Agatha Christie's Poirot

by Anne Hart

  But on the heels of this accomplishment there came a painful blow to Poirot’s pride – a would-be client who changed her mind about consulting him on a murder she might have committed.

  His visitor was a girl of perhaps twenty-odd. Long straggly hair of indeterminate colour strayed over her shoulders. Her eyes, which were large, bore a vacant expression and were of a greenish blue. She wore what were presumably the chosen clothes of her generation. Black high leather boots, white open-work woollen stockings of doubtful cleanliness, a skimpy skirt, and a long and sloppy pullover of heavy wool.

  She and Poirot looked at each other. ‘You’re too old,’ she said, ‘I’m really very sorry.’ Nameless and distraught, she blundered away.

  It took a large cup of chocolate topped with whipped cream before Mrs Oliver, to whom Poirot rushed for comfort, could calm him. ‘You do not understand,’ he cried, when she urged him to forget his strange caller. ‘I am worried about this girl. She came to me for help.’

  To lighten his misery they set out to find Poirot’s visitor. Early in their investigation Mrs Oliver deduced that she was a Third Girl. Poirot had never heard the term before.

  ‘Good gracious, don’t you know what a third girl is? Don’t you read The Times’ …

  She went to a side table and snatched up The Times, turned the pages over and brought it to him. ‘Here you are – look. ‘THIRD GIRL for comfortable second floor flat, own room, central heating, Earl’s Court.’ ‘Third girl wanted to share flat, 5gns. week own room.’ … It’s the way girls like living now. Better than P.G.s or a hostel. The main girl takes a furnished flat, and then shares out the rent. Second girl is usually a friend. Then they find a third girl by advertising if they don’t know one.’

  In searching for their third girl, and in tracking her difficulties, Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver encountered the swinging London of the Sixties. Poirot had observed the mores of the young in the late 1950s – Teddy Boys, coffee bars, stereos, tight blue jeans, fishermen’s jerseys and so on – but now the youth revolution burst upon him in full flower. ‘Long-haired young fellows, beatniks, Beatles, all sorts of names they’ve got,’ complained one of his contemporaries:

  ‘They probably look like mods or rockers or beatniks or whatever they call these chaps nowadays with the long hair and the dirty nails. I’ve seen more than one of them prowling about. One doesn’t like to say ‘Who the devil are you?’ You never know which sex they are, which is embarrassing. The place crawls with them. I suppose they’re Norma’s friends. Wouldn’t have been allowed in the old days. But you turn them out of the house, and then you find out it’s Viscount Endersleigh or Lady Charlotte Marjoribanks. Don’t know where you are nowadays.’

  It was all very confusing. At times in Third Girl – despite once again hiring the formidable talents of Mr Goby and receiving behind-the-scenes help from Scotland Yard – Poirot wondered if he and Mrs Oliver would ever manage to solve this case. Mrs Oliver was coshed on the head in an alley near the King’s Road, and Poirot was reduced to the depths of despair (‘Perhaps I am too old … What do I know?’), but in the end they overcame.

  Hallowe’en Party, published in 1969, saw the collaboration once again of Poirot, Mrs Oliver and Superintendent Spence, the trio who had worked together so winningly in Mrs McGinty’s Dead.

  In the latter years of Poirot’s life the ever-enthusiastic Ariadne Oliver became something of a constant. ‘Hercule Poirot speaks’ was one of the grandiloquent ways in which he answered the phone, and increasingly the voice on the other end tended to be Mrs Oliver’s – ‘a magnificent booming contralto which caused Poirot hastily to shift the receiver a couple of inches further from his ear’. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she might begin, all out of breath. ‘I wanted to get hold of you urgently – absolutely urgently,’ for Mrs Oliver not only constantly invented murders in the course of writing detective novels, but she had, as well, the habit of encountering them first-hand in her own gloriously disorganized life.

  Superintendent Spence, Poirot’s other great ally in old age, was by now retired, but in his day he had been a police officer of high rank and reputation. He and Poirot held each other in great esteem, and in several of Poirot’s later cases Spence’s well maintained contacts with Scotland Yard and local police forces proved invaluable.

