Towards Zero (1944) by Agatha Christie

I was inspired to read this book when I saw the commercials for the BBC adaptation. Look at when that came out. Now look at when I released this review. Clearly, a lot happened between then and now, but everything led towards this…

Towards Zero is one of Christie’s Superintendent Battle novels, and a very well-known one at that. It was interesting to compare this to my previous review of an Ellery Queen novel. The Queen novel technically has a stronger hook. Two characters enter the strange world of The Hamlet, meet the eccentric great detective, and we immediately go into an eye-catching murder. Christie’s book opens with lawyers and their hangers-on discussing a case, and yet while the Queen book is a little slow, Christie essentially rams a hook down the reader’s throat from the jump.

One of the attendees at the meeting is Richard Treves. Treves reflects that most mystery novels “begin in the wrong place. They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that—years before sometimes—with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day…All converging towards a given spot…And then, when the time comes—over the top! Zero Hour.” A philosophy that Christie follows here, as the next portion of the book shows the reader snapshots of different events, from an attempts suicide to Superintendent Battle’s daughter being accused of theft.

But the main focus is a triangle. Nevile Strange is a professional tennis player who’s recently divorced his wife Audrey for another woman, Kay. Still, Nevile feels bad about the whole thing and his guilt has led to him hitting on a terrible great idea: He and Kay will visit his mother-in-law at her home in September while Audrey is there. He’s very insistent that this was his idea, but Kay is skeptical. Also skeptical is said very traditional mother-in-law, Lady Tressilian, who dislikes the concept of divorce and isn’t fond of Kay anyway. Also going to be there in September is Mary Aldin, Lady Tressilian’s caretaker who comes into money if the old lady dies. Also present is Thomas Royde, a distant cousin of Audrey who still carries a torch for her and Ted Latimer, a dancer who carries a torch for Kay. Not to mention Mr. Treves himself.

This is already a trainwreck in the making…but the reader knows that it’s going to get worse. For one of the snippets we get is of a person plotting, “a clear, carefully detailed project for murder.” And the date of this plan’s climax? “A date in September.”

Towards Zero is one of Christie’s best works. She throws a lot of characters at the reader, and it’s a testament to her skill that they quickly sharpen and stay in the reader’s mind. There’s ghost-like Audrey, drifting through the house, seemingly inscrutable. There’s Kay, who beneath all her garishness truly cares about Nevile and, having schemed to get him in the first place, thinks she recognizes what Audrey is doing. Nevile himself is key to the narrative. While most readers will be appalled at his decisions, they are understandable. This is a man who has never suffered a serious setback in his life, and the idea that he’s willingly built a time bomb to sit on never seems to occur to him. The other characters are well-drawn as well. Of note is Ted. Normally, Christie’s angry young men tend to get eye-rolling pity at best, but here Christie gives a sharp scene with Mary where she recognizes his frustration and anger with all the snobs he’s surrounded by and offers him genuine sympathy. It’s a good scene and speaks to the depth Christie gives her cast. The only part that rings false is a last-second romance. You can kinda justify it if you tilt your head and squint a bit, but it still comes out of nowhere. And I don't like the language used to describe marriage.

I’ve been deliberately leaving out details about the murder, because I want to leave as much as a surprise for the reader if possible. While reading this book, I thought about Peter Lovesey’s The False Inspector Dew, another book with the same formula of having the murder occur halfway through with the first half of the novel being build-up. While I thought that Lovesey’s ended up being a pretty simple mystery, Christie manages to construct a much more dense and complex mystery from her page count. The reader is struck by a series of odd details about the crime—Why did the killer drug the maid, for instance—and the plot takes a number of twists and turns, subverting the reader’s expectations and sending them off asking new questions. I think that Christie could have highlighted some bits of evidence more—and it should go without saying, but some of those opening scenes have important clues—but she gives you most of the important bits and gives you plenty of time to chew over what they mean. And to fail to understand them, of course. I had been spoiled on this book before reading it, so it amused me to see how smoothly Christie introduced a series of red herrings designed to confuse the reader who thought they were a step ahead of the Queen.

Obviously, I had a blast with this book. Excellent characters interacting in a solid mystery. Highly Recommended. 

Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, Only Detect, Mysteries Ahoy!, The Grandest Game in the World, Ah, Sweet Mystery!, Countdown John's Christie Journal, Clothes in Books, A Crime is Afoot, Tangled Yarns, The Invisible Event (podcast, contains spoilers), and The Green Capsule.