Agatha Christie’s Poirot

2 THE ENGLISH DEBUT

‘He stepped forward, beaming’.

—‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’

Towards five o’clock on the afternoon of 17 July 1916, an incongruous figure advanced steadily upon the post office of the village of Styles St Mary:

… an extraordinary looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg … His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible.

It was Poirot, limping gallantly and no doubt bored to tears. On that fateful afternoon, however, deliverance from ennui was at hand, for out of the post office, and straight into Poirot, there catapulted a large boyish man. As Hastings was later to write:

I drew aside and apologized, when suddenly, with a loud exclamation, he clasped me in his arms and kissed me warmly. ‘Mon ami Hastings!’ he cried. ‘It is indeed mon ami Hastings!’

The surprise and excitement of Captain Arthur Hastings at this chance meeting equalled Poirot’s. Had he not, just a few days before, described this very gnome to Mary Cavendish?

‘I came across a man in Belgium once, a very famous detective, and he quite inflamed me. He was a marvellous little fellow. He used to say that all good detective work was a mere matter of method … He was a funny little man, a great dandy, but wonderfully clever.’

After further exclamations and explanations, and after promising to visit Poirot at the refugees’ cottage, Hastings returned to Styles, where he had recently arrived to stay with the Cavendishes during the last of his convalescence from a war injury. But what a momentous encounter occurred on that warm sleepy day! No doubt the post office of Styles St Mary now bears a plaque commemorating the genesis of Poirot’s English career? For early the next morning the household at Styles was awakened by agonized sounds coming from Mrs Inglethorp’s bedroom. Someone had poisoned her with strychnine.

‘I am going to ask you something,’ said Hastings to his old friend, John Cavendish, within an hour of his stepmother’s death. ‘You remember my speaking of my friend Poirot? The Belgian who is here? He has been a most famous detective … I want you to let me call him in – to investigate this matter.’ So began an illustrious association that was to span almost sixty years, and so began that celebrated landmark of detective fiction, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Styles!

‘We will proceed to the château,’ said Poirot, when summoned, ‘and study matters on the spot.’ How many millions have since gazed upon the historic plan of the eleven bedrooms and the one bathroom of Styles Court drawn by Arthur Hastings in 1916?1

It was a household at war. Petrol was rationed. Supper was at half-past seven (‘We have given up late dinner for some time now’). Every scrap of paper was saved and sent away in sacks. Only three gardeners were left (one of them ‘a new-fashioned woman gardener in breeches and such-like’). John Cavendish helped with the farms and drilled with the volunteers. Mary Cavendish was up and dressed in her white land smock every morning at five. Cynthia Murdoch worked in the dispensary of the nearby Red Cross Hospital. The formidable Mrs Inglethorp continually presided at patriotic events. A German spy (soon to be unmasked) dropped by from time to time. And, nearby, Leastways Cottage sheltered seven refugees, ‘them Belgies’.

‘WEALTHY LADY POISONED’, trumpeted the newspapers, and Styles was under siege. At the inquest held a few days later at the Stylites Arms, Poirot recognized an old colleague and nudged Hastings. ‘Do you know who that little man is?’ he asked, indicating someone ‘sharp, dark, ferret-faced’ near the door. Hastings shook his head. ‘That is Inspector James Japp of Scotland Yard,’ replied Poirot. ‘Jimmy Japp.’

Thus, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920, are to be found the archetypal ingredients of many a future adventure – a wilful murder committed amid pleasant surroundings, and a solution at length achieved by a small foreign man with an egg-shaped head. Helping and hindering will be the bluff and energetic Inspector James Japp of Scotland Yard and, faithfully recording it all for posterity, the devoted Arthur Hastings, ever bewildered, ever admiring. It was to prove a great run. ‘Ah!’ Hastings was to write many, many years later, ‘if this could have been that day in 1916 when I first travelled to Styles …’

The Styles mystery and the subsequent murder trial at the Old Bailey occupied everyone concerned for several months. Wrote Hastings:

September found us all in London. Mary took a house in Kensington, Poirot being included in the family party.

I myself had been given a job at the War Office, so was able to see them continually.

