Book Review: THE MONOGRAM MURDERS

Title: The Monorgram Murders (New Hercule Poirot Mysteries #1)

Author: Sophie Hannah

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 384

My GoodReads Rating: 

Hercule Poirot, quietly supping at a coffee house in London, becomes aware of a woman, Jennie Hobbs, who seems to fear for her life. She claims that she will soon be murdered, and that justice will then be served. She begs Poirot not to investigate her death. Of course, Poirot is intrigued and determined to save her from danger.

That evening, three people, Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus, check into the prestigious Bloxham Hotel on the same day, and are killed the following day, within minutes of one another. Each is found with a monogrammed cufflink in his or her mouth. Now Poirot must find the killer before Jennie ends up being the fourth victim.

The story is written in the first person past tense PoV of Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard, who is a Poirot’s housemate. The book is set in 1920.

I wish the author had made use of Hastings as the narrator, rather than creating a brand new, yet ultimately ineffectual character like Edward. If she had permission to write Poirot into her book, surely she could have sought permission to write Hastings in too. He, at least, was a good foil, as against Catchpool. The latter may be well-intentioned but he is rather slow on the uptake. How he could ever have managed to resolve any cases on his own, without any help from Poirot, as he claims, is beyond me.

His very name is self-defeating. He’s the catch of the pool, the best of a mass but not much better. I couldn’t relate to him.

On seeing the three bodies laid out as if in a funeral parlour, Catchpool is so stricken that he rushes home to put the sight out of his mind, leaving the corpses unattended. As the investigating officer, he should have been suspended for not taking charge of the crime scene and for failing to call in a forensic doctor.

How do Catchpool’s superiors not question him about further developments? How do they not give him grief when he receives word that there has been a fourth murder?

The guy is totally in the wrong profession. He’s squeamish about dead bodies, owing to some psychological trauma, stemming from childhood memories, which is triggered on seeing the three bodies laid out. There’s also a big mystery in his life, which has to do with the fact that he is gay. That much is evident, but the author keeps tiptoeing around the issue, obviously wanting to make a big reveal in a later book.

Even Poirot feels off. First of all, the insistence on grammatical accuracy in the English language just wasn’t his strength. The book could have been a lot tighter. It is about 150 pages overweight, leading to repetition of the most basic arguments and deductions. Long after everyone has understood what’s going on, Poirot still persists in explaining the same things in four different ways.

 

It’s Catchpool’s first person narration, but he is still able to describe Poirot’s investigations which are concluded in his absence, complete with long-winding dialogue reproduced verbatim. And yet when Margaret Ernst tells him the story of the Ives, he tells us he’s forgotten his notebook back at the inn and hopes his memory will stand him well.

There are some red herrings raised, which are never properly addressed. For instance, a woman hugged by a hotel employee, Thomas Brignell, whose identity isn’t properly explained.

Also, the resolution is weak. The reason why Harriet agrees to come to the Bloxham Hotel is unbelievably lame.

 

A few interesting lines from the book:

Stories from real life have beginnings and ends… Approach them from any vantage point and you’ll see that they stretch endlessly back into the past and spread inexorably forward into the future.

A conversation was a strange thing that could take you almost anywhere. Often you were left stranded miles from where you had started, with no idea about how to get back.

In classic Agatha Christie, we are led to suspect nearly every Main Character, only to find that we’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Here, I felt too tired to even attempt to suspect anyone. The investigation is that tepid.

Dame Christie could have wrapped this show up better in less than 200 pages. If you’re a true fan, this will seem like a poor imitation, just fan fiction at best.