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Peril End House

It’s a Fall of the House of Usher for the new generation!

Folks

• Hercule Poirot, our detective, not at all humble and ready to learn a lesson when he trusts a lovely lady too much

• Captain Hastings, Hercule’s dim friend who is too trusting and far too Victorian: he’s in the gentleman’s club that trusts gentlemen and disbelieves anything of pretty ladies

• Nick Buckley, the would-be actress, poor and obsessed over her decaying house, End House. Resourceful and completely wicked, she’s ultra-modern yet her hitch is that she can’t get the house off her mind: a nice allegory for modern Britain.

• Commander George Challenger, seriously? I mean, Challenger? Seriously? Well, kind of: he turns out to be a drug dealer with his psychiatrist uncle on Harley Street

• Ellen, the maid, straight out of Cold Comfort Farm, with a quite dim and useless “gardener” husband and a “ghoulish” death-loving son, who says the house is evil, evil she tells you.

• Jim Lazarus, the flashy art dealer with fast cars and loose chicks whose business is being killed by the latest love for contemporary continental art (read: post-Impressionist and whatnot) instead of the traditional crap he sells

• Charles Vyse, the quiet lawyer who hopes to reform Nick’s modern ways.

• the Crofts, the “too perfect” Australians who are indeed just acting a part, Dracula-like representing the horrific return of the peripherals to the center.

• Frederica Rice, the “weary Madonna” of the piece, so tired and weary and “insincere,” a former drug-taker victimized by her druggie husand.

• Maggie Buckley, a Bronte wannabe from a Yorkshire vicarage who gets killed because she unexpectedly gets the love of the national superstar, the daring pilot Michael Seton. Whaaa? Apparently, heroes don’t like modern girls.

Themes

• Provincialism/classism
  • Christie clearly wants to ridicule people who lack cosmopolitan vision, but she tends to do so in such a way that indicates her own classism and prejudice towards the lower classes
• Modernity
  • The old: may be laughed at by some people (Challenger winces at Poirot’s intricate walking stick; Japp at Poirot’s methods), but it’s respectable (it wins the day)
  • It’s mostly judged as negative
    • The modern kids are seen as corrupt in some way or another (sexually loose, drug-taking, egotistic alcoholics)
      • Joking
      • Irreverent
      • Weary
      • Unserious
      • Nervy
      • On Edge
      • Impertinent
      • Unbelieving
    • Poirot remarks that Nick, who we know is the example of the modern girl here, can generate love but not keep it, showing how she can’t retain attention of the National Hero: ie, “modern ladies, look how you can’t keep a man!”
    • Cheap modern versus solid Victorian: “Ultramodern of the cheap variety superimposed on solid Victorian” furniture at End House
  • Exception
    • Poirot ridicules Hastings for being shocked at his examining ladies’ underwear drawers, calling him “Victorian,” so Victorian is something they want to move from but can’t seem to find a way to do it
    • The House is decayed, the servants, Christie hints, are literally degenerate
  • Upshot: Modernity is in an awkward adolescence, where it doesn’t know exactly what to keep or throw away from Victorian era, and yet it hasn’t figured out new ideals
    • “She sunk her modernisms and made everyone welcome in an old-fashioned way.” (58)
      • Hosting a party still needs the old-fashioned
  • Warning: Hanging on to the past will warp you.
    • Her namesake is her wicked grandfather, Old Nick
    • Her obsession over keeping the family house—over keeping the past, even though all her family members have died, the family tree has quite withered, down to all but her—makes her murderous and insane
• Money
  • Poirot obsesses over the lack of a motive, assuming that if there’s no money involve, there can’t possibly be a motive
    • When it turns out that there is money at stack, he calls it “inevitable”
  • Credit: notes that modern businesses can fold at the mere call of a few thousand pounds because of the credit system
• Newspapers and wireless news reports are in charge of information here, as well as telephones and telegrams
• End House
  • Going to rack and ruin
  • She doesn’t have a Gothic lifestyle, which Poirot is amazed at
    • She’s modern, not Gothic! She has modern friends, you see
• Work/Holiday/Retirement
  • Like Death on the Nile, Poirot is merely on vacation at the start of the book
    • He’s in retirement and even declines a request from an eminent politician to take on a case
  • Retirement: he wants to be remembered from his position at his “zenith” (6), not later: it’s a reputation thing
    • Afraid of not doing his job well, wants fame
    • Like Sherlock Holmes, he is in a provincial cottage gardening (and Wilkie Collins’ detective who loves roses)
  • Comes out of retirement because the “attempted murder” happens on his watch: in front of him on terrace
• Order and method: positivism
  • Poirot relies on order and method, just like his predecessor Holmes, and just like Comte: one kind of knowledge for every situation
    • Inspector Japp says his methods are “old-fashioned” but admits that they work
  • If you don’t have order, you won’t find the truth
  • If the truth seems resistant, then you just need more order
    • Shows a persistent faith in objective rationality and the scientific method
    • Any problem to fact-finding is just incentive to do it more, not seen as a critique of objectivity
    • Psychology, which Poirot constantly claims knowledge of, is just another science for him, another way to use “the little gray cells,” as he calls his intellect
  • The seance is a fake: instead of using psychic power, Poirot fakes it, manipulates people, to find out the truth
    • The seance is an intellectual trick, not a serious inquiry into the unknown
    • Poirot’s successful use of it symbolizes the triumph over science and modern quantitative psychology over spiritualism and alternate methods of knowledge
    • Exception: he respects the old servant’s intuition or superstition: the old—but here again, that doesn’t solve the case, but is only docketed adn filed away for Poirot’s intellect’s use

