I’ve been trying to remember the name of this Hercule Poirot mystery with no success. Here’s the initial set-up: Poirot’s old friend Inspector Japp (at least I think it’s Japp) asks Poirot’s help on a special case. The case seems very ordinary - an old lady has been murdered and her tenant (a shifty drifter) has been arrested, charged & sentenced with the crime. It all seems like an open & shut case, since all the evidence seems to fit. But when the suspect protests his innocence, Japp can’t help but believe him. Decades of service in the police has given him a sharp instinct into when people are lying and when they aren’t, and Japp realizes that despite all the evidence, this man isn’t a killer.
Poirot investigates, and finds among the victim’s belongings some news clippings concerning five violent murder cases, and the perpetrators of those crimes. He forms a hypothesis that the victim discovered that someone she knew was one of those killers (or connected in some way to the murders). At a dinner party, Poirot makes an uncharacteristically brazen move by announcing to the assembled villagers that he’s icome to the village to investigate this crime, and shows off the five news clippings. One elderly lady seems to recognize a face in one of the photographs, but is closed-mouthed about it. Naturally, she gets bumped off soon afterwards.
The only other thing I can remember about it is that Ariadne Oliver makes a cameo appearance in it. She doesn’t have much at all to do with the mystery though. She only appears in a comic relief subplot where one of her books is going to be turned into a Hollywood movie, and the screenwriter vexes her by wanting to rewrite the whole story. (Curiously, the wikipedia entry on Mrs. Oliver lists “all” the books she appeared in, but none of them seem to fit the description of this book.)
Does this ring a bell with anybody?