The Pleasures of Poirot: "Appointment with Death"
The mystery, set in the Middle East, explores the sinister side of the human psyche.
In this week’s installment of “The Pleasures of Poirot,” I want to talk about one of my favorite mystery novels, Appointment with Death. This is one of those Christie novels in which the action takes place outside of England, in the fabled city of Petra (located in contemporary Jordan). There, Poirot crosses paths with the Boynton family, led by the domineering tyrant Mrs. Boynton, who exercises such a powerful force of control over both her stepchildren and her daughter that it’s nothing less than a miracle that she isn’t killed right away. Eventually, however, her corpse is discovered, and Poirot sets out to solve the mystery. As it turns out, however, none of her family had the wherewithal to actually do the deed. No, that honor fell on the British MP who happened to be with the group, a Lady Westholme who, it turns out, was an inmate in the prison that Mrs. Boynton once oversaw. Threatened by the old woman’s threat to blackmail her, she poisoned her and then, hearing Poirot reveal the truth, she shoots herself, though the papers report that it was an accident.
This is one of those books whose plot and conclusion I remember clearly from my time reading it as a teenager. In part, this stems from the nature of the book’s true villain, Mrs. Boynton, who takes an inordinate amount of pleasure in tormenting everyone around her, including the unfortunate Lady Westholme. Her proclamation that she never forgets a face, an action, or a person is the statement that seals her doom, since Lady Westholme is determined to make sure that the old lady’s malevolence doesn’t destroy the life that she has taken such pains to build around herself. Even though, of course, no one should actually approve of murder, given the extent to which the novel highlights her toxic influence on those around her, it at least allows us to understand why everyone would have a motive for doing so.
As is so often the case with Christie’s novels, she has the ability to shine a light into the darker, more sinister parts of the human psyche, and it’s especially revealing that the action takes place in the Middle East. This allows her to explore the more “primitive” aspects of human nature, using this cradle of western civilization to show how the primal impulses are still very much alive in the modern age. The setting of Petra lends the entire book a rather sinister gloss, and the image of Lady Boynton seated at the mouth of one of the caves is especially evocative.
There is, to be sure, more than a little Orientalism in this book, which makes it a rather uncomfortable read from the point of view of 2021. The characters all reveal a casual sort of contempt for the Arabian people, which is essentially what one would expect from Americans and Europeans traveling in the Middle East during this period. There are also allusions to the increasing Jewish presence in the region, which again makes sense, considering that this is the 1930s.
Poirot is, as always, his usual meticulous and yet irritating self, with his sharp intellect and his “little grey cells.” The mystery is quite elegantly done, and there are, I think, enough clues planted in the narrative to lead us to the inevitable conclusion.
All of which brings us to the 1988 film adaptation, which features a truly stellar cast: Peter Ustinov returns for his last outing as Poirot, while the screen legend Lauren Bacall plays Lady Westholme. Though I consider Ustinov to be the second-best person to have portrayed Poirot (after Suchet), I have to admit that his performance in Appointment with Death feels a bit tired. He seems to have grown rather fatigued with the role, and while he’s always a pleasure to see, this outing lacks the peculiar dynamism that he had brought to his other outings.
Lady Westholme is a fascinating literary creation, and Bacall imbues her with her signature steely grace. In her capable hands, we’re given a woman that we can well believe is a powerful American willing to do everything she can to hold onto the life that she’s built for herself. In fact, she says as much to Poirot during a tense conversation (that didn’t happen in the book), and it’s hard not to find yourself sympathizing with her. Who wouldn’t resort to desperate measures when faced with the destruction of everything they’ve fought so hard to attain?
For her part, Pipe Laurie turns in a strong performance as Mrs. Boynton, though she’s a bit shriller in the film version. Notably, she also isn’t morbidly obese, a trait in the novel that seemed, in Christie’s mind at least, to signify her inner corruption and indulgence in cruelty. Sometimes, Laurie comes close to chewing the scenery, but her iron-jawed performance is impossible to look away from.
Much as it pains me to say it, I think that the ITV adaptation suffers a bit in comparison to the film version. To be sure, David Suchet turns in his usual impeccable performance as Poirot. However, there are some very substantial changes to the novel, some of which work and others which leech it of everything that made it so compelling.
To start with, there’s Lady Boynton. While the film allowed us to see just how expertly she wielded her psychological influence over her family, the ITV adaptation has her order the children’s nanny to actually physically abuse them, something that is both more disturbing and more pedestrian. However, she spends so little time on-screen that it’s hard to really get a good feeling for what makes her personality so powerful that so many, including the nanny herself, would go along with her commands. Furthermore, rather than a widow, Mrs. Boynton is instead married to an archaeologist desperately searching for the head of John the Baptist. While I’m incredibly fond of Tim Curry, his bluster as the character seems curiously misplaced, and his supposed love for the woman who terrorizes her children is, to put it mildly, unbelievable.
However, there are two things that I did appreciate about this adaptation. First, there are the changes to the character of Dr. Gerard (played in this version by the fantastic John Hannah). In the novel, he develops a rather inexplicable attachment to young Ginevra, and while we as readers are supposed to read this as benevolent, I personally found it distasteful and even a bit repugnant, especially considering their age difference. In this version, his attachment has a much more normative explanation: she is, in fact, his illegitimate daughter, the result of a liaison he had with Lady Westhome, who had been serving in the Boynton household as a nurse. It makes much more sense for him to want to comfort Ginny if she’s his daughter, rather than a young woman for whom he seems to have developed a sort of Humber Humbert-like attraction.
However, this also means that Lady Westholme’s character has changed substantially. No longer is she the fierce, domineering MP who sweeps all before her. Instead, she’s a globe-trotting author of great renown, one who has long schemed to get revenge on the woman who first took her daughter and then subjected her to all sorts of torment. It’s touching, in a way, but personally I prefer a Lady Westholme that doesn’t have to be a mother in order to have a sound motivation for wanting to murder someone. The conclusion is largely the same, though in this instance Westholme and Gerard commit suicide together in front of the others, this time through poison rather than a gun. It is, to my eyes, a rather anticlimactic moment. Their murder of Mrs. Boynton, moreover, is significantly more gruesome than its novel counterpart, involving an actual stabbing rather than a simple poison injection.
While the original novel focused on the dark, primordial energies surging beneath the surface, the adaptation translates this into a different though related focus. Rather than the focusing these powers in the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, here it’s more about the sinister aspect of Christiniaty, manifested in Lord Boynton’s macabre (and misguided) pursuit of the head of John the Baptist and in the efforts of the sinister Sister Agnieszka to lure Ginevra into white slavery. The latter ultimately ends up stranding in the desert, where she collapses, soon to be food for the vultures.
Obviously, neither the ITV adaptation nor the film version entirely get away from the Orientalism that permeates the original novel. The Middle East still emerges as a deadly playground for European and American tourists. It’s also striking that neither of them sets its story in the city of Petra (mostly for production reasons), which robs it of some of the beauty that the novel captures so well.
All told, though, I thoroughly enjoyed both the novel and filmed versions of this sinister and disturbing story. It’s everything that you could want from an Agatha Christie murder mystery, and a little bit more besides.