, “I see your point.”
And so do I, Monsieur Poirot, so do I.