Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot

1 THE CURTAIN RISES

‘My name,’ said Poirot, contriving as usual to make the simple statement sound like the curtain of the first act of a play, ‘my name is Hercule Poirot.’

—THE LABOURS OF HERCULES

That benevolent despot, Hercule Poirot, who to this day keeps a firm grasp on the affection of countless subjects, made his debut as a fully formed foreign eccentric on page 34 of his creator’s first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. On page 35 Cynthia Murdoch of Styles Court made a pioneer English attempt to describe him. ‘He’s a dear little man,’ she said.

Her remark was to stand the test of time wonderfully well, though not everyone who was to meet Poirot over the next six decades – especially not those attempting to cover up crimes – would agree with her. ‘You unutterable little jackanapes of a foreigner!’ more than one was to cry, purple with rage. Poirot himself would have been annoyed if he had heard Cynthia’s remark. ‘My name is Hercule Poirot,’ he was apt to say to those not appropriately impressed, ‘and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.’

A number of Christie scholars have debated his origins. The most important clues, of course, have been provided by Agatha Christie herself. In 1916, in her twenty-sixth year, she set herself the task of writing a detective novel:

Who could I have as a detective? I reviewed such detectives as I had met and admired in books. There was Sherlock Holmes, the one and only – I should never be able to emulate him. There was Arsène Lupin – was he a criminal or a detective? Anyway, not my kind. There was the young journalist Rouletabille in The Mystery of the Yellow Room – that was the sort of person whom I would like to invent … then I remembered our Belgian refugees. We had quite a colony of refugees living in the parish of Tor … Why not make my detective a Belgian? I thought. There were all types of refugees. How about a refugee police officer? A retired police officer. Not too young a one …

Anyway, I settled on a Belgian detective. I allowed him slowly to grow into his part. He should have been an inspector, so that he would have a certain knowledge of crime. He would be meticulous, very tidy … always arranging things, liking things in pairs, liking things square instead of round. And he should be very brainy – he should have little grey cells of the mind – that was a good phrase: I must remember that – yes, he would have little grey cells.

Other possible predecessors and contemporaries have been suggested: G. K. Chesterton’s Hercule Flambeau, Robert Barr’s Eugène Valmont, A. E. W. Mason’s Inspector Hanaud, Marie Belloc Lowndes’s Hercules Popeau, and inevitably – despite Agatha Christie’s disclaimer – Sherlock Holmes.

Like Holmes, Poirot was vain, brilliant, and a bachelor; like Holmes he possessed, in Arthur Hastings, a faithful Watson; and, as readers will discover, there occur from time to time in the Poirot canon situations and frames of mind distinctly Holmesian. ‘Ah, well,’ as Poirot himself said complacently in Cards on the Table, ‘I am not above stealing the tricks of others.’ He knew perfectly well who he was. He was the one and only, the unique Hercule Poirot. If he had been asked about origins, I imagine him stroking his moustaches, his eyes as green as a cat’s. ‘Once upon a time,’ he might have replied, with an imperious wave of his hand, ‘there was born in the kingdom of Belgium a baby with an egg-shaped head …’

The kingdom of Belgium was – and still is – a neat, cautious, Catholic country that knows what it’s about. Family businesses flourish. Education and the arts are taken seriously and so is food. Its restaurants are well known to gourmets and its pastry chefs are famous.

Its capital, Brussels – the city where Poirot was probably born, and certainly flourished for many years – possesses what is probably the most beautiful and sociable square in Europe, the Grand Place. Here, high atop the magnificent Hôtel de Ville, a gilded figure of St Michael watches over the city. It is perfectly possible that, once upon a time, St Michael watched a procession of Poirots taking a new baby to church to be christened.

