Beginnings and endings

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/agatha_christie.html

 "Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it." - Agatha Christie

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/agatha_christie.html

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/agatha_christie.html

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/agatha_christie.html

Here I have an old book, once a book of the month in fact, released in June 1976. Agatha Christie's Curtain: Hercule Poirot's last case. The book contains an added cover which I'm about to throw in the trash bin because of its terrible condition, well, after I've written here what it says to make me remember this for inspirational material, if not anything else. I'm a fan of her Hercule Poirot stories and it's interesting to know facts about her. By the way as I'm planning to go to a writing course in the future, I'll be sure to remember Christie's quote about giving out advices.

Agatha Christie wrote her first crime-detective novel called 'Styles's case' in 1920. In that book she introduced the readers to a small retired belgian man, the master detective Hercule Poirot, whose egg-shaped head, waxed moustache and famous gray brain cells have gotten familiar over fifty years of solving countless (well ok not quite) crimes in Christie's stories.
 Now the circle has closed, however. A little while before her death, Agatha let her final Poirot book get out in the public, the book was called Curtain and it was contained in a testament to her brother's son to be released after her death. This double close-up to the stories of both Hercule Poirot and Agatha Christie left a mysterious feel of fate to linger over the book which closes the curtain to many, many stories that came before it.

All stories come to an end one day.

"Curtain: Hercule Poirot's last case" tells a story which takes place in Style's Court, as it did in Christie's first detective novel.  However the times have changed and the place is newly renovated and has been turned into a boarding house that the white haired Ms. Luttrell rules over with an iron fist. Hercule Poirot has gone to the Style's Court to spend his old days. His health is in bad shape, he sits on a wheelchair and suffers from heart attacks, but his infamous gray brain cells work as dangerously effectively as they've always done.

Poirot's old friend Hastings has gotten an invitation from his friend and has thoughts of spending a nice little vacation with his small friend, talking of good old days, but Poirot has something else in his mind. A mysterious murderer X and a sure awareness of the fact that Styles's Court will once again be the scene of a ruthless crime.
 Hastings, with uncertainty in his mind, starts to investigate and keep an eye on the people of the boarding house. The suspicious animal test subject doing dr. Franklin,  his paranoid wife, her beautiful nurse, charmer Allerton and even his daughter Judith are all under Hastings's watchful eyes.

Curtain: Hercule Poirot's last case, as the name implies, is supposed to pull the plug on the series and finally make the curtain fall on the story of Hercule Poirot. In order to do this, Christie made her and Poirot's 'first' scene of crime be their last in a beautiful, down-to-earth but symbolic manner and style of presentation. The idea surely is nothing new, but for a series that had gone on for years. The story of Poirot was testamented to end when Christie herself dies, so it had a double, fourth wall breaking meaning to it. Larger than life, you could say. The curtain falls on everything and the stage will never be used ever again by the original author. Her stories will be read, played, told and used as an inspiration for as long as there exist people who are into the medium of novels and genre of mystery, crime and soft-boiled detective fiction.

What does this photograph tell me? Well, it shows two scales, it's meant to balance each of the scales out by adding one thing on the other end. Test it out, spend your time of years and years tangoing on the scales with anything you can, spend the time in balancing and getting the scales of understandings of light and heavy, good and bad, and so on, to their positions where nothing is weighing the other down.