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It was probably in this same year that the three cases recorded in the short stories ‘Problem at Sea’, ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, and ‘Murder in the Mews’ occurred.13. In all three of these, as so often happened to Poirot, his presence at or near scenes of murder was a direct result of futile attempts to take restful holidays or lead a calm social life.
In ‘Problem at Sea’14 his determination to escape was clearly a case of masochism:
‘Are you enjoying this trip, M. Poirot?’
‘Frankly, no. It was an imbecility to allow myself to be persuaded to come. I detest la mer. Never does it remain tranquil – no, not for a little minute.’
Before long, however, Poirot was enjoying himself very much as he graphically explained to a captive audience in the main lounge just how it was that disagreeable Mrs Clapperton came to be murdered in her locked cabin while the ship was docked in Alexandria.15
Surely, though, in ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, one could expect a little peace in the kind October sun? But even here, uneasily surveying the emotions surging just below the surface at his quiet hotel, ‘M. Poirot perceived the inevitable shaping of events to come’ – the duty to solve, while on holiday, a crime passionnel.
And could any meal with Inspector Japp – like one on a Guy Fawkes night for example – not lead to a murder investigation?
Turning off the main road, the two men passed into the comparative quiet of a mews. They had been dining together and were now taking a short cut to Hercule Poirot’s flat.
As they walked along the sound of squibs was still heard periodically. An occasional shower of golden rain illuminated the sky.
‘Good night for a murder,’ remarked Japp with professional interest. ‘Nobody would hear a shot, for instance, on a night like this.’
How true! Nor was Japp alone in such thoughts, as subsequent events in ‘Murder in the Mews’ proved.
Poirot had murmured in The ABC Murders:
‘Supposing that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four; while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and, intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?’
Just such a closed circle puzzle is set in Cards on the Table, published in 1936,16 in which a diabolical host, the fashionable Mr Shaitana, who ‘existed richly and beautifully in a super flat in Park Lane’, invited to dinner four people he was convinced were secret murderers, and four others well known for detection: the celebrated Hercule Poirot, the venerable Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, the popular detective fiction writer, Ariadne Oliver, and a distinguished veteran of the Secret Service, Colonel Race.17 After dinner Mr Shaitana arranged two tables of bridge. The four famous sleuths were sent to the smoking room:
‘Five diamonds. Game and rubber,’ said Colonel Race. ‘Good for you, partner,’ he said to Poirot. ‘I didn’t think you’d do it. Lucky they didn’t lead a spade.’
‘Wouldn’t have made much difference, I expect,’ said Superintendent Battle, a man of gentle magnanimity.
He had called spades. His partner, Mrs Oliver, had had a spade, but ‘something had told her’ to lead a club – with disastrous results.
Meanwhile in the drawing-room, alone with his four suspected murderers, something much more disastrous was happening to Mr Shaitana. While seated by the fire he was deftly slain with a jewelled stiletto. Which of the four did it?
With only the bridge scores as a tangible clue, with three fine collaborators in Superintendent Battle, Mrs Oliver and Colonel Race, and with the removal, by Mr Shaitana’s untimely death, of ‘the only moustache in London, perhaps, that could compete with that of M. Hercule Poirot’, it is no wonder that Agatha Christie observed, in a foreword to Cards on the Table, that this was one of Poirot’s favourite cases.
A year later, far from Mr Shaitana’s drawing-room, Poirot encountered Colonel Race again on a steamer on the Nile. Poirot was once more in pursuit of a holiday. (‘This winter I shall visit Egypt, I think … One will escape from the fogs, the greyness, the monotony of the constantly falling rain’), and Colonel Race, a man ‘usually to be found in one of the outposts of Empire where trouble is brewing’, was in pursuit of a political agitator; but these goals were forgotten in the excitement of three murders committed in quick succession as the Karnak churned toward the Second Cataract.