Style

• Has lists of suspects jammed into the text, in the tradition of epistolary novels
• First person: Hastings
• Anti-impressionist
  • Illness is represented completely “straight,” no impressionism whatever
  • Poirot’s reconstruction of the crime, he informs us he will make not by expressing his thoughts at the time, but instead the finished pieced-together full story.

Seaside Resort

• Holiday
  • They’re on vacation in the seaside town of St. Loo on southern coast of England, based on the real Torquay
  • “A perfect holiday,” anticipates Hastings (2)
  • They stay at the Majestic Hotel, also modeled on a real hotel
• Advertised on the train as they travel down
• Hotel
  • “nastiest food and highest prices in all England,” says Nick (18)
• Significance of These Leisure Spaces
  • Sidenote: here’s a good definition of leisure adapted from Adorno’s “Free Time:” a piece of time rigidly demarcated from work time but which really is in cahoots with work
  • Set habits: “like sheep” (15) people all go to the same terrace overlooking the bay instead of going elsewhere, like Poirot on side garden
  • Rigid demarcation of private versus public by signs, walls, gates, etc
    • Yet it’s constantly penetrated!
    • People sometimes can and do just freely go back and forth
  • Noises can hide things: fireworks, conversations, partying, music, etc
  • Sightseeing so you can be distracted from grief or other negative emotion (134)
• The Other Leisure Space: the nursing home
  • It’s run by bureaucracy
  • Rigid, boring, plain old not fun
  • Seen as safe and secure, but of course it ends up not being
  • People see it as “nasty” and lame

Images

• Fast cars, sea-planes, and airplanes of the newest design! And cocktails!
• Lombroso and physiognomy
  • Judging people’s intelligence by shape of head
  • Saying that criminals have deformed brains
• Seance/spiritualism
• Constant self-conscious referentiality: but not trying to highlight its reflexivity, but to transcend the genre and pretend it’s more than fiction, more than a lurid detective novel
• Theatricality
• Bureaucracy (of the nursing home), impossible to penetrate, even by one’s loved ones

Theses/Notes

• The ending has a random marriage, one that the rest of the book does not lead to: being realist almost in spite of itself, almost an automatic reaction
• Everyone is a strange mixture of the old and the new: Adolescent Modernity
• Shows the persistent power of rationality, especially because it always triumphs against the uncanny
  • Resistance to intellect only makes the intellect more important and powerful