story of 1975 has given me more undiluted pleasure. As a critic, I welcome it, as a reminder that sheer ingenuity can still amaze." Maurice Richardson in The Observer of 5 October 1975 summed up: "One of her most highly contrived jobs, artificial as a mechanical birdcage, but an unputdownable swansong." Robert Barnard, in A Talent to Deceive, less favourably writes:Written in the 'forties, designed for publication after Christie's death, but in fact issued just before it. Based on an idea toyed with in Peril at End House (chapter 9) – a clever and interesting one, but needing greater subtlety in the handling than Christie's style or characterisation will allow (the characters here are in any case quite exceptionally pallid). In fact, for a long-cherished idea, and as an exit for Poirot, this is oddly perfunctory in execution. It was one of the bestselling books of 1976. References or allusions Being their last case together, mention is made of earlier cases. Hastings became involved in the first Styles investigation in 1916, at which time he was thirty years old. He married at the end of the next Poirot novel, The Murder on the Links, mentioned twice in this novel, as Hastings is now a widower. Poirot mentions that once in Egypt he attempted to warn a murderer before the person committed the crime. That case is the one retold in Death on the Nile. He mentions that there was another case in which he had done the same thing: almost certainly that retold in "Triangle at Rhodes" (published in Murder in the Mews in 1937). In The A.B.C. Murders, Inspector Japp says to Poirot: "Shouldn't wonder if you ended by detecting your own death;" an indication that the idea of Curtain had already formed in the author's mind in 1935. On 6 August 1975, The New York Times published a front-page obituary of Poirot with a photograph to mark his death. Hastings also mentions "the case of Evelyn Carlisle" as he speculates over a possible hidden financial motive for X's actions, referring to Sad Cypress which centred on the revelation of money as a motivation for the crime. Sequence of publication in Poirot novels Christie wrote the novel in the early 1940s, during World War II. Partly fearing for her own survival, and wanting to have a fitting end to Poirot's series of novels, Christie had the novel locked away