Mrs McGinty's Dead

Mrs. McGinty’s Dead

Author	Agatha Christie
Cover artist	Not known
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Crime novel
Publisher	Dodd, Mead and Company
Publication date	1952
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	243 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	NA
Preceded by	They Came to Baghdad
Followed by	They Do It with Mirrors

Mrs. McGinty's Dead is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1952 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on March 3 of the same year. The Detective Book Club issued an edition, also in 1952, with the title Blood Will Tell. The novel features the characters Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver. The story is a “village mystery”, a sub-genre of whodunit which Christie usually reserved for Miss Marple. The novel is notable for its wit and comic detail: something that had been little in evidence in the Poirot novels of the thirties and forties. Poirot's misery in the run-down Guest House, and Mrs. Oliver's observations on the life of a detective novelist, provide considerable entertainment in the early part of the novel.

The publication of Mrs. McGinty’s Dead may be considered as marking the start of Poirot’s final phase, in which Ariadne Oliver plays a large part. Although she had appeared in Cards on the Table in 1936, Mrs. Oliver’s most significant appearances in Christie’s work begin here. She appears in five out of the last nine Poirot novels to be written, and has her own novel as detective: The Pale Horse (1961). It is likely, given Christie’s frequent complaints about the character of Poirot, that she regarded Mrs. Oliver as a means of renewing her own enthusiasm for her most popular creation.

Plot introduction

Poirot, disillusioned by the “senseless cruel brutality” of modern crime, pays no attention to the sad case of Mrs. McGinty, an old woman apparently struck dead by her lodger for thirty pounds that she kept under a floorboard. When, however, he is asked by the investigating officer to take another look at the case in order to stop an innocent man going to the gallows, he realises that things may not be as simple as they first appear to be.

Explanation of the novel's title

The novel is named after a children’s game – a sort of follow-the-leader type of verse somewhat like the Hokey-Cokey - that is explained in the course of the novel.

Plot summary

Mrs. McGinty has been killed by a blow to the head with an unidentified weapon. James Bentley has been convicted of murder and awaits execution. Poirot, however, discovers that Mrs. McGinty bought a bottle of ink shortly before her death, and must have had a reason to write a letter. Examining her possessions, he finds her shoes wrapped in a Sunday newspaper that was published in the week before her death. It is missing an article inquiring about the whereabouts of four women connected with famous crimes of the distant past. Soon it is certain that Mrs. McGinty believed that she had seen one of the photographs in the house of one of the people in the village. Poirot and Inspector Spence narrow down the options to one of two cases.

Mrs McGinty has either seen a photo of Lily Gamboll, who committed murder with a meat cleaver as a child; or of Eva Kane, who had been the love interest who inspired a man to murder his wife and bury her in the cellar (a case clearly based heavily on Dr Crippen). Eva Kane is believed to have had a daughter, who took the name Evelyn Hope. So is one of the younger women in the village Lily Gamboll grown up, or Eva Kane's daughter? Or is one of the older women Eva Kane herself?

Poirot discovers the murder weapon, a sugar hammer, on open display at Long Meadows and accessible to all the suspects. In an attempt to flush out the murderer, Poirot claims to know more than he does, but when he is almost pushed under a train he uses a different tactic. He shows the four photographs at a party attended by most of the suspects, and Mrs. Upward reacts, so it seems, to the picture of Lily Gamboll. She refuses to say where she has seen the picture, though.

Ariadne Oliver arrives at the village to collaborate with Robin Upward on a stage version of a story featuring her famous Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson. She does not investigate the crime directly, instead serving as a means for Christie gently to parody Poirot himself, but when she and Robin return from an evening at the theatre, they discover that Mrs. Upward has been strangled to death. She has evidently taken coffee with her murderer, and the evidence of lipstick on a coffee-cup and perfume in the air points towards one of three suspects - Eve Carpenter, Deirdre Henderson or Shelagh Rendell – each of whom had been invited at different times to visit her. Only Deirdre Henderson will admit to visiting, but the house was dark when she arrived and she went away without discovering the body. Who, however, was the blonde seen entering the house by Edna, Mrs. Sweetiman’s assistant?

Poirot seems baffled. He focuses on why anyone would keep a photograph. Vanity seems unlikely (none of the photographs is of a pretty young woman) but either sentiment or hatred might serve as motives. Perhaps the killer is not the woman in the picture, but someone who wished to be avenged on the person in the picture … one of the children whose father had murdered their mother, incited by Eva Kane? When Poirot discovers the photograph itself in Long Meadows, he has the final piece of the puzzle.

In the denouement Poirot seems about to accuse, first, Eve Carpenter, and then Maureen Summerhayes. The photograph, with “My mother” written on the back, has been discovered in her house, but by chance Poirot has checked the same drawer of photographs minutes before. The photograph has been planted … by Robin Upward.

