Tom Adams - Curtain - Poirot's Last Case

Tom Adams wrote:  "Perceptive readers will notice how the house has deteriorated over 50 odd years and has also acquired a TV aerial; and the trees have grown substantially. A word about the flowers; in Styles it is a bright red begonia (featured in the plot) and in Curtain a dark, sinister red poppy, but they are almost precisely the same shape. 

...Apparently kept in a bank vault in case anything happened to its author, Curtain was finally published on 22 September 1975, less than four months before Dame Agatha died, and attracted widespread adulation, including an infamous obituary for Poirot—the only one ever for a fictional character—in the New York Times.

Thus we have in the pair of Styles novels two key books: the first and last Poirot—indeed the first and last Hastings—both vintage Christie, and both fundamentally connected to the two great wars of the twentieth century. Bookending nearly 40 Poirot titles and published almost 55 years apart, the

connections between them are rarely considered. And there are other connections, almost like a sub-plot, not known even to Agatha, but one now shared by Mathew Prichard, Agatha’s grandson, and me, her long-time cover artist. It concerns Agatha’s first husband, Archibald Christie (Mathew’s grandfather), and my father, James Adams.

At the beginning of the First World War a young army officer, Archie Christie, was seconded to the Royal Flying Corps and fought in France with great courage and distinction. At the end of the war, Colonel Christie, as he became, transferred to the Royal Air Force. At this time my grandfather, a consultant to the Canadian government, was living with his family in Ontario. My father, James Adams, a young subaltern in the Governor General’s Foot Guards, sailed to the UK with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He then transferred to the Royal Naval Air Service and flew bombing missions over Germany. At the end of the war my father also transferred to the Royal Air Force, training in the new four-engine Handley Page bombers for the planned raids on Berlin, which thankfully did not happen because the war ended. Both Christie and Adams were mentioned in dispatches and decorated.

This is why these two books and the chance to paint their covers has meant so much to me. The house, depicted in both paintings, connects the two stories and reflects the passage of time, and in The Mysterious Affair at Styles the pink candle with its dripping wax is a vital clue in the murder of Mrs Inglethorp. In Curtain the candle is extinguished, signifying the end of Poirot, and his soul is represented by a proud peacock butterfly soaring heavenwards through a curtain of smoke!

Just as Curtain was Poirot’s swansong as a detective, it is fitting, I think, that Curtain should be my swansong as an artist. Fortunately, to date, I’ve been lucky enough to survive mine!

 Tom Adams, Cornwall, 25th January 2016