The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Murder on the Links
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A fellow traveller on the Calais express and a letter signed ‘Bella’
I believe that a well-known anecdote exists to the effect that a young writer, determined to make the commencement of his story forcible and original enough to catch and rivet the attention of the most blasé of editors, penned the following sentence:
“ ‘Hell!’ said the Duchess.”
Strangely enough, this tale of mine opens in much the same fashion. Only the lady who gave utterance to the exclamation was not a Duchess!
The preview stops after the opening of Chapter 1. The complete text is in the free download below.
Download Full EPUB1923
~65,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 3.6 hours
Hercule Poirot, book 2
Merlinville-sur-Mer, near Calais, France
28 chapters in 12 groups
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.54 MB (EPUB) · 0.61 MB (AZW3) · 0.50 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #58866
The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie’s second Poirot novel, published in 1923, and the book that sends her detective out of England. Paul Renauld, a Canadian who has made a fortune abroad, is found stabbed and buried in a shallow grave beside the golf links at Merlinville-sur-Mer, near Calais, while his wife is left bound and gagged in the villa. Poirot and Hastings cross the Channel to help, and find a French examining magistrate, a rival detective from Paris, a love letter signed Bella, and a household that is not telling the truth about the night of the murder.
It is also the most French of the early Poirot books: a villa on the Channel coast, a commissaire and a juge d’instruction, and a detective from the Sûreté who treats Poirot as a relic. Christie uses the case to mock the thriller conventions of her day — masked men, a secret society, a mysterious South American city — and then to replace them with patient arithmetic about time and money. The Murder on the Links remains the novel in which Hastings falls in love, Poirot loses his temper, and the fairest clue is a stopped wristwatch. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #58866.
The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie: Summary, Characters & Themes
This is a summary and analysis of Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Links, her second Poirot novel and the third book she published. Paul Renauld, a Canadian who has grown rich in South America, lives at the Villa Geneviève outside the resort town of Merlinville-sur-Mer, a few miles south of Calais. One morning in June his wife is found bound and gagged in her bedroom, and his body is found face down in a grave dug a few yards beyond the garden wall, beside the golf links. Poirot, summoned by a letter that reached him too late, crosses from London with Hastings and agrees to stay. The local police, the examining magistrate and a celebrated detective from Paris all have theories, and none of them fits the grave. The letter spoke of a secret and named a South American city.
The case has more pieces than the household can account for: a love letter signed Bella found in an overcoat pocket, a wristwatch that does not agree with the clock, a spade and a pair of gardening gloves borrowed from a shed, and a second body in that same shed, dead two days before anyone thought to look. Each object is produced in the order the police notice it, and each is explained twice, once by the prosecution and once by Poirot. Around them Christie arranges a French investigation rather than an English one: a commissaire who wants a confession, a juge d’instruction who wants a story that holds, and Giraud of the Sûreté, who finds footprints by the dozen and understands none of them. Hastings, meanwhile, is falling in love with a girl he met on the train, and his judgment is about to fail him in a different way.
Christie was thirty-two when The Murder on the Links appeared, with two novels behind her and a reputation still mostly among magazine readers. She had learned plotting from the detective stories she read and from her work in a hospital dispensary at Torquay, and she knew the Channel coast from holidays and crossings. What she does here is deliberately French: the examining magistrate, the commissaire, the rival detective, the café where the case is discussed within earshot of the waiter. The French procedure also gives her a clock, and she uses it without mercy. The result is a Poirot novel with a road and a timetable instead of a drawing room, and it fixed the pattern her readers would expect for the next forty years: a closed circle of suspects, an outsider who explains them, and a solution that turns on evidence nobody weighed.
