COPYRIGHT

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Revised edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Anne Hart 1990

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Source ISBN: 9780008340278

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DEDICATION

For Susan, Peter and Stephen

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

1 The Curtain Rises

2 The English Debut

3 The 1920s

4 The 1930s

5 The 1940s

6 The Last Three Decades

7 The Complete Poirot

8 The English World of Hercule Poirot

9 Captain Arthur Hastings, OBE

10 The Domestic Poirot

11 The Expeditionary Poirot

12 ‘My Friend Poirot’

13 Countess Rossakoff and Mrs Oliver

14 The Available Poirot

15 The Detective Poirot

16 The Curtain Falls

A Poirot Bibliography

Hercule Poirot Short Stories

Poirot on Stage, Film, TV and Radio

References

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Anne Hart

About the Publisher

PREFACE

This is a biography of the illustrious Hercule Poirot who, behind a façade of dandyisms and mannerisms, was as shrewd and subtle a detective as ever walked the streets of London. For his creator, the incomparable Agatha Christie, he was at times a torment. In 1938, a mere twenty-two years after his genesis, she exclaimed in an interview: ‘There are moments when I have felt: “Why-Why-Why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature? … Eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustaches and tilting his egg-shaped head” … I point out that by a few strokes of the pen … I could destroy him utterly. He replies, grandiloquently: “Impossible to get rid of Poirot like that! He is much too clever.”’ Indeed he was. Poirot knew a supreme story-teller when he found one and never let go. For him she set her most perfect puzzles, thereby achieving immortality for them both.

As with my biography of Agatha Christie’s other major detective, Miss Jane Marple, I owe a great debt of thanks to Rosalind Hicks, Agatha Christie’s daughter, for her kind permission to use her mother’s writing in this way. In working on this second book I have also received the benefit and pleasure of her direct encouragement and hospitality, for which I am immensely grateful. I would also like to thank Anthony Hicks for his lively and helpful comments at the early stages, particularly on the ever controversial matter of Hercule Poirot’s age.

Two people have helped me enormously in the writing of this book. Peter Hart’s knowledgeable, rigorous and witty editing has saved me from many a pitfall (the ones that remain are entirely of my own digging), and Vernon Barber’s encouragement and assistance from the very beginning made the whole enterprise possible. I am grateful as well to Debbie Edgecombe for her heroic and intelligent deciphering of a seemingly interminable number of drafts and revisions. I would also like to thank Brian Stone, my astute and encouraging agent, Bob Comber, his assistant, Nancy Grenville, who gave discerning attention to the final draft, Christopher Burton, who kindly pursued the mystery of Poirot’s telephone numbers in the archives of British Telecom, and Pamela Hodgson who helped so much in the final stages.

Finally, at risk of appearing precious, I would like to thank Hercule Poirot. In my preoccupation for almost two years with this endearing and elegant little detective, there have been many moments of trepidation and exasperation. At the end of it all Poirot is firmly in my heart, a delightful condition I share with millions of readers. All of us are indebted to his inspired creator and sternest critic, Agatha Christie.

Anne Hart

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.

‘The real thing – Scotland Yard? Or Sherlock Holmes?’

‘Oh, Sherlock Holmes by all means. But really, seriously, I am awfully drawn to it.’

Hastings came back from Belgium inspired and reciting, at every opportunity, ‘the various exploits and triumphs of Hercule Poirot’. That in a few years he would be permitted to work under the tutelage of this great man would have been, at that time, the stuff of his wildest dreams.

As we have seen, Poirot was due to retire in about 1914. Perhaps he had already begun to plan a quiet new life amidst ‘les dunes impeccables’ of Knocke-sur-Mer? In August of 1914, however, catastrophe struck with the invasion of neutral Belgium by Germany. The Great War had begun.

