August is the month for reading an Agatha Christie book containing a beloved duo, if you are participating in the Read Christie 2026 challenge. If you’ve been following my posts on ‘Read Christie’ this year, then you’ll know that I have been doing precisely that.
Beloved duos in Christie novels as they appear repeatedly over the course of the Christie canon are, at least for me, really distinct: Poirot and his loyal sidekick, Captain Hastings, the often underrated and forgotten about Tommy and Tuppence Beresford (on whom I wrote my Masters dissertation), and Poirot and the force of nature who is the novelist Ariadne Oliver. There are other amateur detective pairings who appear as one-time partnerships throughout Christie’s novels, too, of course, but in choosing my beloved duo, I could not help but respond viscerally with my own very personal emotions with regard to my choice. I remembered the very first time I, personally, encountered Poirot and Hastings together, which was in The ABC Murders, the first Christie novel that I ever read at the age of ten (there’s a link at the bottom of this post if you want to read more about how that came about). Quickly, at the time, I realised how much I adored this duo and sought out their first ever adventure together, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. And so began a lifelong literary love affair for me with Poirot and his long-suffering narrator sidekick. I have been reading and re-reading their mysteries for over 40 years. So it it fitting that I have chosen Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case as the book I read for August, as it returns both Poirot and Hastings, both much older, to the original location of their first novelised murder case.
In Curtain, Poirot is already ensconced at Styles, no longer a family home where a murder took place but now bought up by an elderly couple as a place for paying guests. Poirot invites Hastings by letter as a matter of some urgency to come and stay there with him. Because there is a murderer once again at Styles, and Poirot needs Hastings to help him catch this terrifying person before this person kills again.
Bringing Poirot and Hastings full circle in this way brings with it a heavy weight of memory, a remembering (and misremembering) of the past, and the realisation that much has happened since this duo first teamed up in a detecting capacity. A huge sense of loss bears down upon the book throughout: that of time, of Hastings’ now deceased wife, and most particularly of Poirot’s physical capability, for he is seen to be now suffering with a severe heart problem. Styles was once Poirot’s place of refuge as a refugee, injured in World War One, and he returns here, once again physically vulnerable and reliant on others, now biding his time until death comes to claim him. I feel that this weighs heavily on, not just the characters of Poirot and in particular Hastings, but also on the reader if, like me, they have spent a lifetime (either in real time or in character time) with this pair. We know their banter of old, their foibles and nuances, their zest for life, and experience it having been ripped away from them both due to the longevity of time.
In many ways, this is an emotionally difficult novel to read, as well as for the characters to participate in. Maybe this also has something to do with the reasons why Christie wrote the book, and when she wrote it, too. It was written during World War Two, at a time when the author herself did not know if she would come out of the war alive. In writing it, she ensured there was a definitive end for Poirot’s detecting work, which ultimately was locked away and not released until the mid-1970s. It is also reported that Christie had had enough of writing about Poirot, and so this book clearly marks the end of her desire to write about the detective (although her readership had a very different view, and so the stories continued. In this, there are obvious parallels to this author-character relationship to that of Conan Doyle’s relationship with Sherlock Holmes; I find this particularly ironic as Christie very much followed intentionally in the footsteps of Holmes and Watson with the characters of Poirot and Hastings.
The emotional nature which permeates Curtain is utilised to its utmost in the premise for the crimes in which Poirot and Hastings are entwined in this book, expertly and meticulously created and executed in the plot by Christie. We learn from Poirot that, historically, there have been emotionally-led murders around the country for which only the person accused could possibly have been responsible, yet something was clearly amiss: either the perpetrator was acting completely out of character, or evidence stacked up against them and led other to believe that they were responsible, even if they were not convicted. And now, at Styles, where an atmosphere of death and evil seems to overhang the place from the crimes committed here before, there is a distinct possibility that some of the guests just might kill, as emotions get the better of them. Emotions can be volatile and manipulated, and this can lead to the very real danger of otherwise perfectly innocent and placid people murdering to appease the emotions that have been riled up in them.
But how have their emotions got to this state at this guest house? And, more to the point, who is manipulating these people in order to commit the most perfect of murders: one in which the murderer has literally no connection with the murder at all? Poirot believes this is the most intriguing case he has ever encountered, and also the most perfect of crimes. Human emotion of ‘victim who could become murderer’ is pitted against the cruel and psychological game play of the killer. And, mirroring that, is Poirot’s dogged intellectual pursuit of this evil inhuman form, and the more active and emotion-led investigation of Hastings, who can move around in a way that the aged and decrepit Poirot can now no longer do. In this way, the intellectual, the physical and the emotional act as separate and individual thematic elements, almost characters in their own right, within the book.
If you have anything like the heartfelt attachment to this detecting pair of Poirot and Hastings that I have acquired over the decades, then I urge you to read Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case at some point in your life of reading Christie books (and, if you can bear to do so, to watch the TV film of the same, starring David Suchet, but with a handkerchief ready). In some ways, this novel makes for heart wrenching reading, an experience threaded with sadness and the impending sense of loss beyond that already documented in the pages of the book. But it completes the circle of this beloved duo’s lives together, in setting, in detecting, and in their unwavering loyalty to, love for, and need of, each other. Equally, it allows for this to stretch even beyond the grave.
And, if you want to know what I mean by that, you’ll need to read the book…
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Death on the Nile (Read Christie Challenge, February 2026): Book Containing Beloved Characters
The Labours of Hercules (Read Christie Challenge, May 2026): Best Short Story Collection