You don’t really think of Agatha Christie as a sixties kind of bird, and yet she was certainly alive and writing in London when it was really swinging. Needless to say, like a lot of people, she didn’t get it, even when she thought she did, as these artfully arranged excerpts from 1966’s The Third Girl demonstrate:

His visitor was a girl of perhaps twenty-odd. Long straggles of hair of indeterminate color strayed over her shoulders. Her eyes, which were large, bore a vacant expressions and were of a greenish blue. She wore what were presumably the chosen clothes of her generation – black high leather boots, white open-work stockings of doubtful cleanliness, a skimpy skirt, and a long and sloppy pull-over of heavy wool. Anyone of Poirot’s age and generation would have had only one desire – to drop the girl into a bath as soon as possible.

Silly girl. Goes about in dreadful clothes and has picked up with a dreadful young man. Ah, well, they’re all alike nowadays. Long-haired young fellows, beatniks, Beatles, all sorts of names they’ve got. I can’t keep up with them. Practically talk a foreign language.

They probably look like mods or rockers or beatniks or whatever they call these chaps nowadays with the long hair and the dirty nails. I’ve seen more than one of them prowling about. One doesn’t like to say, who the devil are you? You never know which sex they are, which is embarrassing. The place crawls with them.

"Would you like a cup of tea," he added, "or would you prefer a purple heart or a tranquilizer? That’s the kind of thing people of your age go for. Done a bit yourself in that line, haven’t you?"

She shook her head. "Not – not really."

"I don’t believe you. Well," he went on, "what are your tastes? Something out of my drug cupboard or a good solid old-fashioned English cup of tea? Right. Sit down there. Make yourself comfortable. Do you smoke?"

"Well, I–"

"Only reefers – something of that kind?"

The girl’s full of drugs. I’d say she’s been taking purple hearts, and dream bombs, and probably LSD. She’s been hopped up for some time.

It was the drugs that did it. Drugs that made her do things she would never have done of her own volition, and left her with no knowledge of having done them.

A rather interesting medley of drugs – LSD giving vivid dream sequences – nightmares or pleasurable. Hemp distorting the time factor, so that she might believe an experience has lasted an hour instead of a few minutes. And a good many other curious substances that I have no intention of letting any of you know about. Somebody who was clever with drugs played merry hell with that girl.