When was Hercule Poirot born? In what he himself would have called ‘supreme exercises of imagination’, a number of serious attempts have been made to pinpoint one improbable year or another. Usually these calculations depend on a remark of Poirot’s in Three Act Tragedy that he was ‘due’ to retire from the Belgian Police Force at the time of the outbreak of the First World War. Making an undocumented guess at a retirement age of sixty to sixty-five years, the conclusion has then been reached that he was born between 1849 and 1854.1

Tempting as it is to reconstruct a chronological Poirot in this matter of age – particularly as he was still flourishing in the early 1970s – I suspect that Agatha Christie, and Poirot himself, would have been amused by all this arithmetic. In context, Poirot seems to be a man in his late fifties or early sixties when he arrives in England and somewhere in his mid-eighties in Curtain, his last case. That close to sixty years of elegant ageing elapsed between, with never a diminution of his grey cells, was a tour de force for his adroit creator and one of Poirot’s great charms. ‘Men have as many years as they feel,’ says an Italian proverb. In this matter of years, and of his age at any particular time, Poirot was always extremely – and wisely – reticent.

In The Labours of Hercules Dr Burton, a Fellow of All Souls College, ruminated on Hercule Poirot’s first name. ‘Hardly a Christian name,’ he pointed out. ‘Definitely pagan. But why? That’s what I want to know. Father’s fancy? Mother’s whim?’ Whether moved by fancy or whim, the Poirots showed no timidity. In an inspired moment they delved into Greek mythology and named their son after Hercules the Strong, the mightiest of the ancient heroes. Poirot himself loved his name; it was to prove a glorious compensation for his diminutive size. ‘It is the name of one of the great ones of this world,’ he boasted in The Mystery of the Blue Train.2

All his life Poirot preferred privacy and was particularly unforthcoming about his earlier (and long) life in Belgium. References to his past are rare, but in Three Act Tragedy we are permitted an insight into his childhood: ‘See you, as a boy I was poor. There were many of us. We had to get on in the world.’ One glimpses the Poirots again, hard-working and close-knit, in his lifelong devotion to The Family. ‘I am very strong on the family life, as you know,’ he declared to Hastings on one occasion, and ‘Family strength is a marvellous thing,’ he said on another.

Papa Poirot is scarcely mentioned. All evidence suggests that the mother was the strong one in this family. ‘Madam, we, in our country, have a great tenderness, a great respect for the mother. The mère de famille, she is everything!’ was how he introduced himself to a matron in ‘The King of Clubs’; and ‘I comprehend the mother’s heart. No one comprehends it better than I, Hercule Poirot,’ he told the Dowager Duchess of Merton in Lord Edgware Dies. Throughout his life he was to stand in awe of mothers. ‘Mothers, Madame, are particularly ruthless when their children are in danger,’ he said to a somewhat enigmatic one in Death on the Nile. Perhaps Madame Poirot had cause to be formidable? One imagines her determined and orderly, keeping strict accounts, supervising lessons, fighting against considerable odds to bring her children up to be good little bourgeois, and insisting, in their small quarters, that everyone have good manners and be very neat. Is it Madame Poirot we are seeing, shepherding her large flock to church, in Poirot’s recollection of how women looked in his youth: ‘… a coiffure high and rigid – so – and the hat attached with many hatpins – là – là – là et là.’

But life was not all obedience and hard work. Madame Poirot’s children had some good times as well. ‘Les Feux d’Artifices, the Party, the Games with balls,’ recalled Poirot in Peril at End House. Little Hercule must have been especially enthralled with ‘the conjurer, the man who deceives the eye, however carefully it watches’. And they all must have had a splendid time at the Ommegang, the great holiday in July when the Grand Place is thronged with merrymakers. Like most Europeans, however, Poirot regarded childhood as not a particularly desirable state, but as something to be got over with as quickly as possible. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead, listening to Superintendent Spence dwell in nostalgic detail on the pleasure of childhood:

Poirot waited politely. This was one of the moments when, even after half a lifetime in the country, he found the English incomprehensible. He himself had played at Cache Cache in his childhood, but he felt no desire to talk about it or even think about it.

What of his brothers and sisters? ‘There were many of us,’ he told Mr Satterthwaite, but there is a mention of only one of them in all the Poirot literature, and it is a mention that is quickly erased. In the original version of ‘The Chocolate Box’, a short story that recalls his earlier days in Belgium, Poirot says:

‘I was informed that a young lady was demanding me. Thinking that it was, perhaps, my little sister Yvonne, I prayed my landlady to make her mount.’3

Later versions of this story omit this reference to Yvonne, but it does provide an affectionate glimpse of Poirot as an older brother, a glimpse reflected in an avuncular way a generation later in Cards on the Table when Poirot says to a young woman:

‘It is, you understand, that Christmas is coming on. I have to buy presents for many nieces and grand-nieces.’

