True Crime Parallels to the Mysteries of Agatha Christie by Anne Powers

Author:Anne Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2020-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

“The Lernean Hydra”

Charles Oldfield had lost his wife to a chronic disease a year earlier. She had been older than he, and the rich partner in the marriage. Her customarily irritable behavior and habit of life had been exacerbated by long martyrdom to painful battles against the gastric disease that had finally killed her. But immediately after his wife’s death, a whispering campaign sprang up against Dr. Oldfield in his home town, the village of Market Loughborough; a campaign that seemed to intensify rather than abate as time passed. The physician fears that the frustratingly nebulous menace was about to explode into ­full-blown, open accusations to the authorities: accusations that he poisoned his wife for her money—and in order to wed another, younger woman. In desperation, the doctor goes to Poirot for help.

Gossip continues rife, and the hagridden Oldfield expects at any minute that the police will arrive at his door to charge him with murder. Poirot senses that the doctor is holding something back, and rightly surmises that there is another woman involved in the case. “The village gossip,” he tells Oldfield, “it is based always, always on the relations of the sexes…. It is because [the villagers] are convinced that the murder has been committed in order that the man may marry another woman that the talk grows and spreads” (Christie, “Lernean” 43). With evident reluctance Oldfield feels forced to reveal to Poirot a detail of his personal life that he would clearly have preferred to keep to himself: he is in love with his dispenser, Jean Moncrieffe, and the most damaging brunt of the gossip spitefully couples her name with his. Jean reciprocates the doctor’s affections, but the hate campaign has forced them to a bitter acknowledgment: they dare not go ahead with plans to wed, lest the marriage give their enemies an opening for jeopardizing their happiness—and their lives.

Poirot senses two significant points in the situation the doctor describes to him: an opportunity to perform one of the “twelve Labors of Hercules” that he has set for himself—and a real and purposeful malevolence toward Dr. Oldfield behind the crusade of rumors against him. Someone was deliberately and relentlessly trying not only to destroy the unfortunate doctor’s happiness, but the doctor himself as well.

Poirot accepts the troubling case. Like the terrifying, ­many-headed Hydra of Lake Lerna that Heracles (Roman equivalent Hercules) of Greek myth was commanded to destroy, the ­many-tongued monster of malicious gossip which Hercule Poirot had engaged himself to hunt down and demolish was nearly impossible to kill. The Hydra had been possessed of many heads; only one was the monster’s master engine. To strike it off was the only way to slay the beast; cutting off any but that one vulnerable head would only spawn two more writhing and venomous replacements in its stead.

When Poirot travels to Dr. Oldfield’s village to investigate, he finds a symbolically similar situation. The physician’s hidden nemesis had artfully bred a network of venom with as many heads as the mythological Hydra.

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