The book is also funnier than its reputation suggests. Giraud is a parody of the scientific detective, all tweezers and contempt; the examining magistrate is a pompous, decent man; Hastings is at his most Victorian and most wrong. Christie sends up the thriller furniture of the day — masked men, a secret society, a coded summons to South America — and then insists on arithmetic: the time of death, the last train, the length of a coat, the money paid into a bank. Readers who enjoy Poirot among the English should go on to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where the same method is applied to a village; readers who want the beginning should start with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the case that made him. The Big Four shows what happened when Christie tried to turn him into a conspiracy novel.
This edition follows the Project Gutenberg #58866 transcription, which keeps the twenty-eight numbered chapters and their titles exactly as the 1923 printing gives them. That matters here: the titles are part of the book’s manner, from ‘A Fellow Traveller’ to ‘Journey’s End’, and they tell a first-time reader nothing about the solution. The titles are Christie’s own, and the last of them is a promise the book keeps. Spelling and punctuation are the transcription’s; Poirot’s French, the servants’ idiom and Hastings’s stiff colloquialisms are left as they stand. The summaries below walk through the novel in twelve groups and keep the final explanation to themselves, so the last pages are left to the reader. Word count, reading time and file sizes are measured from the files on this page, and all three downloads carry the same complete text, chapter for chapter.
Historical Context
By 1923 the detective novel was a settled form with a settled audience, and Christie wrote this one against the conventions rather than inside them. The French setting lets her change the machinery: no inspector from Scotland Yard but a commissaire of police, an examining magistrate who builds the case before trial, and a detective from the Sûreté whose reputation rests on fingerprints and footprints. The contrast is the joke and the argument. Poirot, a Belgian refugee with no official standing, works by conversation and arithmetic; Giraud, the professional, works by tweezers and publicity. English readers in 1923 knew the French system mostly from newspaper reports of celebrated trials, and Christie uses that half-knowledge: a juge d’instruction can hold a man, a commissaire can leak, and a case can be lost before it reaches a court.
The props are the decade’s. The golf links at Merlinville are new, cut out of the cliff for the resort trade that filled the Channel coast between the wars; the villa with its shutters and its gravel drive belongs to a generation of English money in France. The motor car is a luxury with a hired chauffeur, the cross-Channel boat is the ordinary way to Calais, and the wristwatch is new enough that a stopped one is worth a chapter. Beside them Christie puts the older apparatus of the French police — the whitewashed outline round a grave, the glass jar holding a dagger, the gardien on the gate. And behind the plot sits the Paris murder trial of twenty years before, reported in the papers as a society scandal, with a widow, a young lawyer and a missing man.
Christie published the novel in 1923, the year she turned thirty-three, with a small daughter and a career that had only just begun to pay. She had written it, like the two books before it, without much fuss, and its success confirmed what the first two had suggested: that Poirot could carry a series, and that a detective story could be built as precisely as a watch. The reviews were good and the sales better; the book appeared in London and New York in the same year, and it is the first of her novels to be set mainly outside England. Nothing in it predicts the disappearance and the divorce that would fill her own headlines a few years later, but the coolness of the telling is already there.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Hercule Poirot: A short Belgian with an egg-shaped head, a waxed moustache and a coat that is always too tight, retired from the Brussels police and now sharing rooms with Hastings in London. He is vain, courteous and stubborn, and he takes the case because a letter asked for help and because a rival has insulted him. His method is a list: every person, every time, every coat. He bets Giraud five hundred francs that he will find the answer first, and he means to collect.
- Captain Arthur Hastings: The narrator, a retired army captain with a small private income, a taste for golf and a very English set of assumptions about women, foreigners and class. He worships Poirot and understands him about half the time, which makes him a useful pair of eyes and a poor witness. He falls in love at first sight with a girl on the Calais express, meets her again at the villa, and spends the second half of the book trying to protect her from a case he cannot see clearly.
- Detective Giraud: A detective of the Paris Sûreté, sent to Merlinville because the murder looks like a professional job, and everything Poirot is not: young, vain, athletic, admired by the press. He measures footprints, collects cigarette ends and announces that he knows everything. Christie uses him to parody the scientific detective of the day, and his certainty is the most reliable sign in the book that the obvious answer is wrong. His contempt for Poirot is returned with interest.
