Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table

I read Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table last week. Agatha Christie used to be my favourite author in primary school and each week I will borrow some of her detective stories to read. Being a young feminist then, I never read those stories that are solved by her male detective, Hercule Poirot. I would rather stick to the nice sweet Miss Maple's stories.

I was waiting for a friend in the library and somehow came to pick up this book by Agatha Christie. The story is interesting not because it has an amazing convoluted, strange, amazing plot. It is worth mentioning because of the way the murderer is being discovered.

In this story, Mr Shaitana invited eight guests to his house for dinner. Four of them are Poirot, Superintendent Battle, mystery writer Ariadne Oliver and Colonel Race of His Majesty Secret Service. The other four are four people who he believed had murdered before. For Mr Shaitana, it was immerse entertainment to this detectives intereacting with murderers. But as expected, Mr Shaitana was soon murdered during the dinner while all the guests were playing bridge.

There is no eye witness to the crime and the four people are equally suspicious as they are all present.

Therefore to solve the crime, Mr Poirot decided to work on the psychology of the murderer. And to learn their character, he relied heavily on the four rounds of bridge that were played. Hence this is a very different kind of murder solving. Not looking for alibi, not looking for eye witness, not looking for motive of the murder. But instead looking at the character and personality of the suspects to decide who is more likely to commit the crime, the way it happened.