Scan barcode
A review by strangeeigenfunction
The Big Four by Agatha Christie
- 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.
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.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny, Murder, and Kidnapping
While I usually try to be as thorough as possible if I leave content warnings, here I haven't gone much past the most egregious aspects. Murder and kidnapping are relatively par for the genre though.