- Monsieur Hautet: The examining magistrate, a large, excitable, well-meaning man who conducts the case in the villa’s salon and believes that a crime should have a motive, a suspect and a confession. He is decent, easily impressed and not stupid, but he wants a story that holds together before he wants the truth. His politeness to Poirot and his irritation with Giraud are two of the book’s quieter jokes, and his courtroom, when it comes, is an ordinary room with an extraordinary man in it.
- Madame Daubreuil: The widow next door at the Villa Marguerite, a handsome woman in black with a white collar and a manner that is either grief or calculation. The police cannot place her: she visits the Renaulds in the evening, she has money in the bank, and her daughter Marthe is the girl Jack Renauld wants to marry. Poirot notices that she is never surprised, which is not the same as being innocent. Her past is the hinge on which the whole case turns.
- Dulcie Duveen: A young American acrobat travelling under the stage name Cinderella, met on the Calais express and met again outside the villa. She is quick, rude, funny and physically fearless, and she treats a murder as the best entertainment in Merlinville. Hastings is shocked by her and then in love with her. She has a sister in the same line of work, and the novel’s last surprise is how much that sister matters.
Core Literary Themes
- Method against intuition: The novel sets two kinds of detective against each other and lets the reader watch. Giraud is the modern professional: he photographs footprints, bags cigarette ends, works from the outside in, and is certain within a day. Poirot is the old-fashioned observer: he measures a coat, notices a wristwatch, asks why a man would dress to go nowhere, and refuses to move until the facts are arranged. Christie does not pretend that science is useless; she shows that it can be thorough and still wrong. The case is solved by arithmetic and psychology, and the man with the tweezers is left with a pile of correctly collected evidence and no story.
- Time, timetables and the alibi: Almost every important clue is a question of time. Death happened between ten and seven hours before the body was examined, but the widow’s story fixes it two hours later; the last train left Merlinville at seventeen minutes past twelve; the wristwatch stopped, or did not; the boat sails at five. Christie builds the plot the way a railway timetable is built, and the reader is invited to check the connections. The alibi is the book’s engine and its subject: what a person can prove, what a person can be made to seem to have proved, and how a single hour of invention can hold for twenty chapters.
- Money, wills and the marriage market: Renauld is a millionaire several times over, and the plot turns on what happens to his money: a will altered a fortnight before the murder, a fortune settled on a wife, a son who will inherit half if he marries the right girl. The Daubreuils live quietly next door with an income nobody can explain, and the blackmail that pays for it is treated as a business arrangement rather than a sin. Christie is exact about sums — four thousand in two months, five hundred francs, the price of a car and a chauffeur’s holiday — because in this book money is motive, evidence and motive again.
- The thriller parodied: Christie had read the shockers of her day, and she lifts their furniture deliberately: masked men who bind a woman and demand a secret, a summons to Santiago, a conspiracy reaching from Paris to South America, a master criminal with a taste for disguises. Then she has Poirot dismiss the whole apparatus as a story invented by someone who read the same books. The joke is affectionate and structural. By making the melodrama a lie, she clears the ground for a quieter and more frightening explanation, and she teaches the reader not to trust the genre’s own clichés — a lesson her later books would use again and again.
- Narration, class and the unreliable witness: Hastings tells the story, and his assumptions are as important as his observations. He judges the girl on the train by her accent and her lipstick, he decides that a foreign detective is comic, and he is sure that a lady does not lie. Christie lets him report accurately and interpret badly, so the reader sees the clues and inherits the prejudices. The novel is a study in how a decent witness can be wrong: not because he withholds, as in some of her later books, but because he has already decided what kind of person commits a murder and what kind of person cannot.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Murder on the Links?
