Agatha Christie’s Poirot: Elephants Can Remember

Publicity still from Elephants Can Remember, season 13 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. David Suchet as Poirot; Zoë Wanamaker as crime writer Ariadne Oliver.

“Elephants can remember, but we are human beings and mercifully human beings can forget.” Agatha Christie, Elephants Can Remember

I complained some months back that Agatha Christie’s Elephants Can Remember was unreadable. It was published in 1972, among Christie’s final books, and it was the last one to feature the excitable Ariadne Oliver as a character; the crime writer investigates alongside Hercule Poirot.

But the TV adaptation with David Suchet is perfectably watchable and rather fun for fans of the Mission Impossible franchise: Vanessa Kirby plays Oliver’s goddaughter, Celia, who is engaged to be married to a gifted young pianist who is financially dependent on his family.

There’s a roadblock to their happiness. Her fiancé’s mother (the wonderful Greta Scacchi) is worried about the circumstances surrounding Celia’s parents’ deaths. They were found 12 years earlier, both shot, with a nearby revolver bearing only their own fingerprints.

A double suicide?

A murder-suicide?

The mother-in-law to be would like this resolved, or she’ll withhold her endorsement of the marriage.

Ariadne Oliver does most of the investigating on her own while Poirot is looking into a more recent crime: the death of a famed psychiatrist whose son now runs the institute his father began decades earlier.

Both plots, which turn out to be intertwined, deal with aging and memory.

An academic study argued that the diminished vocabulary of Christie’s Elephants Can Remember suggests that the author herself was experiencing cognitive deterioration at the time she wrote the novel.

The “decline in the lexical richness” of her writing charted by the scholars is intriguing and aligns with some family suggestions that Christie was experiencing dementia-related memory loss during her last years of life.

These academic authors also point out that the novel is significantly shorter than most of its predecessors and that Christie may have been hampered by additional medical issues, including a broken hip, during the period when she was drafting Elephants.

It’s poignant to consider that even as Ariadne Oliver informs Poirot that she’s been fixated on the phrase “Elephants can remember” through a complex word and concept association because “the meringue got stuck in my teeth,” Christie may, herself, have been struggling with remembering.

Because Christie’s death was 50 years ago, 2026 is a big year for Agatha Christie celebrations and commemorations of all kinds.

Most of these are centred on her most famous creations.

Christie’s fans loved Poirot; they adored Miss Marple.

They kept wanting more, which made it challenging for Christie to branch out, although she did also publish a series of romance-focused novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. (Christie also managed to keep her authorial alter ego under wraps for much longer than contemporary authors have been able to do, perhaps because in a pre-computer era, there weren’t digital copies floating around.)