‘A journey on a swift-moving river, between dangerous rocks, and heading for who knows what currents of disaster …’ Thus did Hercule Poirot predict the course of events in one of his most famous cases, Death on the Nile,18 published in 1937. At first acquaintance the passengers on the Karnak seemed a pleasant enough lot – Poirot certainly enjoyed the company of Mrs Allerton, for example, ‘one of the most charming people I had ever met’ – but as he and Colonel Race pursued their murder investigations some very nasty secrets came to light. ‘So many conflicting hates and jealousies and envies and meannesses. It is like a cloud of flies, buzzing, buzzing …’
Poirot’s next case, Appointment with Death, unfolded in Palestine and Jordan. As it follows on the heels of Death on the Nile, it is fair to assume that both cases occurred on the same eventful holiday, and that Poirot proceeded from the Karnak on the Nile to the Solomon Hotel in Jerusalem and thence to Amman. With him he brought a letter of introduction from Colonel Race to Colonel Carbury, an administrative ‘power’ in Transjordania. Raising his eyes from Race’s letter, Colonel Carbury, a devotee of detective fiction, smiled hopefully upon his guest:
‘Tell me, d’you ever find your own special job has a way of following you around?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Well – to put it plainly – do you come to places expecting a holiday from crime – and find instead bodies cropping up?’
‘It has happened, yes – more than once.’
‘H’m,’ said Colonel Carbury, and looked particularly abstracted.
Then he roused himself with a jerk.
‘Got a body now I’m not very happy about,’ he said.
The body was that of an American tourist, the autocratic Mrs Boynton – ‘a distorted old Buddha – a gross spider in the centre of a web!’ – whose life had been universally pronounced as ruinous to all around her, and whose sudden death, while surrounded by her family in a tourist encampment at Petra, now raised a most disagreeable question: had someone slain the dragon?
In the course of his investigations Poirot enjoyed fulfilling Colonel Carbury’s every expectation of how a detective should behave:
‘You desire to know, do you not, Colonel Carbury, who killed Mrs Boynton? (That is, if she was killed and did not die a natural death.) Exactly how and when she was killed – and, in fact, the whole truth of the matter?’
‘I should like to know that, yes.’ Carbury spoke unemotionally.
Hercule Poirot said slowly:
‘I see no reason why you should not know it!’
And promising a solution within twenty-four hours, Poirot commenced to unravel the tangled web at Petra, thereby encountering a ménage of tourists who, when their minds were not on Mrs Boynton’s death, tended to discuss questions of the day: the League of Nations, the enmity of the Arabs toward the Jews, the menace of white slavers and drug dealers, and the benefits or otherwise of psychotherapy.
But Colonel Carbury was only concerned with the whodunit writing itself before his very eyes:
‘I suppose you couldn’t do the things the detective does in books? Write a list of significant facts – things that don’t seem to mean anything but are really frightfully important – that sort of thing?’
‘Ah,’ said Poirot kindly. ‘You like that kind of detective story? But certainly, I will do it for you with pleasure.’
He drew a sheet of paper towards him and wrote quickly and neatly: SIGNIFICANT POINTS.
In one respect Hercule Poirot’s Christmas,19 published in 1938, is reminiscent of ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ of the early 1920s – the outset of each case finds Poirot ill at ease with country Christmas cheer and gazing gloomily upon a blazing Yuletide fire. In ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ he had been in mourning for a Hastings departed to the Argentine. In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, in the home of Colonel Johnson, the Chief Constable of Middleshire and a friend from the Three Act Tragedy case, his secret lamentations were all for his neck. In the absence of central heating it was, he felt sure, dreadfully at risk from cold draughts.
Inevitably, an alarming distraction soon came to hand. ‘Damn it all!’ cried the Chief Constable. ‘Case of murder! On Christmas Eve too!’ This led to Poirot’s posthumous introduction to a neighbouring millionaire, the tyrannical Simon Lee, whose neck – cut neatly through the jugular vein – had suffered a far greater misfortune than Poirot’s that Christmas Eve.
The surviving members of the Lee family, as described by Colonel Johnson, were of a mode familiar to Poirot from many an earlier case:
‘All the same, it’s incredible, you know. Here’s a particularly crude and brutal murder – and whom have we as suspects? Alfred Lee and his wife – both charming, well-bred, quiet people. George Lee, who’s a member of parliament and the essence of respectability. His wife? She’s just an ordinary modem lovely. David Lee seems a gentle creature and we’ve got his brother Harry’s word for it that he can’t stand the sight of blood. His wife seems a nice, sensible woman – quite commonplace. Remains the Spanish niece and the man from South Africa.’