The years of German occupation were a period of great suffering for Belgium. Under a German governor, many Belgians who refused to collaborate were executed or deported. In defiance workers withdrew their services, universities voluntarily closed, and newspapers ceased publication. A British heroine, Edith Cavell, the Matron of the Belgian School of Nursing, was shot for aiding escaped Allied soldiers. Countless patriots went underground.

Somewhere in this resistance, we may be sure, was Poirot. As chief of a police force that declined to co-operate, he would have been a prime target for imprisonment by les Bosches – or worse, for under the occupation the penalty for those in the Belgian intelligence service was death. For almost two years Poirot dropped from sight. Evidence of his importance to the resistance surfaced towards the end of the war in the case of ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’, a commission which came from the highest levels of the British Government. ‘What made you come to me?’ he asked a delegation from the War Cabinet. ‘I am unknown, obscure in this great London of yours.’ From the reply it is clear that it had been King Albert himself, the Belgians’ monarch in exile, who had suggested his small compatriot as the one person in England capable of wresting a missing prime minister from the enemy.

In the spring of 1916 the Germans must have been closing in on Poirot. Badly wounded, he was smuggled out of Belgium into France. Years later, in Murder on the Orient Express, he reminded a French General of the debt he owed him:

‘But indeed, do I not remember that once you saved my life?’ And then the General had made another fitting reply to that, disclaiming any merit for that past service; and with more mention of France, of Belgium, of glory, of honour and of such kindred things they had embraced each other heartily.

From France Poirot came, ‘a sad and weary refugee to England’.

From the outset of the war the English had opened their hearts and homes to Belgian refugees. ‘REMEMBER BELGIUM’, admonished enlistment posters, and ‘Vivent les braves Belges!’ was the cry, even some seven years later, of the young people in ‘Christmas Adventure’. Hard-working officials toiled to place these bewildered exiles with appropriate benefactors. Where, they must have wondered, should they send this funny little policeman? Perhaps to Mrs Inglethorp?

Emily Inglethorp, the autocratic mistress of Styles Court in the pretty Essex village of Styles St Mary, had already established a colony of six Belgians in a small cottage called Leastways, not far from the park gates. In the early summer of 1916 her seventh refugee limped down from a train at the village station.

‘A kind lady gave me hospitality,’ said Poirot of Mrs Inglethorp. ‘We Belgians will always remember her with gratitude.’ At Leastways he was given an upstairs room and there he seems to have spent most of his days sitting by a window overlooking the village street, smoking an occasional Russian cigarette, and pondering his fate. ‘You may speak for yourself, Hastings,’ said Poirot in Curtain. ‘For me, my arrival at Styles St Mary was a sad and painful time. I was a refugee, wounded, exiled from home and country, existing by charity in a foreign land.’

What was he to do now, the famous Hercule Poirot, suddenly without aim and far from young? Time must have passed very slowly in this quiet sanctuary ‘in the midst of green fields and country lanes’.

I am sure that, as an occasional diversion, Poirot and his compatriots were hospitably summoned to Styles Court – Styles, as the family called it – to have tea with Mrs Inglethorp and her ménage. At Mrs Inglethorp’s side would have been her new husband, her junior by twenty years, the black-bearded Alfred Inglethorp (the ‘fortune hunter’, her bitter family called him). The refugees would have been introduced as well to Mrs Inglethorp’s two stepsons from an earlier marriage, John Cavendish, who played at being a country squire, and Lawrence, who published ‘rotten verses in fancy bindings’. And they would have met Mary, John Cavendish’s stormy-eyed wife, and plucky Cynthia Murdoch, another of Mrs Inglethorp’s protégées.

‘You’ve been entertaining a celebrity unawares,’ Hastings was to tell them later, and it is interesting to imagine Poirot observing this promising group as he politely sipped a cup of the dreaded English tea. Perhaps, for the first time since coming to England, a gleam of professional interest appeared in those inquiring green eyes?