It was probably while staying with the Cavendishes that Poirot, no longer limping, began looking for a more permanent home. A later story, ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’, indicates that at about this time Poirot was asked to undertake a small matter for the War Office. Perhaps he took this as a sign? Why return to the rural obscurity of Styles St Mary? As he later told Mr Satterthwaite, the Styles Affair had given him fresh confidence:

‘I found that I was not yet finished. No, indeed, my powers were stronger than ever. Then began my second career – that of a private inquiry agent in England.’

Poirot’s new enterprise was no doubt launched by the ordering of appropriate business cards and a search for suitable quarters. And, for guidance through the thickets of English customs and manners, who could be better than Arthur Hastings, now invalided out of the army and assigned a London job at recruiting? Firmly bonded to Poirot by the Styles Affair, and still hoping to become a detective himself, Hastings stuck to Poirot like glue.

In time Poirot would become the most fashionable detective in London and would live in considerable style, but at the outset he took modest rooms, often shared by Hastings, and endured certain privations:

Poirot had just finished carefully straightening the cups and saucers which our landlady was in the habit of throwing, rather than placing, on the table. He had also breathed heavily on the metal teapot, and polished it with a silk handkerchief.

In these surroundings Poirot commenced his practice as a private detective, and Hastings began to look forward to each evening’s account of the cases on hand. Several bread-and-butter years passed pleasantly enough and then, at last, Poirot received a commission of major consequence. As Hastings described it, he had just settled down one evening to listen to developments in the current investigation, a charlady’s missing husband (‘A difficult affair, needing the tact’), when:

… the landlady thrust her head round the door and informed him there were two gentlemen below who wanted to see him.

‘They won’t give their names, Sir, but they say as it’s very important.’

‘Let them mount,’ said Poirot …

In a few minutes the two visitors were ushered in, and my heart gave a leap as in the foremost I recognized no less a personage than Lord Estair, Leader of the House of Commons; whilst his companion, Mr Bernard Dodge, was also a member of the War Cabinet, and, as I knew, a close personal friend of the Prime Minister.

Clients worthy of Poirot’s mettle at last! And what a case they brought to his sitting-room – the disappearance of the Prime Minister on the eve of the approaching Allied Conference at Versailles. Said a grave Lord Estair:

‘We sought you out on the express recommendation and wish of a very great man of your own country.’

‘Comment? My old friend the Préfet – ?’

Lord Estair shook his head.

‘One higher than the Préfet. One whose word was once law in Belgium – and shall be again! That England has sworn!’

Poirot’s hand flew swiftly to a dramatic salute.

‘Amen to that!’

In the melodramatic episode that followed, ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’, which, one wonders, was sweeter for Poirot – foiling a desperate set of German agents, or succeeding where the French police and Detective Inspector Japp had failed? Wrote Hastings of this affair, his eye already on posterity:

‘I feel it is only just that England should know the debt it owes to my quaint little friend, whose marvellous brain so ably averted a great catastrophe.’

Whether the charlady’s husband was ever found is not recorded.

Soon after this coup there occurred a case that Hastings grandly and prematurely called ‘the ultimate problem brought to Poirot to solve’. This harked back to 1916 when Hastings had renewed his acquaintance with Captain Vincent Lemesurier, a fellow officer from an old Northumberland family. Remembering her husband’s account of his introduction to Poirot two years before, Mrs Lemesurier, a troubled and determined mother, sought his assistance in exorcizing the family’s medieval curse. Were all first-born Lemesurier sons doomed to die before inheriting the estate? In the short story, ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’, Poirot, at work like ‘an intelligent terrier’, proved that they need not.

In the spring of 1919, as England celebrated the end of the Great War, young Viscount Cronshaw was stabbed to death at a grand victory ball. ‘Every twopenny-halfpenny hop calls itself that nowadays, but this was the real thing, held at the Colossus Hall, and all London at it,’ reported Japp, dropping by Poirot’s rooms to invite him to lend a hand in tracking the Viscount’s murderer – or, as Hastings observed, ‘seeking favours under the guise of conferring them!’ Poirot had ‘a good opinion of Japp’s abilities, though deploring his lamentable lack of method’ and, probably realizing how much Japp must have smarted over the case of the kidnapped prime minister, he consented to join in the hunt. In ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’ he cracked open a sensational cocaine case involving such Bright Young Things as Miss Coco Courtenay and the Honourable Eustace Beltane. ‘Une belle affaire!’ Poirot later pronounced it, celebrating at a ‘recherché little supper’.

