Third Girl

infobox Book |
name = Third Girl
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = Dust-jacket illustration of the first UK edition
author = Agatha Christie
cover_artist = Kenneth Farnhill
country = United Kingdom
language = English
series =
genre = Crime novel
publisher = Collins Crime Club
release_date = November 1966
media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
pages = 256 pp (first edition, hardcover)
isbn = NA
preceded_by = At Bertram's Hotel
followed_by = Endless Night

"Third Girl" is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in November 1966Chris Peers, Ralph Spurrier and Jamie Sturgeon. "Collins Crime Club – A checklist of First Editions". Dragonby Press (Second Edition) March 1999 (Page 15)] and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year [John Cooper and B.A. Pyke. "Detective Fiction - the collector's guide": Second Edition (Pages 82 and 87) Scholar Press. 1994. ISBN 0-85967-991-8] [http://home.insightbb.com/~jsmarcum/agatha53.htm American Tribute to Agatha Christie] ] . The UK edition retailed at eighteen shillings (18/-) and the US edition at $4.50.

It features her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the recurring character Ariadne Oliver. The novel is notable for being the first in many years in which Poirot is more or less present from beginning to end. It is also notable in that there is no clear crime to be investigated until comparatively late in the novel.

Plot introduction

When a young woman visits Hercule Poirot to seek his help regarding a murder that she believes herself to have committed, she is appalled by his age and leaves with her story untold. Poirot is keen to track her down … but who is she, and what, if anything, has she done?

Plot summary

Ariadne Oliver, serving here as a deus ex machina, provides Poirot with a number of key clues in the novel, beginning with the identity of the girl, Norma Restarick, whom she had met at a party. Mrs. Oliver and Poirot begin to investigate Norma, but soon find that she has apparently gone missing. Mrs. Oliver meets the girls with whom she shares a flat at 67 Borodene Mansions: Claudia Reece-Holland (who turns out to be secretary to Norma's father) and Frances Cary, an artsy girl with long, dark hair that falls across her face. Neither has seen Norma recently. Poirot (visiting her paternal great uncle’s home in Long Basing) finds that her father and stepmother also have no idea where she has gone. Poirot does meet David Baker, Norma’s boyfriend, in the house, and sees that Norma’s stepmother, Mary, is highly annoyed to discover him there. Poirot also meets Norma’s paternal great-uncle, Sir Roderick Horsefield, who is elderly and has poor eyesight. Norma’s father, Andrew, has been staying with Sir Roderick since returning from Africa, where he had made a vast fortune.

Mrs. Oliver provides a second essential clue when she happens across David and Norma in a café. She telephones Poirot, who comes to meet Norma, while she herself tracks David to a dingy artist’s studio, where Norma’s flatmate Frances is posing as a model. Leaving the studio Mrs. Oliver is knocked unconscious. Meanwhile, Norma awakens to find herself in the safe keeping of Stillingfleet, having apparently thrown herself under an oncoming car. In a red herring that is easily spotted by those who recognise the doctor from an earlier meeting with Poirot, it seems that Stillingfleet may have kidnapped Norma. In fact, Poirot has hidden her from danger, and she is not seen again for much of the novel. Andrew Restarick employs Poirot to track her down, and is insistent that the police are not to become involved.

Sir Roderick also contacts Poirot seeking help. He has lost letters written during the Second World War by a third party, which would now cause embarrassment should they be made public. Poirot’s attention attaches itself to Sir Roderick’s personal assistant, Sonia, who has apparently been passing secrets to a representative of the Herzogovinian [Sic| ["sic"] Embassy at Kew Gardens. This is all a red herring, however: Poirot hints to Sonia that he knows of her espionage activities, and she abandons them in order to marry Sir Roderick instead at the end of the novel.

