Book Review by Charles Carman: “One day, Mrs. Pengelley came to London seeking the assistance of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective with the mustache, whose “little grey cells” assist him in solving mysteries. With a troubled look, she tells him that she fears she is being slowly poisoned. The doctor doesn’t see anything much the matter, she says. He attributes the stomach trouble to gastritis. She even sometimes improves, but strangely this happens during the absence of someone in her life, confirming in her a certain suspicion.
After listening to her tale with great interest, Poirot agrees to take up the case. He sends the lady back and plans to catch a train the following day to begin his investigation. Discussing the matter with his close friend, Captain Hastings, Poirot admits the case is especially interesting, even though “it has positively no new features,” because “if I mistake not, we have here a very poignant human drama.”
When Poirot arrives the next day, he discovers that the lady has been murdered after unwittingly taking the final dose of poison. Having found the case intriguing enough to look into it, Poirot chastises himself, a “criminal imbecile,” for not having taken her story more seriously. “May the good God forgive me,” he declares, “but I never believed anything would happen at all. Her story seemed to me artificial.” Had he been convinced enough to return with her right away, he might have saved her. All that remains for him now is to catch the murderer.
“The Cornish Mystery” occurred to me while reading Paul Kingsnorth’s new collection of essays, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. In the story he weaves, a sinister force has been lurking for some time within our civilization, especially in the West. His suspicion falls upon something to do with science, technology, and how we misapprehend the world. It has been slowly sapping away at our life, creating problems that have been diagnosed as this or that malady and treated with such and such a remedy. Sometimes we feel better. And yet, we sense we are being dehumanized, unmade, that something essential is being destroyed piece by piece. Such a process is hard to pin down. This is the genius of murder by slow poisoning: it leads to doubt and misattribution. There is little ambiguity about a gunshot to the heart. Yet when killing dose by dose, one easily mistakes murderous intent with the body’s frailty, a lingering affliction, or incidental complications: murder disguised as natural causes…(More)”.
