Agatha Christie's Poirot

by Anne Hart

  ‘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 overweigh
t 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 ari
se. 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