1932: Peril at End House  

Publisher: William Collins & Sons, 1932 (UK);   Dodd, Mead & Co, 1932 (US)

Series: Hercule Poirot

Category: Novel

Cross refs: The Mystery of the Blue Train; The Mysterious Affair at Styles; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd  

Warning, spoilers!

And so we return, in 1932, to Hercule Poirot. In Peril at End House – set in the seaside town of St Loo, on the Cornish coast, ‘just over 30 miles from Devonport’ – we join Poirot and Captain Hastings enjoying a holiday at the Majestic Hotel. In response to Hastings’ observation that the Cornish coast ‘reminds one forcibly of the Riviera’, Poirot recalls his previous case – The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) – before commenting on how he is enjoying his retirement:

[It] suits me admirably, my friend. To sit in the sun – what could be more charming? To step from your pedestal at the zenith of your fame – what could be a grander gesture?

He later adds (and the irony of this will not be lost on the modern reader):

… I have retired, my friend, I have retired! It is finished! I am not a stage favourite who gives the world a dozen farewells.

Hmm.

Needless to say, he will once again be catapulted out of retirement, not by a request from the Home Secretary, whose plight he summarily dismisses, but when it appears that the life of the pretty, impish-faced and rather reckless Nick Buckley, is under threat.

In Peril at End House, we see that Poirot is as susceptible to the charms of a beautiful woman as Hastings – with his judgement momentarily clouded as he works to solve the crime. He observes of Nick that, ‘she is a pretty girl’, and repeatedly refers to her endearingly as, ‘that little one’. In a plot twist that is repeated in later novels, Poirot finds himself hired by the perpetrator of the crime that he has been enlisted to crack, possibly in the hope of fostering a pseudo alibi/alliance, but ultimately in a move that spectacularly backfires.

Meanwhile, Hastings, on his sojourn from his ranch in ‘the Argentine’, remains as credulous as ever, and as prone to falling asleep in a comfortable chair while Poirot’s ‘little grey cells’ are at work. This book introduced me to the phrase a ‘pukka sahib’ – a now much-outdated British Indian term used to denote a ‘proper gentleman’. It is Hastings’ confidence that Commander Challenger is such a pukka sahib that sparks Poirot’s suspicions:  

You have an extraordinary effect on me, Hastings. You have so strongly the flair in the wrong direction that I am almost tempted to go by it! You are that wholly admirable type of man, honest, credulous, honourable, who is invariably taken in by any scoundrel … Ah, well – I shall study this Commander Challenger. You have awakened my doubts.

The social and cultural milieu of the period in which this novel was written weave their way into the plot. The 1930s marked a golden age for solo aviation, seeing a number of pioneering, long-distance solo flights, daring record attempts, and the rise of the aviatrix, all of which fed into the cultural zeitgeist. Although Amy Johnson (1903–disappeared 1941; fig. 1) goes unnamed in Peril at End House, it is likely that she is the ‘what’s her name’ mentioned by Lazarus to Nick, who flew to Australia, and ‘all by herself too’. Departing on 5 May 1930, and flying for up to eight hours at a time, Johnson faced extreme conditions during her expedition. She reached Darwin, Australia on 24 May 1930 and was received by crowds of supporters, later returning to England to a hero’s welcome. The impact of her feat was felt country-wide, not only influencing public morale but also women’s hairstyles![1]

During this conversation between Lazurus and Nick, the former also asks the latter when she will get her ‘Moth’, an allusion to the plane – the second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth – that Johnson used to make her journey (fig. 2).

Meanwhile, there were a number of prominent male aviators who could have been the basis for Micheal Seaton’s character, and it is hard to speculate on this. We know that rather than flying in a Moth he is using an amphibious plane, possibly of his own invention – the Albatross. At the time of the novel’s publication, no one had yet successfully flown solo around the world and, key to the plot of this story, Seaton also failed in this endeavour. However, it was only a year later, in 1933, that the American aviator Wiley Post (1898–1935) became the first man to circumnavigate the globe single handedly.

We learn that Nick and Seaton had met while on holiday in Le Touquet, a fashionable, glamourous, seaside resort, favoured by the British aristocracy in the 1930s. This was a spot frequented by the likes of Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) – photographer to the rich and famous – the playwright Noël Coward (1899–1973) and even the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII; 1894–1972). However, we later discover that it was in Scarborough, ‘Blessed, blessed, blessed Scarborough – the most wonderful place in the world’, that Seaton actually met his true love and wife to be.

Christie doesn’t miss a chance to give a nod to her other novels within this story, even beyond the direct reference to the Mystery of the Blue Train noted above. In his efforts to discover a motive for the attempts on Nick’s life, Poirot mentions the potential of buried treasure in the garden of End House – something that recalls the tale of ‘The Clergyman’s Daughter’ from Partners in Crime (1929). Elsewhere, Hastings cites ‘the famous case which Poirot had solved by his habit of straightening ornaments on the mantelpiece’, a reference to The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921). Finally, Japp questions whether Poirot has not retired to ‘grow vegetable marrows in the country’, reminding us of Poirot’s previous failed attempt at retirement in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). The figure of Freddie also carries shadows of previous characters, her tired, languid manner recalling both Lettice Protheroe in Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and Naomi Carlton Smith in The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930). These figures seem so specific and especially vivid, that I’ve often wondered whether they were based on someone Christie knew.  

Peril at End House was met with positive reviews, perhaps because, in Hastings words, it was regarded to have been ‘playing the game’. Indeed, the Times Literary Supplement observed that, ‘everything is perfectly fair’, later stating that the plot was, ‘arranged with almost mathematical neatness’.[2] The perfect crime for Poirot to crack.

[1] Heather Bennett, The Wonderful Miss Johnson’, Science Museum blog, 5 May 2020, https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/wonderful-miss-johnson/ [accessed 29 January 2026].

[2] Times Literary Supplement, 14 April 1932.