Agatha Christie's Poirot

by Anne Hart

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Monsieur Poirot? You seem very deep in thought.’

  Poirot roused himself with a start.

  ‘I reflect, that is all. I reflect.’

  ‘Meditation on Death. Death, the Recurring Decimal, by Hercule Poirot. One of his well-known monographs.’

  ‘Monsieur Ferguson,’ said Poirot, ‘You are a very impertinent young man.’

  In Peril at End House Poirot demanded of Nick Buckley:

  ‘You know my name, eh?’

  ‘Oh! Yes.’

  She wriggled uncomfortably. A hunted look came into her eyes. Poirot observed her keenly.

  ‘You are not at ease. That means, I suppose, that you have not read my books.’

  ‘Well – no – not all of them. But I know the name of course.’

  Poirot usually retired to bed about midnight. He liked to have a bottle of mineral water on the table beside him and the windows tightly closed:

  Hercule Poirot had been brought up to believe that all outside air was best left outside, and that night air was especially dangerous to the health.

  As a rule, Poirot slept lightly. Sometimes, if preoccupied with a case, he slept badly. In After the Funeral, for example:

  Elusive snatches of conversation, various glances, odd movements – all seemed fraught with a tantalizing significance in the loneliness of the night. He was on the threshold of sleep, but sleep would not come.

  When he finally did fall asleep on this particular night he dreamt of crimson paint, wax flowers, and nuns, and awoke with a solution to the case.

  Shortly after the end of the Second World War Poirot bought a weekend cottage even though, as he confessed to himself in The Hollow, he did not really like the country:

  The weekend cottage – so many of his friends had extolled it – he had allowed himself to succumb, and had purchased Resthaven, though the only thing he had liked about it was its shape which was quite square like a box. The surrounding landscape he did not care for, though it was, he knew, supposed to be a beauty spot. It was, however, too wildly asymmetrical to appeal to him …

  The best thing about Resthaven, he considered, was the small vegetable garden neatly laid out in rows by his Belgian gardener, Victor. Meanwhile, Françoise, Victor’s wife, devoted herself with tenderness to the care of her employer’s stomach.

  By this time Poirot had clearly abandoned thoughts of actually gardening himself and, in his brief ownership of Resthaven, the ominous words vegetable marrows are never uttered. Always, however, a well-cultivated kitchen garden or a neat herbaceous border caught the eye of the domestic Poirot. Despite his disclaimers about nature, he had a considerable knowledge of flowers. ‘Do you know the name of this rose?’ he asked Peter Lord in Sad Cypress. ‘It is Zephyrine Droughin, my friend—’, an observation that was to prove an important break in the case.

  The fact remains, however, that at heart Poirot was an urban animal. Like The Larches in King’s Abbot, Resthaven, with its neat hedges and prim sitting-room containing ‘two of everything’, was soon given up and Poirot resumed his year-round residence in London.

  In the 1960s Whitehaven Mansions – which was beginning to be overshadowed by trendier neighbours – received cosmetic surgery. Wrote Colin Lamb in The Clocks:

  It had been quite a long time since I had visited Whitehaven Mansions. Some years ago it had been an outstanding building of modem flats. Now there were many other more imposing and even more modem blocks of buildings flanking it on either side. Inside, I noted, it had recently had a facelift. It had been repainted in pale shades of yellow and green.

  And in Flat 203 he found an agitated Poirot:

  ‘I am disturbed. I am much disturbed. They make the renovations, the redecorations, even the structural alteration in these flats.’

  ‘Won’t that improve them?’

  ‘It will improve them, yes – but it will be most vexatious to me. I shall have to disarrange myself. There will be a smell of paint!’ He looked at me with an air of outrage.

  Happily, these renovations seem to have retained Whitehaven Mansions’ delicious 1930s look, for a few years later, in Hallowe’en Party, Ariadne Oliver described Poirot’s flat as ‘ultramodern, very abstract, all squares and cubes’. Inexplicably – and even before these events – the Mansions underwent a temporary change of name. In Cat Among the Pigeons Poirot’s visitors found him living in Whitehouse Mansions and, depending on what edition one consults, George answered the door of Flat 28 or Flat 228. This may account for Ariadne Oliver’s confusion in the 1970s in Elephants Can Remember when, on her way to visit Poirot, she remarked to a friend:

  ‘I think it’s Whitefriars Mansion. I can’t quite remember the name of it, but I know where it is.’