Because the case can be checked. The times are given, the grave is measured against the garden wall, the coat is too long for the man who wore it, and the last train leaves at a printed hour. Read the book once for the story and once more for the arithmetic, and the second reading is the better one: the small sentences that seemed like atmosphere turn out to be evidence. The text here is complete, with all twenty-eight chapters in order and the chapter titles as Christie wrote them.
The files are built for reading rather than archiving: a working table of contents, chapter breaks that survive a change of font, no page images and no scanning errors. Poirot’s French, the servants’ idiom and the 1923 punctuation are left alone, italicised titles stay italic, and the paragraphing follows the book. The same text opens on a phone, a Kindle, a Kobo or an old e-ink reader, and nothing is locked: no account, no sample chapter, no email address, no conversion.
Read it beside this page rather than instead of it. The summary, the character notes and the context above are meant to be useful before and after the novel, not to replace the last chapters; the chapter notes stop at the door of the final explanation. If you already know the answer, the second reading is the interesting one, because the fair-play clue is easier to admire when you are watching for it. If you do not, avoid the introductions, and do not read the last page first.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #58866, the source used for this edition, transcribed from the 1923 text and checked against the chapter divisions of the printing, with all twenty-eight titles kept and none invented.
- Complete twenty-eight-chapter text No abridgement, no modernised spelling and no silent rewriting; the novel as the transcription gives it, from the letter read at breakfast to the last line in the garden at Merlinville, with the French, the servants’ idiom and the punctuation of the period intact.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One download per format, so the book opens on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and every other reader without conversion, with a table of contents that works on all of them, including older devices that dislike nested navigation.
- Free and DRM-free Public domain in the United States, with no account, no sample chapter and no lock on the file; download it once and it is yours to keep, to move between devices and to reread, with nothing to renew and nothing to lose.
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Big Four — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
Twenty-eight numbered chapters, each with its own title, each short enough to read in a sitting. These twelve summaries follow the book in order, from the letter that reaches Poirot at breakfast to the last morning in the garden at Merlinville.
- Chapters 1–2: On the Calais express Hastings shares a carriage with a young American acrobat who calls herself Cinderella and refuses to give her real name. Back in London, Poirot has a letter from a Canadian named Renauld at Merlinville-sur-Mer, asking for a detective and mentioning a secret; the last line is a plea. They cross at once, drive out to the Villa Geneviève, and are met at the gate by the news that their client was murdered that morning. At the Villa Marguerite they pass a girl with anxious eyes, and Poirot remembers her face.
- Chapters 3–4: At the villa the police are already at work. Madame Renauld has been found bound and gagged; her husband’s body lies face down in a freshly dug grave just outside the garden, beside the golf links. She tells of two masked men who demanded a secret. The examining magistrate, Hautet, and the commissaire, Bex, take Poirot through the evidence, and Giraud of the Paris Sûreté produces a love letter signed Bella, found in the dead man’s overcoat. Poirot notes that the grave is a man’s work and that the letter names no one.
- Chapters 5–6: Madame Renauld repeats her story: two men, a gag, rope, a demand for a secret, her husband dressing himself while they waited. Poirot is not convinced. He notices that the bedside clock and her wristwatch disagree, and that a woman who has been tied all night is strangely composed. Then the party walks out to the grave, where Giraud has found a spade, a pair of gardening gloves and footprints in a flower-bed. The body was stabbed in the back and buried face down. Poirot says the footprints matter more than the police think.
- Chapters 7–8: Poirot and Hautet call at the Villa Marguerite and meet Madame Daubreuil, a widow in black who answers questions without ever being surprised, and her daughter Marthe, who is beautiful and anxious. Poirot warns Hastings off Marthe and refuses to explain why. Next day Hastings, showing Cinderella the sights of the case, takes her into the shed and lifts the sheet from a body the police have just found there. She faints. He revives her with brandy, walks her home through the hot white afternoon, and is already in serious trouble.
