Reviews with content warning for Misogyny - The Big Four

After being reunited with Hastings, Poirot goes up against the toughest enemies he has faced till now. Every time it seems like he’s one step ahead of them, the Big Four proves him wrong. But Poirot doesn’t give up easily! I liked that this mystery wasn't easy to solve. Poirot really had to give his all and put his little grey cells to work.

The structure of the story was different compared to the other Poirot stories. Whilst the focus mainly lies on the Big Four, Poirot has many side investigations which all in turn seem to be connected to the Big Four.

I liked that there were references to Poirot’s previous cases. Poirot and Hastings have inside jokes about Inspector Giraud, the human foxhound, who appears in ‘Murder on the Links’, and Hastings’ soft spot for girls with auburn-coloured hair. This became evident when he proposed to Cynthia in ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’.

Also, there were many similarities with Sherlock Holmes! The Big Four reminded me of the criminal mastermind Moriarty.

During his struggle with Moriarty, Watson believed Holmes was dead and that is exactly how it went down with Hastings and Poirot in this story. Poirot additionally mentions that he has a brother who is as smart as Poirot and maybe even smarter if he wasn’t lazy. We eventually find out that Poirot made this up to confuse the Big Four, but still it is very similar to Holmes’ brother, Mycroft.

There were some parts that I didn’t like that much. First of all, it bothered me that an Asian character was referred to as ‘Chink’ and secondly, Hastings’ comment about women in science.

“It has always seemed to me extraordinary that a woman should go so far in the scientific world. I should have thought a purely masculine brain was needed for such work.”

But it didn’t bother me too much. The story is nearly 100 years old and it is not entirely fair to judge it by today’s standards.

Content Warnings

thequeeraunt's review against another edition

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mysterious relaxing slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

Here's the thing about revisiting books originally published almost 100 years ago - you're going to find racism. There's going to be cringe-worthy language, slurs used in common speech, and some really dated stereotypes. Because of the nature of this particular mystery's antagonist(s), there are some unpleasant characterizations of people from China. I mention all of this at the beginning of my review because if casual racism is a deal-breaker for you, then nothing else I say about the novel will make it palatable.

Moving past the racist characterizations of Chinese people in The Big Four, this is one of the weaker Poirot mysteries I've read so far. Without giving away anything that may spoil the ending, I found that it wrapped up a little too neatly for my tastes. Obviously, that's part of the suspension of disbelief one agrees to when one is reading mysteries, but there were some fairly outrageous stunts pulled in The Big Four that felt like they would have been more at home in a modern international spy thriller than an Agatha Christie novel. In the previous Poirot cases, while the detective's skills are truly amazing, they don't stretch the limits of what I consider humanly possible.

I would hesitate to recommend this book to any reader. Either you are interested in reading Agatha Christie in spite of the language and racism, or you aren't. The Big Four certainly isn't where I would consider starting the Poirot series. I get the feeling that you don't necessarily need to read Poirot from beginning to end as you do with some series, so you could probably just skip this one altogether and move on.

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strangeeigenfunction's review against another edition

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Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

1.0

Picked this one up mostly because it was the earliest Poirot that was immediately available at my library.

It is not badly written stylistically per se, and the audiobook was pleasantly performed, but the plot is both somewhat ridiculous and painfully saturated in interwar bigotry—orientalist and while not perhaps overtly antisemetic, redolent of the sort of conspiracy theories that are trotted out as motivation for antisemitism. (There's also the typical period subtle pseudoscientic judgment of people's looks that's probably in most of Christie's works but I've recently gotten better at picking up on.)

It seems to me that Christie was trying to create Poirot's Moriarty, but her creation strains credulity and even suspension of disbelief far beyond ACD's London/Britain criminal mastermind (who after all was created in a single short story as a sort of death ex machina when ACD tired of writing his beloved-by-the-public creation). My first major inkling of how dreadful this would be is when "Number One", some mysterious Chinese mastermind, gets blamed early on for ...Lenin and Trotsky. And we're never given much hint beyond that of the motivation of this international criminal syndicate, or even much of what they intend to do beyond contrived petty silencing murders seemingly directed at Poirot himself. They're something like Bond villains, but that is at odds with their Moriarty-nature and just doesn't work well in the context of a Poirot book. Further, Poirot-as-foil for them smacks of paranoid delusion. (I'm also not fond of how the book treats the woman scientist it posits, almost in the fashion of those Star Trek historical trio citations (eg Newton, Einstein, Cochrane), as the sucessor and superior to Marie Sklodowska Curie.)

I think even if Christie had contrived to use much of the plot without the bigotry (it might have helped to do without the orientalism, and even improved plausibility if Number One was say, a fellow Belgian with a grudge against Poirot. Moriarty works, inasmuch as he does, largely because his scope and motivation mirror/foil Holmes. That is far from true of the Big Four relative to Poirot.) it still wouldn't be a very good plot despite some fun points, but the egregious period bigotry makes this hard to recommend to anyone. I'd especially advise against it for younger readers who might absorb the bigotry (or even the conspiracy sort of paranoia) unless they are coached through reading it critically.

Incidentally, I had a little trouble at first sorting out whether some characters were fictional or just obscure, which complicated my sense of how true-to-life this is meant to be. A lot of mysteries, Christie or otherwise, feel realistic except for certain contrivances of detective fiction, but The Big Four is unrealistic in far more aspects than this without necessarily being obvious about it.

The good: some of little murder plots could have been fun in Holmes length short stories; ...I guess the aptitude granted the female scientist character is nice to see in a way, though maybe it's a backhanded compliment considering... (and there is sexism expressed about her)
The bad: practically everything else about the book is either bigoted, implausible, or both.

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dorsetreader's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

mx_eyebrows's review against another edition

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adventurous funny mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

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