John Curran: Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

A most unlikely and almost unique thought for Poirot!

This is a reference to the first meeting of Vera Rossakoff and Poirot in ‘The Double Clue’, published in December 1923, when he unmasked her as a jewel thief. They subsequently met four years later in The Big Four.

This is a reference to The Big Four when Poirot arranges the return to the Countess of the small son she had thought long dead.

The passage about the Countess’s son is almost word-for-word the same as in the collected version of the story.

It seems odd that Poirot would look forward to drinking vodka.

Although he sounds like a character from the world of operetta, it is difficult not to think of Mussolini.

Despite the unavoidable allegory throughout the story, this is the only unequivocal reference to the Nazis.

The dog handler is called Mr Higgs, and described as ‘odorifer-ous’ in both versions of the story.

Such is the political flavour, the eponymous Hound is almost forgotten and he plays a much smaller role than his counterpart in the collected story.

In the course of this story we see a different Poirot, one who longs for the company of a woman, drinks vodka and now climbs over a wall, although this is a feat he has already performed in the course of the eleventh Labour, ‘The Apples of the Hesperides’. Indeed, the tracking down and eventual discovery of August Hertzlein is reminiscent of a similar procedure involving the Cellini chalice in that story.

The exact wording of the title appears, more than once, in Chapter 9 of Dumb Witness and also in Miss Arundell’s letter in Chapter 5.

This letter is very similar to that sent by Miss Amelia Barrowby, another elderly lady living in a small village who is subsequently poisoned, in ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’

If the letter was written on 12 April and received by Poirot in early August, this should read ‘nearly four months ago’.

This should read ‘April’.

Oddly, this very specific occupation, suspicious in the context of a poisoning mystery, is never mentioned again.

This picture (it changes to a jar with similar wording in Chapter 8 of the novel) can be seen in Greenway House and may have been part of Christie’s inspiration. She was a dog-lover and lifelong dog-owner.

This scientific explanation appears verbatim in Chapter 23 of Dumb Witness.

This somewhat questionable procedure, with Poirot taking the law into his own hands, is also adopted in the novel.