In today’s episode, Brook and Sarah discuss Miss Lemon and Colonel Race, two of Agatha Christie’s supporting characters.
Discussed and mentioned
Death on the Nile (1937) Agatha Christie
Cards on the Table (1936) Agatha Christie
The Man in the Brown Suit (1924) Agatha Christie
Death on the Nile (1978 film)
The Man in the Brown Suit (1989 adaptation)
Death on the Nile (2022 film)
Hickory Dickory Dock (1955) Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989-2013 series)
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Transcript
This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.
| Sarah | Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah. |
| Brook | And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery. |
| Sarah | Hi, Brook. |
| Brook | Hi Sarah. Today we’re going to talk about two more of Agatha Christie’s recurring characters. |
| Sarah | Yes, this is going to be very exciting. We’ve been working our way through many of the characters that Agatha Christie wrote about in her short stories and her novels. |
| Brook | That’s right. So today we’re going to talk about Colonel Race and Miss Lemon, and we’ll start with Colonel Race. Colonel Johnny Race is an ex-army officer and intelligence agent known for his calm, methodical approach and quiet authority. |
| Brook | He’s said to be independently wealthy, having inherited his fortune from a distant cousin named Sir Lawrence Erdsley. He’s described as being over 60, a tall, erect military figure with sunburnt face, float closely cropped iron gray hair, and shrewd dark eyes. |
| Brook | He’s an old acquaintance of Poirot with their friendship going back well before the events of Death on the Nile. |
| Brook | In that novel, race boards the Karnak along with the other passengers. After receiving word that a dangerous political agitator may be among the passengers. Remember, he is MI5. |
| Brook | When a murder takes place on board, he becomes Poirot’s trusted ally in the investigation. Though he isn’t as dazzlingly detective as the star sleuth, Race is steady, practical, and invaluable in organizing searches and interrogations on the ship. |
| Brook | Race plays a similar role in his books as some of the other official law enforcement officers we’ve highlighted in past episodes. And this contrast between the workaday cop and Poirot works really nicely in the stories. One difference though, is that, as I said, he’s an MI5 guy, not a Scotland Yard officer. |
| Brook | Race also appears in Cards on the Table, where both he and Miss Lemon, among others, join Poirot in investigating a murder committed during a bridge game. In total, he appears or is mentioned in eight novels. Across Christie’s works, Colonel Race stands out as this military mind who brings a touch of realism and strength to Poirot’s world of psychology and, shall we say, flair. |
| Brook | So, Sarah, I was thinking about Colonel Race and how really I don’t have a lot of memory of him in these stories, even though, you know, I’ve read or watched them. What about you? Like, is he a character that kind of sticks out to you? |
| Sarah | Not in the same way that Poirot or Miss Marple do. But I have read ah Death on the Nile and Man in the Brown Suit. So, I’ve certainly, encountered him in the the, you know, some of the books that I’ve read. |
| Brook | Right. I ah I definitely feel like he’s this sort of grounding, um like the establishment, right? And we we’ve talked about that when we discussed Japp or Battle. These ah you know, law enforcement guys that kind of ground things. And I was thinking about how um there are things that Poirot can’t do because he’s a civilian. |
| Brook | And then yet there are things that these military or law enforcement guys can’t do because they’re official. So the team up is really important, I think, in these stories. |
| Sarah | I think that’s right, Brook. |
| Brook | So, he has been seen on screen, ah but in screen adaptations, sometimes his role or his name changes a bit. He appears unchanged in the 1978 Death on the Nile version, and he is portrayed by actor David Niven. Um, then in 1989, he appears in an adaptation of The Man in the Brown Suit. |
| Brook | This is a Warner Brothers production, and he’s renamed Gordon Race, and ah he’s portrayed by Ken Howard. And in this ah version, Race is actually a CIA agent, which I found interesting. |
| Sarah | Mm-hmm. |
| Brook | But otherwise, the portrayal is pretty close to the original. ah He also, for example, was known to have inherited that fortune from John Erdsley. So, you know, a pretty similar character there. |
| Brook | Perhaps one of the more interesting adaptations and portrayals is Russell Brand playing Colonel Race in the 2022 Kenneth Branagh version of Death on the Nile. |
| Brook | Um I, for one, was not a big fan of Russell Brand as Colonel Race. What did you think of that one, Sarah? |
| Sarah | You know, Brook, it’s been a while since I’ve seen that version of Death on the Nile. So I actually don’t remember Russell Brand as Race. |
| Brook | Well, I will have to admit myself that when I was doing the research and I, that, you know, jogged my memory and I went back to look at some some stills of the movie and I had kind of forgotten. But he doesn’t look over 60, does not strike a military figure, does not have iron gray hair. Like even just the way he was styled as a character, I don’t think really brought in the Race. |
| Sarah | Yeah, he doesn’t have the gravitas that I would associate with that character. |
| Brook | That’s an excellent word. Excellent word. |
| Brook | But we have seen Colonel Race many times on screen thanks to the fact that he’s always beside Poirot, and Poirot has, of course, been seen on television through David Suchet many times. And so I think… versus some of the other lesser-known recurring characters we’ve discussed who have either completely gone away or been replaced by other Christie characters, Colonel Johnny Race does endure. |
| Sarah | I think that’s good because as you say, he is he is an important character for Poirot. So, I’m glad that he continues to exist in those adaptations. |