  ‘Oh, flats. Rather modern ones. Very square and geometrical.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Oliver.

  From this geometrical haven Poirot went bravely forth to challenge a world lamentably askew.

  NOTE

  1 In ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ the rooms seem to have been redealt. Poirot’s bedroom is no longer off the sitting-room but on the floor above.

  11

  THE EXPEDITIONARY POIROT

  They commented on a new guest who had just arrived, trying to guess his nationality. Harold thought a moustache like that must be French – Elsie said German – and Mrs Rice thought he might be Spanish.

  —‘The Stymphalean Birds’

  In London, if one is to believe Poirot’s complaints, his professional and social obligations required him to emerge far too often from his comfortable flat. Sometimes, to his great disapproval, this happened several times a day. His misgivings about going outdoors bore a direct relation to the weather, however. Wind and rain – the precursors of disarranged moustaches and wet feet – were viewed with despair from the sitting-room window, while a sunny day tended to bring forth a Poirot full of expeditionary zeal.

  Poirot spent a great deal of time in taxis. Occasionally he took the Tube. In ‘The Capture of Cerberus’:

  The train started off again with a jerk, Poirot was thrown against a stout woman with knobbly parcels, said, ‘Pardon!’ bounced off again into a long angular man whose attaché case caught him in the small of the back. He said, ‘Pardon!’ again. He felt his moustaches becoming limp and uncurled. Quel enfer!

  Once, in Cards on the Table, he was seen clambering aboard a bus, and now and then one might have spied him walking. In One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, meditations on the case at hand:

  … occupied Hercule Poirot on his homeward way until he reached Regent’s Park. He decided to traverse a part of the park on foot before taking a taxi. By experience, he knew to a nicety the moment when his smart patent-leather shoes began to press painfully on his feet.

  It was a lovely summer’s day and Poirot looked indulgently on courting nursemaids and their swains, laughing and giggling while their chubby charges profited by nurse’s inattention.

  Dogs barked and romped.

  Little boys sailed boats.

  And under nearly every tree was a couple sitting close together.

  ‘Ah! Jeunesse, jeunesse,’ murmured Hercule Poirot, pleasurably affected by the sight.

  Poirot loved London, and not all his expeditions around it had to do with crime. As he once exclaimed to Hastings, ‘Mon Dieu, I cannot always be talking blood and thunder!’ and so we learn of him attending an exhibition of Snuff-Boxes in Cards on the Table, a sale of authors’ manuscripts in The Clocks, and the exhibitions at the Royal Academy in The Labours of Hercules.

  He was particularly fond of the theatre and supper afterwards at the Savoy, though in Dumb Witness Hastings remembered a critical occasion:

  I made the slight mistake of taking Poirot to a crook play. There is one piece of advice I offer to all my readers. Never take a soldier to a military play, a sailor to a naval play, a Scotsman to a Scottish play, a detective to a thriller … Poirot never ceased to complain of faulty psychology, and t
he hero detective’s lack of order and method nearly drove him demented.

  With the order and method of Shakespeare he had no such quarrel, as a good many of his cases testify, and in any performance of Othello he was particularly gripped by the character of lago. Peril at End House provides an example of many such musings:

  ‘Jealousy may not, necessarily, be a sexual emotion. There is envy – envy of a possession – of supremacy. Such a jealousy as drove the lago of your great Shakespeare to one of the cleverest crimes (speaking from the professional point of view) that has ever been committed.’

  Poirot was forever quoting, misquoting, and evoking Shakespeare. In Taken at the Flood he explained to Inspector Spence:

  ‘… you have here two different kinds of crime – and consequently you have, you must have, two different murderers. Enter First Murderer, and enter Second Murderer.’

  ‘Don’t quote Shakespeare,’ groaned Spence.

