Agatha Christie's Poirot

by Anne Hart

  Out of doors Poirot always wore a hat – a top hat for evenings, a grey Homburg or black bowler by day, and a Panama in warm climates. In Death on the Nile he wore a white toupee on one occasion and, on another, carried ‘a highly ornamental fly whisk with a sham amber handle’. When in an officious mood he carried a small dispatch-case and when in a sociable one something to swing with a jaunty air. Sometimes he carried a cane, but more often it was an ornate walking stick with an embossed gold handle, the very thing to make a bluff Englishman, like Commander Challenger in Peril at End House, wince. In his jewel case were to be found a gold scarf pin and pearl studs and, on his feet, pointed black patent leather shoes.

  Oh those cruel shoes of Poirot! ‘A nice pair of brogues?’ George respectfully suggested from time to time. On one occasion, when holidaying in Devon, Poirot recklessly wore a pair of white suede shoes, but for most of his life nothing could part him from his black patent leather shoes. ‘Take your shoes off,’ Mrs Oliver suggested in Hallowe’en Party when Poirot complained of his painful feet:

  ‘No, no, I could not do that.’ Poirot sounded shocked at the possibility.

  ‘Well, we’re old friends together,’ said Mrs Oliver … ‘You know, if you’ll excuse my saying so, you oughtn’t to wear patent leather shoes in the country. Why don’t you get yourself a nice pair of suede shoes? Or the things all the hippy-looking boys wear nowadays? You know, the sort of shoes that slip on, and you never have to clean …’

  ‘I would not care for that at all,’ said Poirot severely. ‘No indeed!’

  Poirot took the outdoors very seriously – especially the English outdoors – and in his wardrobe hung several mackintoshes and a large collection of overcoats: thin ones, heavy ones, and, when he became rich, fur-lined ones. With them he wore silk scarves in warm weather and woolly waistcoats and mufflers in cool. In temperatures below freezing he could be found in several coats and mufflers. He wore galoshes at the slightest hint of rain and had gloves for every occasion. Oddly, he never seems to have carried an umbrella.

  When he took off his clothes and his painful shoes Poirot donned a ‘resplendent’ dressing-gown and embroidered slippers. In After the Funeral, Lanscombe, the butler at Enderby Hall:

  looked disapprovingly at Hercule Poirot’s back as the latter climbed the stairs. Poirot was attired in an exotic silk dressing gown with a pattern of triangles and squares.

  In bed Poirot wore the fashions of two eras. When he turned out the light in ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’2 he was arrayed in pyjamas and a nightcap.

  ‘The neatness of his attire was almost incredible,’ wrote Hastings. ‘I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.’ Very occasionally Poirot went against his better judgement and allowed himself, in the interests of a case, to be untidy. In ‘The Veiled Lady’, for instance, to Hastings’s amazement, he groped through a Wimbledon coal-bin, and in ‘The Lost Mine’ he was persuaded to make a dishevelled appearance in an opium den, but such exceptions only proved the rule – there was no peace of mind for Poirot unless he was faultlessly dressed.

  Maintaining these impeccable standards consumed most of Poirot’s spare time for years. By day his clothes brush ‘waged an unceasing war on the dust which accumulated on his dark apparel’, and in the evenings the smell of benzene hung in the air. When summer came his winter clothes had to be laid away in ‘the powder of Keatings’, and when the winter came they had to be taken out. The work went on and on.

  No one was better at solving problems than Poirot. With his decision to employ a valet, this unending toil passed forever into the capable hands of George. Poirot’s linen, however, was still sent out, and in ‘The Dream’ we catch a glimpse of a spirited war with his laundress – ‘That miserable woman who ruins my collars!’

  Having taken on board the amiable bow, the gleaming moustaches, and the spotless clothes of this odd little stranger, the next thing immediately apparent to anyone of the island race was the fact that Poirot was a foreigner – a gallant little Belgian, to be sure, but suspiciously French-like for all that. Those exaggerated gestures, those idioms so extravagant to the English ear – ‘Oh dear,’ thought Rhoda Dawes in Cards on the Table, confronted by a Poirot in a particularly Gallic mode, ‘He’s going to be French and it does embarrass me so.’

