Agatha Christie’s Poirot

‘Remember the Plymouth Express mystery. The great Japp departed to make a survey of the railway line. When he returned, I, without having moved from my apartments, was able to tell him exactly what he had found.’

Poirot was probably apt to cite ‘The Adventure of the Cheap Flat’, which turned into a case of international proportions, as another salutary lesson: never neglect the trivial. How, for example, in overcrowded post-war London, had the young Robinsons managed to rent a handsome Knightsbridge flat for only eighty pounds a year? When put to Poirot by Hastings as a mock challenge, the little detective figuratively sniffed the air:

‘It is as well, mon ami, that we have no affairs of moment on hand. We can devote ourselves wholly to the present investigation.’

‘What investigation are you talking about?’

‘The remarkable cheapness of your friend. Mrs Robinson’s, new flat.’

Another exciting spy story in those ‘difficult days of reconstruction’ is told in ‘The Submarine Plans’.4 In this case Poirot was summoned by the Minister of Defence on a matter of national emergency, the disappearance of the new Z type submarine plans. ‘I remember only too well what you did for us during the war, when the Prime Minister was kidnapped,’ said the shaken Minister to Poirot. ‘Your masterly deductions – and may I add your discretion – saved the situation.’ In Hastings’s opinion, Poirot treated this matter of the Z type submarines far too lightly, but ‘One thing is quite certain,’ he recorded with satisfaction. ‘On the day when Lord Alloway became Prime Minister, a cheque and a signed photograph arrived.’

It must be admitted that momentous cases such as this tended to go to Poirot’s head. ‘You have a client,’ announced Hastings in ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’.5 ‘Unless the affair is one of national importance, I touch it not,’ declared Poirot. He reconsidered, however, when faced with an intimidating Mrs Todd, whose prized cook had disappeared. ‘It’s all this wicked dole,’ said Mrs Todd. ‘Putting ideas into servants’ heads, wanting to be typists and what nots.’ A chastened Poirot decided that Mrs Todd’s cook was a matter of national importance, after all, though privately he cautioned Hastings: ‘Never, never, must our friend Inspector Japp get to hear of this!’

Hard on the heels of Mrs Todd came Mrs Pengelley of Polgarwith to confide to Poirot her suspicions that she was being gradually poisoned by her husband.

‘I don’t intend to let him have it all his own way. Women aren’t the downtrodden slaves they were in the old days, M. Poirot.’

‘I congratulate you on your independent spirit, Madame … I have nothing of great moment on hand. I can devote myself to your little affair.’

But in ‘The Cornish Mystery’ this ‘little affair’ soon got out of hand. On the very next day Poirot found himself investigating Mrs Pengelley’s death. It was a sad experience for this kind and protective man. ‘May the good God forgive me, but I never believed anything would happen at all,’ he cried to Hastings.

‘The Cornish Mystery’ is a good example of Poirot afield. He and Hastings were forever snatching up timetables to find the best trains and reconnoitring country inns (‘a night of horror upon one of your English provincial beds, mon ami’). In ‘The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor’ Poirot was commissioned by an insurance company to investigate a misadventure in Essex. Was Mr Maltravers’s sudden death while shooting rooks entirely due to natural causes?

In ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ Hastings, attempting an investigation on his own, accompanied a distraught Hon. Roger Havering to a remote shooting-box on the Derbyshire moors in response to a telegram from his wife:

‘Come at once uncle Harrington murdered last night bring good detective if you can but do come – Zoe.’

Left behind in London in the grip of ‘flu, Poirot kept relentlessly in touch:

‘… wire me description of housekeeper and what clothes she wore this morning same of Mrs Havering do not waste time taking photographs of interiors they are underexposed and not in the least artistic.’

And so on.

A village inn could be a trial, but nothing, in Poirot’s opinion, could equal the sufferings of a voyage at sea. Just such a martyrdom is described in ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’, in which members of an archaeological team had met mysterious deaths within a month of uncovering the tomb of the shadowy King Men-her-Ra. In the aftermath of these tragedies, Poirot was commissioned by Lady Willard, widow of the expedition’s leader, to travel to Egypt to investigate.

