After the Funeral

After the Funeral does not announce itself as one of Christie's best. It does not have the high-concept hook of Murder on the Orient Express or the gothic drama of Hercule Poirot's Christmas. It begins quietly, almost domestically, with a funeral and a family gathering and a woman saying something foolish at the wrong moment. And then Christie does what she does best: she builds, patiently and without any apparent hurry, a puzzle so well-constructed that by the time the answer arrives you cannot believe you were ever standing anywhere other than directly in front of it.
The Abernethie family is one of Christie's finest ensemble casts. There are six potential heirs, and Christie gives each of them a distinct voice, a distinct set of anxieties, and a distinct reason to have wanted Richard dead. None of them are particularly likeable. Most of them are quietly desperate in the way people with expensive habits and shrinking bank accounts tend to be. Christie has always been good at drawing the English upper-middle class with a combination of sympathy and cool, clear-eyed judgment, and here she is at her most precise. You spend a good portion of the book genuinely unsure whether you dislike these people or simply pity them, which is exactly where she wants you.
The opening gambit of the novel is one of the cleverest things Christie ever devised. Cora's remark at the funeral is so simple, so blunt, so immediately dismissed by everyone who hears it, that you move past it almost without thinking. And that is entirely the point. Christie is counting on you to treat Cora the way the family treats her, which is as a harmless eccentric whose blunt little observations don't quite connect to reality. She is doing something very subtle with the character of Cora throughout the book, and if you are paying the right kind of attention it is possible to see it. But the right kind of attention is the kind Christie has spent thirty years teaching you not to pay.
Poirot enters the story relatively late, which is unusual, and Christie makes it work beautifully. The first act of the book belongs almost entirely to the Abernethie family and their solicitor, and by the time Poirot appears you are already so deep in the tangle of relationships and secrets that his arrival feels less like a cavalry charge and more like a very calm person walking into a room full of noise and sitting down to think. He moves through the family quietly, asking questions that seem harmless, listening with an attention so complete it is almost physical. His eventual solution is one of those Christie moments where the rug is pulled and the floor turns out to have been somewhere completely different from where you thought you were standing.
There is also Miss Gilchrist, Cora's paid companion, who is one of the most brilliantly underwritten characters in Christie's entire catalog. She is so perfectly drawn in her ordinariness, her vague helpfulness, her seemingly total lack of significance, that I would be doing this review a disservice to say anything more about her. Just keep an eye on Miss Gilchrist.
The book is not without its slower passages. The middle section, in which Poirot conducts the bulk of his interviews, moves at a careful pace that may test readers who prefer a more urgent tempo. And the sheer number of Abernethie relatives requires some concentration in the early chapters to keep straight, particularly for readers who are coming to it without the aid of the family tree that some editions include. But neither of these things diminish what After the Funeral ultimately is, which is Christie writing at the height of her mature powers, utterly in control of her material, and pulling off a deception so precise it almost qualifies as an act of literary sleight of hand.