NOTES

1 For reasons not explained, some researchers and obituaries have taken a mention in The Mysterious Affair at Styles that Poirot and Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard first met in Brussels in 1904, while working on the Abercrombie Forgery Case, as the year of Poirot’s retirement and have concluded that he was born between 1839 and 1844. Assumptions have then been made that he worked as a private detective in Belgium or France between 1904 and 1914. Adding to the confusion, a charming but suspect foreword to Hercule Poirot: Master Detective, an omnibus collection published in 1936, has Poirot stating: ‘I began work as a member of the detective force in Brussels on the Abercrombie Forgery Case in 1904.’ As we know Poirot joined the Belgian police force as a young man, this red herring would have us believe he was born about 1884 and arrived in England at about the age of thirty-two.

2 His family name was to cause difficulties later on. Pwarrit, Porritt, Peerer, Porrott and Prott were some of the ways the English attempted to pronounce it. On three different occasions, in the interests of subterfuge, Poirot himself garbled his name and gave it as Poirier, Pontarlier and Parotti.

3 First published as ‘The Clue of the Chocolate Box’ in The Sketch, 23 May 1923.

4 Some prefer to believe that a triple bluff was played in The Big Four and that Achille really did exist, despite Poirot’s assurances that ‘Brother Achille has gone home again – to the land of myths.’

5 This quotation is from ‘Christmas Adventure’, the first version of ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’.

6 In one of his last cases, Hallowe’en Party, Poirot expressed a slight change of mind: ‘There were times when he almost regretted that he had not taken to the study of theology, instead of going into the police force in his early days. The number of angels who could dance on the point of a needle; it would be interesting to feel that that mattered and to argue passionately on the point with one’s colleagues.’

7 Also published under the titles ‘The Clue of the Chocolate Box’ and ‘The Time Hercule Poirot Failed’. There is some confusion as to when this case actually occurred. In Cards on the Table, set in 1937, Poirot spoke of it as having happened ‘twenty-eight years ago’, which places it in 1909, but in Peril at End House he referred to it as ‘a bad failure in Belgium in 1893’.

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:

‘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.

In ‘The Under Dog’ Poirot was firmly back in business (‘at this present time I have many cases of moment on hand’) and settled in a flat with George in attendance. From there he was summoned to the country by a recent widow, Lady Astwell, who, against all evidence, was convinced that her husband had been murdered by his inoffensive secretary. To uncover the truth Poirot subjected a large household to a reign of terror:

‘For two weeks now I have played the comedy, I have showed you the net closing slowly around you. The fingerprints, footprints, the search of your room with the things artistically replaced. I have struck terror into you with all of this; you have lain awake at night fearing and wondering; did you have a fingerprint in the room or a footprint somewhere?’

A strange little story is ‘Wasps’ Nest’¹⁸ in which Poirot took as his mission the solution of a murder before it even occurred. The setting is charming:

John Harrison loved his garden, and it had never looked better than it did on this August evening, summery and languorous. The rambler roses were still beautiful; sweet peas scented the air.

Two months later the stock markets crashed around the world. We can be sure, however, that Poirot, that canny practitioner of Flemish thrift, continued to sip his tisanes with equanimity. By the end of the 1920s he was a very rich man and remained so for the rest of his life. ‘I like not the sensational. For me the safe, the prudent investment … what you call the gilded edge.’

NOTES

1 Later collected into books, sometimes with minor changes, many of these stories first appeared in magazines such as The Sketch (1923) and Blue Book (1923–25).