Could the curse of Men-her-Ra have been at work? ‘You must not underrate the force of superstition,’ said Poirot to Hastings, ‘But oh … the sea! The hateful sea!’ The agony of a few days’ voyage from Marseilles to Alexandria, with a camel ride at the end of it, called forth ‘shrieks, gesticulations and invocations to the Virgin Mary and every Saint in the calendar.’

Despite these anxieties about travel, Hastings persuaded Poirot to go on holiday from time to time, but these expeditions seldom provided an escape from crime. A relaxing weekend at a comfortable hotel in Brighton, for example, turned into an energetic hunt for a glamorous pearl necklace (‘The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metro-politan’6); a week’s holiday in Devon became a search for a collection of stolen miniatures (‘Double Sin’7); and a quiet weekend arranged by a surprisingly solicitous Inspector Japp at a delightful country inn (‘Nobody knows us, and we know nobody … That’s the idea’) saw Sunday breakfast abandoned at the stirring summons of the local constable: ‘Gentleman up at Leigh Hall – shot himself – through the head’ (‘The Market Basing Mystery’).

By now Poirot was much in vogue, his discreet services increasingly in demand by the aristocracy (particularly members of tottering European dynasties), by London high society, and by imitators and hangers-on in the demimonde. Adventures in these elegant, sometimes dangerous worlds were of great satisfaction to a detective invincibly bourgeois. Of course the companionship of Hastings, admiringly agog and breathing heavily, added pleasure to the chase.

In ‘The King of Clubs’,8 a particularly complex case, Poirot was retained by Prince Paul of Maurania who trembled to know the truth: could the recent murder of a notorious blackmailer have possibly been committed by the Prince’s fiancée, the dancer Valerie Saintclair? Surprisingly, this commission led Poirot and Hastings to a suburban drawing-room to interview a solid English family, the Oglanders, about certain events that had occurred on the night of the murder.

‘I think that Miss Oglander made a mistake in going one no trump. She should have gone three spades,’ murmured Poirot to an exasperated Hastings, who was expecting more impressive sleights of hand. In future cases, to remind Hastings of the importance of trivia, Poirot was apt to admonish: ‘Remember the case of the dancer, Valerie Saintclair.’

Poirot was, of course, always lecturing Hastings. ‘We all have the little grey cells. And so few of us know how to use them,’ he exclaimed in ‘The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman’, patiently taking his Watson step by step through the maze that would eventually explain the bashing in of Count Foscatini’s head.

In ‘The Double Clue’,9 an important case in Poirot’s personal life, his client was Mr Marcus Hardman, a mildly rich collector (‘Old lace, old fans, antique jewellery – nothing crude or modern for Marcus Hardman’). In great distress, he sought out Poirot. Which of his beloved guests, Mr Hardman beseeched Poirot to discover, had stolen a collection of medieval jewels at yesterday’s little tea party? Very soothingly, and with great tact, Poirot arranged the jewels’ return. In doing so he lost his heart to the dashing and daring Countess Rossakoff, a Russian émigrée of the old regime. ‘A remarkable woman,’ sighed Poirot to Hastings. ‘I have a feeling, my friend – a very decided feeling – I shall meet her again.’

‘A pleasing little problem, obscure and charming’ was, in Poirot’s opinion, ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’,10 a case which saw a happy ending to the kidnapping of a three-year-old son and heir. But shortly thereafter Hastings failed to share Poirot’s satisfaction in another undertaking, ‘The Case of the Missing Will’, which brought to their sitting-room a ‘so-called New Woman’, a species the hopelessly sexist Hastings viewed with great suspicion. Miss Violet Marsh was a young scientist and the heir to the estate of her recently deceased uncle, a man unalterably opposed to the higher education of women. Challenged from beyond the grave to find her hidden inheritance within a year, Miss Marsh cleverly hired Poirot to find it for her. Hastings thought this all rather unfair.

‘But no, Hastings. It is your wits that go astray. Miss Marsh proved the astuteness of her wits and the value of the higher education for women by at once putting the matter in my hands. Always employ the expert. She has amply proved her right to the money.’

