Mrs McGinty's Dead by Agatha Christie * * *

I read Mrs McGinty's Dead by Agatha Christie as the February pick for my 2026 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge, and I was genuinely excited going in. It is a Poirot novel, and unlike some of the earlier ones, he is present from the very beginning and remains at the centre of the story. No dramatic last chapter entrance. No five minute cameo. This is Poirot throughout.

And yet… it left me oddly unmoved.

The premise is simple and strong. An elderly charwoman, Mrs McGinty, is brutally murdered in a small English village. Her lodger has already been tried and sentenced to death. The case is, officially, closed. But Superintendent Spence, the very man who oversaw the investigation, is uneasy. Not because of a missing clue or a procedural mistake, but simply because he does not believe the condemned man is a killer. That instinct alone sends Poirot, bored and restless in retirement, into the village to dig up the truth.

It is a classic Christie setup: a tight community, polite façades, money that seems too small to kill for, secrets that turn out to be anything but small.

Poirot installs himself in a dreadful guesthouse run by Mrs Summerhayes, a woman who cannot cook, cannot organise, and seems permanently overwhelmed by the very concept of housekeeping. The breakfast eggs are underdone, the tea is lukewarm, the domestic chaos is constant. These sections are actually very funny. Christie leans into the absurdity of village life and gives Poirot plenty of opportunities to bristle with polite indignation.

The real highlight, though, is Ariadne Oliver. She sweeps into the story in all her eccentric glory, complaining about adaptations of her detective Sven Hjerson and the insistence that he be turned into a dashing romantic hero. In her books, he is middle aged and cerebral. On stage, they want him young, handsome, and athletic.

It is impossible not to see Christie herself behind those lines.

There is something sharp and almost weary in those passages, a sense that she is defending Poirot from being reshaped into something he is not. Reading that, I could not help thinking about modern adaptations that turn him into a gun wielding action hero. Christie’s irritation feels timeless. Through Ariadne, she makes her point clearly: clever does not need to be dashing, intelligence does not need to sprint, and not all main characters need a love interest.

As for the mystery itself, it is solid but not electric. I did not guess the killer, which usually earns high marks from me. And yet the reveal did not land with the force I expected. Competent. Neatly constructed. But not unforgettable.

The village characters are serviceable, though none of them truly linger in the mind. Interestingly, as is often the case with Christie, the modern women are more vivid than many of the male figures orbiting the plot. There is wit in Ariadne Oliver, independence, flashes of personality that feel more alive than some of the more traditional authority figures. It makes me wish, once again, that Christie had written more novels centred entirely on one of those modern women. She clearly could have.

In the end, I gave it three stars. It is a fine little mystery. It works. The structure is clean, the solution makes sense, the justice system is corrected before the worst can happen.

But it did not thrill me. It did not burrow under my skin. What stayed with me most was not the murder, but Ariadne Oliver grumbling about artistic integrity.

And perhaps that says everything.