With these four cases – the unmasking of a country house murderer, the rescue of a prime minister, the laying of a family ghost, and the solving of a Mayfair stabbing – Poirot’s credentials as a private detective of brilliance and discretion were assured. Furthermore, he had found a new home and a new purpose. For the next half century his energies would be almost entirely devoted to the remarkable crimes of the bloodthirsty English.

NOTES

1 Even though Hastings was rapidly falling in love with Cynthia Murdoch, he misspelled her name on the plan.

3 THE 1920S

‘This street, it is not aristocratic, mon ami! In it there is no fashionable doctor, no fashionable dentist – still less is there a fashionable milliner! But there is a fashionable detective. Oui, my friend, it is true – I am become the mode, the dernier cri!’

—Hercule Poirot,

‘The Adventure of “The Western Star”’

The Great War over, the 1920s were years of economic and social upheaval and an uncertain but flourishing time for the middle and upper classes of England. Poirot, devoting himself to their expensive and interesting crimes, flourished along with them. His moustache, his famous hallmark, reflected it all. Described in the earlier years as ‘stiff’ and ‘military’, it waxed luxurious as the decade progressed.

At some time in the early 1920s Poirot and Hastings – who had acquired a position as ‘a sort of private secretary … to an M.P.’ – became the tenants of a nicer landlady, Mrs Pearson of 14 Farraway Street, and to their sitting-room came a seemingly endless stream of troubled clients. There were housewives, for example (‘Private – that’s what I want. I don’t want any talk or fuss, or things in the papers’). There was Royalty (‘He was a strange-looking youth, tall, eager, with a weak chin, the famous Mauranberg mouth, and the dark fiery eyes of the fanatic’). There were film stars (‘Lord Cronshaw was telling me last night how wonderfully you cleared up the mystery of his nephew’s death’). There were ladies in distress (‘From the costly simplicity of her attire, I deducted at once that she belonged to the upper strata of society’). There were men on the run (‘Poirot hurried to his side … “Brandy – quickly”’). To Hastings’s delight, there was hardly a dull moment.

And if clients couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come to Poirot, he would go to them, usually accompanied by Hastings, seemingly unconstrained by his job – to the superb Park Lane house of an American magnate, for example (‘Poirot picked up a pin from the carpet, and frowned at it severely’); to a country house drawing-room at the moment of a midnight robbery (‘The women were in becoming négligées’); to old-fashioned gardens where ‘the smell of stocks and mignonette came sweetly wafted on the evening breeze’; to an opium den in Limehouse (‘Then there came to us the proprietor, a Chinaman with a face of evil smiles’); to luncheons of steak and kidney pudding at the Cheshire Cheese; to clandestine laboratories (‘I believe that she has, to a certain extent, succeeded in liberating atomic energy and harnessing it to her purpose’); to villas in the suburbs (‘The place was somewhat overloaded with gimcrack ornaments, and a good many family portraits of surpassing ugliness adorned the walls’).

Most of the accounts of Poirot’s adventures in the early 1920s are preserved in the writings of his devoted colleague and scribe, Arthur Hastings, whose usual mode was the short story. Taken collectively, these recall exhilarating days.1

‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’2 opens with Inspector Japp, by now something of a constant in Poirot’s life, dropping by for tea. For Poirot and Hastings it was still the days of the untidy landlady and the metal teapot, but these trials were soon forgotten with Japp’s news of the disappearance of a famous financier. After a lively discussion on rival methods, Poirot wagered Japp five pounds that, without leaving his chair and given the same information as Scotland Yard, he could retrieve Mr Davenheim within a week.

Five days later, with their inevitable winnings, Poirot and Hastings fled their landlady and took Japp out to dinner. But had he learned his lesson? The next case, the murder of a millionaire’s daughter in ‘The Plymouth Express’,3 was later used by Poirot in a tutorial session with Hastings: