Hickory Dickory Dock is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on October 31, 1955[1] and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in November of the same year under the title of Hickory Dickory Death[2][3]. The UK edition retailed at ten shillings and sixpence (10/6)[1] and the US edition at $3.00[3].
It features her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The novel is notable for featuring Poirot’s efficient secretary, Miss Felicity Lemon, who had previously only appeared in the Poirot short stories.
Plot introduction
An outbreak of apparent kleptomania at a student hostel is not normally the sort of crime that arouses Hercule Poirot's interest. But when he sees the bizarre list of stolen and vandalized items - including a stethoscope, some lightbulbs, some old flannel trousers, a box of chocolates, a slashed rucksack, some boracic powder and a diamond ring later found in a bowl of a soup - he congratulates the warden, Mrs Hubbard, on a 'unique and beautiful problem'. It is nevertheless not long before the crime of theft is the least of Poirot’s concerns.
Explanation of the novel's title
The title is taken, as are other of Christie’s titles, from a nursery rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock. This is nevertheless one of her most tenuous links to the original nursery rhyme, consisting of little more than the name of a road.
Plot summary
Poirot’s solution of the petty thefts is unsubtle but effective: once he has threatened to call in the police, Celia Austin quickly confesses to the pettier amongst the incidents. She denies specifically: stealing Nigel Chapman’s green ink and using it to deface Elizabeth Johnston’s work; taking the stethoscope, the light bulbs and boracic powder; and cutting up and concealing a rucksack.
Celia appears to have committed the lesser thefts in order to attract the attention of Colin McNabb, a psychology student who at first regards her as an interesting case study, and then – almost immediately – becomes engaged to her. Celia makes restitution for the crimes and is seemingly reconciled with her victims, but when she is discovered the following morning dead from an overdose of morphine it does not take the investigators long to see through attempts to make her death seem like suicide.
Several of the original incidents have not been solved by Celia’s confession. Inspector Sharpe quickly solves the mystery of the stolen stethoscope during his interviews with the inhabitants of the hostel. Nigel Chapman admits to having stolen the stethoscope in order to pose as a doctor and steal the morphine tartrate from the hospital dispensary as part of a bet to acquire three deadly poisons. He claims that these poisons were then carefully disposed of, but cannot be sure that the morphine was not stolen from him while it was in his possession.
Poirot turns his attention to the reappearance of the diamond ring, and confronts Valerie Hobhouse, in whose soup the ring was found. It seems that the diamond had been replaced with a zircon and, given the fact that it was difficult for anyone but Valerie to have put the ring into the soup, Poirot accuses her of having stolen the diamond. She admits to having done so, saying that she needed the money to pay off gambling debts. She also admits to having planted in Celia’s mind the entire idea of the thefts.
Mrs. Nicoletis has been behaving very nervously, as if she were losing her nerve. One night someone gets her drunk and kills her.
Poirot focuses his attention now on the cutting up of the rucksack. By comparing an example of the rucksack type destroyed with others, he identifies an unusual corrugated base, and suggests to the police that the rucksack may have been part of a clever international smuggling operation. The rucksacks were sold to innocent students, and then exchanged as a means of transporting drugs and gems. Mrs. Nicoletis had been bankrolling the organisation, but was not the brain behind it. When the police visited Hickory Road on an unconnected issue, the murderer had cut up the rucksack to avoid its being found and removed light bulbs to avoid being recognised.
Patricia Lane comes to Nigel and admits that, in an effort to keep a dangerous poison safe, she has taken the morphine from the bottle in his drawer and substituted for it bicarbonate of soda. Now, however, the bottle of bicarbonate of soda has been taken from her own drawer. While they are searching for this bottle Patricia mentions that she is intending to write to his father in order to reconcile the two. Nigel tells her that the reason for his estrangement from is father is that he discovered that his father had poisoned his mother. This is why he changed his name and carries two passports.
Nigel comes to Inspector Sharpe and tells him about the missing morphine, but while he is there, Patricia telephones to say that she has discovered something further. By the time that Nigel and Sharpe get to the house, Patricia has been killed by a blow to the head. Mr. Akibombo comes to Sharpe and says that he had taken Patricia’s bicarbonate to ease a stomach complaint; when he took a teaspoonful of the bicarbonate, however, he had stomach pains and later discovered that the white powder was in fact the boracic powder. By the time Patricia had substituted the bicarbonate, the morphine had already been substituted by the stolen boracic powder.
Poirot, whose suspicions about Valerie Hobhouse’s role in the smuggling operation have been proved correct by a police raid on her beauty shop, now closes the case. The murderer has been the most obvious person, Nigel Chapman, who was known to have the morphine in his possession. He killed Celia because she knew about his dual identity and also knew that Valerie travelled abroad on a false passport. He killed Mrs. Nicoletis because she was sure to give the smuggling operation away under pressure, and killed Patricia because she was likely to draw to his father’s attention the recent events.
When Poirot outlines to Nigel’s father’s solicitor the case against Nigel, the solicitor is able to provide final proof. Nigel’s mother had been poisoned, not by his father, but by Nigel himself. When the father discovered this he forced him to write a confession and left it with his solicitor together with a letter explaining that it should be produced were there any evidence of further wrongdoing by his son.
Valerie confirms Poirot’s solution further. She has placed the call to the police station, apparently from Patricia, after Nigel had already killed her. The green ink was a double-bluff intended to divert suspicion away from him. Valerie is willing to incriminate Nigel fully because Mrs. Nicoletis was actually her mother.
Characters in "Hickory Dickory Dock"
- Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective
- Inspector Sharpe, the investigating officer
- Miss Felicity Lemon, Poirot’s secretary
- Mrs. Christina Nicoletis, the owner of the student hostel at Hickory Road
- Mrs Hubbard, Miss Lemon’s sister and the warden of Hickory Road
- George, Poirot’s valet
- Celia Austin, chemist in the dispensary at St. Catherine’s Hospital
- Colin McNabb, a psychology student
- Nigel Chapman, a History student, a resident at Hickory Road
- Valerie Hobhouse, a resident at Hickory Road and partner in a beauty shop
- Sally Finch, a student resident at Hickory Road
- Elizabeth Johnston, a student resident at Hickory Road
- Patricia Lane, a student resident at Hickory Road
- Genevieve, a student resident at Hickory Road
- Leonard Bateson, a student resident at Hickory Road
- Mr. Chandra Lal, a student resident at Hickory Road
- Mr. Akibombo, a student resident at Hickory Road
- Maria, the cook at Hickory Road
- Geronimo, Maria’s husband
Literary significance and reception
Philip John Stead's review in the Times Literary Supplement of December 23, 1955 began, "Poirot's return to the happy hunting grounds of detective fiction is something of an event. He is called upon to solve the mystery of a series of apparently trivial thefts at a student's hostel but soon finds himself partnering the police in investigating murder. Mrs. Christie rapidly establishes her favourite atmosphere by her skilful mixture of cheerfulness and suspense." After summarising the plot he concluded, "The amount of mischief going on in the hostel imposes some strain on the reader's patience as well as on Poirot's ingenuity; the author has been a little too liberal with the red herrings. Yet the thumb-nail sketches of the characters are as good as ever and in spite of the over-elaborate nature of the puzzle there is plenty of entertainment."[4]
"The Christie fan of longest standing, who thinks he knows every one of her tricks, will still be surprised by some of the twists here." - New York Times
Robert Barnard: "A significant falling-off in standards in this mid-'fifties story. A highly perfunctory going-through-the-paces: the rhyme has no meaning within the story; the plot (drugs smuggled in imported haversacks) is unlikely in the extreme; and the attempt to widen the range of character types (Africans, Indians, students of Freud etc.) is far from successful. Evelyn Waugh's diary records that it 'began well' but deteriorated 'a third of the way through into twaddle' – a judgment which, unusually for him, erred on the side of charity."[5]
References or Allusions
References to other works
When the students are attempting to place Hercule Poirot, during Chapter 4, one of them mentions the case retold in Mrs McGinty's Dead (1952). When Poirot comes to lecture to the students about his cases in the same chapter, he retells the story of The Nemean Lion, published in book form in The Labours of Hercules (1947). In chapter five Poirot also remembers Count Vera Rossakoff’s "exotic splendour...even in decay", something that he has only observed in The Capture of Cerberus, also from The Labours of Hercules.
References to actual history, geography and current science
In Chapter 11 Elizabeth Johnston refers to anti-Communist “witch hunts” in America. The term was first used in its metaphorical sense in 1938, but its specific connection with McCarthyism dates from the first performance of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, in 1953. This implies that the setting of the novel is at most two years before its publication.
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
A television adaptation, starring David Suchet as Poirot; Philip Jackson as Inspector Japp; Pauline Moran as Miss Lemon; Sarah Badel as Mrs Hubbard; Elinor Morriston as Valerie Hobhouse and Jonathan Firth as Nigel Chapman, was broadcast in 1995 in the series Agatha Christie's Poirot. In common with the rest of the series, the setting is moved back in time from the post-World War II period of Christie's original novel to the 1920s and 1930s. This adaptation can cause a number of inaccuracies - in the case of Hickory Dickory Dock, the most significant of these concerns a subplot featuring the Jarrow March and MP Sir Arthur Stanley, who is seen to be dying in hospital as the march reaches London. In real life, the Jarrow March took place in 1936 but Stanley did not die until 1947. This adaptation also differed from Christie's original in that Sharpe is replaced with the recurring character of Inspector Japp, and a number of the students from the novel are left out, most notably both ethnic minority characters, Akibombo and Lal. Other aspects omitted from the TV adaptation include the red herring of the green ink and the relationship between Valerie and Mrs. Nicoletis.
Publication history
- 1955, Collins Crime Club (London), October 31, 1955, Hardcover, 192 pp
- 1955, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), November 1955, Hardcover, 241 pp
- 1956, Pocket Books (New York), Paperback, 222 pp
- 1958, Fontana Books (Imprint of HarperCollins), Paperback, 192 pp
- 1967, Pan Books, Paperback, 189 pp
- 1987, Ulverscroft Large-print Edition, Hardcover, ISBN 0-70-891637-6
In the UK the novel was first serialised in the weekly magazine John Bull in six abridged instalments from May 28 (Volume 97, Number 2552) to July 2, 1955 (Volume 98, Number 2557) with illustrations by "Fancett"[6].
The novel was first serialised in the US in Collier's Weekly in three abridged instalments from October 14 (Volume 136, Number 8) to November 11, 1955 (Volume 136, Number 10) under the title Hickory Dickory Death with illustrations by Robert Fawcett.
References
- ^ a b Chris Peers, Ralph Spurrier and Jamie Sturgeon. Collins Crime Club – A checklist of First Editions. Dragonby Press (Second Edition) March 1999 (Page 15)
- ^ John Cooper and B.A. Pyke. Detective Fiction - the collector's guide: Second Edition (Pages 82 and 87) Scholar Press. 1994. ISBN 0-85967-991-8
- ^ a b American Tribute to Agatha Christie
- ^ The Times Literary Supplement December 23, 1955 (Page 773)
- ^ Barnard, Robert. A Talent to Deceive – an appreciation of Agatha Christie - Revised edition (Page 194-5). Fontana Books, 1990. ISBN 0006374743
- ^ Holdings at the British Library (Newspapers - Colindale). Shelfmark: NPL LON LD116.
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