  Though Rhoda, gingerly sipping blackberry sirop, was spared, one of the most embarrassing things about Poirot was his habit of embracing and kissing in moments of excitement. ‘Suddenly clasping me in his arms, he kissed me warmly on both cheeks,’ wrote Hastings, shaken, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. ‘Ah, you are a brave man! If we were not in the street, I would embrace you!’ cried Poirot in The Big Four to Mr Ingles, a retired civil servant. Mr Ingles looked relieved.

  Alien as well was Poirot’s repertoire of dramatic shrugs, lightning movements, and unexpected noises. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for example, his innuendoes to Caroline Sheppard were expressed by ‘his eyebrows and his shoulders’. In Sad Cypress, in a poignant moment, ‘He spread out his hands in a wide, appealing foreign gesture’. In ‘The Under Dog’ he broke ‘into a fantastic little dance’. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in moments of joy, he both gambolled ‘wildly’ on a lawn and ‘swayed backwards and forwards, apparently suffering the keenest agony’. In The Big Four he ‘uttered an excited yelp, reminiscent of a Pomeranian dog’, and in Murder in Mesopotamia his throat clearing caused Nurse Leatheran to observe: ‘I’ve always noticed that foreigners can make the oddest noises’.

  In meditative moments Poirot became inscrutable. Hastings particularly resented his habit of abandoning a scene of action for an armchair, ‘furiously to think’. There he would sit, an aloof little cat, stroking his chin and caressing his moustaches.

  Of course nothing displayed Poirot’s foreignness more than his French accent and exclamations – ‘Sacré mille tonnerres!’, ‘Nom d’un nom d’un nom!’ – and his idiosyncratic use of the English language. Examples abound: ‘I will not derange you further’ … ‘I perceive that you think Lady Astwell has in her bonnet the buzzing bee’ … ‘Among the sleeping dogs there is one on whom I shall put my foot, and by shooting the arrows into the air, one will come down and hit a glass-house!’

  ‘I speak the English very well,’ he once declared, ‘except when I am excited – but hardly so as to deceive the ear.’ Poirot was right. His English was memorably adequate and he understood every nuance in return. Moreover, in these mixed metaphors there was a method, as he explained to Mr Satterthwaite in Three Act Tragedy:

  ‘Why do you sometimes speak perfectly good English and at other times not?’

  Poirot laughed.

  ‘Ah, I will explain. It is true that I can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But, my friend, to speak the broken English is an enormous asset. It leads people to despise you. They say, ‘A foreigner; he can’t even speak English properly.’ It is not my policy to terrify people; instead, I invite their gentle ridicule.’

  When the Big Four Syndicate prepared a dossier on its enemy, it pinpointed two of Poirot’s most ingrained traits and possible weaknesses – a ‘finicky tidiness’ and an ‘overweening vanity’.

  Everyone needs something to cling to. With Poirot it was tidiness. Asked Nick Buckley in Peril at End House:

  ‘Are you very tidy, M. Poirot?’

  ‘Ask my friend Hastings here.’

  The girl turned an inquiring gaze on me.

  I detailed some of Poirot’s minor peculiarities – toast that had to be made from a square loaf – eggs matching in size – his objection to golf as a game ‘shapeless and haphazard’ whose only redeeming feature was the tee boxes! I ended by telling her the famous case which Poirot had solved by his habit of straightening ornaments on the mantelpiece.

  With Poirot impeccable clothes were only the beginning. Such was his mania that he tidied up wherever he happened to be, especially in moments of agitation. ‘I do not like confusion,’ was his cry, headi
ng straight towards the nearest cluttered bookcase or mantelpiece for therapy. When John Cavendish threw a match into a flowerbed in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Poirot ‘retrieved it and buried it neatly.’ When gazing upon the Pyramids in ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’ he observed:

  ‘It is true that they, at least, are of a shape solid and geometrical, but their surface is of an unevenness most unpleasing. And the palm-trees I like them not. Not even do they plant them in rows!’

  Nor did his worries stop with inanimate objects. ‘I never cease trying to persuade Hastings to part his hair in the middle instead of on the side. See what an air – lopsided and unsymmetrical – it gives him,’ he scolded in Peril at End House, and in The Mysterious Affair at Styles Cynthia Murdoch reported: ‘He made me take the brooch out of my tie the other day, and put it in again, because he said it wasn’t straight.’

