Title: One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Author(s): Agatha Christie
Publisher(s): Berkley
Pages: 256
Year: 1987
Format: EPUB
Language: English
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This is one of those Christie crime novels whosedonne? the reader would be wise to scrutinize very closely, for things are not necessarily what they seem. The plot is a particularly complicated one but is clearly and unconfusingly presented, except at moments when Mrs. Christie intends to confuse. References to politics and to international intrigue abound, but they are both more specific and somewhat more sophisticated than in such Agatha Christie thrillers of the twenties asThe Seven Dials Mystery and The Big Four . Left-wing agitators are more lightly satirized, conservative financiers no longer have to be treated as sacrosanct, both ‘the Reds’ and ‘our Blackshirted friends’ (Mosley’s Fascists) are seen as threats to democracy, and there is even a mention of the IRA. References are to the real world of 1939, teetering on the brink of war, and not to a cosily recalled, more stable past. It is odd, surely, that Poirot, who has elsewhere described himself asbon catholique , should have known his way around the Anglican forms of service sufficiently to take part, even if ‘in a hesitant baritone’, in the chanting of Psalm 140 when he accompanies a family to morning prayers in the parish church. ‘The proud hath laid a snare for me,’ he sang, ‘and spread a net with cards; yea, and set traps in my way,’ and suddenly he sees clearly the trap into which he had so nearly fallen. It is comforting to think that Poirot has derived some benefit from his visit, for this is the only church service he is known to have attended in the course of his abnormally long career.
Walking through Regent’s Park at one point in the story, Poirot notices young lovers sitting under ‘nearly every tree’. He compared the figures of the ‘little London girls’ unfavourably with that of the Countess Vera Rossokoff, a Russian aristocrat and thief whose path had crossed his many years earlier inThe Big Four , and who has lingered in his thoughts and dreams ever since. The Countess plays no part inOne, Two, Buckle My Shoe , but she will appear again, seven years later, inThe Labours of Hercules . Elsewhere during his investigation Poirot recalls another of his cases, one ‘that he had named the Case of the Augean Stables’. This, along with the other labours of Hercules, had not yet been collected into a volume, but will be found in 1947’sThe Labours of Hercules .