Closed Casket (New Hercule Poirot Mysteries #2)

by Sophie Hannah

he preferred shocks and startling about-turns to occur in the safely distant world of fiction, not in reality.

I tend to assume that if something crops up that I would prefer not to do, that means I will certainly do it.

“I thought you and I were les bons amis.” “We are. I have been confoundedly busy, Poirot.” “Ah, busy! You would like me to believe that is all it is.”

“You Englishmen! However strong the emotion, however fierce the fury, stronger still is the desire to smother it, to pretend it was never there at all.”

It’s the weakest as have to shout the loudest, make others suffer, he says.”

Everything made nowadays is flimsy and disposable.”

is a profession that risks attracting those who find sickness and weakness attractive.”

“‘He is the half part of a blessed man, left to be finished by such as she, and she a fair divided excellence, whose fullness of perfection lies in him.’”

Bitterness emanates from her as she stomps around the house feeling aggrieved on her own behalf, and she gives full vent to it.

In this case, I am guilty of negligence: I suspect everybody except you.” “Then you are foolish,” he said. “You know nothing of my character.”

He had worked it all out, you see: appear to want nothing and people want to give you everything.

She’d have taunted me for being foolish and tried to persuade me to step out with her nephew, Dennis.

asked. “Walked up and down a bit, then came back up to the garden. Sat on the grass by the big pond, hoping I’d get wet and catch a chill and die of it.”

“One regrets nothing so much as the unfortunate things one has done oneself that cannot be undone—don’t you find?”

I found it fascinating to observe how Joseph did it, how he reeled them in and kept them all adoring him while he felt nothing for any of them, really.

“Naturally. Even Hercule Poirot is, on the very rare occasion, wrong.”

One can, you see, insist that the truth is true in a way that makes it appear a lie.”

“Strong suspicion is not knowledge, as any detective will tell you,”

How does one choose between the present and what was once a possible future?

Like a damned fool, I took too long about it, waiting for some sort of sign that she was the right girl for me.

One has sometimes to make a random choice and hope for the best.

Soon I hope to know for certain.

things will start to happen, and soon enough we will know who we’re after.

if I have had good luck on my travels, I will know everything.

Action without proper foundation could be catastrophic.”

“Good sense appears the most underhand of tactics to a man who has no reserves of his own to draw upon.”

I have tried to keep myself to myself. It’s not very jolly around here without you to brighten up the place. When are you coming back?”

She’d let him go—gone off with some wrong ’un who’d talked a pretty tale—and couldn’t get the right one back. So she picked another wrong ’un: Percival Gillow Esquire!”

We were peas in a pod, Iris and me. But she never could see that I was the one for her, even once we were married. She kept wanting better.” “I see. So you saw her

Playford. As it turned out, she was also looking for me, and claimed it as her victory when our paths crossed.

Then you will know what it felt like: as if no one in the world had ever understood you so well as he did; as if no one had ever cared so much.”

that the vast majority of people are disinclined to confront anything that is messy or peculiar. Most people are scared of most things—never forget that!

only writers and artists who can cope with the puzzling ambiguities—and those with an investigative inclination.

If he had only decided, finally, to be completely truthful with me, I believe I could have cured him—of whatever was wrong with his mind that made him feel the need to indulge in these fabrications.

And then, once he had admitted to his true problem, he and I could have addressed, together, the unhappiness that must have been plaguing him for so long.