One has to be a bit wary about this mention of nieces and grand-nieces, however, as Poirot, who practically never mentioned his real family, was apt to invent imaginary relatives to suit his purposes. The most outrageous example of this is the appearance among the dramatis personae of The Big Four of a twin brother, Achille. When first told of this hitherto unsuspected twin, Hastings was understandably surprised. ‘What does he do?’ he demanded, ‘putting aside a half-formed wonder as to the character and disposition of the late Madame Poirot, and her classical taste in Christian names.’ Replied Poirot, smoothly:

‘He does nothing. He is, as I tell, of a singularly indolent disposition. But his abilities are hardly less than my own – which is saying a great deal.’

‘Is he like you to look at?’

‘Not unlike. But not nearly so handsome. And wears no moustaches.’4

In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Poirot invented a nephew to extract information from that indomitable purveyor of village news, Miss Caroline Sheppard. ‘I never knew that Poirot had an imbecile nephew?’ said her brother, Dr Sheppard.

‘Didn’t you? Oh, he told me all about it. Poor lad. It’s a great grief to all the family. They’ve kept him at home so far, but it’s getting to such a pitch that they’re afraid he’ll have to go into some kind of institution.’

‘I suppose you know pretty well everything there is to know about Poirot’s family by this time,’ I said, exasperated.

‘Pretty well,’ said Caroline complacently. ‘It’s a great relief to people to be able to tell all their troubles to some one.’

In Dumb Witness, to Hastings’s amusement, Poirot produced three more unfortunate relatives: an invalid uncle, a cousin with jaundice, and an ailing but belligerent mother:

This time he had an aged mother for whom he was anxious to find a sympathetic hospital nurse.

‘You comprehend – I am going to speak to you quite frankly. My mother, she is difficult. We have had some excellent nurses, young women, fully competent but the very fact that they are young has been against them. My mother dislikes young women, she insults them, she is rude and fractious, she fights against open windows and modern hygiene. It is very difficult.’

There may, of course, have been germs of truth in some of these confidences, but one thing we can be sure of is that Poirot once had a grandfather who possessed ‘a large turnip of a watch’ (Hastings called it ‘a large grotesque turnip of a watch’) and that Poirot fell heir to it. ‘Take my watch in your hand – with care,’ he once instructed. ‘It is a family heirloom!’

As a young child, Poirot, a good little Catholic, was ‘educated by the nuns’. There is an evocative scene in ‘The Apples of the Hesperides’ when, working on a case in Ireland, he heard the tolling of a convent bell. At once he was transported back in time: ‘He understood that bell. It was a sound he had been familiar with from early youth.’ He may have heard it with mixed feelings. In Five Little Pigs there is a clue that his convent school had its share of dragons. In meeting ‘the shrewd, penetrating glance’ of a retired governess, Poirot ‘once again felt the years falling away and himself a meek and apprehensive little boy’.

As to his later education – and despite Dr Burton’s suspicions that he was never properly taught the classics – Poirot appears to have undergone a thorough and conventional schooling including the study of English, German and Italian in addition, of course, to the two languages of Belgium, French and Flemish. ‘Alas, there is no proper education nowadays,’ he lamented in After the Funeral. ‘Apparently one learns nothing but economics – and how to set Intelligence Tests!’

It is not easy to imagine Poirot as a youth, his moustache in mere infancy, but bits and pieces emerge in the kindness he later showed to injudicious and awkward young men. ‘I cannot overcome my shyness. I say always the wrong thing. I upset water jugs,’ confessed one of them in Murder in Mesopotamia. ‘“We all do these things when we are young,” said Poirot, smiling. “The poise, the savoir faire, it comes later”’; and ‘It is the time for follies, when one is young,’ he said encouragingly to another in ‘Christmas Adventure’.5

An endearing glimpse of Poirot himself as a youth is provided in Evil Under the Sun:

‘When I was young (and that, Mademoiselle, is indeed a long time ago) there was a game entitled “If not yourself, who would you be?” One wrote the answer in young ladies’ albums. They had gold edges and were bound in blue leather.’

