After the Funeral (Hercule Poirot, #33)

by Agatha Christie

Isn’t it precisely the job of fiction to offer us what real life cannot, while at the same time enlightening us with regard to real life? If so, then this is exactly what Agatha Christie does. Her novels are packed with wisdom and experience and psychological insight.

Amount of cash taken really quite pitifully inadequate one would think.” “The value of money is always relative,” said Mr. Entwhistle. “It is the need that counts.”

What any woman saw in some particular man was beyond the comprehension of the average intelligent male. It just was so. A woman who could be intelligent about everything else in the world could be a complete fool when it came to some particular man.

“Mustn’t crab the Government, though! Don’t know really what we’d do without it. I can tell you that nowadays you can walk in most anywhere with a notebook and pencil, dressed right, and speaking B.B.C., and ask people all the most intimate details of their daily lives and all their back history, and what they had for dinner on November 23rd because that was a test day for middleclass incomes—or whatever it happens to be (making it a grade above to butter them up!)—ask ’em any mortal thing you can; and nine times out of ten they’ll come across pat, and even the tenth time though they may cut up rough, they won’t doubt for a minute that you’re what you say you are—and that the Government really wants to know—for some completely unfathomable reason!

Yes, Government snooping is God’s gift to investigators and long may it continue!”

“I must say I’m glad to hear it! To be always right must be sometimes monotonous.” “I do not find it so,” Poirot assured him.