Editors Reads Verdict
An extraordinary farewell — Christie wrote this as her insurance policy during the Blitz, and the decades between writing and publication lend it an elegiac weight that no planned finale could have manufactured.
What We Loved
- The decision to return Poirot and Hastings to Styles is profoundly right — the circle closes with complete emotional logic
- The solution involves one of the most genuinely original concepts Christie ever deployed in the series
- The elegiac tone is earned rather than manufactured — age, illness, and farewell are handled without sentimentality
- Hastings as narrator achieves a depth of feeling here that transcends his usual role as foil
Minor Drawbacks
- The other guests at Styles function primarily as vehicles for the central problem rather than as fully realized characters
- Some readers find the solution's central concept more clever than emotionally satisfying on first reading
Key Takeaways
- → The best endings return to the beginning — not for nostalgia but because the circle reveals what the journey has meant
- → Christie's willingness to let Poirot be fallible, aged, and ultimately tragic distinguishes this from most detective series finales
- → Writing for a posthumous drawer rather than an immediate audience can liberate a writer from the compromises of serial publication
- → The concept of the indirect murderer is one of the most genuinely disturbing ideas in the genre's history
| Author | Agatha Christie |
|---|---|
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
| Pages | 256 |
| Published | September 1, 1975 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Mystery, Crime Fiction, Classic |
Curtain Review
In 1940, with German bombs falling on London and no certainty that she or her life’s work would survive the war, Agatha Christie wrote what she intended to be Poirot’s final case and locked the manuscript away. She would not allow it to be published until after her death. She wanted to say goodbye to her detective on her own terms, in her own time, without external pressure.
Curtain was published in September 1975, six months before Christie died. It is everything a farewell should be and almost nothing a commercial finale would dare to attempt.
Arthur Hastings returns to Styles Court — the country house in Essex where, decades earlier, his friend Hercule Poirot solved his very first English murder case. Styles is now a guest house, somewhat faded. Poirot is there already, old and wheelchair-bound, his heart condition severe. He has asked Hastings to come. Among the guests, he has identified someone he calls X — a murderer of unusual cunning, a person who has never been convicted because they arrange for others to commit the crimes they engineer. Poirot intends to stop X.
The concept Christie deploys — the indirect murderer who operates through suggestion and psychological manipulation — is one of the most intellectually original ideas she ever brought to the series. It places the central problem at the intersection of law, morality, and evidence in a way that conventional detection cannot resolve, and forces Poirot to act outside every constraint he has honoured for his entire career.
What gives Curtain its particular weight is the return to Styles. Christie understood that the resonance of an ending depends on the resonance of a beginning. The circle closes, and it closes perfectly.
Our rating: 4.5/5 — A genuinely remarkable finale, written under wartime conditions and published posthumously, in which Christie gives Poirot a farewell of extraordinary emotional honesty and intellectual originality.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Curtain" about?
Poirot and Hastings return to Styles Court for the last time. Poirot is elderly and gravely ill, but he has identified a murderer who has never been convicted — and he intends to act. Written during World War II, published posthumously in 1975.
What are the key takeaways from "Curtain"?
The best endings return to the beginning — not for nostalgia but because the circle reveals what the journey has meant Christie's willingness to let Poirot be fallible, aged, and ultimately tragic distinguishes this from most detective series finales Writing for a posthumous drawer rather than an immediate audience can liberate a writer from the compromises of serial publication The concept of the indirect murderer is one of the most genuinely disturbing ideas in the genre's history
Is "Curtain" worth reading?
An extraordinary farewell — Christie wrote this as her insurance policy during the Blitz, and the decades between writing and publication lend it an elegiac weight that no planned finale could have manufactured.
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