Analysis of Agatha Christie's "Curtain: Poirot`s Last Case" (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2.0, University of Vechta (IKG), course: English and American Detective Fiction of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, language: English, abstract: Agatha Christie's novel "Curtain: Poirot`s Last Case" was written in the early 1940s. It is her last Poirot novel. The author intended to publish the novel posthumously. Therefore, the manuscript was kept in a safe for over thirty years. "Curtain: Poirot's Last Case" was finally published in 1975 since Agatha Christie "changed her mind and allowed the publication before her death, which followed only about three months later". Christie lived from 1890-1976. She was born in Torquay, Devon, and died in Wallingford, Oxfordshire. Agatha Christie is regarded as the Queen of Crime all over the world. She has written 80 crime novels which include short story collections, 19 plays and six additional novels which were published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. "Her books have sold over a billion copies in English with another billion in 100 foreign countries. She is the most widely published author of all and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare."

Agatha Christie's novels are often related to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which is mostly dated between the two World Wars. One of the characteristics of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction is that the so far dominated short form of detective stories has been replaced by the long form of detective stories. Additionally, the majority of the novels, which were written during this period, are so-called "Whodunnits" where the reader does not know who the villain is, until the ending of the story. Curtain was written during the Second World War and does not only show characteristics of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction but also shows modern traits of crime fiction since the detective "fails to protect his society from criminal contagion or from the dangers of the criminal voice" as seen later in this assignment.