2 Also published under the title ‘Mr Davenby Disappears’.

3 Also published under the title ‘The Mystery of the Plymouth Express’.

4 A much expanded version of this story was published in 1937 under the title ‘The Incredible Theft’.

5 Also published under the title ‘The Mystery of the Clapham Cook’.

6 Also published under the title ‘The Curious Disappearance of the Opalsen Pearls’.

7 Also published under the title ‘By Road or Rail’.

8 Also published under the title ‘The Adventure of the King of Clubs’.

9 Also published under the title ‘The Dubious Clue’.

10 Also published under the title ‘The Kidnapping of Johnnie Waverly’.

11 Also published under the title ‘The Million Dollar Bank Robbery’.

12 Also published under the title ‘The Case of the Veiled Lady’.

13 The history of this delectable story is complicated. The first version appeared in The Sketch, 12 December 1923, and made other appearances under the title ‘Christmas Adventure’. In 1960 a much expanded and updated version, set in the 1950s, appeared under two titles: ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ and ‘The Theft of the Royal Ruby’.

14 Though first published as a book in 1927, The Big Four is a somewhat expanded collection of twelve stories which appeared serially in The Sketch in 1924.

15 In 1929, in Partners in Crime, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, actors in another corner of the Christie arena, parodied the exploits of Poirot and Hastings in The Big Four in their adventure ‘The Man Who was No. 16’.

16 Presumably in defending the existing social order against the Big Four. It was probably at this time, for his share in the victory, that Hastings received an OBE. We are never told what Poirot thought of that.

17 Also published under the title ‘In the Third Floor Flat’.

18 Also published under the title ‘The Worst of All’.

4 THE 1930S

‘Monsieur Poirot here,’ said Japp. ‘Quite a good advertisement for a hair tonic, he’d be. Face fungus sprouting finer than ever. Coming out into the limelight, too, in his old age. Mixed up in all the celebrated cases of the day. Train mysteries, air mysteries, high society deaths – oh, he’s here, there and everywhere.’

—THE ABC MURDERS

For many the 1930s were disturbing years. Even among Poirot’s clients it was understood that most people were not as well off as before. Complained Elinor Carlisle in Sad Cypress: ‘Everything costs so much – clothes and one’s face – and just silly things like movies and cocktails – and even gramophone records!’ Some people actually became poor. ‘Darling,’ confided the Hon. Joanna South-wood in Death on the Nile,

‘if any misfortunes happen to my friends I always drop them at once! It sounds heartless, but it saves such a lot of trouble later! They always want to borrow money off you, or else they start a dressmaking business and you have to get the most terrible clothes from them. Or they paint lampshades, or do Batik scarves.’

In Poirot’s world the uncertain political times – the ‘question’ of India, the ‘troubles’ in China, agitation against the Establishment, ‘Bolshies, Reds, all that sort of thing’ – were spoken of over cocktails and at tea. Towards the end of the decade a Europe under the shadow of war brought talk of armaments, the race for Supremacy in the Air, Hitler and Mussolini, the Spanish Civil War, ‘days of crisis’.

In Chelsea flats Poirot was apt to encounter chairs made of webbing and chromium, and in country drawing-rooms even elderly hostesses made concessions to ‘modernity’ by allowing guests to smoke. Egypt in winter was expensive, Majorca was cheap, and ‘Paris doesn’t cut any ice nowadays. It’s London and New York that count,’ cried Jane Wilkinson in Lord Edgware Dies. Bottles of mouthwash could turn out to hold liquor instead, and gold-topped perfume bottles might hide cocaine. People now flew regularly across the Channel, and in one of Poirot’s cases air travel made possible the appearance of a surprise witness from New Zealand.

In the younger generation people of fads and crazes might aspire to be ‘all S.A. and IT’, and in the older – like the Misses Tripp in Dumb Witness – to be ‘vegetarians, theosophists, British Israelites, Christian Scientists, spiritualists and enthusiastic amateur photographers’. Dinner parties might conclude with dancing to phonograph records, or with poker or bridge – in Cards on the Table Mrs Lorrimer declared: ‘I simply will not go out to dinner now if there’s no bridge afterwards!’ – or with earnest conversations, as deplored in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe:

‘Jane has changed a lot lately. Where does she get all these ideas?’

‘Take no notice of what Jane says,’ said Mrs Olivera.