  Nothing gave him more pleasure than catching an untidy criminal. In ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, for example, he rejoiced to find a few shells of the wrong size in a flower-bed border, and in ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’ he gloated over dust in the comers.

  His other great obsession was himself. ‘The fellow is the most conceited little devil I ever met,’ said Sir Charles Cartwright in Three Act Tragedy: Poirot was forever bragging that he had ‘the finest brain in Europe’ and knew everything. Though on occasion he adopted a mock-modest air, no one enjoyed fame more than he. ‘Even in our remote country village we have heard of you,’ declared an admirer in Peril at End House to audible purrs.

  A failure stung Poirot to the heart. ‘It is impossible. I cannot be wrong!’ he would cry, and then would follow a short bout of true and disarming humility: ‘I am a triple imbecile, a miserable animal; thirty-six times an idiot.’ As a rule, however, vanity was one of Poirot’s outstanding characteristics and, like his mutilation of the English metaphor, it had its uses. In Three Act Tragedy he observed:

  ‘An Englishman he says often, ‘A fellow who thinks as much of himself as that cannot be worth much.’ That is the English point of view. It is not at all true. And so, you see, I put people off their guard. Besides,’ he added, ‘it has become a habit.’

  His adopted milieu also found disconcerting the unashamed way he told falsehoods and pried into other people’s business. We are told in Five Little Pigs:

  It has been said of Hercule Poirot by some of his friends and associates, at moments when he has maddened them most, that he prefers lies to truth and will go out of his way to gain his ends by means of elaborate false statements rather than trust to the simple truth.

  Hastings was always taking him to task for this. ‘More lies, I suppose?’ he exclaimed in Dumb Witness when, in the course of a few hours, Poirot changed his name, posed as a prospective house buyer, invented a couple of relatives, and claimed to be writing the biography of a deceased admiral. ‘You are really very offensive sometimes, Hastings,’ Poirot replied with dignity. ‘Anyone would think I enjoyed telling lies.’ As a pragmatist he rejoiced in his belief that the end often justified the means. ‘A lot of additional pain and grief is caused by honesty,’ he once said. The fact is that Poirot loved subterfuge and often resorted to it for pure pleasure. In Dumb Witness he said with relish: ‘… if one is going to tell a lie at all, it might as well be an artistic lie, a romantic lie, a convincing lie!’

  Equally distressing to Hastings was Poirot’s addiction to listening at doors, peering through keyholes, and reading other people’s letters. In Lord Edgware Dies he calmly read a letter while the Duke of Merton was actually writing it (‘in my early days in the police force in Belgium I learned that it was very useful to read handwriting upside down’).

  ‘Poirot,’ I cried. ‘You can’t do a thing like that, overlook a private letter.’

  ‘You say the imbecilities, Hastings. Absurd to say I “cannot do” a thing which I have just done!’

  ‘It’s not – not playing the game.’

  He could also pick locks and pockets. ‘You see,’ he said in ‘Wasps’ Nest’,

  ‘one of the advantages, or disadvantages, of being a detective is that it brings you into contact with the criminal classes. And the criminal classes, they can teach you some very interesting and curious things.’

  ‘Nice mind you’ve got, Poirot, I must say,’ said his friend Mr Bonnington in ‘Four-and Twenty-Blackbirds’. ‘All this police work saps your ideals.’ In fact this was not so. Poirot was naturally a sceptical man – it was one of the reasons he was such a good detective – but he had a firm code of his own. ‘When a person has been murdered,’ he said in Evil Under the Sun, ‘it is more important to be truthful than to be decent.’ Order and reason, truth revealed and justice done were his passions. Accused of being sentimental in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, he replied indignantly:

  ‘It is not I who am sentimental! That is an English failing! It is in England that they weep over young sweethearts and dying mothers and devoted children. Me, I am logical.’

  He resolutely believed in cause and effect. ‘You have no doubt heard the Spanish proverb,’ he said in ‘The Apples of the Hesperides’, ‘Take what you want – and pay for it, says God’; and in Peril at End House he told a clergyman:

  ‘Evil never goes unpunished, Monsieur. But the punishment is sometimes secret.’

