Agatha Christie's Poirot

by Anne Hart

‘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 th
e 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,