Puzzles in Agatha Christie, Part Five

Fair warning: this puzzle was impossible to consider with spoilers.

7. What are Lord Edgeware’s vices? (Lord Edgeware Dies, 1933, with reference to Mrs McGinty’s Dead, 1952)

Lord Edgeware is the unpleasant murder victim in Lord Edgeware Dies: we know he’s unpleasant, because we’re told so (and, perhaps, because his daughter is so highly strung and terrified). But we know very little about the actual man.

Yet we know there’s something about him that is outside the normal. He strikes Arthur Hastings as an animalistic, barely human creature who exercises superb self-control (33). Poirot says that “he is very near the borderline of madness” and that “I should imagine he practises many vices, and that beneath his frigid exterior he hides a deep-rooted instinct of cruelty” (34). His daughter speaks haltingly of his “queerness” (85). His nephew and heir’s “fatuous expression of good nature” falters when he is asked about his estrangement from his uncle (89). And his wife shivers when she talks about him, describes him as a “fanatic” and “a queer man—he’s not like other people” (15).

Yes, there’s definitely something odd about this man.

But his wife’s testimony is not reliable: she is, after all, the one who kills him.

And she kills him for gain: she hesitates not at all to admit that. She wishes to marry another man and, since that man is possessed of a violent and rather morbid Anglo-Catholic fervour, he is willing to marry a widow but not a divorcee.

But just because she has one motive, is that any reason to assume she doesn’t have another? What exactly are Lord Edgeware’s vices?

We don’t know for certain, but we do receive a hint from Arthur Hastings: as Lord Edgeware, with a “queer smile” notes, “But I enjoy the macabre. I always have. My taste is peculiar,” Hastings “had been looking at the shelves near. There were the Memoirs of Casanova, also a volume on the Comte de Sade, another on mediæval tortures” (33).

If these books represent Lord Edgeware’s tastes, then we can plausibly assume two things: his vices are sexual and they are sadistic.

Who is more likely to suffer from those vices than a wife? A wife who leaves him within months of the wedding and, despite her other motive for murder, shivers when she speaks of him?

A clever defense counsel could do something with this.

Perhaps I wouldn’t find this so intriguing if it didn’t remind me of an ultimately irrelevant piece of back story in a later novel, Mrs McGinty’s Dead. This novel turns on the recognition, by the late Mrs McGinty, of a photograph previously published in a newspaper exposé of four female murderers: Eva Kane, Lily Gamboll, Vera Blake, and Janice Courtland.

Eva Kane is clearly modelled on Ethel Le Neve from the Crippen Case. Lily Gamboll is a young girl who murdered her aunt and Vera Blake a woman who was more or less implicated (though not legally) in her husband’s crimes.

Little direct text from the fictional newspaper report is repeated in the novel. But what is describes Janice Courtland as the woman whose husband was a “fiend in human form” (66): the narrative voice, paraphrasing the article, speaks only of “peculiar practices referred to in such a guarded way as to arouse instant curiosity” (69).

The newspaper report is clearly sensational—based on the snippets we get—and, at the confession of the journalist who wrote it, occasionally inaccurate. But Janice Courtland still seems analogous to Jane Wilkinson in Lord Edgeware Dies: a woman married to a man who seems to be abusive in a viciously sadistic fashion.

Does this mean Lord Edgeware deserves a knife to the base of the skull? Of course not.

But perhaps there’s more to his murder than simply his wife’s desire to marry a violently Anglo-Catholic duke who looks like a dreamy monk.

(All quotes from Mrs McGinty’s Dead taken from the 1990 Fontana edition. All quotes from Lord Edgeware Dies taken from the 1979 Fontana edition.)