From an early age Poirot knew exactly who he would be:

‘To most of us the test comes early in life. A man is confronted quite soon with the necessity to stand on his own feet, to face dangers and difficulties and to take his own line of dealing with them.’

And here we have it, the surprising lure to this tidy and diminutive young man of a life of dangers and difficulties. ‘I entered the police force,’ he told Mr Satterthwaite.6

In police circles, in Poirot’s day, Belgium, which claimed to have an almost perfect statute book, was considered one of the least policed countries in Europe, so law-abiding were her citizens. Nevertheless, Poirot – who quickly became attached to the judicial police whose duties were to investigate crimes and apprehend offenders – had at least one combative moment. A reminiscence in Curtain recalls him in a startling role – Poirot, the Sharpshooter:

‘As a young man in the Belgian police force I shot down a desperate criminal who sat on a roof and fired at people below.’

In a few laconic sentences, Poirot, many years later, summed up perhaps forty to forty-five years he spent with the Belgian police:

‘I worked hard. Slowly I rose in that force. I began to make a name for myself. I made a name for myself. I began to acquire an international reputation.’

Poirot’s career was brilliant. In time he became head of the force. As Hastings described him in The Mysterious Affair at Styles:

… this quaint dandified little man … had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police. As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.

In his English life Poirot occasionally spoke of these Belgian days, and when he did it was almost always of the one case in which he had been utterly fooled.

This dreadful experience was recounted one stormy night as Poirot and Hastings traded confidences before the fire (‘Outside, the wind howled malevolently, and the rain beat against the windows in great gusts’). ‘You ask me if I have ever made the complete ass of myself, as you say over here?’ said Poirot, and there followed the story of ‘The Chocolate Box’,7 a case of a political murder in Brussels in which, outfoxed by a most unlikely killer, he had completely misread the evidence and nearly arrested the wrong person. ‘Sapristi! It does not bear thinking of!’ he cried (but what a consolation for Hastings, one can’t help thinking).

Another case Poirot recalled from time to time – ‘one of my early successes’ – was the affair of the soap manufacturer of Liège, a man of porcine appearance who was found guilty of poisoning his wife in order to marry his secretary. In ‘The Nemean Lion’, while gazing upon ‘the swelling jowl, the small pig eyes, the bulbous nose, and the close-lipped mouth’ of his client, Sir Joseph Hoggin, ‘a memory stirred dimly. A long time ago … in Belgium … something, surely, to do with soap …’ On a hunch that his client was up to no good, Poirot immediately recounted the story of The Soapmaker of Liège to Sir Joseph, who went quite pale. Before long his wife, Lady Hoggin, was saying to her husband: ‘Funny, this tonic tastes quite different. It hasn’t got that bitter taste any more. I wonder why?’ Poirot was especially proud of this case. ‘Prevention, always, is better than cure,’ he said of it in Hickory Dickory Dock.

Two collaborations with the British police in these earlier days (Poirot spoke a tolerable, if mannered, English) were to have important consequences as it was through them that he met the ebullient Inspector Jimmy Japp of Scotland Yard. In 1916, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Poirot’s first case as a private detective in England – he encountered Japp again:

‘I fear you do not remember me, Inspector Japp.’

‘Why, if it isn’t Mr Poirot!’ cried the Inspector. He turned to the other man. ‘You’ve heard me speak of Mr Poirot? It was in 1904 he and I worked together – the Abercrombie forgery case – you remember, he was run down in Brussels. Ah, those were great days, moosier. Then, do you remember “Baron” Altara? There was a pretty rogue for you! He eluded the clutches of half the police in Europe. But we nailed him in Antwerp – thanks to Mr Poirot here.’

After this, Japp took Poirot under his wing – or was it the other way around? No matter, in England their guarded friendship would flourish for years.

In the long run, the most significant link Poirot forged with England in his Belgian days was the assistance he gave to Arthur Hastings, a young employee of Lloyd’s. The nature of the business that brought Hastings from London to Brussels is not recorded, but through it he met Poirot and fell hopelessly under his spell. Hastings was ripe for this. ‘Well, I’ve always had a secret hankering to be a detective!’ he confessed to a new friend in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.