- Chapters 9–10: Giraud works the garden and the shed, collecting footprints, a cigarette end, a match and the gardener’s gloves, and announces that he knows everything. Poirot asks why three strangers should arrive without weapons or a spade and find both waiting for them. Then Gabriel Stonor, Renauld’s English secretary, arrives from London and gives the case a different shape: Renauld had been paying large sums to Madame Daubreuil, and had made a new will a fortnight before his death, leaving control of the fortune to his wife. Stonor is astonished by the sums and by the will.
- Chapters 11–12: Jack Renauld, the son, walks in from Cherbourg, where he should have sailed for South America; a telegram ordered him to Buenos Aires instead. He admits quarrelling with his father over Marthe Daubreuil, and reads the letter signed Bella without recognising it. In the locked shed the dagger has vanished from its jar. Poirot measures Jack’s overcoat in the hall and says nothing. Out on the road he explains his real discovery: the time of death is wrong by two hours, which gives anyone leaving by the 12.17 train an alibi.
- Chapters 13–14: Over lunch Poirot teases Hastings about the two girls and advises him to keep his word. The teasing ends when a waiter reports that a man has been found stabbed in the shed. The second body is middle-aged, swarthy, well dressed and has been dead at least two days; the dagger in the wound was stolen from the villa the day before, and a woman’s long black hair is coiled round its hilt. Giraud reads the scene as a woman’s crime. Poirot notices that the man was laid out neatly, as if posed.
- Chapters 15–16: A newspaper cutting shown by Giraud carries the photograph of a woman Hastings has seen before: Madame Daubreuil, twenty years younger and then called Madame Beroldy. He remembers the case. In Paris, Arnold Beroldy was found stabbed in his flat; his wife told a story of masked men and political secrets; her young lover, Georges Conneau, disappeared; she was tried amid enormous publicity and acquitted, inheriting the fortune. Poirot and Hastings set the old trial beside the new murder: the same story, the same kind of lie, and a man who vanished twenty years ago.
- Chapters 17–18: Poirot argues that the case contains two crimes, not one, and that the stories of masked men have been borrowed from the Beroldy trial. At the villa Marthe tells him she saw Renauld quarrelling in the garden with a tramp a few days before the murder, and Poirot believes her, though her story is more useful to him than she knows. Searching Jack’s room, he finds a photograph inscribed ‘With love from Bella’. Then Giraud, who has been watching the house, arrests Jack Renauld as he tries to leave, and the case against the son looks complete.
- Chapters 19–21: Hastings works out that Georges Conneau may still be alive and may be the tramp in the shed; Poirot tells him he has the right facts and the wrong man. In a long reconstruction he lays out the chronology: the quarrel over Marthe, the new will, the letter to Poirot, the telegram to Jack, the chauffeur’s holiday, the visit from a woman. The letter signed Bella was written to Jack, not to his father. The tramp was killed to provide a body, and the man buried as Paul Renauld had planned his own death. Then Poirot shows Hastings the photograph, and it is Cinderella’s face.
- Chapters 22–24: Hastings realises that the girl he loves is the Bella of the letters, and that Poirot means to find her. He says nothing, crosses to England with him, and then keeps the secret through a day of quarrelling and a night of worry: Bella must be protected, and Jack must be saved. In Saint-Omer they visit the prison, where Jack will not explain himself, and then the Villa Marguerite, where Marthe kneels and begs Poirot to save the boy she loves. Poirot asks about the daggers and is told there were three.
- Chapters 25–28: At the examination Jack refuses to say where he was, and a veiled woman rises in court to confess to the murder: Bella Duveen, giving herself up to save him. A letter from Dulcie tells Hastings the truth about the two sisters. Jack then describes the night: a cry, a grave, a figure he took for Bella, and his own silence to shield her. Poirot sets a trap at the villa, and the last chapters explain the Beroldy case, the substitute body and the money behind the killing. The book ends in a garden, with an engagement.
The Murder on the Links: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Detective & Mystery Classics · The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