We next find Hastings brooding over his chronic overdraft at the bank, and toying with the dubious charm of The Porcupine Oilfields whose prospectus predicted dividends of 100%. This prompted the prudent Poirot to recall a cautionary tale of an expensive fleecing, ‘The Lost Mine’. As if to reinforce this lesson, they were both soon involved in solving a scandal that rocked the London and Scottish Bank, ‘The Million Dollar Bond Robbery’.11

Towards the end of this hectic period there came an unexpected lull, a dearth of interesting cases. To cheer Poirot up, Hastings resorted to Watson’s methods and read aloud from the morning paper:

‘Here’s an Englishman mysteriously done to death in Holland …’

‘They always say that – and later they find that he ate the tinned fish and that his death is perfectly natural.’

‘Well, if you’re determined to grouse!’

At that moment a beautiful young lady, heavily veiled, was ushered in. She was, she explained, ‘in a soft musical voice’, being shamefully blackmailed by a brute.

‘The dirty swine!’ cried Hastings.

‘Have faith in Papa Poirot, said Poirot reassuringly, and within a day, using tactics that shook Hastings, he had the problem of ‘The Veiled Lady’12 solved.

In ‘The Adventure of the “Western Star”’ two very different ladies coincidentally consulted Poirot on the same delicate matter – Mary Marvell, the well-known film star, referred by a friend from ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, and Lady Yardly, of an impoverished old country family, sent by Mary Cavendish of The Mysterious Affair at Styles. There followed an energetic tale of feudal estates, sinister Chinamen, and legendary temple diamonds.

Murder on the Links, published in 1923, was the second full-length book devoted to Poirot. Its title tends to conjure up summer days somewhere in the British Isles but, set in a fashionable villa in northern France, it is one of Poirot’s Continental mysteries and very dramatic it is.

Early in this adventure we find Poirot and Hastings at breakfast. Once again Poirot was in a fret:

‘The cases I have been employed upon lately were banal to the last degree. In verity I am reduced to recovering lost lap-dogs for fashionable ladies! The last problem that presented any interest was that intricate affair of the Yardly diamond, and that was – how many months ago, my friend?’

He shook his head despondently.

‘Cheer up, Poirot, the luck will change. Open your letters. For all you know, there may be a great case looming on the horizon.’

For once Hastings was correct. In the morning post came a letter from France from Paul Renauld, a well-known South American millionaire. ‘For God’s sake, come!’ it pleaded. ‘I go in daily fear of my life … I will send a car to meet you at Calais … I shall be content for you to name your own fee …’ and so on.

‘The Continental express leaves Victoria at 11 o’clock,’ cried Poirot, and by the afternoon they were face to face with an imposing sergent de ville at the gate of the Villa Geneviève.

‘M. Renauld was murdered this morning,’ announced le sergent.

‘I have a feeling,’ said Poirot, ‘that this is going to be a big affair – a long, troublesome problem that will not be easy to work out.’ Adding zest to the case was the war instantly declared between M. Poirot and M. Giraud of the Paris Sûreté.

‘I know you by name, M. Poirot,’ said Giraud, ‘you cut quite a figure in the old days, didn’t you? But methods are very different now.’

‘The human foxhound!’ Poirot called Giraud, who spent most of his time crawling on hands and knees in search of significant footprints, cigarette stubs and unlighted matches, tactics that Poirot professed to deplore. For his part Giraud referred to Poirot as the ‘old fossil’.

So heated did the rivalry at the villa Geneviève become that Poirot wagered Giraud 500 francs he would find the murderer first. ‘I have no wish to take your money from you,’ sneered Giraud. The end of the affair saw Giraud back in Paris with ‘a crise of the nerves’, and Poirot back in London with a splendid model of a foxhound costing 500 francs and no doubt exhibited to Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard at the first possible moment.

Murder on the Links did more than dispel Poirot’s immediate boredom – it changed his life profoundly, for it was during this adventure that Hastings fell in love with a most unlikely person, Dulcie Duveen.

Now Hastings was forever falling in love, but until he met Dulcie he had always fallen in love with young women from very proper backgrounds. As he himself wrote:

I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who dances from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a Billingsgate fishwoman blush!

Who, then, could have imagined Arthur Hastings seriously proposing marriage to an impudent young woman with an explicit vocabulary who had earned her living since the age of six as a dancer and an acrobat? And who could have imagined the nimble-witted and passionate Dulcie (or Cinderella, as she liked to be called) deciding to marry Hastings? ‘She looked over her shoulder. A dimple appeared in each cheek. She was like a lovely picture by Greuze,’ wrote the smitten Hastings. ‘I knew you weren’t such a mutt as you looked,’ declared Cinderella. While Giraud hunted footprints and matches, and Poirot reviewed his grey cells, Hastings and Cinderella were falling in love.

