Agatha Christie's Poirot

by Anne Hart

  I put a few things together in a suitcase whilst Poirot once more rang up Scotland Yard.

  A few minutes later he came into the bedroom and demanded:

  ‘Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites là?’

  ‘I was packing for you. I thought it would save time.’

  ‘Vous éprouvez trop d’émotion, Hastings. It affects your hands and your wits. Is that a way to fold a coat? And regard what you have done to my pyjamas. If the hairwash breaks what will befall them?’

  ‘Good heavens, Poirot,’ I cried, ‘this is a matter of life and death. What does it matter what happens to our clothes?’

  ‘You have no sense of proportion, Hastings. We cannot catch a train earlier than the time that it leaves, and to ruin one’s clothes will not be the least helpful in preventing a murder.’

  In later years packing became the responsibility of George. ‘There is drama there, at Mon Repos. A human drama and it excites me,’ exclaimed Poirot in ‘The Under Dog’ as he prepared to answer an urgent call to the country. ‘Shall I pack dress clothes, sir?’ came George’s singleminded reply.1

  In England, especially in the more frenetic Hastings years, Poirot usually travelled on trains. These varied from great monsters hissing ‘superbly, throwing off clouds of steam’ to one wryly recollected by Hastings in The Big Four: ‘We went back to London on a milk train in the early hours of the morning, and a most uncomfortable journey it was.’ When on an expense account – and always in his later, affluent years – Poirot travelled first class. As a rule he liked trains, but he never hesitated to jump off one at the next station if he suddenly decided he should be going somewhere else. Occasionally Hastings, often deputized to work out impromptu timetables, attempted to divert him on to a bus. In ‘Double Sin’ this brought on a tirade:

  ‘My friend, why this passion for the motor coach? The train, see you, it is true? The tyres, they do not burst; the accidents, they do not happen. One is not incommoded by too much air. The windows can be shut and no draughts admitted.’

  He had similar reservations about cars. In Dumb Witness, persuaded to travel in Hastings’s second-hand Austin:

  On the way to London we talked very little. I am not fond of talking and driving, and Poirot was so busy protecting his moustaches with his muffler from the disastrous effects of wind and dust that speech was quite beyond him.

  As the years went by, Poirot became more reconciled to the automobile, particularly when whisked away to the country in a rich client’s Rolls-Royce. Although he certainly never drove a car himself, from time to time he hired a limousine. In After the Funeral Susan Banks glimpsed:

  … a big Daimler which was preparing to go out. It was chauffeur driven and inside it, very much muffled up, was an elderly foreign gentleman with a large moustache.

  For a short time in the late 1930s Poirot actually owned a car, but he seems to have given it up after a trying incident in ‘The Arcadian Deer’:

  He was annoyed. His car – an expensive Messarro Gratz – had not behaved with that mechanical perfection which he expected of a car. His chauffeur, a young man who enjoyed a handsome salary, had not succeeded in putting things right. The car had staged a final refusal in a secondary road a mile and a half from anywhere with a fall of snow beginning. Hercule Poirot, wearing his usual smart patent leather shoes, had been forced to walk that mile and a half to reach the riverside village of Hartly Dene – a village which, though showing every sign of animation in summertime, was completely moribund in winter.

  The meal that the stranded Poirot was subsequently served at the Black Swan in Hartly Dene confirmed all his suspicions about country hostelries. On this occasion, however, he ate in a somewhat mellow mood.

  An hour later, his feet stretched out toward the comfortable blaze, Hercule Poirot reflected leniently on the dinner he had just eaten. True, the steak had been both tough and full of gristle, the Brussels sprouts had been large, pale, and definitely watery, the potatoes had had hearts of stone. Nor was there much to be said for the portion of stewed apple and custard which had followed. The cheese had been hard and the biscuits soft. Nevertheless, thought Hercule Poirot, looking graciously at the leaping flames, and sipping delicately at a cup of liquid mud euphemistically called coffee, it was better to be full than empty, and after tramping snowbound lanes in patent leather shoes, to sit in front of a fire was Paradise!

  ‘I suffer,’ Poirot was sure to exclaim ‘in acute self-pity’ when staying at a country inn. At bedtime, as in ‘The Apples of the Hesperides’, things could get very miserable indeed:

  In the saloon bar of Jimmy Donovan’s Hotel, Hercule Poirot sat uncomfortably against the wall. The hotel did not come up to his ideas of what a hotel should be. His bed was broken – so were two of the window panes in his room – thereby admitting that night air which Hercule Poirot distrusted so much. The hot water brought him had been tepid and the meal he had eaten was producing curious and painful sensations in his inside.

