Mrs McGinty's Dead

Poirot, disillusioned by the "senseless cruel brutality" of modern crime, pays no attention to the sad case of Mrs McGinty, an old woman apparently struck dead by her lodger for thirty pounds that she kept under a floorboard. When, however, he is asked by the investigating officer to take another look at the case to stop an innocent man going to the gallows, he realises that things may not be as simple as they appear.

Superintendent Spence informs Hercule Poirot of the case of Mrs McGinty, an elderly charwoman, apparently killed by her lodger, James Bentley, for her savings of £30, which she kept under a floorboard. Bentley is convicted and to be executed for the crime, but Spence does not think he is guilty. Poirot agrees to go to the town of Broadhinny and investigate the murder further. Poirot finds that Mrs McGinty often worked as a cleaner at the houses of people in the village. No one wants to talk to Poirot, and most believe Bentley is the killer.

During a search among Mrs McGinty's possessions, Poirot finds a newspaper from which an article has been cut out. The newspaper is dated a few days before the murder. He later discovers that the missing article is about women connected with famous murder cases, and includes photographs of them. He also discovers that Mrs McGinty had purchased a bottle of ink in a local shop shortly before her murder. He concludes that she had recognised one of the women in the article, and had written to the paper in question. Someone must have found out about it and then killed her to prevent her from talking. Poirot and Spence, using the ages of people in the town, conclude that someone is either Lily Gamboll, who committed murder with a meat cleaver as a child, or Eva Kane, who had been the love interest who inspired a man to murder his wife and bury her in a cellar. Another possibility is that someone is Evelyn Hope, the daughter of Eva Kane. Shortly afterwards, Poirot discovers the murder weapon, a sugar hammer, left around in plain sight at his boarding house and accessible to all the suspects. In an attempt to flush out the murderer, Poirot claims to know more than he does and is nearly pushed under an oncoming train. Poirot decides to show most of the suspects the photos at a party. Mrs Upward claims to have seen the photo of Lily Gamboll, but does not say where.

The following day, Poirot is contacted by Maude Williams, who had approached him a few days earlier, telling him that she had known Bentley when they worked together briefly for the same estate agents. She told Poirot that she liked Bentley and did not believe he was guilty or even capable of murdering Mrs McGinty. She now offers to help Poirot who takes up her offer by getting her to pose as a maid in the house of Mrs Wetherby, a resident in the village for whom Mrs McGinty worked as housekeeper, and whose daughter, Deirdre, Poirot suspects may have some connection with the circumstances surrounding Mrs McGinty's murder. During the maid's night off, Mrs Upward's spoiled son Robin, a somewhat flamboyant theatre director, and Ariadne Oliver, a famed mystery novelist who has been working on a theatre adaptation with Robin, leave for an evening at the theatre, leaving Mrs Upward alone at the house. When they return, they find Mrs Upward strangled to death. She has evidently had coffee with her murderer, and the lipstick on a coffee cup and perfume in the air points to a woman having committed the crime. Mrs Upward had invited three people to her house that night: Eve Carpenter, Deirdre Henderson and Shelagh Rendell. Any of the three women could be someone from the photographs. Additionally, the postmistress's assistant, Edna, saw someone with blonde hair enter the house, which points to either Carpenter or Rendell, as Henderson is not blonde. Confusing matters even further is the fact that a book is discovered in the Upward house with Evelyn Hope's signature written on the flyleaf, suggesting Mrs Upward was actually Eva Kane. Poirot connects the final piece of the puzzle when he finds the photo Mrs McGinty saw at Maureen Summerhayes' house. It is of Eva Kane and has the inscription “my mother” on the back. Poirot gathers the suspects together and reveals the murderer – Robin Upward.

Robin is Eva Kane's son, Evelyn, which can be a man's name as well as a woman's. Mrs Upward had not known who was the mother of her adopted son, but he realised that any scandal would be to his detriment. Mrs McGinty saw the photo of Eva Kane while working at the Upward house and assumed the photo was of Mrs Upward as a young woman. Robin killed her to prevent her from telling anyone who might recognise the photo, and framed Bentley by stealing the £30, correctly assuming Bentley would incriminate himself by panicking. Mrs Upward thought Kane's photograph to be similar to a photo Robin had shown her of his mother, whose back story he made up. She wanted to confront Robin by herself, so she pointed to the wrong photo (that of Lily Gamboll) to put Poirot off the scent.