  In Hallowe’en Party Ariadne Oliver, while visiting a friend in the town of Woodleigh Common, had the misfortune to be present at a children’s party at which an appalling murder was committed – the drowning of a thirteen-year-old girl in a galvanized water bucket as she knelt to bob for apples.

  Poor Mrs Oliver! With her, apples were almost a motif:

  She was either eating an apple or had been eating an apple – witness an apple core nestling on her broad chest – or was carrying a bag of apples.

  But never again. ‘I hate apples,’ she announced to Poirot when she burst upon him with news of this murder. ‘I never want to see an apple again …’ It was now his turn to be soothing: ‘He stretched out a hand and filled a small glass with cognac. “Drink this,” he said. “It will do you good,”’ and as soon as Mrs Oliver had recovered a bit, and Poirot had recalled that Superintendent Spence lived in Woodleigh Common, their course was set. In their subsequent investigation the police co-operated beautifully, of course.

  A dreamy quality, a gradual slowing of pace, are often present in Poirot’s last cases, and nowhere are these more evident than in this narrative set in an early November. ‘We are up against ruthlessness, quick reactions, greed pushed beyond an expectable human limit,’ said Poirot, but in vanquishing these dragons he often paused to contemplate other things: the artifacts of old rituals, the secret lives of children, the stirrings of leaves and shadows in an enchanted garden.

  The case of Elephants Can Remember, published in 1972, began with Ariadne Oliver’s reluctant attendance at a literary luncheon. In the course of it she was trapped over coffee by what Poirot was apt to call une femme formidable:

  ‘You’ll be very surprised, really, at what I’m going to say,’ said Mrs Burton-Cox. ‘But I have felt, from reading your books, how sympathetic you are, how much you understand of human nature. And I feel that if there is anyone who can give me an answer to the question I want to ask, you will be the one to do so.’

  Her question was about a young woman, Celia Ravenscroft, a god-daughter of Mrs Oliver’s, whom Mrs Burton-Cox’s only son hoped to marry. ‘Mrs Burton-Cox leaned forward and breathed hard … ‘Did her mother kill her father or was it the father who killed the mother?’ she asked.’

  And really, thought Mrs Oliver, wishing she was brave enough to say it, how on earth you have the impertinence to ask me such a thing, I don’t know.

  Neither did she know the answer to the question. She remembered Celia as a baby (‘and had found a very nice Queen Anne silver strainer as a christening present. Very nice. Do nicely for straining milk and would also be the sort of thing a god-daughter could always sell for a nice little sum if she wanted ready money at any time’), and she remembered the dreadful news of Celia’s parents’ deaths – both found shot at the top of a cliff – but beyond this she knew nothing. As ‘Mrs Burton-Cox dipped a lump of sugar in her coffee and crunched it in a rather carnivorous way, as though it was a bone’, Mrs Oliver was seized with sudden concern for her mislaid god-daughter and, it must be admitted, rampant curiosity. Which of Celia’s parents had killed the other?

  As always in such quandaries, she sought out Poirot:

  ‘I expect I’m mad,’ said Mrs Oliver sadly. She brushed her hands through her hair again so that she looked like the old picture books of Struwwelpeter. ‘I was just thinking of starting a story about a golden retriever. But it wasn’t going well. I couldn’t get started, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘All right, abandon the golden retriever,’ replied Poirot, who had scented something far more interesting. Their new case had begun.

  It was, of course, a trip to the past to reconstruct and reinterpret old m
otives and events. First Mrs Oliver had to retrieve her god-daughter (‘And – very modern, you know. Goes about with long-haired people in queer clothes. I don’t think she takes drugs’). Next, a consultation had to be arranged:

  ‘This is Monsieur Hercule Poirot. He has special genius in finding out things.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Celia.

  She looked very doubtfully at the egg-shaped head, the monstrous moustaches and the small stature. ‘I think,’ she said rather doubtfully, ‘that I have heard of him.’

  Hercule Poirot stopped himself with a slight effort from saying firmly, ‘Most people have heard of me.’ It was not quite as true as it used to be, because many people who had heard of Hercule Poirot and known him were now reposing with suitable memorial stones over them in churchyards.