How did Poirot take all this? In principle, in the matter of marriages, he took a dim view of the way les Anglais conducted themselves: ‘No method – absolutely none whatever. They leave all to chance!’ And in the matter of marriage and Hastings in particular – up to now but a theoretical possibility – had he not said, ‘Some day, if you permit, I will arrange you a marriage of great suitability’? And here was Hastings, his ever present student and friend, contemplating marriage to an acrobat and talking of emigration to the Argentine.

In justice it must be said that Poirot initially took all this very well. He generously put his friend’s happiness before his own in reuniting the lovers at the dénouement of Murder on the Links, even though Hastings’s declaration, ‘in future I must take my own line’, must have come as a shock. Perhaps Poirot did not believe him? Perhaps he expected this infatuation, like the others, would come to nothing?

But it did come to something, and in the latter part of 1923 there must have been a great packing of valises and trunks at 14 Farraway Street, and Mrs Pearson must have wrung her hands at the loss of such a good tenant, as Hastings departed for marriage and a ranch in the Argentine.

Before these unsettling events occurred, were there long discussions over tisanes and whiskies and sodas in the joint sitting-room? Or did Hastings leave quite suddenly? Whatever the circumstances, it was a decidedly forlorn Poirot, mourning his friend who ‘has gone away across the sea to the South America’, whom the Endicott family invited to the country in the short story ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’.13

‘You are not like me, old and alone,’ lamented Poirot at the Endicotts’ Christmas, but he soon cheered up under the influence of crackling logs and snowmen, and honoured the occasion by donning a red waistcoat and treating the household to the capture of a pair of criminals about to make off with a famous jewel.

And what of Hastings? Fear not that he was forever lost to Poirot in ‘the free and easy life of the South American continent’, for on a morning a year and a half later we find him at the rail of a ship approaching the cliffs of Dover:

I had landed in France two days before, transacted some necessary business, and was now en route for London. I should be there some months – time enough to look up old friends, and one old friend in particular. A little man with an egg-shaped head and green eyes – Hercule Poirot! I proposed to take him completely by surprise.

Poirot was indeed surprised as, in the interests of an enormous commission, he was busy packing for a dreaded sea voyage to Rio. Tearful embraces concluded, he explained to Hastings:

‘And there was a second attraction – you, my friend. For this last year and a half I have been a very lonely old man. I thought to myself, why not? I am beginning to weary of this unending solving of foolish problems. I have achieved sufficient fame. Let me take this money and settle down somewhere near my old friend.’

How these two might have resolved all this we shall never know, as fate immediately intervened to plunge them into the all-consuming case of The Big Four.14 To meet this challenge, Poirot unpacked his enormous trunk and Hastings moved his luggage to Farraway Street. It was just like old times.

An earlier case, ‘The Veiled Lady’, had found Hastings musing on Poirot’s vanity:

He always imagines that the whole world is thinking and talking of Hercule Poirot … but I could hardly believe that his existence struck terror into the criminal world.

The Big Four proved Hastings wrong. In it Poirot found himself the chief adversary of an international conspiracy of four master criminals out ‘to destroy the existing social order’. This struggle became a duel to the death, an epic that saw such excitements as Poirot sacrificing his moustache to foil the enemy, Hastings sacrificing himself to save Poirot, the reappearance of the dashing Countess Rossakoff (Poirot’s ‘woman in a thousand’), and a premature funeral for Poirot at which he was mourned and buried. ‘World-wide unrest, the labour troubles which beset every nation, and the revolutions that break out in some’ loomed in the background.

While locked in combat with the Titans, Poirot ‘abandoned his private practice almost entirely’, and Hastings’s ‘business complications’, his reason for coming to England, fell by the way. ‘Little Cinderella as you call her, what does she say?’ asked Poirot uneasily after six months of the campaign had passed with no end in sight. Replied Hastings: ‘I haven’t gone into details, of course, but she understands.’

