Retro Book Review: The Murder on The Links

I’m just gonna lead with it — I think The Murder on the Links is one of the weakest Christie mysteries. The story hinges on way too many extreme coincidences, with identical twins, 3 identical copies of one-of-a-kind murder weapon, a convenient corpse that just happens to look like the guy who’s gotta fake his own death, two estranged criminals from a British cold case just happen to resettle in the same tiny France village, two people both wandering the same under-construction golf course in the middle of the night and see the body, etc., etc.  It’s just too many coincidences to feel like Poirot is cleverly working out what happened, it feelsmore like Poirot and Captain Hastings wandering through a farce. Ok, here’s the evidence, but what if there was a second copy of the unique souvenir used as murder weapon? No, what if there was a third identical copy? Ok, what if the mysterious woman was also the mysterious woman on the train, and she has an identical twin?  

So this is the second Poirot novel, following The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and the action starts when Poirot gets a letter from a man named Renauld, saying he’s in danger and requesting immediate assistance. Poirot and Captain Hastings go to meet him in France, but find that he was murdered between sending the letter and their arrival. There’s a bit of competition between Poirot and the local police, which is one of the most enjoyable parts of the story. 

Renauld’s wife explains that masked men broke into their home in the night, tied her up, said vaguely menacing things about her husband’s secret, and forced her husband to go with them. She is deeply upset, especially when she sees her husband’s body, and Poirot says here that no one could fake the grief, and since Poirot is never wrong in his generalizations about women and what all women do/don’t do, readers know that means she didn’t stab him for inheritance.   Poirot recalls as freakishly similar case from decades years ago. Georges Conneau and his lover, Madame Beroldy, killed her rich husband, using the same story of masked men at night, the wife tied up, the vague references to his secrets, etc., etc. Conneau and Beroldy were prosecuted but got off and disappeared…  

Also, a wandering homeless man who looks kinda like the dead Renauld, was also found stabbed with the same murder weapon. He died of natural causes before being stabbed, because seriously, what’s one more coincidence? And there are so many more I haven’t mentioned! 

You know I love Agatha Christie in general, but this one required just too much suspension of disbelief. It also had two spoilers for Christie fans, which weaken it further. First, part of the plot hinges on Poirot’s unerring understanding of women, which is usually him saying some (awkwardly dated) generalization about les femmes. Second, part of the plot hinges on a romance, and a budding romance in a Christie mystery usually gives that character immunity from being a suspect. There are a few exceptions (Endless Night, anyone?!?!?), but because this wasn’t my first Christie mystery, a meta-text kept me from taking either Madame Renauld or Cinderella seriously as a suspect. 

Renauld was really Conneau, who fled to France after his crime, and happened to settle next to Mrs. Beroldy, who also changed her name and fled to that same small village! To make things worse, his son has a crush on her daughter and won’t be dissuaded by his father. Somehow she is able to blackmail him, I don’t know why he didn’t just change his name again or reverse-blackmail her or even kill her instead, but he finds a corpse of guy who looks like him and decides to fake his death. This faked death is a pretty good plot, he changed his will so his wife will “inherit” his property, and sends away the staff who will recognize him,  and if there weren’t so many freaking coincidences, he could probably have pulled it off. But there are also a set of identical twins and triple copies of the murder weapon so how could a criminal mastermind cope with all that?

I didn’t dislike it while I was reading it, at least the first two-thirds are an interesting story. Especially the local French police and Poirot snarking at each other. But the book started to feel like the classic final scene with Poirot saying, oh, but you didn’t take into account THIS wild fact! Voila! was just scene after scene after scene of another wild coincidence turning up. By the end, Murder on the Links felt like a parody of a Poirot novel. Oh, but see this suspect had TWO secret girlfriends and gave them both the same one-of-kind custom-made murder weapon as a souvenir! Oh, but they found an unrelated body, of a man with no family or identity, that just happened to look like the murder victim! Just too many coincidences for me.