The Hollow (1946)
(in America as Murder After Hours)
1946 Collins blurb:
The Hollow is the home of Sir Henry and Lady Angkatell. Here, for a week-end, come a Harley Street doctor, his devoted wife, a sculptress, a girl who works in a cheap dress shop, a disgruntled undergraduate, and the dilettante Edward Angkatell, owner of Ainswick, the lovely country house which secretly means so much to most of these people.
For one of the guests there is no return journey. Murder takes place at the Hollow. But there is an expert in murder close at hand. Hercule Poirot is trying the experiment of having a week-end country cottage. He comes to Sunday lunch, and finds a problem in crime that nearly succeeds in baffling him—until one simple sentence clears away the mist and shows him the truth.
This is a human story about human people, as Poirot himself is the first to admit.
My review:
Obviously Christie set out to write a novel; and succeeded. As a novel of character, it is a brilliant success, for the characters and their relations, including several affairs, are strongly drawn and motivated. Naturally, the murder of the philandering doctor with his two mistresses and subdued wife is a crime passionel. Unfortunately, as a detective story, the book is a failure: there are no subplots, the murderer is obvious from the beginning, and the plot is a reworking of Lord Edgware Dies. Poirot is very much in the background, acting only as a deus ex machina at the end; it was a mistake, Christie later felt, to have him in the book.