‘Jane’s a very silly girl. You know what girls are – they go to these queer parties in studios where the young men have funny ties and they come home and talk a lot of nonsense.’

Fashion in clothes was a subject dear to Poirot’s heart, and in the 1930s he often found reason to regard his immediate world with satisfaction. ‘She really is a lovely girl,’ said Hastings of Thora Grey in The ABC Murders. ‘And wears very lovely clothes,’ mused Poirot. ‘That crêpe moracain and the silky fox collar – dernier cri!’. In Murder on the Orient Express he gazed with delight upon the Countess Andrenyi dressed in ‘a tight-fitting little black coat and skirt, white satin blouse, small chic black toque perched at the fashionable outrageous angle’. To match, there were plenty of sleek-headed men in well tailored clothes, though most of Poirot’s English circle tended to look askance at men (including Poirot) who paid too much attention to their appearance. ‘He was too well dressed – he wore his hair too long – and he smelt of scent,’ said Major Despard disparagingly of a murder victim in Cards on the Table.

The 1930s found Hercule Poirot at the height of his powers. For him it was to prove a decade of triumphs, la crème de la crème.

In Black Coffee,¹ a play first staged in 1930, Poirot rescued for England a formula for the disintegration of atoms. This coup, and the solution to the after-dinner death of a brilliant scientist, Sir Claud Amory, was but the work of a few hours with the assistance of Hastings – presumably back on another business trip – and an enthusiastic Inspector Japp.

On his own once more, Poirot travelled to Lytcham Close, ‘one of the most famous old houses in England’, at the summons of the eccentric Hubert Lytcham Roche, a man of ungovernable temper and a fanatic for punctuality. As not infrequently occurred in Poirot’s cases, his announced arrival was slightly preceded by his client’s untimely death. For the first and last time, in ‘The Second Gong’,² Hubert Lytcham Roche was late for dinner.

Fourteen full-length books are devoted to Poirot’s exploits in the 1930s, and the first two of these – Peril at End House, published in 1932, and Lord Edgware Dies,³ published in 1933 – find Arthur Hastings at his side. As a sort of appetizer to these major cases, Hastings first enjoyed collaborating in a shorter one, ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’,⁴ a macabre society murder which Poirot pronounced ‘an artistic masterpiece!’ On the perpetrator he bestowed the greatest of compliments:

‘It goes to my heart to hang a man like that. I may be a genius myself, but I am capable of recognizing genius in other people. A perfect murder, mon ami. I, Hercule Poirot, say to you. A perfect murder.

Epatant!’

Welcome as he was to Poirot, Hastings-watchers may find his frequent returns to England rather disconcerting. Wasn’t all that sailing back and forth terribly expensive? Could the ranch afford it? Didn’t Cinderella mind? One imagines her standing on the verandah gazing across the pampas, the cicharra singing, as Arthur and his steamer trunk depart once again for England. From scattered references one rather imagines her waving cheerfully. ‘Tiens!’ as Poirot was apt to say about mysteries. ‘C’est curieux, n’est-ce pas?’

Presumably Hastings sent Cinderella several postcards from the Majestic Hotel in St Loo, the ‘Queen of the Watering Places’ on the Cornish coast, where he and Poirot spent an unexpectedly eventful holiday in Peril at End House. Once again Poirot was in one of his retirement fits. Flattering appeals for help from the Home Secretary left him unmoved (‘I have retired! It is finished!’), but how could he resist intervening when only he could see that someone in St Loo was determined to murder a very independent young thing, Miss Nick Buckley?

Peril at End House was a slippery case. Unchaperoned young women partying and weekending and wearing watches filled with cocaine dumbfounded poor Hastings, but Poirot – who tended to be at his most avuncular at the seaside – took everything in his stride:

‘My friend Hastings is shocked,’ remarked Poirot. ‘You must be more careful, Mademoiselle. He is out of date, you comprehend. He has just returned from those great clear open spaces, etc., and he has yet to learn the language of nowadays.’