  Poirot much preferred the theatre to the cinema. At a loose end, in the opening pages of Mrs McGinty’s Dead:

  He turned into Shaftesbury Avenue. Should he cross it and go on to Leicester Square and spend the evening at a cinema? Frowning slightly, he shook his head. The cinema, more often than not, enraged him by the looseness of its plots – the lack of logical continuity in the argument – even the photography which, raved over by some, to Hercule Poirot seemed often no more than the portrayal of scenes and objects so as to make them appear totally different from what they were in reality.

  On most evenings Poirot could, if he chose, go ‘faultlessly and beautifully apparelled’ into London society. As Hastings pointed out in ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’, ‘Poirot, whilst bemoaning social engagements and declaring a passion for solitude, really enjoyed these affairs enormously. To be made a fuss of and treated as a lion suited him down to the ground.’

  As a celebrity he was much in demand. In ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, wishing to discuss a case with a particular friend, he had merely to take a pile of invitation cards from his desk and: ‘His face brightened. “A la bonne heure! Exactly my affair! He will certainly be there.”’ Before long:

  A Duchess greeted M. Hercule Poirot in fulsome tones:

  ‘So you could manage to come after all, M. Poirot! Why, that’s splendid.’

  ‘The pleasure is mine, madame,’ murmured Poirot bowing.

  He escaped from several important and splendid beings – a famous diplomat, an equally famous actress and a well-known sporting peer – and found at last the person he had come to seek, that invariably ‘also present’ guest, Mr Satterthwaite.

  In ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’ he was to be seen at a lively cocktail party:

  The door of Lady Chatterton’s delightful house in Cheriton Street was ajar and a noise as of animals mutinying at the zoo sounded from within. Lady Chatterton who was holding two ambassadors, an international rugger player and an American evangelist in play, neatly jettisoned them with the rapidity of sleight of hand and was at Poirot’s side.

  ‘M. Poirot, how wonderful to see you! No, don’t have that nasty martini. I’ve got something special for you – a kind of sirop that the sheikhs drink in Morocco.’

  On several occasions Poirot visited nightclubs – most notably when Countess Rossakoff ran one of her own – but he was not fond of dancing and much preferred more sedentary pleasures. In The Big Four it is mentioned that he had once played chess, but in his English years he played bridge. In Lord Edgware Dies a game of bridge ended ‘in a heavy financial gain’ to Poirot and Sir Montagu Corner, and in Cards on the Table he and Colonel Race won over Ariadne Oliver and Superintendent Battle. Poirot was a steady, if cautious, player:

  ‘Je crois bien – a grand slam vulnerable doubled. It causes the emotions, that! Me, I admit it, I have not the nerve to go for the slams. I content myself with the game.’

  But more than anything else Poirot enjoyed going out to eat. ‘We will dine first, Hastings,’ he announced in Lord Edgware Dies, ‘and, until we drink our coffee, we will not discuss the case further.’ It was his modus operandi.

  As a sought-after guest, Poirot was often to be seen at dinner parties. These were apt to prove memorable for more than just the food and company. In Cards on the Table, it will be recalled, Poirot was invited to an elegant dinner by a famous host, the wealthy and cunning Mr Shaitana. This proved to be Mr Shaitana’s last dinner party, but at least it began in the best traditions of Park Lane:

  The butler threw the door open.

  ‘Dinner is served,’ he murmured.

  … The dinner was delicious and its serving perfection. Subdued light, polished wood, the blue gleam of Irish glass. In the dimness, at the head of the table, Mr Shaitana looked more than ever diabolical.

  Not all Poirot’s invitations were issued by the rich and famous. In Hickory Dickory Dock he had a splendid dinner at a hostel for students presided over by Mrs Hubbard, Miss Lemon’s sister:

  Dinner was at seven thirty and most of the students were already seated when Mrs Hubbard came down from her sitting-room (where sherry had been served to the distinguished guest) followed by a small elderly man with suspiciously black hair and a moustache of ferocious proportions which he twirled contentedly.

  ‘These are some of our students, M. Poirot. This is M. Hercule Poirot who is kindly going to talk to us after dinner.’

