Wealth & Money Quote by Agatha Christie

Greed is Christie’s favorite accelerant: it turns drawing rooms into crime scenes and family trees into motive charts. “Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody” reads like a prim Victorian warning, but its bite is modern and procedural. The phrasing is cool, almost bureaucratic - “advisable” suggests this isn’t paranoia, it’s basic risk management. In Christie’s universe, cash doesn’t just tempt villains; it reorganizes everyone’s moral math, including the people who look most respectable.

The subtext is less “people are bad” than “money changes what people are willing to be.” By narrowing the condition to “large sums,” she implies a sliding scale of ethics: small stakes allow for virtue, big stakes expose the seams. That’s why the line works so well as a piece of social observation. Christie isn’t romantic about intimacy; she’s clinical about incentives. Trust, she suggests, is a luxury belief - easy to profess until an inheritance, insurance payout, or missing will makes sincerity expensive.

Context matters: Christie wrote through two world wars and the long churn of class anxiety, when fortunes could vanish, titles meant less, and new money unsettled old codes. Her mysteries repeatedly stage that upheaval: the genteel setting isn’t reassurance, it’s camouflage. The warning lands because it flatters no one, not even the reader. You can enjoy the puzzle, but you’re also being told the solution is always the same: follow the money, and assume everyone has already started.