Mrs. Oliver now provides Poirot with another key clue: she has heard while at Borodene Mansions that a woman, Louise Charpentier, has committed suicide by throwing herself out of the window of Flat 76. This, Poirot infers, must be the murder that Norma believed herself to have committed. Investigating the dead woman, he discovers that her real name was Louise Carpenter: also the name of a woman with whom Andrew Restarick had been in love many years earlier. Mrs. Oliver later even provides Poirot with the draft of a letter from Louise to Andrew in which she attempted to make contact once more: an item that had providentially come into her possession early in the novel when it fell from a drawer.

Amongst other clues on which Poirot focuses, there are several that are only explained at the end of the book. Mary Restarick wears a wig, to which the reader’s attention is repeatedly drawn by the fact that Mrs. Oliver’s hairpieces are often mentioned as a plot device: indeed, Mrs. Oliver alters her hair in order to be in disguise when she sees Norma and David in the café. Also, Poirot notices that there is a pair of portraits of Andrew Restarick and of his first wife (Norma’s mother) in their home; why is Mary Restarick apparently content to have a picture of her predecessor on display, and why does Andrew later split the set in order to have his own portrait in his office?

Stillingfleet contacts Poirot to say that Norma has walked out on him unexpectedly. She has seen a message in the personal column of a newspaper calling her to the flat, where she is discovered by Frances Cary standing over the dead body of David Baker with a knife, the murder weapon, in her hand. Norma immediately claims responsibility for the murder to a neighbour, Miss Jacobs. Norma has, however, been subjected to a cocktail of drugs intended to disorientate her and make her susceptible to the suggestion that she is a murderer.

In the denouement Poirot reveals that the man posing as Andrew Restarick is an impostor, Robert Orwell, who has taken his place after the real Restarick died in Africa. Orwell has persuaded David Baker to paint a fake painting in style with the original one, which establishes to anyone who questions it that the new “Restarick” had looked much the same fifteen years earlier when the pair was painted. Mary Restarick, meanwhile, has been leading a double life, as both Mary and as Frances Cary, whom she could become by changing wigs. Their imposture, however, could be revealed by two people: by David Baker, who had taken to blackmailing Orwell over the picture; and Louise Carpenter, who knew Restarick too well to be fooled by Orwell. The murder plot involved killing both of them, and convincing Norma that she was the killer. Norma had never in reality been in Louise’s flat: they simply switched the 7 and the 6 on the door of her own flat. All along the “third girl” in the flat on whom attention should have been focused has been, not Norma, but Frances.

At the end of the novel, Stillingfleet, who has staunchly defended Norma’s innocence even when it was most in question, is rewarded by her agreeing to marry him. As Mrs. Oliver realises, Poirot has planned this happy ending all along.

Characters in “Third Girl”

* Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective
* Ariadne Oliver, the celebrated author
* Chief Inspector Neele, Poirot’s police source
* Sergeant Conolly, a policeman in the case
* Miss Felicity Lemon, Poirot’s secretary
* George, Poirot’s valet
* Dr. John Stillingfleet, a physician
* Mr. Goby, a private investigator
* Norma Restarick, a modern young woman
* Mary Restarick, Norma’s stepmother
* Andrew Restarick, Norma’s father
* Sir Roderick Horsefield, a retired politician
* Sonia, Sir Roderick’s personal assistant
* David Baker, an artist
* Claudia Reece-Holland, Norma’s flatmate
* Frances Cary, Norma’s flatmate
* Miss Jacobs, a neighbour at Borodene Mansions

Major themes

This novel is notable for its overt use of coincidence, such as Mrs. Oliver going into a café that happens to contain the girl for whom she is seeking, and having a key piece of evidence literally fall into her hands from a drawer as furniture is being removed from a dead woman’s flat. This very obvious use of coincidence is known as "open authorial manipulation" and is often used to draw the reader’s attention to the artificiality of the plot. It is highly appropriate to a detective novel in which a central character writes detective fiction and is an example of metafiction.

Literary significance and reception

Unusually for this period, "The Guardian" didn't carry a review of the novel.

