Author: Agatha Christie

Published: 1927

Format: Novel, consisting of several linked short stories

Detective(s): Poirot and Hastings

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The Big Four is one of Christie’s earlier works, and like several from around this time, is more experimental in format and tropes than her later books are.

The set up of the plot is that Hastings has returned to England for a visit and meet’s Poirot, on the verge of leaving England for South America. Poirot has stumbled across mentions of ‘The Big Four’ in the criminal world and is curious but not certain that he is on to anything significant.

“But I will admit to you, Hastings, that had not the money offered been so big, I might have hesitated, for just lately I have begun a little investigation of my own. Tell me, what is commonly meant by the phrase, ‘The Big Four’?”

Poirot and Hastings spend the novel investigating a series of crimes, all of which lead back in one way or another to The Big Four. Some are obviously linked, as they search for the identity of ‘number four’ and others are set up as distractions for Poirot only to shockingly lead us back to The Big Four once more.

It’s worth noting that The Big Four was first published as twelve short stories in consecutive issues of The Sketch magazine starting in January 1924, these were then merged into the book which was published in 1927. This background also then explains the fact that Poirot declares at the end of the novel his intention to retire and grow vegetable marrows, something we have already seen in the preceding novel (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd).

“Yes, non ami, together we have faced and routed the Big Four; and now you will return to your charming wife, and I – I shall retire. The great case of my life is over. Anything else will seem tame after this. No, I shall retire. Possibly I shall grow vegetable marrows.”

Thematically, the novel fits with the earlier writing of Christie, before the genre of ‘detective fiction’ had been fully defined. It’s as much political thriller as it is detection and has an almost Tommy and Tuppence level of chasing about and actively detecting. It was written before the ‘Ten Commandments’ of detective fiction were set out by Ronald Knox (1929) and one could question if Knox had this in mind when he wrote his ‘no chinaman’ rule – the novel is thick with racial stereotypes and insults and is a difficult read because of this.

Christie heavily pulls from Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in The Big Four, with references to the Mycroft and Sherlock relationship and to the Sherlock and Moriarty relationship and to the general events of ‘The Final Problem’. We see this open nod to the wider genre more in Partners in Crime.

Murder by Numbers

UK Title:	The Big Four
Author:	Agatha Christie
Year of Publication:	1927
Detective(s):	Poirot and Hastings
Setting:	Urban, rural and global
Body Count:	Numerous, seven named characters during the timeline of the novel
Villain:	1. Mysterious foreigner 2. Lady scientist, widowed and disfigured 3. American tycoon 4. Mysterious low born actor
Villain’s fate:	All die by suicide, three together in an explosion set off deliberately, one on his own ‘off stage’.