  ‘I have a thoroughly bourgeois attitude to murder,’ he declared on one occasion and, on another: ‘A human being who has exercised the right of private judgement and taken the life of another human being is not safe to exist amongst the community,’ but unlike his contemporary, Jane Marple, he was never heard advocating capital punishment. He had, after all, served many years with the police in Belgium, where convicted murderers were never executed but could be sentenced to a lifetime of solitary confinement.

  Always he was pragmatic. ‘Let us not discuss the Bomb,’ he said to Colin Lamb in The Clocks. ‘If it has to be, it has to be, but let us not discuss it.’ In Dead Man’s Folly an angry young man demanded to know Poirot’s attitude towards life:

  ‘You are rather old-fashioned in your views, I think. Let’s hear what your slogan would be.’

  ‘I do not need to formulate one of my own. There is an older one in this country which contents me very well.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Put your trust in God, and keep your powder dry.’

  In the matter of God, it was Poirot’s opinion that people could have ‘too much religion or a lamentable lack of religion’. Brought up as a bon catholique, he had a habit of making the sign of the cross on momentous occasions, and twice he can be seen in church. In Taken at the Flood, in Warmsley Vale,

  In front of Poirot, set back a little, was the Roman Catholic Church of the Assumption, a small modest affair, a shrinking violet compared to the aggressiveness of St Mary’s which stood arrogantly in the middle of the Square facing the Commarket, and proclaiming the dominance of the Protestant religion.

  Moved by an impulse Poirot went through the gate and along the path to the door of the Roman Catholic building. He removed his hat, genuflected in front of the altar and knelt down behind one of the chairs.

  In One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, in the course of one of his most perplexing cases, Poirot accompanied his weekend host to church, where he seems to have got along very well with the Anglican liturgy:

  Hercule Poirot essayed a hesitant baritone.

  ‘“The proud have laid a snare for me,”’ he sang, ‘“and spread a net with cords: yea, and set traps in my way –”’

  His mouth remained open.

  He saw it – saw clearly the trap into which he had so nearly fallen!

  A snare cunningly laid – a net with cords – a pit open at his feet – dug carefully so that he could fall into it …

  For the first time, Hercule Poirot was looking at the case the right way up …

  As one in a dream, [he] rose to praise the Lord in the Te Deum.

  And no doubt Poirot praised the Lord in a collegial spirit,
for he appears to have regarded the Almighty as more or less an equal. In The Mystery of the Blue Train, castigating a slippery witness,

  He leant forward and struck the table a blow with his fist; his eyes flashed with anger.

  ‘Yes, yes, it is as I say. You tell your lies and you think nobody knows. But there are two people who know. Yes – two people. One is le bon Dieu –’

  He raised a hand to heaven, and then settling himself back in his chair and shutting his eyelids, he murmured comfortably:

  ‘And the other is Hercule Poirot.’

  This table-banging and evoking of le bon Dieu was not an uncommon occurrence as Poirot had a quick temper, though sometimes – as with so much else in his repertoire – he created tantrums deliberately. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles Hastings was upset to hear ‘a frightful row going on below. I could hear Poirot shouting and expounding,’ thereby revealing the disappearance of an important clue to the whole household. ‘Once again,’ Hastings wrote, ‘I could not help regretting that my friend was so prone to lose his head in moments of excitement.’ When Poirot was really angry he was apt to attack furniture. In Evil Under the Sun he exclaimed:

  ‘I enrage myself at an imbecile. I say, “I would like to kick him.” Instead I kick the table. I say, “This table, it is the imbecile, I kick him so.” And then, if I have not hurt my toe too much, I feel much better and the table is not usually damaged.’

  Another characteristic was his ‘steady appraising gaze’. When he wished, this could intimidate. In Lord Edgware Dies, questioning a frightened young woman about her beloved cousin in danger, he said bluntly: ‘You do not want to see him hanged then?’, a remark ‘that shocked me in its crudity,’ Hastings recalled. In Peril at End House, begged to hush up a case, Poirot said imperiously: ‘You cannot silence me now,’ raising his forefinger in a threatening gesture. But such moments were rare. Ordinarily Poirot was the soul of politesse. A prima donna at climactic moments, when offstage – particularly in the early stages of a case – he was apt to be deceptively unobtrusive, his voice lulling and gentle, his manner watchful and composed.