Review: DUMB WITNESS, Agatha Christie

• 
   this edition an e-book on Kindle (Amazon)
  
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0046RE5CW
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins; Masterpiece Ed edition (October 14, 2010)
• originally published 1937 AKA USA edition POIROT LOSES A CLIENT
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 337 pages
• My original reviews, 2011, 2017
  

Synopsis (Amazon) 

An elderly spinster has been poisoned in her country home…

Everyone blamed Emily’s accident on a rubber ball left on the stairs by her frisky terrier. But the more she thought about her fall, the more convinced she became that one of her relatives was trying to kill her.

On April 17th she wrote her suspicions in a letter to Hercule Poirot. Mysteriously he didn’t receive the letter until June 28th… by which time Emily was already dead…

My Take

I am re-reading this for my U3A Agatha Christie Reading class. I read it on my Kindle because it enables me to make notes as I go, so I can come up with discussion questions. I have found that these questions help to bring the plot back to the people in the class.

So here are some of the questions I want to discuss:

• This novel leaps straight into the fact that Emily Arundell has died. Did you know straight away who the narrator was? What did you base this on? Do you expect this narrator to be reliable?
  
• What do you learn straight away about the Arundell family, and about Emily's character in particular? What does it mean to say the family were"service people"?
• When is this novel set? Are there any clues?
  
• Emily Arundell has not been well for a number of years. What causes her ill health? Why would various members of the family like to see her death?
• What caused Emily to fall down the stairs?
• When Emily wrote to Poirot she "crossed and recrossed the page". What do you envisage that to look like? Why did people do that?
• We find out in Chapter 5 that Hastings is the narrator. How did he come up with the detail evident in the first 4 chapters (dialogue, thoughts etc)
• Why did so much time elapse between the writing of the letter to Poirot and its final delivery?
• Hastings can't see why Poirot wants to follow this up. What is Poirot's reasoning?
  
• Bob the dog is made a real character. How does Christie do this?
• Hastings challenges Poirot's decision to tell "white lies" in his search for information about what happened to Emily Arundell.
• Do you think Emily meant to destroy her new will? Why?
  
• What caused the "halo" around Miss Arundell's head at the seance?
• If Emily had not made a new will, how would her estate have been distributed? If she hadn't told the family about the new will, would she have been murdered?
• Who did you suspect of plotting the murder? Did you change your mind? How difficult was it to work out? Bear in mind the fact that Poirot said he had concluded that there could only be one person, but Hastings could not work it out.
• What did you think of Poirot's account of what had happened? Why did he give Bella a copy of his conclusions? What he fear would happen if he didn't do this? Was justice done?
  
• How does Agatha Christie demonstrate her own knowledge of poisons?
• What happens to the dog Bob? Does he feature at all in later books?
• If Bob could talk.... Would he have been able to say who murdered Emily?
  

My rating: 4.5

See my list of Agatha Christie novels