Well, there they all were. As Poirot commented, as he set to work, on Christmas Eve there is apt to be ‘a great amount of strain’ in families.
Two cases of this busy period, described in the short stories ‘Yellow Iris’ and ‘The Dream’, took place in London and mercifully required no more than the summoning of taxis to bring Poirot to the scenes of impending crimes.
Nevertheless, the affair of the ‘Yellow Iris’ did tear him away, on a chilly night, from the contemplation of his beloved electric radiator to the far less certain pleasures of a champagne supper at a fashionable restaurant. Here – according to an anonymous phonecall – someone at a table decorated with yellow irises was in danger of being murdered. Dutifully insinuating himself into this lively scene, Poirot encountered hazards of his own. Seated beside a well-known South American dancer, he murmured:
‘Señora, as the evening advances I become more brave. If you would dance with me now –’
‘Oh, yes, indeed. You are – you are ze cat’s whiskers, M. Poirot. I inseest on dancing with you.’
‘You are too kind, Señora.’
Altogether it turned out to be a tense evening. So quickly and cleverly did Poirot foil a murderer, however, that his amour propre returned in a rush:
‘Señora, as the evening advances I become more brave. If you would dance with me now – ‘
‘Oh, yes, indeed. You are – you are ze cat’s whiskers, M. Poirot. I inseest on dancing with you.’
‘You are too kind, Señora.’
Poirot found events in ‘The Dream’ far less exciting. In this case a summons for help took him to the somewhat déclassé mansion of a reclusive millionaire, Benedict Farley, a man constantly tormented by a dream that at exactly twenty-eight minutes past three he will shoot himself. Poirot firmly declined the case (‘For that, Monsieur Farley, I should recommend Napoleon’s Book of Dreams – or the latest practising psychologist from Harley Street’), but within a week Farley’s dream had come true, and Poirot was summoned again. Gathered together were Farley’s widow, his daughter, his secretary, his doctor and a police inspector. Poirot heard out their stories, sat back, and inquired:
‘One more question, Mrs Farley. Had your husband good sight?’
‘No. Not without his glasses.’
‘He was very short-sighted?’
‘Oh, yes, he was quite helpless without his spectacles.’
‘He had several pairs of glasses?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah,’ said Poirot. He leaned back. ‘I think that that concludes the case …’
There was silence in the room. They were looking at the little man who sat there complacently stroking his moustache.
It is clear from a number of contemporary references that Poirot’s next investigation, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,20 published in 1940, takes place in the first half of the catastrophic year of 1939. Hints of dangers in Europe – Communists and Fascists, arms dealers and assassins, spies and counter-spies – surface like piranha throughout this complex affair. As for England, there is much talk of preserving a solvent economy and conservative values at all costs, the Prime Minister is shot at, and the Imperial Shirts ‘march with banners and have a ridiculous salute’.
Disturbing as all this was, at the outset of the case Poirot was preoccupied with anxieties of his own:
There are certain humilating moments in the lives of the greatest of men. It has been said that no man is a hero to his valet. To that may be added that few men are heroes to themselves at the moment of visiting their dentist.
Hercule Poirot was morbidly conscious of this fact.
He was a man who was accustomed to have a good opinion of himself. He was Hercule Poirot, superior in most ways to other men. But in this moment he was unable to feel superior in any way whatever. His morale was down to zero. He was just that ordinary, that craven figure, a man afraid of the dentist’s chair.
‘It is a beautiful thought,’ said a deliriously happy Poirot half an hour later to a taxi driver, ‘that I have been to the dentist and I need not go again for six months.’ But even as he was digesting a celebratory lunch, George handed him the telephone: ‘It’s Chief Inspector Japp, sir.’ Astonishingly, within an hour of Poirot’s departure, Mr Morley, his chatty and inoffensive dentist, had committed suicide.
Or was it murder? Or espionage? Or a monstrous double bluff of which poor Mr Morley was but an accidental victim? Steadily gathering victims, and paced by a familiar nursery rhyme, the case advanced like a juggernaut. Who was he really up against, Poirot began to wonder. Was he trying to avenge his dentist? Or was he, in fact, trying to save England? When Japp was called off the case by the highest authority, Poirot soldiered on alone:
George entered the room with his usual noiseless tread. He set down on a little table a steaming pot of chocolate and some sugar biscuits.
