Elephants Can Remember made me sad...because I solved it. You see, the reason I hold Dame Agatha Christie in such high regard is that she always outfoxes me, even though I've been studying the detective genre and teaching courses on it for years. No other author can do it; fond as I am of Dame Agatha's Golden Age contemporaries--Dorothy Sayers, Patricia Wentworth, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, et. al.--they seldom baffle me unless they haven't played fair and given me enough to go on. But Dame Agatha...I rarely figure her out before the end. This novel, though, seemed transparent to me, and that's a shame. I don't believe for one moment that Dame Agatha declined in talent with age--she wrote excellent novels throughout her 56-year career, and a few of my favorites were written late in her life. I just think, for whatever reason, this wasn't one of her best.Dame Agatha has many excellent "cold case" novels; they were one of her specialties--Murder in Retrospect, Dumb Witness, Nemesis, Sleeping Murder, and many others. Perhaps she did finally run out of variations on this specific theme. Perhaps it should have been a Miss Marple case instead of a Poirot, since Miss Marple does such a wonderful job of playing the gossipy old lady in situations like this. I don't know. I just know that for once the obvious twist was the correct one, and I'd rather never speak of that again!