  Salutations were exchanged and Poirot sat down by Mrs Hubbard and busied himself with keeping his moustaches out of the excellent minestrone which was served by a small active Italian man-servant from a big tureen.

  In the evening after dinner, or at a supper party after the theatre, a host or hostess might persuade Poirot to have something to drink beyond coffee and liqueurs. In Lord Edgware Dies he drank champagne – ‘possibly a glass too much’ in Hastings’s opinion – and occasionally he accepted a dry martini, but no one could induce him to drink ‘your English national drink’, whisky and soda. In Three Act Tragedy he exclaimed:

  ‘The sherry, I prefer it to the cocktail, and a thousand thousand times to the whisky. Ah, quelle horreur, the whisky. But drinking the whisky, you ruin – absolutely ruin – the palate. The delicate wines of France, to appreciate them, you must never, never – Ah, qu’est-ce qu’il y a?’

  The strange sound that interrupted him was a choking cry from a guest who ‘stood swaying, his face convulsed. The glass dropped from his hand onto the carpet; he took a few steps blindly, then collapsed.’ This sort of thing often happened at parties Poirot attended.

  Eating in good restaurants was one of his passions. In the early pages of Death on the Nile:

  M. Gaston Blondin, the proprietor of that modish little restaurant Chez Ma Tante, was not a man who delighted to honour many of his clientèle … Only in the rarest cases did M. Blondin, with gracious condescension, greet a guest, accompany him to a privileged table, and exchange with him suitable and apposite remarks.

  On this particular night, M. Blondin had exercised his royal prerogative three times – once for a Duchess, once for a famous racing peer, and once for a little man of comical appearance with immense black moustaches, who, a casual onlooker would have thought, could bestow no favour on Chez Ma Tante by his presence there.

  M. Blondin, however, was positively fulsome in his attentions. Though clients had been told for the last half hour that a table was not to be had, one now mysteriously appeared, placed in a most favourable position. M. Blondin conducted the client to it with every appearance of empressement.

  ‘But naturally, for you there is always a table, Monsieur Poirot! How I wish that you would honour us oftener.’

  The Jardin des Cygnes, the Vieille Grand-mère, the Ritz, The Savoy, Claridges, the Carlton, the Gallant Endeavour, the Cheshire Cheese – they all knew Poirot well. In busy cases he used them as retreats for himself or as meeting places with others. In periods of retirement, such as occurred in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, they became his raison d’être:

  … Always a man who had taken h
is stomach seriously, he was reaping his reward in old age. Eating was now not only a physical pleasure, it was also an intellectual research. For in between meals he spent quite a lot of time searching out and marking down possible sources of new and delicious food …

  ‘Alas,’ murmured Poirot to his moustaches, ‘that one can only eat three times a day …’

  Escargots, consommé, omelette aux champignons, sole à la Normandie, chicken en casserole, blanquette de veau, steak and kidney pudding, petit pois à la française, baba au rhum, blackberry and apple tart, ‘a cheese of Port Salut’, a Stilton, café noir and Benedictine – turning his critical attention to each menu, Poirot lunched and dined his way through Soho and Mayfair and Chelsea.

  At the dictates of a case, he sometimes found himself eating and drinking in less elegant establishments. In ‘The Lost Mine’, for example, his stomach, usually reliable in matters of food, quailed before the ‘peculiar dishes’ served him in an opium den. In Third Girl he ordered coffee and received ‘a cup of pale beige fluid’ at the Merry Shamrock Café. In Death in the Clouds he sought out a murder witness in the bar of the matey Crown and Feathers.

  In London, coffee à la Merry Shamrock Café could usually be avoided, but away from home, and at the mercy of haphazard country houses, obscure village inns or uncertain hotels, who knew what uncontrollable discomforts lay in wait? Often, when preparing for a trip, ‘An expression of conscious heroism spread over Poirot’s face.’

  Packing – even when the summons was urgent – was, of course, a careful affair. In his early years in England Poirot seems to have embarked on overnight forays surprisingly lightly. In ‘The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor’ Hastings watched him ‘strapping up his small valise’, and in ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’ he found him ‘busy packing a minute suitcase with quick, deft movements’. In The ABC Murders Hastings attempted the packing himself: