The secret of the buckle shoes
The secret of the buckle shoes (original title One, Two, Buckle My Shoe ) is the 28th detective novel by Agatha Christie . It first appeared in November 1940 in the United Kingdom at the Collins Crime Club and in February 1941 in the US with Dodd, Mead and Company under the title The Patriotic Murders . For a paperback edition in 1953 in the USA, the title was changed again to An Overdose of Death . The German first edition was published in 1951 by Scherz Verlag in Bern.
Hercule Poirot is investigating together with Chief Inspector Japp.
Explanation of the title of the novel
The original title goes back to a counting rhyme very well known in Great Britain :
- One, two, buckle my shoe;
- Three, four, knock at the door;
- Five, six, pick up sticks;
- Seven, eight, Lay them straight:
- Nine, ten, A big fat hen;
- Eleven, twelve, Dig and delve;
- Thirteen, fourteen, maids a-courting;
- Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen;
- Seventeen, eighteen, maids a-waiting
- Nineteen, twenty, My plate's empty
Christie uses the individual rhymes for the headings of the individual chapters. Such nursery rhymes can be found also in other novels, so in Hickory Dickory Dock (dt. The kleptomaniac ), A Pocket Full of Rye (dt. A Pocket Full of Rye ) and probably the most famous in And Then There Were None (dt. And then there weren't any more ).
action
As Poirot leaves the practice of his dentist Henry Morley, he watches the arrival of Mabelle Sainsbury Seale. He carries a shiny buckle from her shoe that she has lost. He later learns that Morley was killed by a pistol shot. There were only three patients in the practice between Poirot's appointment and Morley's death: the banker Alistair Blunt, Mabelle, and a Greek blackmailer who called himself Amberiotis. The involvement of a person of national importance (blunt) results in Japp taking the case. Amberiotis is also found dead from an overdose of a narcotic drug . It is now believed that Morley shot himself after the accident with Amberiotis.
The movements in the dental office are inconclusive. Morley's partner seems to be a windy guy, but has no motive. The secretary was lured away with a false telegram . Your friend Frank Carter has a weak motive because Morley tried to tear him and Gladys apart. Also involved is Howard Raikes, a left-wing activist and opponent of Blunt, who is madly in love with his niece. But all of this is not enough for Poirot to develop a hypothesis alternative to suicide .
Then Mabelle disappears. The search for her leads to Mrs. Albert Chapman's apartment, where a body is found. She is identified as Mabelle by the buckle shoes. But the face of the corpse is so dressed that Poirot doubts. It turns out that the body is not Mabelle, but Mrs. Chapman. The hunt for Mabelle continues.
Poirot is now concerned with the life of the Blunt family. After a murder attempt on Alistair Blunt, in which Raike was a witness, Poirot is invited to Blunt's house. During his stay, a second attack is carried out, which is obviously foiled by Raikes. The weapon that was used for the two attacks is in the hands of none other than Frank Carter, who has taken a job as a gardener in the house under a false name. When it turns out that he was also seen in the office by Morley, he appears to be the killer.
At the height of the novel - one of the darkest scenes in the Poirot novels - Poirot realizes that the real killer can escape if Carter continues to lie, and he manages to extract the truth from Carter: Morley was already dead when Carter in the practice came.
Poirot visits Alistair Blunt and explains the murders. Mabelle Sainsbury Seale had known him and his first wife, Gerda, from whom he had never divorced, from India . However, he had inherited his fortune from his wife, who had since passed away. When Mabelle appeared, he feared that his bigamy would become known and that his inheritance would be lost. After meeting Blunt, she told the full story to Amberiotis, who linked the famous banker and immediately began blackmailing him.
Gerda, who appears under various aliases, including Mrs. Albert Chapman, invites Mabelle to join her, murders her and assumes her identity. But she has to buy new shoes because Mabelle's don't fit her. That is why the buckles of the shoes shone in front of the practice, because the fake Mabelle has newer shoes than the real one. So Mabelle's face wasn't disfigured because it wasn't her, but because it was her.
