Lord Edgware Dies
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| Author | Agatha Christie |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Collins Crime Club |
| Released | 1933 |
Lord Edgware Dies (published in 1933), also known as Thirteen at Dinner, is a murder mystery by Agatha Christie. It features Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp.
In Great Britain Penguin Books published a paperback edition (#685) of Lord Edgware Dies in August 1948. It cost one shilling and sixpence.
[edit] Plot
Jane Wilkinson, an actress, is suspected of murdering her husband, the fourth Baron Edgware, so that she can marry another man. Jane asks Poirot to convince her husband to agree to a divorce. When he reluctantly does so, Edgware says he already agreed to a divorce and wrote a letter to Jane awhile back. Later, Jane denies ever having gotten such a letter. On the night of the murder, she supposedly goes to the Edgware house. The butler lets her in, and she goes into her husband's study. The next day, he is found murdered and Chief Inspector Japp tells Poirot about it. But in the newspaper, there was an article about a party and among the guests was Jane Wilkinson herself. At the party, there were thirteen guests at the dinner table. One guest mentioned that thirteen people at dinner means bad luck for the first guest to rise from the table (hence the original title of the book Thirteen At Dinner). Jane Wilkinson is the first to rise. So the police are baffled with the case, including Poirot.
Later, comedian/actress Carlotta Adams is found dead due to an overdose of Veronal. There was a mysterious gold case with the sleeping powder in it. The engravement said: "From Paris, November. Poirot tries to decode this and arranges the evidence together. At a dinner party, Jane appears there and the guests talk about Paris (as in Paris in Greek mythology of Troy). Jane thought the writer Donald Ross was referring to Paris as in the city of France. Ross couldn't understand this, because at the party on the night of the murder, Jane was talking about Paris (the Paris in Greek mythology) and seemed to know all about him. Ross goes to ring up Poirot about his discovery, but before he can say what he discovered, he is stabbed.
In the conclusion to the book, Jane Wilkinson turns out to be the murderer. She pays Carlotta Adams to pose as her at the party on the night of the murder. Carlotta was an expert on Greek Mythology, so she talked a lot about it with Donald Ross. With her made up alibi, Jane goes to the Edgware house and kills her husband. Later at her hotel room, she sits in the room with Carlotta to reward her the money. Jane slips Veronal in Carlotta's drink, effectively killing her. Jane discovers a letter Carlotta wrote to her sister and sees that she talks about posing to be Jane and how she was going to get paid. Jane couldn't let this happen. At the top left hand corner of the second page, there was a she (referring to Jane paying her to pose as her at the party) and she tears off the 's' and it appears as 'he'. Poirot wonders about this. Jane then puts the Veronal in the gold case engraved with Paris on it to make it look like Carlotta was a Veronal adict. She ordered the gold case the week previously, but Poirot went to the engravement shop and found out it was ordered that last week, and he found out that November was engraved on it to throw him off. So at the dinner party, Jane realizes she made a mistake about Paris and had to kill Donald Ross from telling Poirot about his discovery that the Jane at the party (on the night of the murder) was not Jane herself. She stabs him. In the end, Poirot realizes that he was actually tricked by the killer. Jane's motive for killing Lord Edgware was so that she could marry the Duke of Merton (he was Catholic and didn't want to marry a divorced woman). In the last chapter, she writes a letter to Poirot before her execution and tells him how she committed the crime.
[edit] Film versions
One movie, Lord Edgware Dies (1934) and two television movies (in 1985 and 2000) have been made from this book. Respectively, Austin Trevor, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet played Poirot.