| Brook | So next we’ll turn our attention to Miss Felicity Lemon. And she is Poirot’s middle-aged secretary. She’s highly efficient with near-perfect organizational skills and a complete lack of sentimentality. Poirot even once described her as unbelievably ugly and incredibly efficient, which I think is both awful, however quite Poirot-like. |
| Brook | Her greatest ambition is to create the perfect filing system, and this becomes a running joke in the stories, highlighting her love of order and precision. On several occasions, she even joins Perot in his investigations or follows up on clues at his request, which I thought was really interesting. |
| Brook | Like many of Christie’s side characters, we don’t know much about Miss Lemon’s background. We’re told she grew up in Croydon Heath and has a widowed sister, Mrs. Hubbard. And Mrs. Hubbard appears in Hickory Dickory Dock. ah We learn that she’s the director of a student hostel. But this Mrs. Hubbard is not to be confused with the American Mrs. Hubbard, who is a passenger on the Orient Express. |
| Brook | Miss Lemon isn’t defined by romance, beauty, or emotion. She’s plain, businesslike, and completely dedicated to her work. While other female characters in Christie’s stories ah might flirt or want to fall in love or act on impulse, Miss Lemon’s interests are filing systems, organization, and efficiency, which I think that this makes her a very endearing character. And it also makes her stand out in Christie’s world. |
| Brook | In a more complimentary comment, Poirot also tells us that she is a perfect machine. Another interesting detail is that Miss Lemon also worked for Parker Pyne, and we learned about him as the happiness detective. You can listen to our episode on Parker Pyne. It’s unclear whether her job with him came before she ever began working for Poirot during one of his many retirements, but either way, it’s a nice connection between two corners of Christie’s world. |
| Brook | Miss Lemon appears in four Poirot novels as well as several short stories and three Parker Pyne stories. |
| Sarah | Thanks for that, Brook. I really like that she interacts with both Poirot and Parker Pyne. And I think that that speaks to something that we’ve spoken about previously, this Christie-verse that she clearly was creating. |
| Brook | Yes, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole because I realized this week that um these two characters, Race and Lemon, are perfect examples of that. Both worked with Poirot. Both knew mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver. And through Oliver, there’s a connection to the Miss Marple world. Miss Lemon also links Poirot’s story to Parker Pyne, as you just said. And these little subtle overlaps are just little Easter eggs to find. And I think you’re right. It just makes it all the more rich. |
| Sarah | Well, and it… speaks to how important these minor characters are to the world that Agatha Christie is building, right? Because we’ve talked before about that Poirot and Miss Marple never appear in the same story. |
| Sarah | um But so many of the people that they encounter do cross over. I do think it’s interesting that Christie never did put Miss Marple and Poirot together. Right and she it was It was just these side characters that that had those encounters. |
| Brook | I do too, Sarah. And, uh, I think your point is perfect about how this really shows that these characters who maybe don’t have a lot of time on the page or a lot of lines, were very important to her or otherwise, you know, sometimes she gets blamed for having cardboard characters or, you know, placeholder characters. And clearly these characters meant more to her than that, because as you said, they all kind of tie the whole world. |
| Brook | Miss Lemon also appears in some screen adaptations. Pauline Moran portrays her in Agatha Christie’s Poirot and she made Miss Lemon quite memorable on screen. She’s a little softer than maybe Miss Lemon in the books, but then Angela Easterling played her ah in the Agatha Christie hour and probably closer to the text. More ah exact and precise and lacking sentimentality. |
| iSarah | Well, and the way you describe her, it’s certainly clear why Poirot would have ah enjoyed having her work for him because, you know, you can use those words to describe him as well. |
| Brook | Precisely. Exactly what I was thinking. Of course, he would love a perfect machine. And there are some suggestions through the fandom that Miss Lemon was actually in love with Poirot. Like she had this big crush on him. And I think that I could see that as well because they seemed like they were very similar type people. |
| Brook | And similarly to what I said about Colonel Race, I don’t think that Miss Lemon ever really stuck out to me. I mean, she definitely is a fun character in that she has that obsession with filing and things like that. But I don’t think she stuck with me too much until really researching her this week. And I came to think about what a great character she would be to have a spinoff. |
| Brook | um She’s very closely tied to the canon, but she’s not fleshed out so much that an author couldn’t take her and kind of run with it. And can’t you see her, Sarah, working as a sleuth on her own, solving mysteries and working to refine that perfect filing system? |
| Sarah | Brook, I love this idea so much. |
| Brook | I know I’m getting a little obsessed with it, to be honest. |
| Sarah | And it would be so fun to just, yeah, see this expansion of the Christie world. Ariadne Oliver can pop in. |
| Brook | Oh, yes. |
| Sarah | Parker Pyne could pop in. Race. Yeah, I think that this is a fantastic idea. |
| Brook | I do too. |
| Sarah | Brook, thank you for sharing what you’ve learned about these two minor but very important characters in the Christie world. |
| Brook | It was my pleasure, Sarah, as always. And thank you, listeners, for joining us today on Clued in Mystery. Until next time, I’m Brook. |
| Sarah | And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery. |