Poirot, with Hastings in tow, was soon back in London and accepting commissions from wealthy clients. In Lord Edgware Dies some of these clients’ requests were outside Poirot’s usual genre. He reluctantly acceded to Lady Edgware’s request that he ask her husband to give her a divorce (‘Of course if we were only in Chicago,’ she exclaimed, ‘I could get him bumped off quite easily’), but drew the line at accepting an overlapping commission from Lady Edgware’s next prospective mother-in-law, the Dowager Duchess of Merton, to stop Lady Edgware from marrying her son. The two men in question were a very rum lot in Hastings’s opinion. Lord Edgware was secretive, sneering, and had most peculiar tastes in art and literature, while the Duke of Merton, ‘A young man of monkish tendencies, a violent Anglo-Catholic … was supposed to care nothing for women.’

Poirot was preparing to cut and run on all this when the sensation of Lord Edgware’s murder broke upon London. There he lay in his handsome library, stabbed in the back of the neck, a challenge for Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard. But could Poirot, whose mind should have been elsewhere – the strange disappearance of an ambassador’s boots, for example – leave well enough alone? ‘To say I have the head of a pig is not pretty,’ Poirot exclaimed indignantly to Japp as he clambered aboard the case. Within a day or two of Poirot’s inspired solving of the Edgware affair, Hastings was ‘suddenly recalled to the Argentine’ and Poirot resumed his distinguished life as a consultant on matters of the greatest importance. ‘I belong to the world,’ he declared loftily, and we find him next journeying in the Middle East after ‘disentangling some military scandal in Syria’. On his way to Baghdad a diversionary case, ‘a fantastic crime’, plucked him from his course.

The narrator of Murder in Mesopotamia⁵ is Amy Leatheran, ‘a woman of thirty-five of erect, confident bearing’, temporarily employed as a nurse to Louise Leidner, the beautiful but overweight wife of the leader of the University of Pittstown’s expedition to Iraq. In what Nurse Leatheran was to call ‘the Tell Yarimjah business’, her assignment placed her in the compound of an archaeological team, a tense group of people that Poirot was to label ‘Mrs Leidner’s entourage’.

Mrs Leidner’s murder – predicted by herself – confounded the local authorities and brought Hercule Poirot jolting down the dusty track to Tell Yarimjah. Amy Leatheran described her first sight of him:

I don’t know what I’d imagined – something rather like Sherlock Holmes – long and lean with a keen, clever face. Of course, I knew he was a foreigner, but I hadn’t expected him to be quite as foreign as he was, if you know what I mean.

When you saw him you just wanted to laugh! He was like something on the stage or at the pictures. To begin with, he wasn’t above five foot five, I should think – an odd plump little man, quite old, with an enormous moustache, and a head like an egg. He looked like a hairdresser in a comic play!

And this was the man who was going to find out who killed Mrs Leidner!

Some years later Nurse Leatheran neatly settled her starched cuffs and wrote an excellent account of how Poirot solved the murder. As she neared her conclusion she observed laconically: ‘M. Poirot went back to Syria and about a week later he went home on the Orient Express and got himself mixed up in another murder.’

At the outset of this next adventure we glimpse Poirot, ‘of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache’, in danger of freezing to death on a winter morning on the platform of a Syrian railway station. Just behind him lay The Syrian Army Case (‘“You have saved us, mon cher,” said the General emotionally … “You have saved the honour of the French Army”’) and the crime passionnel of the Mesopotamian Murder Case. Just ahead a telegram awaited him in Stamboul recalling him to England on important business. And just beyond that, all unforeseen as he stamped his galoshes on the railway platform, lay an immobilization in snowdrifts aboard the most fabled train in detective literature.