In the end it took Poirot and Hastings the better part of a year to save the world from anarchy. ‘The great case of my life,’ Poirot called it. ‘Anything else will seem tame after this.’15

Hastings, sailing away to Buenos Aires, no doubt thought so too. And, in the wake of The Big Four and Hasting’s second departure, Poirot made an extraordinary decision – he would leave Farraway Street, retire to the country, and devote the rest of his life to the scientific cultivation of vegetable marrows.

We now come to one of the strangest periods in Poirot’s life – a year of seclusion in the quiet village of King’s Abbot, a seclusion so complete as to drive the village Intelligence Corps, led by his neighbour, Miss Caroline Sheppard, close to despair. Who was he? Where had he come from? Why was he there? ‘Someone very like Caroline must have invented the questions on passports,’ observed Miss Sheppard’s brother. ‘The one thing we do know about him is that he is interested in the growing of vegetable marrows.’

Vegetable marrows? Poirot? Had he gone quite mad? Was he pining for Hastings? Or the audacious Countess Rossakoff? Or both? Was a year spent virtually alone in a neat walled garden and an overheated sitting-room in King’s Abbot Poirot’s tidy version of a nervous breakdown? It is true that he was now comfortably off, his reputation assured by the recent publication of Hastings’s memoirs, but this period of self-imposed exile, with only the marrows and an ancient Breton housekeeper for company, was a curious episode indeed. Fortunately, one afternoon something snapped. In anger he threw his most impressive vegetable marrow over the garden wall (it landed with ‘a repellent squelch’) and re-entered the world. King’s Abbot, on the very day that Roger Ackroyd was murdered, was at last permitted to know that in its midst dwelt the most eminent detective in Europe.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, published in 1926, is a Big House Mystery, and the man who by his own death inadvertently rescued Poirot from the marrows was a selfmade country squire, described by Dr James Sheppard, the narrator of this famous affair, as ‘the life and soul of our peaceful village’. Roger Ackroyd stabbed to death in his comfortable study was a Big Case, not only for Poirot but also for the history of detective fiction. It invariably leaves its readers shaken, and it certainly shook King’s Abbot.

Poirot’s attempts at retirement now took a different form. The old housekeeper in the huge Breton hat was returned to her homeland and we hear no more of King’s Abbot. Rustication behind him, Poirot embarked on a life on the Riviera:

‘I take it, M. Poirot, that you no longer exercise your profession?’

‘That is so, Monsieur. I enjoy the world.’

And so he did, and could be seen on many a fine day in Nice setting forth from his hotel in a white duck suit with a camellia in his buttonhole to lunch on fillet de sole à la Jeanette.

The Mystery of the Blue Train, published in 1928, demonstrates, however, that Poirot’s retirement had not quite taken. The robbing and strangling of a beautiful heiress, Ruth Kettering, in a sleeping compartment of the Riviera-bound Blue Train, the request of her wealthy father that Poirot find her murderer, and the flattering gratitude of the French police at even a hint that the great detective might take an interest in the affair, soon had Poirot back in harness.

A major event in The Mystery of the Blue Train, and an indication of Poirot’s new style, was his acquisition of an English valet, the wooden-faced George. From this time on Poirot no longer had to concern himself with the removal of grease spots and the brewing of hot chocolate, or depend for an audience on friends who might disappear to South America. For the rest of his long, long life he could depend on the faithful George.

‘You have a wide experience, Georges,’ murmured Poirot. ‘I often wonder having lived so exclusively with titled families that you demean yourself by coming as a valet to me. I put it down to love of excitement on your part.’

‘Not exactly, sir,’ said George, ‘I happened to see in Society Snippets that you had been received at Buckingham Palace. That was just when I was looking for a new situation. His Majesty, so it said, had been most gracious and friendly and thought very highly of your abilities.’16

Poirot’s retirement to the Riviera was even briefer than his retirement to King’s Abbot. By 1929 he was back in London, though tentatively at first, on a case requiring temporary accommodation and an assumed name.

‘I take the flat in the name of Mr O’Connor,’ he announced to a neighbour startled at encountering ‘a little man with a very fierce moustache and an egg-shaped head’, and added, unnecessarily, ‘But I am not an Irishman.’ As it happened, his neighbour and her friends had just had the bad luck to discover a body. Resplendent in a handsome dressing-gown and embroidered slippers, Poirot, in ‘The Third Floor Flat’,17 had the mystery solved within a couple of hours.