  Then serious sleuthing began. In the course of it Poirot even flew to Geneva to interview a retired governess, but mainly he relied on that splendid network of his old age: Superintendent Spence – who produced the very police officer who had once been in charge of the case – and that ‘great purveyor of information’, the enigmatic Mr Goby:

  Mr Goby came into the room and sat, as indicated by Poirot, in his usual chair. He glanced around him before choosing what particular piece of furniture or part of the room he was about to address. He settled, as often before, for the electric fire, not turned on at this time of the year. Mr Goby had never been known to address the human being he was working for directly. He selected always the cornice, a radiator, a television set, a clock, sometimes a carpet or a mat. Out of a briefcase he took a few papers.

  ‘Well,’ said Hercule Poirot, ‘you have something for me?’

  ‘I have collected various details,’ said Mr Goby.

  Elephants Can Remember was Poirot’s penultimate case. Had he discovered, in his awful tisanes and sirops, the secret of eternal life? Sadly, as we shall see in Curtain, his last case, he was to meet an end common to all, but before taking again the road to Styles, there is still much to learn about Hercule Poirot.

  NOTES

  1 Also published under the title Blood Will Tell.

  2 Also published under the title Funerals are Fatal.

  3 Also published under the title Hickory Dickory Death.

  4 While this is Poirot’s only recorded contact with The Arrangers, Mr Robinson and his syndicate appeared in several other Christie novels.

  5 Though set in the 1950s, the lively short story ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ (also published under the title ‘The Theft of the Royal Ruby’) is an expanded version of the ‘Christmas Adventure’ of the 1920s. Also set in the 1950s, ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’ is an expanded version of ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’ of the 1930s.

  6 It is likely that Colin Lamb, who operated under an assumed name, was the son of Superintendent Battle, Poirot’s old friend from Cards on the Table.

  7

  THE COMPLETE POIROT

  ‘You’re unique. Once seen, never forgotten.’

  —Inspector Japp, PERIL AT END HOUSE

  Any number of artists have taken a turn at depicting Hercule Poirot. The most memorable examples appeared with the early short stories in magazines of the 1920s. A familial resemblance of moustaches and a foreign dandified look links these illustrations but there are also great differences. Here he is elderly and almost bald, there he is middle-aged and well-thatched. Here he is lean and dangerous in a lounge suit, there he is rotund and comic in tails.

  The most famous of these illustrations is W. Smithson Broadhead’s portrait of Poirot which appeared in The Sketch of 21 March 1923. In it a small sturdy Poirot stands in a haughty pose, his left hand leaning on stick, his right hand holding a top hat and gloves. He is wearing impeccably formal clothes and on his feet are pointed black shoes and gleaming white spats. His head is tilted to one side and on his face – moustaches curling upwards, eyebrows raised – is a disdainful expression in the Versailles mode. C’est moi! It was ‘not unlike my idea of him’, wrote Agatha Christie in her autobiography, ‘though he was depicted as a little smarter and more aristocratic than I had envisaged him.’ With those in the role of Poirot on stage and screen she was not so happy. ‘It always seemed strange to me,’ she observed, ‘that whoever plays Poirot is always an outsize man’; and she wrote him out of several adaptations of books to the stage rather than see him miscast.1

  Poirot himself had a very clear idea of his appearance and spent an inordinate amount of time maintaining it. He had only to look in a mirror (and he often did) to see, as in The Labours of Hercules, ‘a small compact figure attired in correct urban wear with a moustache … magnificent yet sophisticated’. This accords well with many descriptions of him over the years. Here is a typical one from Third Girl, one of his last cases. It could as easily have been from his first:

  A moment or two later Claudia Reece-Holland returned ushering with her a small man with an egg-shaped head, large moustaches, pointed patent leather shoes and a general air of complacency …

  There is no doubt, however, that to English eyes Poirot looked odd. ‘It was an unfortunate circumstance,’ wrote Hastings in The ABC Murders, ‘that the first time people saw my friend they were always disposed to consider him a joke of the first order.’ ‘A ridiculous-looking little man,’ thought Mary Debenham in Murder on the Orient Express. ‘The sort of little man one could never take seriously.’ People often mistook him for a hairdresser or a piano tuner.