Maurice Richardson in "The Observer" of November 13, 1966 concluded, "There is the usual double-take surprise solution centring round a perhaps rather artificial identity problem; but the suspense holds up all the way. Dialogue and characters are lively as flies. After this, I shan't be a bit surprised to see A.C. wearing a mini-skirt." ["The Observer" November 13, 1966 (Page 26)]

Robert Barnard: "One of Christie's more embarrassing attempts to haul herself abreast of the swinging 'sixties. Mrs Oliver plays a large part, detection a small one." [Barnard, Robert. A Talent to Deceive – an appreciation of Agatha Christie - Revised edition (Page 207). Fontana Books, 1990. ISBN 0-00-637474-3]

References to other works

The novel reintroduces Stillingfleet, a character from the short story "The Dream" and first published in book form in the UK in "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding" in 1960, and Mr. Goby, whose previous appearance had been in "After the Funeral" in 1953.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

A TV adaptation by Peter Flannery for the series "Agatha Christie's Poirot" starring David Suchet as Poirot and Zoë Wanamaker as Ariadne Oliver was filmed in April and May 2008. It aired on 28 September of the same year on ITV. The adaptation takes huge liberties with the novel, which include:
* Moving the 1960s setting to the 1930s, in accordance with the other episodes in the series.
* Omitting the characters of Dr. Stillingfleet and Miss Lemon.
* Replacing the character of Louise Charpentier with a new character, Lavinia Seagram, who becomes Norma's nanny. She is murdered in exactly the same way Mary Restarick committed suicide, instead of being pushed out of a window like Louise Charpentier in the novel. The motive of her murder remains the same as Louise's in the novel - she is killed because she threatened to reveal the true identity of Robert Orwell, the man posing as Andrew Restarick.
* Omitting the subterfuge of Frances Cary posing as Mary Restarick. Instead, Mary Restarick is made to be Norma's mother, who committed suicide by slitting her wrists when Norma was a little child.
* Having Frances Cary become the half-sister to Norma. Norma's old teacher, Miss Battersby, had an affair with Andrew Restarick (Norma's father), and together they bore Frances. When Miss Battersby learned of Robert Orwell and his deception, she told her daughter, who found a way to become Orwell's co-conspirator. Frances tried to get Norma hanged for a crime that she never committed in order to inherit her half-sister's fortune.
* Having Norma's disoriented state being blamed on the trauma caused by her mother's suicide. She is never given drugs like in the novel. Her fragile mind is manipulated by Frances, who planted a knife in her room before Norma discovered Nanny Seagram's body, and then removed it afterwards. This made Norma believe that she had committed the murder.
* The character of David Baker being spared at the end, unlike in the novel, in which he was murdered. In the adaptation, he serves as Norma's love interest, whereas in the novel, Norma's love interest is Dr. Stillingfleet.
* Ariadne Oliver's book "Lady Don't Fall Backwards" - this comes from the Tony Hancock story "The Missing Page" in which Tony Hancock tries to find out who did the murder in a book he'd just read with a missing page (mirrored by the concierge, Alf Renny, who tells Mrs Oliver that he'd read her book 4 times and still had no idea who did it).

Publication history

* 1966, Collins Crime Club (London), November 1966, Hardcover, 256 pp
* 1967, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), 1967, Hardcover, 248 pp
* 1968, Ulverscroft Large-print Edition, Hardcover, 230 pp
* 1968, Fontana Books (Imprint of HarperCollins), Paperback, 190 pp
* 1968, Pocket Books (New York), Paperback
* 1979, Greenway edition of collected works (William Collins), Hardcover, ISBN 0-00-231847-4

In the US a condensed version of the novel appeared in the April 1967 (Volume 128, Number 6) issue of "Redbook" magazine with a photographic montage by Mike Cuesta.

References

External links

* [http://us.agathachristie.com/site/find_a_story/stories/Third_Girl.php "Third Girl"] at the official Agatha Christie website
*imdb title|id= 0981210|title= Third Girl (2008)