June 21, 1935

June 21, 1935, the date specified in an anonymous warning to Hercule Poirot, turns a seemingly empty prediction into the first temporal marker of the murders in Andover. Its significance emerges through a sharp reversal: the warning is initially treated as a hoax, but Alice Ascher’s body is discovered in her shop in the early hours of the following morning.

The Warning and Its Date

The letter challenges Poirot to solve a mystery and directs him to watch Andover on the twenty-first. Its message is printed on thickish white notepaper, and the envelope is printed as well; it is postmarked WC1. The date therefore arrives as part of a deliberate, impersonal-looking challenge, not as a date established through ordinary police inquiry.

Dismissed as a Hoax

After June 21 passes, Chief Inspector Japp tells Poirot that he called Andover out of curiosity. The police had found no sign of the predicted crime: the reported incidents were a broken shop window caused by a child throwing stones and two cases of drunken disorder. Japp treats the warning as one of many harmless letters written by people seeking excitement, and jokes that Poirot had been alarmed by it. Poirot admits that he is relieved, making the failed prediction seem to close the matter.

The Date’s Darker Meaning

At 1 a.m. on the morning of June 22, Police Constable Dover finds Alice Ascher’s shop unfastened and discovers her body behind the counter. She has been struck on the back of the head, apparently while reaching for cigarettes. Investigators narrow the likely time of the attack to between 5:30 and 6:05 p.m. on June 21, using the accounts of a customer who bought tobacco and another man who entered the shop shortly afterward and thought it empty. The date named in the letter is thus not merely adjacent to the crime: it is the day on which the killing occurred, though the body is found after midnight. That contrast between the warning’s apparent failure and the murder’s timing establishes the first unsettling gap between what the police think the date means and what the investigation will reveal.