Agatha Christie's Touch Fades

Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie was 82 when she wrote Postern of Fate. It was three years before she died. It was the last novel she wrote, though not the last one published. So perhaps it is forgivable that the book rambles, has a clunky plot, and it is insufficiently resolved.

Postern of Fate revisits Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Christie's detecting couple that first appeared in The Secret Adversary. They are no longer the young couple that once they were. Christie, though, seems uncertain as to their exact age. She makes vague references to it, but their precise chronological age is a moving target. The book was written in 1973 and presumably that is when the story takes place as well, but it is never spelled out. Tommy and Tuppence were in their early 20s during The Secret Adversary, a book that opened at the end of World War I. One would suspect that they are in their 70s or 80s in this book, but that is only a suspicion. Likewise, the events that Tommy and Tuppence are investigating alternately take place when they were in their 20s, when they were three years old, or before they were born. Christie never quite decides.

The mystery novel contains many traditional Christie elements. There is an unusual death that at least one person suspects of being unnatural. The murder took place far in the past. There are lots of gossiping villagers in the quiet town-most of whom know nothing other than the name of the person who died. Tommy and Tuppence have all sorts of government connections but they are rarely as helpful as the older folks in the village. Christie also mixes in a few literary elements, drawing the title from a poem that is then woven into the story.

Postern of Fate begins with Tommy and Tuppence buying and remodeling a house in a quiet village. Tuppence finds a secret coded message from a young boy in one of the books that was left behind. The message says that Mary Jordan did not die naturally. The couple decides to find out who Mary was and what happened to her. They slowly discover that she was a resident of the house prior to World War I. They never learn the exact date of her murder-or if they do, it isn't revealed in the book.

While there is potential here for a good plot, the writing in the book is so painfully bad that the promise wilts almost immediately. By the time I closed the book after reading the last page, I still wasn't sure exactly what happened, who murdered Mary Jordan, or why anyone should care 80 (or thereabouts) years later. Christie tried to explain all of these things, but never quite succeeded.

And getting to the end was tedious. There were many times where there were long monologues revealing absolutely nothing. It seemed that everyone who spoke was guilty of saying the same thing three or four times-and not always in a different way. Tommy would be off doing his "research" and the only possible reason that his contacts couldn't give him the information he wanted was because it might bring the book to an early conclusion. Apparently the British government would rather send out security guards to watch over two elderly citizens than give them anything so simple as a date of death or a background story of someone long dead.

What clues were available were transparent and obvious from the beginning, but the detecting couple fail to see them or act upon them. Christie tried to use the failing memory of Tommy and Tuppence as a device for why they couldn't figure out the clues, but it made it rather dull for the reader. Also, the clues weren't really clues-they were bits of gossip where someone just happened to say just the right word, despite not knowing what it meant or whether it was relevant.

There were also parts of the book that read like an infomercial for one of their previous mysteries, N or M? Everyone they met kept talking about how wonderful they were during those events-events that took place thirty years before this book.

I was expecting to like this novel. First, Tommy and Tuppence have always been my favorites of Christie's detectives. Tommy is slow and sure, Tuppence is quick-thinking and impetuous. They're madly in love with each other and quite devoted. In this book, though, Christie can't seem to remember whether she is writing about the young couple, the middle-aged one, or the senior ones. They never behave consistently and people react to them as if they are wildly different people. Everyone worries about Tuppence, but she never does anything in the book that would give them cause to.

Second, I was enchanted by the fact that the mystery was first brought to light because Tuppence had a love of children's books and was eagerly revisiting the novels of her youth. It was an impulse I could relate to and I initially loved the way she described her discoveries-until about the third or fourth time she gave the same description.

In fact, Postern of Fate was filled with repetition and unrealistic conversations. At one point, Tommy turns to his wife and says something like, "Betty, our adopted daughter, is in East Africa." Why in the world would Tommy have to tell Tuppence who Betty was or where she was? Surely Tuppence knows who her daughter is, the fact that she was adopted, and that she has been living in East Africa for a few years. It was a clunky way to share unnecessary information with the reader, but it was a device frequently employed.

It's a pity that Dame Agatha kept writing rather than making a graceful retirement. This book has almost nothing about it that is redeemable and makes me hesitate to seek out the remaining books of hers that I've yet to read. Perhaps I should stick with the classics-those books that are energetic demonstrations of why Agatha Christie was crowned queen of the mystery genre.