The Murder on the Links

☆☆☆

 

 Reasons for the Poirot Score

Narrative technique excellent with good page-turning endings to many of the chapters. Hercule Poirot, and his approach to detection, have developed since The Mysterious Affair at Styles but are not yet mature. An engaging story and clever central plot. Some good clueing but relating only to part of the puzzle. The main puzzle, the one that is the focus of the dénouement, is poorly clued and somewhat arbitrary. But it is good to see Hastings finding romance even if ‘Cinderella’ seems rather too feisty for him.

 

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Trivia

A demi

Bella Duveen (‘Cinderella’) says to Hastings at their first meeting (chapter 1): ‘It’s not everyone who can distinguish between a demi and a duchess’ (p.7). A demi is presumably short for demi-mondaine: a woman ‘of doubtful reputation and social standing, upon the outskirts of “society”’. [Oxford English Dictionary].

 

The Bertillon system

In chapter 4 the local French policeman, Bex, says that there are no fingerprints on a knife found in a dead body. ‘The murderer must have worn gloves’ Bex says. Poirot replies: ‘Of course he did. Even in Santiago they know enough for that. The veriest amateur of an English Mees knows it – thanks to the publicity the Bertillon system has been given in the Press’.

                                                                                                                                     

Alphonse Bertillon

[http://onin.com/fp/fphistory.html]

Alphonse Bertillon, a French police officer, pioneered the use of standardised measurements of the head and body of criminals designed to enable criminals to be re-identified. He is mentioned in a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories. Bertillon did not suggest the use of fingerprints but Juan Vucetich, an Argentinian police officer, developed the first method of recording fingerprints for forensic purposes in the 1890s and related this to Bertillon’s anthropometric system.

 Juan Vucetich

 [http://www.webmedjugorje.com]

 

English Mees

‘The veriest amateur of an English Mees knows it.’ [chapter 4]

This is perhaps a corruption of ‘an English Miss’ (a young unmarried English woman). Rudyard Kipling has written: ‘[The English Mees] is a thing marvellous. With Feet and Teeth.  …and plays savage games till she is warm to execretion. From the English Mees is evolved the English Matron”. [Rudyard Kipling “Les Miserables” Civil and Military Gazette 28 August 1886]