Robin is Eva Kane’s son, Evelyn; the child was a boy, not a girl. As an adopted son of Mrs. Upward, he knew that any scandal might upset his position in her household, and the murder of Mrs. McGinty was a logical step when she discovered the photograph. In fact, Mrs. McGinty thought that Mrs. Upward herself was Eva Kane, not having heard that Robin was adopted; she hinted as much to James Bentley. As it happened, her misapprehension made no difference.

When Mrs. Upward recognised the photograph of Eva Kane, she consciously misled Poirot into thinking that it was the other photograph to which she had reacted. She wished to have time to confront Robin, but anticipating this he invited three convenient female suspects to her house that evening. He then killed her, planted evidence suggesting that the murderer was a woman, and staged the discovery of her body when he returned with Mrs. Oliver. Only when he realised that the false evidence had implicated no one did he try the desperate device of planting the photograph, and it is at this moment that he has been caught.

At the end of the novel, other secrets are discovered. Eve Carpenter had a sordid past that she wished to conceal. Maude Williams, the blonde seen at Mrs. Upward’s house by Edna, is indeed the daughter of Eva Kane's employer, who (drawing the same inference that Mrs. Upward was Eva Kane) actually came to the house to kill her but discovered that she had already been murdered and fled. Most sinister is Dr. Rendell, who had been suspected of having killed his first wife. Both he and Mrs. Rendell feared that Poirot had come to the village investigating this rumour, creating the suspicion in Poirot’s mind that the shove on the station platform had been given to him by Dr. Rendell.

Finally, Poirot reveals his plan to pair off Deirdre Henderson with James Bentley. It is a characteristic piece of matchmaking from the detective, setting a familiar seal on a confusing story.

Characters in “Mrs. McGinty’s Dead”

• Hercule Poirot, the Belgian Detective
• Ariadne Oliver, the crime writer
• Superintendent Spence, the investigating detective
• James Bentley, Mrs. McGinty's lodger
• Mr. Scuttle, an estate agent
• Maude Williams, a secretary at Breather & Scuttle
• Maureen Summerhayes, landlady of the Long Meadows Guest House
• Major Johnnie Summerhayes, her husband
• Guy Carpenter, a candidate for Parliament
• Eve Carpenter, his wife
• Robin Upward, a young dramatist
• Mrs. Upward, Robin’s mother
• Dr. Rendell, a physician
• Shelagh Rendell, his wife
• Mr. Wetherby
• Mrs. Wetherby
• Deirdre Henderson, Mrs. Wetherby’s daughter
• Mrs. Sweetiman, keeper of the local post office
• Mrs. Burch, Mrs. McGinty’s niece
• Joe Burch, her husband
• Edna, Mrs. Sweetiman’s assistant

Literary significance and reception

Robert Barnard: "This village murder begins among the rural proletariat (cf. Death by Drowning in The Thirteen Problems and the excellent London working-class woman in The Hollow), but after a time it moves toward the better-spoken classes. Poirot suffers in a vividly awful country guesthouse in order to get in with the community and rescue a rather unsatisfactory young man from the gallows. Highly ingenious – at this point she is still able to vary the tricks she plays, not repeat them."

Allusions to other works

• When Superintendent Spence arrives to see Poirot, the detective reacts to him as though it has been many years since the case on which they worked. The case in question was, however, the one retold in Taken at the Flood, which is the previous novel in the series, and was explicitly set in 1946. At most, it can only have been six years since they last worked together.

• Poirot refers in the first chapter to a case in which the resemblance between his client and a soap manufacturer proved significant. This is the case of “The Nemean Lion”, first published in the Strand Magazine in November 1939 and later collected in The Labours of Hercules (1947).

• Mrs. Oliver who is a very amiable caricature of Dame Agatha herself, remarks about her gaffes in her books. In chapter 12, she mentions one of her novels (actually a thinly-veiled reference to Christie's own Death in the Clouds) in which she had made a blowpipe one foot long, instead of six.

• “Evelyn Hope” is the name of a poem by Robert Browning that is quoted in the course of the novel. In Taken at the Flood Christie had made a character take the alias of "Enoch Arden", which is a poem by Tennyson.

Film, TV or theatrical versions

The novel was adapted by MGM in 1964 as the film Murder Most Foul. However, in an unusual move, the character of Poirot was replaced with Christie's other most famous detective Miss Marple (portrayed by Margaret Rutherford).

David Suchet has confirmed that the novel will be adapted for the next season of Agatha Christie's Poirot.

Publication History

Dustjacket illustration of the UK First Edition (Book was first published in the US)

• 1952, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), 1952, Hardback, 243 pp
• 1952, Collins Crime Club (London), March 3 1952, Hardback, 192 pp