Murder on the Orient Express⁶, published in 1934, was a lovely romp for Poirot – no outside interferences, no police, no need to rush elsewhere, and all set amidst the most comfortable of surroundings with excellent food and absorbing witnesses at hand. In this agreeable milieu Poirot solved one of his most famous cases, the stabbing in the next compartment of a notorious criminal recently acquitted in the United States of the kidnapping and death of little Daisy Armstrong, the child of famous parents. How grateful was the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits to Poirot for rescuing it from a potential embarrassment! And how grateful was Poirot for his snowbound diversion: ‘I was reflecting … that many hours of boredom lay ahead whilst we are stuck here.’

Three Act Tragedy,⁷ published in 1934, was a very sociable case. With an eye to the audience its cast busied itself with all sorts of camaraderie and hospitality (even Poirot rose to the occasion and gave a sherry party), while the nicotine which in turn dispatched three victims was neatly administered in an excellent martini, a glass of port, and a box of chocolates.

Tiens! Though pretending yet again to be semi-retired, how could Poirot resist rushing home from the Riviera when he heard all this? In this case, however, Poirot was at times gently upstaged by another small elderly man, Mr Satterthwaite:⁸

A dried-up little pipkin of a man, Mr Satterthwaite, a patron of art and the drama, a determined but pleasant snob, always included in the more important house parties and social functions – the words ‘and Mr Satterthwaite’ appeared invariably at the tail of a list of guests. Withal, a man of considerable intelligence and a very shrewd observer of people and things.

Poirot came to have a high regard for Mr Satterthwaite’s acute observation of the social scene, but in the end, the murderer in Three Act Tragedy unmasked, he insisted on having the last word. Said Mr Satterthwaite:

‘My goodness … I’ve only just realized it! That rascal, with his poisoned cocktail! Anyone might have drunk it! It might have been me!’

‘There is an even more terrible possibility that you have not considered,’ said Poirot.

‘Eh?’

‘It might have been me’.

‘If anyone had told me a week ago,’ said Inspector Japp, in September of 1934, ‘that I should be investigating a crime where a woman was killed with a poisoned dart with snake venom on it – well, I’d have laughed in his face!’ Poor Japp! He had come in all innocence to Croydon Aerodrome on the off-chance of catching a smuggler and had found himself confronted with the airliner ‘Prometheus’ just landed from Paris with the body of a French passenger murdered en route. Also on board, as a further annoyance, was an airsick Hercule Poirot who, although claiming to be the greatest detective in the world, had slept through the whole thing. ‘Luckily,’ said Japp, breathing heavily, ‘it’s one of those semiforeign cases.’

But who could the murderer be? wondered Japp, Poirot, and M. Fournier of the French Sûreté as they pondered the list of passengers. Could it be the chatty English mystery writer, whose most recent whodunit, The Clue of the Scarlet Petal, hinged on poisoned darts? Could it be Japp’s favourite suspects, two seedy-looking Frenchmen? (‘What you say is possible, certainly,’ murmured Poirot tactfully, ‘but as regards some of your points, you are in error, my friend. Those two men are not toughs or cutthroats, as you suggest. They are, on the contrary, two distinguished and learned archaeologists.’) Could it be – as initially decided by a xenophobic coroner’s jury – Hercule Poirot? (‘The coroner frowned. “Nonsense, I can’t accept this verdict.”’) And so on. There was no doubt that a very clever murder had been committed in mid air. ‘Our Irish stew’ was one more of the things Japp called Death in the Clouds,⁹ published in 1935. Poirot, once he had recovered from his airsickness, had a splendid time solving it.

A short story which first appeared in 1935 is ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, in which Miss Amelia Barrowby of Charman’s Green in Buckinghamshire wrote to request a consultation with Poirot, on ‘a very delicate family matter’, just before succumbing to strychnine poisoning. Besides the mystery of Miss Barrowby’s sad death, this story is memorable as landmark evidence of Poirot’s mounting press of business, for in it we are introduced for the first time to a very formidable person, Miss Lemon, who rejoices for the rest of this saga in the title of Confidential Secretary to Hercule Poirot.¹⁰ Like George the valet, Felicity Lemon fully met all her employer’s fanatical specifications for neatness and order (‘Her real passion in life was the perfection of a filing system beside which all other filing systems should sink into oblivion’) and, like George, while overlooked in the excitement of a number of cases, she served faithfully in the background for many more years.

