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Dust-jacket illustration of the US (true first) edition. See Publication history (below) for UK first edition jacket image.

The Hollow is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1946^[1][2] and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in November of the same year^[3]. The US edition retailed at the US edition at $2.50^[2] and the UK edition at eight shillings and sixpence (8/6)^[3]. A paperback edition in the US by Dell books in 1954 changed the title to Murder after Hours.

[edit] Specifications

• Author = Agatha Christie
• Cover illustrator =
• Series =
• Genre = Crime novel
• Publisher = Dodd, Mead and Company
• Country = United States
• Publication Date = 1946
• Nature of Rarity =
• Number in Existence =
• Estimated Value =

[edit] Background

The novel is a fine example of a "country house mystery" and was the first of her novels in four years to feature Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot—one of the longest gaps in the entire series. Christie, who often admitted that she did not like Poirot (a fact parodied by her recurring novelist character Ariadne Oliver), particularly disliked his appearance in this novel. His late arrival, jarring, given the established atmosphere, led her to claim in her Autobiography that she "ruined [the novel] by the introduction of Poirot".^[4].

[edit] Plot introduction

On the morning that he and his downtrodden wife, Gerda, are due to travel down to the country to weekend with friends, John Christow allows his little daughter to tell his fortune with cards. When the death card is drawn, he pays no attention, but the appearance of an old flame at The Hollow seems to be the final link in a chain of fatal circumstances.

[edit] Plot summary

The charming and eccentric Lucy Angkatell has invited the Christows, along with a number of other members of the extended family. John is already having an affair with Henrietta Savernake, a talented sculptor and, as is demonstrated by what follows, brilliant improviser. He has always remembered with nostalgia an early love, Veronica Cray, who suddenly appears in the house on Saturday night asking to borrow a box of matches. She is living at one of the two nearby cottages, the other of which is currently occupied by Hercule Poirot, who has been invited for lunch on Sunday. Veronica and John go off together, and he returns much too late: at 3 am.

The next day, Poirot arrives at the house to witness a scene that seems strangely staged. Gerda is standing with a gun in her hand above the body of John, who is bleeding into the swimming pool. Standing, seemingly transfixed, are Lucy, Henrietta, and Edward. John's last word, in a note of urgent appeal, is "Henrietta".

It seems cut and dried that Gerda is the murderess, but in taking the revolver from her hand Henrietta apparently fumbles and drops it into the swimming pool, destroying any evidence. Later, however, it is discovered that the pistol that Gerda had been holding was not the pistol with which John had been shot. None of the witnesses has actually seen Gerda shoot John, and it seems difficult to build a case against any of the other potential suspects. At first Lucy herself seems to be a strong suspect, when it is discovered that she had kept a pistol concealed in her basket of eggs, but the pistol seems to be of the wrong calibre. Henrietta is also implicated, not least by the leaving of an unusual doodle in the pavilion, apparently at the time that John had been killed. When the murder weapon turns up in Poirot's hedge, it has fingerprints on it that match none of the suspects.

These are all pieces of deliberate misdirection on the part of the family. They know in fact that Gerda is indeed the murderess, and are attempting to avoid her imprisonment. As it happens, the murder, with a motive of jealousy, was planned, in that she had taken with her two pistols, planning to be discovered with a pistol in her hands that would later be discovered to be the wrong weapon. Henrietta, who says that John asked her to help Gerda when he said her name, destroys the evidence of the first weapon instinctively, and later goes back and retrieves the second weapon. She hides it in a clay sculpture of a horse in her workshop, then gets it handled by a blind match-seller, and places it in Poirot’s hedge.

There is a romantic subplot in the novel. Midge is in love with Edward, but Edward has always been in love with Henrietta and Henrietta had refused several times his marriage proposals. Besides, she is now deeply in love with John Christow. During the course of the novel, Edward realises that Henrietta is not anymore the Henrietta he used to love and begins to stop seeing Midge as "little Midge". Therefore, he asks her to marry him. During a walk to an area where Edward has walked with Henrietta, Midge believes that he is too deeply in love with Henrietta still, and she calls off the wedding. Edward who does not know that she loves him, misunderstands her decision and later that night, he attempts suicide by putting his head in a gas oven but he is saved by Midge. With this rather dramatic proof of his need for her, she relents and the wedding is on again.

With all the evidence apparently destroyed, the family believe that they have saved Gerda, but there is one final clue: the holster in which the murder weapon was kept. Gerda has cut this up and placed it in her workbag. When Henrietta attempts to retrieve it in order to destroy the final means of proving Gerda's guilt, Poirot arrives and prevents her from drinking tea that Gerda has poisoned. Gerda herself drinks the poisoned tea and escapes justice by this means.

Henrietta who, along with Lucy, has emerged as an attractive and well-characterised heroine throughout the book, ends it by visiting in hospital one of John's patients who now has little hope of a cure but still shows a resilient spirit. Leaving the hospital, she reflects that there is no happy end for her, but she resolves to embark on a sculpture of herself as Grief.

[edit] Publication history

Dustjacket illustration of the UK First Edition (Book was first published in the US)

• 1946, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), 1946, Hardback, 279 pp
• 1946, Collins Crime Club (London), November 1946, Hardback, 256 pp
• 1948, Pocket Books (New York), Paperback (Pocket number 485)
• 1950, Pan Books, Paperback, 239 pp (Pan number 119)
• 1957, Fontana Books (Imprint of HarperCollins), Paperback, 189 pp
• 1974, Ulverscroft Large-print Edition, Hardcover, 431 pp ISBN 0854563016

The US serialisation of this story was a four-part shortened version in Collier's Weekly between May 4 (Volume 117, Number 18) and May 25, 1946 (Volume 117, Number 21) under the title of The Outraged Heart with illustrations by Mario Cooper.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• The Hollow at the official Agatha Christie website
• The Hollow (2004) at the Internet Movie Database