While nothing by Agatha Christie is truly forgotten, Cat Among the Pigeons (Collins, 1959) is one of her lesser known works. One of Hercule Poirot’s later adventures, the great man barely makes an entrance before the end. The mystery is not as well constructed as some of the earlier books and the clues are largely MIA but I find it memorable for its lively setting and characters and a great surprise ending. Unlike Christie’s usual scene of village, country house, or Middle Eastern tourist mecca, this story mostly takes place at Meadowbank, an exclusive girls’ school somewhere within a short train ride to London.
Things go awry only a few weeks into summer term when the new games mistress is found dead in the Sports Pavilion. No one had liked her much but murder seemed uncalled for. The police assumed she surprised a sneak thief. Then Miss Bulstrode leaves the school in the hands of a senior mistress, Eleanor Vansittart, for a weekend to see how well she copes. First one of the foreign royal students disappears, apparently kidnapped, and then Miss Vansittart is murdered in the Sports Pavilion as well.
As panicked parents rush to withdraw their children from the crime wave at Meadowbank, young Julia Upjohn realizes that there is something more than the obvious to all the goings on, including an attempt to break into her bedroom in the middle of the night. Julia’s mother and Maureen Summerhayes were friends, and Maureen had told Julia and her mother all about Hercule Poirot who stayed with her while he looked into a murder in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead. Julia assembles what she knows of the multi-layered puzzle and consults Poirot, who pulls in the local police and British Intelligence and delivers his usual magic to almost everyone’s satisfaction.
This book has always been one of my favorite Christies, mostly for the vivid depiction of the inner workings of a posh girls’ boarding school. Plus who doesn’t enjoy seeing a fourteen-year-old think more calmly and rationally than the adults around her?
Christie’s often-employed gimmick about identity is key to the story; she seems to always have at least one person who is not who they say they are. She touches on how difficult adjusting to a post-war world was for the men and women who had been in the thick of the action during the conflict. This was a recurring theme in her books published from the late 1940s on.
Recommended for fans of traditional mysteries and academic mysteries and Christie completists.