The Murder on the Links

by Agatha Christie

Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a Billingsgate fishwoman blush!

Nobody loves me! I shall go into the garden and eat worms! Boohoo. I am crushed!”

My work is done from within—here—” he tapped his forehead significantly.

“There is old Françoise, the housekeeper, she lived for many years with the former owners of the Villa Geneviève. Then there are two young girls, sisters, Denise and Léonie Oulard. Their home is in Merlinville, and they come of most respectable parents. Then there is the chauffeur whom Monsieur Renauld brought over from England with him, but he is away on a holiday. Finally there are Madame Renauld and her son, Monsieur Jack Renauld. He, too, is away from home at present.”

But if you did stop loving me, I don’t know what I should do—kill myself perhaps!

“Some of the greatest criminals I have known had the faces of angels,”

“A malformation of the grey cells may coincide quite easily with the face of a Madonna.”

“Your idea of a woman is someone who gets on a chair and shrieks if she sees a mouse. That’s all prehistoric.

Man is an unoriginal animal. Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life, equally unoriginal outside the law. If a man commits a crime, any other crime he commits will resemble it closely.

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.”

You may know all about cigarettes and match ends, Monsieur Giraud, but I, Hercule Poirot, know the mind of man.”

“If you would use your grey cells, and see the whole case clearly as I do, you too would perceive it, my friend.”

“Think, my friend,” said Poirot’s voice encouragingly. “Arrange your ideas. Be methodical. Be orderly. There is the secret of success.”

“Why, we have admitted that Georges planned the crime. That brings us to the ridiculous statement that he planned his own murder!”

It is love that has come—not as you imagined it, all cock-a-hoop with fine feathers, but sadly, with bleeding feet.

I had learned, with Poirot, that the less dangerous he looked, the more dangerous he was.

The great criminal (as you may remember my remarking to you once) is always supremely simple.”

That is where, as the Americans say, she ‘put it over’ on Hercule Poirot!”