The Murder On The Links - Literary Significance and Reception

Literary Significance and Reception

The Times Literary Supplement reviewed the novel in its issue of 7 June 1923. The review compared the methods of detection of Poirot to Sherlock Holmes and concluded favourably that the book "provides the reader with an enthralling mystery of an unusual kind".

The New York Times Book Review of 25 March 1923 began, “Here is a remarkably good detective story which can be warmly commended to those who like that kind of fiction.” After detailing the set-up of the story the review continued, “The plot has peculiar complications and the reader will have to be very astute indeed if he guesses who the criminal is until the last complexity has been unravelled. The author is notably ingenious in the construction and unravelling of the mystery, which develops fresh interests and new entanglements at every turn. She deserves commendation also for the care with which the story is worked out and the good craftsmanship with which it is written. Although there is not much endeavour to portray character, except in the case of M. Poirot, several of the personages are depicted with swiftly made expressive and distinctive lines.”

The unnamed reviewer in The Observer of 10 June 1923 said, "When Conan Doyle popularised Sherlock Holmes in the Strand of the 'nineties he lit such a candle as the publishers will not willingly let out. Not a week passes which does not bring a 'detective' story from one quarter or another, and several of the popular magazines rely mainly on that commodity. Among the later cultivators of this anything but lonely furrow the name of Agatha Christie is well in the front. If she has not the touch of artistry which made The Speckled Band and The Hound of the Baskervilles things of real horror, she has an unusual gift of mechanical complication." The reviewer went on to compare the novel with The Mysterious Affair at Styles which they called, "a remarkable piece of work" but warned that, "it is a mistake to carry the art of bewilderment to the point of making the brain reel." They did admit that, "No solution could be more surprising" and stated that the character of Poirot was, "a pleasant contrast to most of his lurid competitors; and one even suspects a touch of satire in him."

Robert Barnard: "Super-complicated early whodunit, set in the northerly fringes of France so beloved of the English bankrupt. Poirot pits his wits against a sneering sophisticate of a French policeman while Hastings lets his wander after an auburn-haired female acrobat. Entertaining for most of its length, but the solution is one of those 'once revealed, instantly forgotten' ones, where ingenuity has triumphed over common sense".

Some additional blurbs regarding the book, and used by The Bodley Head for advertising subsequent print runs, are as follows:

• "One of the best mystery stories I have read." – S.P.B. Mais in The Daily Express.

• "A clinking yarn, most ingeniously contrived and skilfully evolved … there is not a superfluous word or a dull one from start to finish … the very best of this sort of fiction." – Winnifred Blatchford in The Clarion.

• "A thrilling and accomplished book." – Observer.

• "Mrs. Christie has a surprising gift of keeping the reader's tension unslacked, of heaping excitement on excitement, and of always having a surprise up her sleeve." – Daily Mail.

• "Unhesitatingly we recommend ‘The Murder on the Links’ to every lover of such tales, and every non-lover likewise we advise to read it and thereupon reconsider their previous opinion." – Queen.

• "A godsend to hardened readers of fiction." – Illustrated London News.

• "A very convincing and most readable book." – Challenge.

• "A really good detective story." – Tatler.

• "A capital story, cleverly designed, briskly told." – Bookman.

• "None can say that Mrs. Christie is lacking either in imagination or the ability to tell a good story." – Daily Graphic.

• "A rattling, ingenious mystery yarn." – London Opinion.

In a modern work of literary criticism, Christie biographer Laura Thompson writes:

Murder on the Links was as different from its predecessor as that had been from Styles. It is very French; not just in setting but in tone, which reeks of Gaston Leroux and, at times, Racine … Agatha admitted that she had written it in a "high-flown, fanciful" manner. She had also based the book too closely upon a real-life French murder case, which gives the story a kind of non-artistic complexity. …

But Poirot is magnificently himself. What originality there is in Murder on the Links comes straight from his thought processes. For example he deduces the modus operandi of the crime because it is a repeat, essentially, of an earlier murder; this proves his favourite theory that human nature does not change, even when the human in question is a killer: "The English murderer who disposed of his wives in succession by drowning them in their baths was a case in point. Had he varied his methods, he might have escaped detection to this day. But he obeyed the common dictates of human nature, arguing that what had once succeeded would succeed again, and he paid the penalty of his lack of originality."