London Fiction – The Adventure of the Cheap Flat

Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot short story from the 1920s reveals, among other things, that flat-hunting in the capital has never been straightforward

I’ve set myself the task for 2024 of reading and then writing about 25 pieces of London fiction I haven’t read before. This is number 17 in the endearingly ramshackle series.

I continue to cheat a bit in this project by including very short stories, which are helping me get up to speed. September is nearly over and you know how the autumn months fly by. It’s my self-inflicted target and I’ll fiddle the way I hit it if I want to. And surely an Agatha Christie tale inspired by the maddening and expensive business of renting a London flat merits inclusion.

The Adventure of The Cheap Flat, first published in The Sketch magazine in 1923, begins in the dwelling of Gerald Parker, a friend of Captain Arthur Hastings, sidekick and confidant of Christie’s detective hero, Hercule Poirot, and also the story’s narrator.

“The talk fell, as it was bound to sooner or later wherever Parker found himself, on the subject of house-hunting in London,” Hastings informs us. His host was a connoisseur: “It was sheer love of the sport that actuated him, and not a desire to make money at it.”

Another guest, whom Hastings takes a shine to, is a Mrs Stella Robinson, accompanied by her husband. She reveals that they have “at last” had found a flat in a big handsome block called Montagu Mansions, “just off Knightsbridge” for the “dirt cheap” price of £80 a year. “It’s a blinking miracle,” Parker exclaims.

Not so fast. Hastings relates the conversation to Poirot, who in no time has visited letting agents in Brompton Road and rented a flat in the same building two floors above. Soon, he and Hastings are – as you do – lowering themselves in a coal lift to the Robinsons’ back door and fixing it so they can later let themselves in.

By this means they capture an Italian crook from New York who breaks into the place seeking revenge for a murder (“who was it dat croaked Luigi Valdarno?”). The three of them then take a taxi to an address in St John’s Wood, “a small house standing back off the road”, where the ultimate villain is revealed, along with the explanation for Ms Robinson and her spouse getting their bargain.

It’s an ingenious, skilfully-told and enjoyable silly bit of work by an extraordinary writer whose stage play, The Mousetrap, opened in the West End in 1952 and is still going strong, interrupted only by the pandemic. A small highlight is Hastings making a Sherlock Holmes wisecrack.

The London of The Adventure of the Cheap Flat is much the same interwar city this series has previously encountered through the words of Jean Rhys and George Orwell. It is, as you would expect, more plot and detection than social observation, but nonetheless opens a window on the capital of its era, not least by showing us that renting is an eternal London nightmare, one that even the well-to-do had to endure (the Robinsons have a maid) in the days when private renting was very much the norm.

Was there such a building as Montagu Mansions at the time Christie penned her tale? Not as far as I know. But there is a whole street going by that name in Marylebone, a name I assume has a connection with the first Duke of Montagu, whose grand Bloomsbury pile became the first home of the British Museum. Any link with Christie’s creation? That is a mystery, at least to me. If anyone can solve it, drop me a line.

John Vane is a pen name I use for London fiction and sketches. Under my real name, Dave Hill, I am editor and publisher of the journalism website On London. I also publish a personal Substack. Buy my John Vane novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. The Adventure of the Cheap Flat is available in the collection Poirot Investigates or individually for Kindle. It was adapted for television in 1990 (see picture).