Alistair Blunt had kept his appointment, shot Morley and hid his body in a side room. He pretended to leave the office but returned. He then exchanged Mabelle and Mrs. Albert Chapman's files so that the body could be identified as Mrs. Chapman's. Then he put on Morley's smock and killed Amberiotis, who didn't recognize Blunt because he was new to Morley.
people
- Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective
- Chief Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard
- Henry Morley, a dentist
- Georgina Morley, his sister
- Gladys Nevill, Morley's secretary
- Martin Alistair Blunt, a high profile banker and politician
- Julia Olivera, the sister of Blunt's late wife
- Jane Olivera, Juliet's daughter
- Howard Raikes, Jane Olivera's lover, a left wing political activist
- Amberiotis, the patient who died of an overdose
- Mr. Barnes, a patient and former Home Office employee
- Mabelle Sainsbury Seale, a patient
- Frank Carter, Gladys' opaque friend
- Reilly, another dentist
- Georges, Poirot's servant
References to other works
- In Chapter 7, Poirot remembers Countess Vera Rossakoff, the jewel thief . Rossakoff is the woman in Poirot's life for whom he harbored the greatest feelings, who he perhaps even loved. She is familiar to the reader from chapter 6 of the novel The Big Four .
- Chapter 8 recalls The Augean Stables , a crime story that appeared in Strand Magazine in March 1940 and was added to the Laboratory of Hercules collection in 1974 .
Chief Inspector Japp has his last appearance in this novel. Overall, he has been part of the party since The Missing Link in the Chain in seven novels and several crime stories.
politics
In the novel, written at the beginning of the Second World War , Christie becomes clearly political. It is only so clear in her work in the novels about the secret service couple Tommy and Tuppence Beresford . The initially suspect Frank Carter is a member of the British fascists , Raike's communist and Blunt a representative of the conservative establishment . It is committed to conservatism as a stabilizing element in unstable times, but ultimately, expressed in the words of Poirot, puts justice and the individual's right to life above the state of affairs. Therefore, after a long struggle, Poirot decides to hand over his likable Blunt in favor of the unsympathetic Carter of justice. The communist Raikes, although the author does not approve of his views, is ultimately portrayed as politically confused, but humanely decent. So Poirot gives Raikes and his fiancé Jane, who sympathizes with his views, not to forget pity in the new freedom they demand within society ("Let there be freedom and let there be pity").
The Greek Amberiotis is portrayed as a seedy and unpleasant character. Christie already expresses himself similarly about Greeks in The Ball Playing Dog .
Film adaptations
The novel was filmed in 1992 for the television series Agatha Christie's Poirot with David Suchet as Poirot. The film adaptation adheres closely to the specifications of the novel, but leaves out some people, such as Raikes. Blunt's niece therefore doesn't play as much of a role as in the novel. The German dubbed version is entitled Heaven and Hell .
Important English and German language editions
- 1940 Collins Crime Club (London), November 1940
- 1941 Dodd Mead and Company (New York), February 1941
- 1951 German first edition by Scherz Verlag Bern
The novel was first published in nine sequels in the USA in Collier's Weekly magazine from August 3, 1940 (Volume 106, Number 5) to September 28, 1940 (Volume 106, Number 13) under the title The Patriotic Murders with illustrations by Mario Cooper .
Audio books
In June 2016 this novel was published by the audio book publisher as an audio book ( ISBN 3-8445-2089-9 ), read by Oliver Kalkofe .
Web links
- One, Two, Buckle My Shoe on the official Agatha Christie website
- One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1992) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chris Peers, Ralph Spurrier and Jamie Sturgeon. Collins Crime Club - A checklist of First Editions . Dragonby Press (Second Edition) March 1999 (Page 15)
- ↑ American Tribute to Agatha Christie
- ^ German first edition in the catalog of the German National Library
- ^ I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 333-4.