Stop the Christie Murder: Hercule Poirot's Christmas

*Spoilers* 

Hercule Poirot's Christmas was one of the first Christies I read and one of my favorites for many years. I still find the family dynamics fresh and interesting. Christie didn't do manor house mysteries as often as people think. When she did, she did them well. She populates the house in this particular book with three distinct couples plus a roguish son, two outliers, and several servants. And she keeps all of them functioning smoothly (as in believably) together. 

The murder is clever but not entirely believable. 

Hercule Poirot's Christmas (also, a Holiday for Murder) is one of those murders that relies on a kind of Rube Goldberg machine series of events--and like with other closely timed murderers, I don't entirely buy it. 

There's a Columbo episode, for instance, in which the murderer relies on a tape recording of his voice during a film, and every time I watch it, I start getting nervous on behalf of the murderer. Not that I want the murderer to succeed and not that I haven't seen the movie a dozen times but--

I keep expecting the tape recorder to eat the tape. It did often enough back in the days when I listened to tapes. I can't even count the number of tapes I had to disentangle from a machine and then rewind manually. 

I feel the same way about Hercule Poirot's Christmas. Maybe the string will break. Maybe the bladder pig toy will fizzle out or someone will declare, That sounds like a bladder pig toy! Maybe the furniture will remain stacked, greeting the family with an obvious set-up when they burst into the room. Maybe the window will get loose and fall on the string/wire...

 And so on. 

Take into account that when Adam and Jamie decided to do a Rube Goldberg machine as a holiday present for viewers they found it nearly impossible to get it to work flawlessly in one (or even twenty) seamless takes. And these are both skilled special effects guys. As Adam nonchalantly and honestly points out, when one is doing a commercial, one doesn't usually film the whole thing in one go. 

(There is a Rube Goldberg machine at the Boston airport--or used to be--I once spent several hours between flights, staring at it--but it clearly is operating entirely on electricity and items placed on tracks.) 

In any case, my prevention inspectors might miss the murder--I'm not sure that people leap to the conclusion that intricate plots are being hatched that involve strings and toys and stacked furniture--but the convoluted coverup would be a giveaway, especially to eyes trained to see it (Poirot doesn't arrive until after the fact).

In terms of prevention, the murder rests on identity: the many legitimate and illegitimate sons of the murder victim who are lurking about the house. If I give my prevention inspectors access to DNA tests (which Poirot, of course, did not have), they could swab every male in the vicinity. 

Even without DNA tests, however, if my prevention inspectors do thorough, in-depth research on the victim starting in his youth up to his current age (an approach Christie would approve since her detectives believe that the solution to a mystery is often discovered through understanding the victim), the identity of the murderous son would reveal itself.