"When the film director Rian Johnson was a child, he picked up the final book that Agatha Christie published before her death, in 1976: "Curtain: Poirot's Last Case." The novel was sitting on a shelf in his grandparents' sprawling home, in Denver. It had a moody black cover that featured an illustration of the mustachioed detective Hercule Poirot. "It felt very adult," Johnson told me recently. "Very creepy.""
"The book was not only a dynamite mystery; it also represented a kind of magic trick. Although it was published at the end of Christie's life, she wrote the manuscript in the middle of her career, in the nineteen-forties. Then, in a twist worthy of Poirot, she sealed it away in a bank vault for thirty years, insuring that it was kept secret. As her popularity waned, she suddenly produced-voilà!-a book written at the height of her powers."
"Soon, he was bingeing Christie novels two or three at a time. He once walked into a fire hydrant while reading one. In Los Angeles, earlier this year, Johnson's normally mild countenance grew animated as he recounted the plot of "Curtain." "Do you want it spoiled?" he asked. "Do you really?" We were sitting in the sunlit offices of his production company, T-Street, surrounded by shelves filled with trinkets: a hollow Bible concealing a cigar, an engraved knife."
As a child Rian Johnson found Agatha Christie’s Curtain: Poirot's Last Case on a grandparents’ shelf and found it adult and very creepy. The novel unfolds at a grand country house where guests suffer seemingly unrelated fatal mishaps. Christie wrote the manuscript in the 1940s then sealed it in a bank vault for thirty years, later publishing it in 1976 as a rediscovered work. The concealment created an unexpected late triumph written at her creative height. Johnson began binge-reading Christie’s novels, at times distracted while walking, and later animatedly recalled Curtain while seated in his T‑Street production offices surrounded by curios.
Read at The New Yorker
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