  He was five feet, four inches tall and ‘delicately plump’ with a stomach ‘pleasantly rounded’. His feet were small and he had ‘tiny, fastidiously groomed hands’ with ‘short stubby’ fingers. His head, as was so often remarked, was egg-shaped, and his eyes, ‘bright, inquiring, roguish’, were a ‘queer catlike green’. His Gallic eyebrows were expressive and on occasion ‘climbed slowly up his forehead until they nearly disappeared into his hair’.

  Throughout his long life his straight hair remained a glossy black. We have already heard him recommending his ingenious hairdresser to a horrified Hastings, and, as a back-up, he kept in his bedroom a bottle of REVIVIT:

  REVIVIT – To bring back the natural tone of the hair.

  REVIVIT is NOT a dye. In five shades, Ash, Chestnut, Titian, Brown, Black.

  Is there a single word to do justice to Poirot’s famous moustaches, which pointed to the skies with such flamboyant élan? ‘Gigantic’, ‘luxurious’, ‘immense’, ‘amazing’, ‘magnificent’, are but a few of the adjectives that attempted it. ‘In England,’ he once said, ‘the cult of the moustache is lamentably neglected’; and he tended his moustaches, which were as suspiciously black as his hair, with tiny combs, a variety of pomades, and curling tongs which he heated over a small spirit stove.

  One of the reasons Poirot disliked travel – especially in warm climates – was that the ‘ferocious’ points of his moustaches were apt to go limp, and one of the greatest sacrifices he ever made was to temporarily shave his moustaches off to outwit the Big Four. A prospect even more appalling was suggested by Hastings in The ABC Murders:

  ‘I suppose next time I come home I shall find you wearing false moustaches – or are you doing so now?’

  Poirot winced. His moustaches had always been his sensitive point. He was inordinately proud of them. My words touched him on the raw.

  ‘No, no, indeed, mon ami. That day, I pray the good God, is still far off. The false moustaches! Quelle horreur!’

  Poirot was also a fanatic in the matter of clothes. ‘Madame, I like to look soigné in my appearance,’ he told Ariadne Oliver in Hallowe’en Party. Wrote Hastings in ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’:

  To see Poirot at a party was a great sight. His faultless evening clothes, the exquisite set of his white tie, the exact symmetry of his hair parting, the sheen of pomade on his hair, and the tortured splendour of his famous moustaches – all combined to paint the perfect picture of an inveterate dandy.

  As to his daytime attire, there are mentions of grey or brown su
its and waistcoats. In pre-war years he was apt to be more formally dressed, as in The Labours of Hercules:

  Dr Burton’s eyes swept over Hercule Poirot, over his small neat person attired in striped trousers, correct black jacket, and natty bow tie, swept up from his patent leather shoes to his egg-shaped head and the immense moustache that adorned his upper lip.

  When anywhere near the Mediterranean Poirot liked his clothes to be white – a white duck suit for the Riviera, for example, white flannels for Rhodes, and white silk for Egypt. A black bow tie, a pink shirt, and a flower in his buttonhole typically completed the dazzling effect.

  Why the elegant cut of these clothes was not hopelessly marred by all Poirot carried in his pockets is a mystery in itself. He seemed never to be without a small comb, a mirror, a clothes brush, a large silk handkerchief, a pocket case or wallet, a card case, a tiny notebook with a pencil in the loop, a cigarette case, a pocket almanac, a safety pin, and, of course, his turnip-shaped watch (in later years this was put away and replaced by a neat wrist-watch). From time to time – and despite his criticisms of Holmesian methods of detection – he also produced from his pockets a folding measure, a pocket lens, a pocket microscope, tweezers, small forceps, an electric torch, an empty matchbox, an empty test tube, a thumbograph album for fingerprinting, a small flask of brandy, a bottle of turpentine and a sponge, and a set of burglary tools. On one occasion, in his duel to the death with the Big Four, he carried a small automatic pistol, and in Murder in Mesopotamia, behind the lapel of his coat, he secreted ‘a long sharp darning needle with a blob of sealing wax making it into a pin’.