The Big Four by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie’s 1927 thriller “The Big Four” takes her beloved Belgian detective Hercule Poirot on a rollicking international adventure pitting his “little grey cells” against a vast criminal syndicate bent on global chaos and destruction. While not as subversive or groundbreaking as her masterpiece “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” that preceded it, this novel still delivers delicious fun as a classic puzzler blended with espionage intrigue reminiscent of the James Bond stories that would arise decades later.

When the world’s greatest detective Hercule Poirot is summoned to South America by a mysterious millionaire, he finds himself embroiled in a sinister international conspiracy orchestrated by “The Big Four” – a Chinese mastermind, an anonymous American representing wealth, a glamorous Frenchwoman, and the elusive “Destroyer.” As Poirot and his trusty sidekick Captain Hastings race to unravel the web of intrigue and espionage surrounding this powerful crime syndicate, they find themselves dodging deadly assassins and narrowly escaping traps in this unconventional thriller from the Queen of Mystery.

The Story:

Agatha Christie’s The Big Four hits the ground running with a taut, cinematic opening that immediately hooks the reader. After being summoned to South America on a case by a wealthy businessman, the legendary Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is paid an unexpected visit from a wild-eyed, emaciated stranger who literally collapses at Poirot’s doorstep in London.

The man is in dire condition, seemingly after being imprisoned and starved for an extended period. With his last ounce of strength, he scribbles the number “4” and warns Poirot about the global criminal syndicate known as “The Big Four” – a powerful Chinese political mastermind, an anonymous American representing wealth, a Frenchwoman, and the mysterious “Destroyer.”

Poirot’s old friend Captain Arthur Hastings happens to be on hand and recognizes the “Big Four” from his own prior intelligence work. As they prepare to transport the stranger to a doctor, he briefly regains consciousness long enough to identify the Chinese operative Li Chang Yen as the syndicate’s cunning leader before lapsing again.

Wasting no time, Poirot realizes his South American assignment is likely just an elaborate ruse to get him out of England orchestrated by the syndicate. He and Hastings hastily abandon their voyage and return to tend to their unidentified informant, only to find him mysteriously murdered – poisoned by a man posing as an asylum worker who Poirot deduces must be the “Destroyer” himself.

With the stakes ratcheting ever higher, our duo find themselves squarely in the crosshairs of this shadowy crime cabal, forced to go on the offensive and match wits with the masterminds in an international game of spy vs spy…

The Inventive Premise Loses Steam:

From this gripping, inspired opening gambit, The Big Four quickly loses steam as the promising espionage plot devolves into a rambling, disjointed affair that fails to capitalize on its ambitious global scope. While Christie deserves immense credit for her inventiveness in pioneering the spy/crime fiction crossover genre, the novel’s overarching storyline proves too meandering and vignette-driven to sustain much narrative momentum.

Essentially an anthology of loosely linked short stories, The Big Four finds Poirot and Hastings chasing the enigmatic crime lords to exotic locales like Russia, France, Egypt, and Palestine. But the detours are so episodic and stuffed with disappearing side characters that any sense of cohesive stakes or dramatic escalation falls by the wayside.

The short story segments admittedly contain some deliciously twisty plotting and dazzling set pieces that remind us of Christie’s impeccable talent for crafting irresistible mystery scenarios. Yet without much connective tissue or steady pacing between them, the overall experience resembles a slideshow of postcards from Poirot’s travels rather than an edge-of-your-seat thriller about an apocalyptic global threat.

A Disservice to Poirot’s Greatness:

Part of the disappointment stems from how bizarrely uninvolved Poirot himself often is in the central spy dramatics, spending long stretches as a reactive bystander while more conventional spy story protagonists take center stage. While Christie was wise to utilize Hastings as a more active co-lead to balance Poirot’s inimitable cerebral calm, the resulting imbalance tilts too far toward garden variety spy hi-jinx and away from Poirot’s delightful battle of wits against criminal masterminds.

Fans expecting The Big Four to showcase Christie’s infamous trickster at peak form, dazzlingly separating the threads of a grand unifying scheme through his legendary “little grey cells,” will sadly be disappointed. All too often the vaunted detective is stuck traversing hostile foreign territories as part of inscrutable operations he only dimly comprehends. The Big Four itself is referenced as an abstraction for much of the book, reducing one of fiction’s most iconic villains to a fittingly cerebral but somewhat peripheral threat.

When Poirot does take centerstage and pit himself against his equally intellectual rivals like the nefarious Li Chang Yen, the story does recover its dramatic urgency and ingenuity. But those masterful qualities are drowned out amidst the barrage of disposable spy craft, like random kidnappings and rescues, that crowd the narrative. A novel that opened with such daring metafictional ambitions by centering the detective hero at the heart of a grander espionage conspiracy unfortunately bogs down in too many conventional genre trappings.

Diamonds in the Rough:

Which isn’t to say Christie’s inventive ambition with The Big Four was entirely squandered or not worth the venture. In between the fragmented travelogue format and missed opportunities, many truly ingenious sequences sparkle through to remind us why she remains the unchallenged Queen of Mystery fiction.

The introduction of the shadowy, seemingly omniscient mastermind Li Chang Yen immediately plants an indelible, deliciously archetypal villain in the vein of Fu Manchu, but infinitely more compelling through the unsettling opacity of his motives and machinations. By weaponizing the very concept of inscrutable exotic mystery against Western presumptions, Chang exemplifies how deftly Christie could subvert racial and political assumptions of her era through the power of imagination.

Other inspired sequences like Poirot and Hastings’ climactic deductions in the English countryside prove immensely satisfying in their paradoxical simplicity and stunning complexity, masterclasses in how to structure the most deceptively simple mystery scenarios into revelations that blind us with their brilliance in hindsight. The Queen of Mystery’s most celebrated skills remain blissfully intact amid the excesses of her experiment in melding spy and crime fiction.

In that regard, the novel represents a more ambitious miss for Christie, one that’s infinitely more admirable and substantial than the forgettable successes that often typify genre fiction. Even in its dated flaws and missteps, this amusingly overstuffed conspiratorial lark brims over with delirious imagination and clever gambits in its best moments.

The Final Verdict:

Does The Big Four rank among the essential must-read Poirot novels or even Agatha Christie’s canon of truly iconic detective tales? Not quite. Even when considering the cultural context and era it was published in, the storyline feels far too scattered and indulgent of its disparate elements, lacking the control and cohesion of Christie’s very finest mystery plotting. The grand MacGuffin at its core, the elaborate syndicate of geniuses manipulating global events from the shadows, seduces our imaginations with its operatic grandeur. But the delivery never lives up to its tantalizing promise.

And yet, while ultimately a disjointed experiment too enamored with its central espionage gimmick to cohere into a transcendent whole, The Big Four reminds us of the boundless creativity and daring that made Christie an unstoppable innovator in the Golden Age mystery genre. With this loose, baggy monster of a novel, you can sense her trying to push the envelope in new directions, challenging herself as a storyteller to upend her own cherished formulas and see just how far she could bend them into new permutations.

In that spirit of ceaseless experimentation and willingness to risk failure in pursuit of surprising her audience, Christie produced something undeniably messy and flawed here, but also strangely compelling in its sheer narrative ambition and delirious piling on of adventure, incident, and shocking twists. This is a minor work of the mystery canon, but the definition of a “fascinating failure” bursting with boundless imagination and addictive bursts of Christie’s signature genius for subversive deception, exotic atmosphere, and psychological insight. For those reasons, The Big Four remains an engrossing detour for die-hard fans to experience the Grand Dame pushing herself to boldly disruptive new frontiers.