Back from Argentina in June of 1935 came Arthur Hastings to find Poirot established in Whitehaven Mansions, ‘an outstanding building of modern flats’. Taking stock, the two men immediately began talking about each other’s hair. Inspector Japp, dropping by, had something to add. ‘Just a little bit thin on top, eh?’ he remarked tactlessly to Hastings, and Poirot made things even worse:

‘You know, Hastings, there is a little device – my hairdresser is a man of great ingenuity – one attaches it to the scalp and brushes one’s own hair over it – it is not a wig, you comprehend – but – ’

‘Poirot,’ I roared. ‘Once and for all I will have nothing to do with the beastly inventions of your confounded hairdresser’

and added, testily, that Japp – for whom Hastings had never had much affection – was ‘getting as grey as a badger’ and looking much older.

Poirot, of course, was secure with his hairdresser and a black bottle of REVIVIT.

But more important matters were soon at hand – the extraordinarily senseless serial murders recounted in The ABC Murders, published in 1936. Poirot had been hoping for just such a case to enliven Hastings’s visit:

‘As soon as I heard you were coming over I said to myself: Something will arise. As in former days we will hunt together, we two. But if so it must be no common affair. It must be something’ – he waved his hands excitedly – ‘something recherché – delicate – fine …’ He gave the last untranslatable word its full flavour.

‘Upon my word, Poirot,’ I said. ‘Any one would think you were ordering a dinner at the Ritz.’

The puzzle of the ABC killings, in which the date and whereabouts of each murder was ghoulishly announced to Poirot before it was committed, made for an exciting summer. For Poirot it was an interesting departure from his usual type of case, the crime intime: ‘Here, for the first time in our association, it is cold-blooded, impersonal murder. Murder from the outside.’ For Hastings it was, no doubt, a welcome change from worrying about the ranch. What a splendid return! What a ‘cream of crime’! Who cared, after all, if one was going a trifle bald?

The ABC murderer was caught in November, just one month short of Hastings’s return to Argentina, and in June of the following year we find him back again enjoying ‘the roar of London’ from Poirot’s sitting-room window and making notes for the narration of a new case:

But though Miss Arundell’s death surprised no one, something else did. The provisions of her will gave rise to varying emotions, astonishment, pleasurable excitement, deep condemnation, fury, despair, anger and general gossip. For weeks and even months Market Basing was to talk of nothing else!

Thus began Dumb Witness,¹¹ published in 1937, in which Poirot, to Hastings’s horror, told many lies to find the killer of Miss Emily Arundell, an upright and shrewd Victorian, whose death would never have been investigated had she not, in a fatally delayed letter, asked Poirot to undertake unspecified investigations on her behalf.¹²

In Market Basing, Hastings was very drawn to the late Miss Arundell’s household. Of her drawing-room he wrote:

A faint fragrance of pot-pourri hung about it. The chintzes were worn, their pattern faded garlands of roses. On the walls were prints and water-colour drawings. There was a good deal of china – fragile shepherds and shepherdesses. There were cushions worked in crewel stitch. There were faded photographs in handsome silver frames. There were many inlaid workboxes and tea caddies. Most fascinating of all to me were two exquisitely cut tissue-paper ladies under glass stands. One with a spinning-wheel, one with a cat on her knee.

He was also very taken with her amiable wire-haired terrier, Bob. In the end the orphaned dog was given to Poirot but Hastings quickly claimed him as a spoil of war. ‘My word, Poirot, it’s good to have a dog again,’ he said, and off he went, back to Argentina. This time, for whatever reasons and however homesick, Hastings did not return to England for many years.

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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