‘Will there be anything else, sir?’
‘I am in great perplexity of mind, George.’
‘Indeed, sir? I am sorry to hear it.’
Hercule Poirot poured himself out some chocolate and stirred it thoughtfully.
When the case was all over, Poirot found himself exhausted. ‘Is it possible,’ he said to himself with astonishment, ‘that I am growing old?’
The murder in Poirot’s last case of the 1930s occurred on 27 July 1939, and his investigation of it is superbly recounted in Sad Cypress, published in 1940. It is a story of letters and wills, love and greed.
The centrepiece of Sad Cypress is the trial for murder of a young woman, Elinor Carlisle. Caught in a love triangle, her rival poisoned, the evidence against her is overwhelming. When all appears lost, a friend and would-be lover calls in Poirot.
It was a most tactful and beguiling Poirot, looking ‘very Londonified’ and ‘wearing patent leather shoes’, who descended upon the village of Maidensford to interview a majestic housekeeper, a lovelorn garage mechanic, and a confused under-gardener. The re-examination of old evidence over many cups of tea became, at times, a game of cat and mouse. To win the confidence of the housekeeper, for example (‘for Mrs Bishop, a lady of conservative habits and views, strongly disapproved of foreigners’), Poirot had to play a trump card:
He recounted with naive pride a recent visit of his to Sandringham. He spoke with admiration of the graciousness and delightful simplicity and kindness of Royalty.
Mrs Bishop, who followed daily in the court circular the exact movements of Royalty, was overborne. After all, if They had sent for Mr Poirot … Well, naturally, that made All the Difference. Foreigner or no foreigner, who was she, Emma Bishop, to hold back where Royalty had led the way?
NOTES
1 Black Coffee stands on its own as the only Poirot play not based on a previously published work.
2 An expanded version of this story, with a changed ending, was published in 1937 under the title ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’.
3 Also published under the title Thirteen at Dinner.
4 An expanded version of this story was published in 1960 under the title ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’.
5 Though published in 1936, the Foreword to Murder in Mesopotamia states: ‘The events chronicled in this narrative took place some four years ago.’
6 Also published under the title Murder in the Calais Coach.
7 Also published under the title Murder in Three Acts.
8 In the 1920s, and always to his great astonishment, Mr Satterthwaite had been the associate of another of Agatha Christie’s detectives, the mysterious Harley Quin.
9 Also published under the title Death in the Air.
10 Before coming to work for Poirot, Miss Lemon served as secretary to yet another of Agatha Christie’s detectives, Parker Pyne.
11 Also published under the title Poirot Loses a Client.
12 Though a much longer case, Miss Arundell’s posthumous summoning of Poirot is reminiscent of Miss Barrowby’s in ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’.
13 Two others published during this period, ‘The Incredible Theft’ and ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, are expanded versions of ‘The Submarine Plans’ and ‘The Second Gong’.
14 Also published, sometimes in slightly differing versions, under the titles ‘Crime in Cabin 66’, ‘The Mystery of the Crime in Cabin 66’, and ‘Poirot and the Crime in Cabin 66’.
15 During this voyage a fellow passenger asked Poirot if he had ever been to Egypt. ‘Never, Mademoiselle,’ he replied, completely forgetting ‘The Adventure of The Egyptian Tomb’ of the 1920s, a remarkable lapse of Poirot’s famous memory that I can only ascribe to seasickness.
16 Although Cards on the Table was published in 1936, a sobering remark by one of its characters – ‘Even if somebody did push their great-aunt down the stairs in 1912, it won’t be much use to us in 1937’ – places events of this case in the following year.
17 Like Poirot himself, Superintendent Battle, Ariadne Oliver and Colonel Race each has his or her own separate sphere in Christie literature. To bring the four of them together at his dinner table was certainly a triumph for Mr Shaitana.
18 This book should not be confused with a Parker Pyne short story of the same title.
19 Also published under the titles Murder for Christmas and A Holiday for Murder.
20 Also published under the titles The Patriotic Murders and An Overdose of Death.
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