Robin, however, sensed the truth and killed her before leaving for the play. Then he planted the evidence and made the three calls to make it appear that a woman had committed the crime. At this point he still had the photo, but rather than destroy it, he kept it and planted it at Mrs Summerhayes' house to incriminate her. But Poirot had gone through the drawer earlier and did not see the photo, so he knew it had been planted subsequently. Further revelations are also made. Eve Carpenter wanted to conceal her past for reasons of her own, which was why she didn't co-operate in the investigation. Poirot discovers that Dr Rendell may have killed his first wife, which led Mrs Rendell to talk about anonymous letters she'd received warning her of the fact. Poirot now suspects it was Dr Rendell, convinced that Poirot was in Broadhinny to investigate the death of his first wife, and not that of Mrs McGinty, who tried to push him under the oncoming train, not Robin. Maude Williams turns out to be the daughter of Eva Kane's lover, and has always believed that her mother was murdered by Eva and that her father took the blame. She came to see Mrs Upward, who she thought was Eva Kane, intending to confront her, but found her dead and left quietly. She admits this to Poirot, who agrees to keep it a secret and wishes her good luck in her life.

• Hercule Poirot
• Ariadne Oliver
• Superintendent Albert "Bert" Spence
• James Gordon Bentley
• Mr Scuttle
• Maude Williams
• Maureen Summerhayes
• Major Johnnie Summerhayes
• Guy Carpenter
• Eve Carpenter
• Robin Upward
• Laura Upward
• Dr Rendell
• Sheelagh Rendell
• Mr Roger Wetherby
• Mrs Edith Wetherby
• Deirdre Henderson
• Mrs Sweetiman
• Bessie Burch
• Joe Burch
• Lily Gamboll
• Mrs McGinty
• Pamela Horsefall
• Michael West
• Mrs Elliott

The novel is named after a children's game – a sort of follow-the-leader type of verse somewhat like the Hokey-Cokey — that is explained in the course of the novel.

No review of this book appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

Maurice Richardson of The Observer of 23 March 1952 thought that Poirot was "slightly subdued" and summed up "Not one of A.C's best-constructed jobs, yet far more readable than most other people's."[3]

Robert Barnard: "This village murder begins among the rural proletariat (cf. Death by Drowning in The Thirteen Problems and the excellent London working-class woman in The Hollow), but after a time it moves toward the better-spoken classes. Poirot suffers in a vividly awful country guesthouse in order to get in with the community and rescue a rather unsatisfactory young man from the gallows. Highly ingenious – at this point she is still able to vary the tricks she plays, not repeat them."[4]

• When Superintendent Spence arrives to see Poirot, the detective reacts to him as though it has been many years since the case on which they worked. The case in question was, however, the one retold in Taken at the Flood, which is the previous novel in the series, and was explicitly set in 1946. At most, it can only have been six years since they last worked together. Of course, chronologies are difficult to construct, especially with Poirot's career.
• Poirot refers in the first chapter to a case in which the resemblance between his client and a soap manufacturer proved significant. This is the case of "The Nemean Lion", first published in the Strand Magazine in November 1939 and later collected in The Labours of Hercules (1947).
• Mrs Oliver, who is a very amiable caricature of Dame Agatha herself, remarks about her gaffes in her books. In chapter 12, she mentions one of her novels (actually a thinly veiled reference to Christie's own Death in the Clouds) in which she had made a blowpipe one foot long, instead of six.
• "Evelyn Hope” is the name of a poem by Robert Browning that is quoted in the course of the novel. In Taken at the Flood Christie had made a character take the alias of "Enoch Arden", which is a poem by Tennyson.

Dustjacket illustration of the UK First Edition (Book was first published in the US)

• 1952, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), February 1952, Hardback, 243 pp
• 1952, Collins Crime Club (London), 3 March 1952, Hardback, 192 pp
• 1952, Walter J. Black (Detective Book Club), 180 pp (Dated 1951)
• 1953, Pocket Books (New York), Paperback, 181 pp
• 1957, Fontana Books (Imprint of HarperCollins), Paperback, 188 pp
• 1970, Pan Books, Paperback, 191 pp
• 1988, Ulverscroft Large-print Edition, Hardcover, ISBN 0-7089-1771-2
• 2008, HarperCollins; Facsimile edition, Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-00-728053-7

In the US, the novel was serialised in the Chicago Tribune in its Sunday edition in thirteen parts from 7 October to 30 December 1951 under the title of Blood Will Tell.

• Mrs McGinty's Dead at the official Agatha Christie website
• Murder Most Foul (1964) at IMDb
• Mrs McGinty's Dead (2008) at IMDb