The restrained gestures, each strangely significant, the slightly swaying body, the impression, even, of strong physical beauty – how she did it, I cannot think!” Her voice, exquisitely toned, with a deep, husky note in it, was intoxicating. Inanities slipped off her tongue, charged with some powerful emotional appeal so that, in spite of yourself, you felt that each word was uttered with some potent and fundamental meaning. She closes her show with a dead-on recreation of Miss Wilkinson, and Hastings is awed by its accuracy: We learn about Jane’s allure in an interesting way at the start of the novel: Poirot and his friend, Captain Hastings, are taking in a performance by Carlotta Adams, a young American actress who specializes in impersonations. If one examines these characters – Sir Charles Cartwright in Three Act Tragedy, Marina Gregg in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, or Jane Wilkinson, the actress who is the center of the action in Lord Edgware Dies – one could conclude all sorts of interesting things about how Christie viewed actors, particularly their power over an audience. The closest she came was to have several of her novels feature an actor or actress in a main role. It has been observed by others that, for someone as enamored of the theatre as Agatha Christie was – someone who eventually made a name for herself as a dramatist – she never set a story in a theater. Ironically, I thought I would take a look at this 1933 novel in context with Hercule Poirot novels form other years, including the one I most recently read:1963’s The Clocks. This post is part of the celebration of all mysterious books and movies in 1933 going on here at Rich’s blog, Past Offenses.

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