Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: St Martin's Minotaur
Rating: worthy
The Unexpected Guest was first published as a play in 1958, and written into a novel by Charles Osborne in 1999. The story is set in Wales one foggy night. The protagonist is Michael Starkwedder (sounds rather like Starkadder, doesn’t it?!). He's an oil engineer who has returned to his roots after a spell in the Middle East, perhaps looking to buy a house there. His car gets stuck in a ditch conveniently outside this residence. Looking for assistance, he enters the house uninvited since no one answers when he knocks on the french windows (why there and not the front door is unexplained, except that in a play, it usefully confines the action to one setting, but as a novel it's klutzy). This is actually why I don’t go to see stage plays. In my experience of them, they have a sour tendency to be pretentious, and the action is typically completely unrealistic.
In the room Michael discovers an old man (whom he later learns is Richard Warwick) in a wheelchair. He apparently doesn’t notice that the man has been shot through the head(!) until the man's wife, Laura, shows up gun in hand and spontaneously confesses that she killed him. Instead of calling the police, Michael sits down and becomes all chatty with Laura about why she did it. Apparently it was because her husband was a cruel and spiteful man. He offers her a cigarette without asking if she smokes, and he observes that she's very attractive. So they sit there smoking and talking.
My first impression was that Starkwedder was a moron, but it turns out that he's a jerk - or so it appears. He seems to want to cash in on Warwick's personal tragedy and profit by it for no other reason than that she's pretty. It occurs to me that perhaps Laura Warwick isn't quite as helpless as she seems since she goes along with his suggestions as they talk. I can see her, in the end, turning the tables on Starkwedder and using him to her own advantage! For no good reason, Michael suggests covering up the murder to make it seem like something else. As he learns about Richard from Laura, he concocts a plan. Apparently Richard was a cruel and nasty person, and about two years previously, he had killed a child when driving drunk, and had got away with it!
Given that the 'breathalyzer' test made its first appearance as early as 1927 in England, and it’s not so difficult to tell if someone is drunk or has had merely one sherry (as Richard lied) even without the test, I can only put his avoidance of all charges as incompetence on the part of the police. The child's father was extremely angry, but Richard's nurse, who was with him in the car, backed up Richard's story and he was cleared. The family had to move from Norfolk (where this happened) to Wales to get away from the publicity. Now Michael's plan is to blame this murder on belated retribution from the child's father.
I have to say I appreciate the twist here, in that unlike your usual detective story, we know who the perp is right from the start! So the suspense here is whether the two of them can get away with murder or whether the police in Wales are more competent than the ones in Norfolk, and will discover what really happened. The police are represented by Sergeant Cadwallader, who is annoying in the extreme, and Inspector Thompson.
Michael's plan is to create a 'blackmail style' note, made up from letters cut from a newspaper and glued to a page reading simply: 'May 15th. Paid in full', the date being the day Richard killed the child. His first mistake (I believe, but we'll see!) is to give Laura the newspaper from which he cut the letters for the note, asking her to burn it in the furnace. We don't know if she did so. He wipes his fingerprints from the room, and instructs Laura to pretend she had a headache and got out of bed looking for aspirin. In this way she can be with a witness when a shot is fired (by Michael) from the gun. Several of the residents then go to the murder scene, and Michael comes through the door carrying the gun, claiming he was knocked down by someone who came running out of the room with the gun in hand, dropping it as they collided. From that point onwards, he uses his real story - that of being stuck in the ditch and coming to the house for help.
This novel started out being rather poorly for me, but once I discovered how it was going to go down, it improved somewhat. After reading Ian Rankin and being disappointed, and then reading John Dickson Carr and being disappointed, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in Agatha Christie, too, to begin with! It appeared to be a sad month for detective stories.
This one slowly grew on me as yet one layer after another was revealed. I did start to think that this would have made a better story had it been combined with Carr's The House at Satan's Elbow and the resultant mash-up has been titled "The Unexpected Ghast"! Despite these improvements, though, I still found myself looking forward to getting past this novel and moving on to a different genre, which is a bit sad. Three rather disappointing detective stories in a row! I'm having better luck with the TV shows! Prime Suspect (US version) continues to please, and I can recommend the first episode of Midsomer Murders so all is not lost! I plan on getting my hands on the novel that inspired that show, it was so good. As for Prime Suspect the shorter format tells a better story than the English original, but the other side of that coin is that it’s rather sad that the US is completely unwilling to experiment or to stray far from formulaic, given all the jingoistic talk of the US being an innovative and cutting edge nation! Not in entertainment we're not!
But I digress! Christie seems extraordinarily obsessed with people sitting on the ends of things - most often the sofa! I found that a bit weird. Throughout the novel I found myself changing the person I suspected as being the perp. Obviously at the beginning, it seemed pretty obvious that it was Laura, but that "fact" changed and so the story itself changed. Instead of being one where we knew who the perp was and were left thinking that the mystery was whether she would get away with it, it returned to being the standard detective story wherein we no longer sure of the perp, and have to figure it out. Methinks 'twas a bit overdone, though!
Just when I was starting to suspect that Jan (the adult with the mind of a boy who Laura takes care of, and who is Richard's young step-brother) might have shot Richard, and Laura was covering-up for him, a new character showed up: a local politician and evidently an ex-military man named Julian who is Laura's secret boyfriend. At that point it was impossible to to tell if Laura shot Richard to be free to indulge herself with Julian, or if Julian did likewise! Needless to say, Michael is a bit miffed at discovering that Laura has a boyfriend! Or maybe the Laura/Julian thing is a red herring and it was Jan who shot Richard after all? I'm not going to reveal it. All I will do is taunt you with the fact that it becomes much more complicated than that!
While Jan shows the inspector and the sergeant to Richard's gun room, which is only next door, Julian leaves, and Michael, now alone with Laura, challenges her to demonstrate how she shot Richard. She does a really unconvincing job leaving Michael to conclude that Laura never did shoot her husband. There are two problems here. The first is that they're speaking loudly, so unless the room is superbly well sound-proofed, the police ought to be able to hear everything they're saying. Michael is now convinced that that it was Julian who carried out the murder. He remarks to Laura, "You've never fired a revolver in your life...You don’t even know enough to release the safety catch." The problem is that revolvers don’t have a safety! It’s quite amazing that crime writer of Christie's stature did not know this.
Even though this started out looking like an open and shut case, Christie kept ripping out the rug from under me as Jan, Bennett, Angell, Julian, Warwick's mother et al were paraded before me. Every time I thought I knew who had done this, Christie turned it around and pointed me at someone else. In the end, I never did guess who had done it, so it came as rather a surprise! I went back and forth in thinking that this was warty, and then it was not, and on and on. In the end, I decided that it was good enough to be deemed worthy!