  Coffee in the country – even in the large hotels in Brighton and on the Devon and Cornish coasts where he sometimes holidayed – was a particularly sore point with Poirot. ‘Only in England,’ he scolded in The Big Four, ‘is the coffee so atrocious … on the Continent they understand how important it is for the digestion that it should be properly made.’ In Taken at the Flood, at the Stag Inn:

  He stood for a moment in the hall looking from the glass enclosed empty office to the door labelled in firm old-fashioned style COFFEE ROOM. By experience of country hotels Poirot knew well that the only time coffee was served there, was somewhat grudgingly for breakfast and that even then a good deal of watery hot milk was its principal component. Small cups of a treacly and muddy liquid called Black Coffee were served not in the COFFEE ROOM but in the Lounge. The Windsor Soup, Vienna Steak and Potatoes, and Steamed Pudding which comprised Dinner would be obtainable in the COFFEE ROOM at seven sharp.

  Tea, of course, was always a threat. In Sad Cypress, a country case:

  Nurse Hopkins was hospitable with the teapot, and a minute later Poirot was regarding with some dismay a cup of inky beverage.

  ‘Just made – nice and strong!’ said Nurse Hopkins.

  Poirot stirred his tea cautiously and took one heroic sip.

  To help it down he invariably requested three, four and sometimes even five lumps of sugar, and ate whatever was the sweetest. ‘A sandwich, M. Poirot?’ asked Miss Brewis in Dead Man’s Folly:

  ‘Those are tomato and these are pâté. But perhaps,’ said Miss Brewis, thinking of the four lumps of sugar, ‘you would rather have a cream cake?’

  Poirot would rather have a cream cake, and helped himself to a particularly sweet and squelchy one.

  ‘You stick out in a country place,’ Inspector Spence once told him. Spence was right – the countryside was simply not Hercule Poirot’s milieu. ‘Brrrr!’ he complained during an outing in Peril at End House. ‘The grass, it is damp to the feet! I shall suffer for this – a chill. And no possibility of obtaining a proper tisane!’ If it was absolutely necessary to sit down on such occasions he always did so on a rock or a stump – never on the ground – and only after carefully spreading out a handkerchief. His one cautious concession to the country was an occasional walk, and if the matter at hand was urgent Hastings could, to his astonishment, find himself recording Poirot advancing across the countryside ‘at a great pace’.

  Poirot deplored fox hunting, distrusted horse racing, and had a horror of golf. ‘You do not play the golf, M. Poirot?’ he was asked in Murder on the Links:

  ‘I? Never! What a game!’ He became excited. ‘Figure to yourself, each hole it is of a different length. The obstacles, they are not arranged mathematically. Even the greens are frequently up one side! There is only one pleasing thing – the how do you call them? Tee boxes! They, at least, are symmetrical.’

  Of course he was never seen swimming, sunbathing, or in any kind of sports clothes,2 but it must be put to his credit that in Evil Under the Sun h
e organized a very fine picnic. If Hastings had been there I am sure he would have been immediately suspicious of a Poirot saying engagingly, ‘I am most anxious to see something of Dartmoor’, but the picnic, in ‘a delightful heathery spot free from prickly furze’, was a great success.

  As a celebrated Big House detective, Poirot received many an invitation ‘almost royal in its character, to dine and sleep’. On at least one occasion – a visit to Sandringham in the early 1940s – the invitation was royal. Did the corgis take to him, one wonders? Alas, we are permitted no details.

  In winter, before accepting rural hospitality, Poirot was apt to conduct private inquiries of his own as to the existence of central heating, but as a rule these visits, often of a working nature, were his most comfortable expeditions to the country, despite a pall sometimes cast by recent inexplicable deaths and the presence of police constables searching the shrubbery. At Exsham House in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe:

  The vast wealth that owned it was only indicated by the smoothness with which this apparent simplicity was produced. The service was admirable – the cooking English, not Continental – the wines at dinner stirred Poirot to a passion of appreciation. They had a perfect clear soup, a grilled sole, saddle of lamb with tiny young garden peas, and strawberries and cream.

  In The Hollow, on the evening of a day which has seen the murder of a weekend guest:

  They had the cold ducks for supper. After the ducks there was a caramel custard which, Lady Angkatell said, showed just the right feeling on the part of Mrs Medway.

  Cooking, she said, really gave great scope to delicacy of feeling.

  ‘We are only, as she knows, moderately fond of caramel custard. There would be something very gross, just after the death of a friend, in eating one’s favourite pudding. But caramel custard is so easy – slippery if you know what I mean – and then one leaves a little on one’s plate.’

  Poirot preferred to spend Christmas quietly in London and close to his electric radiators. ‘Me – I am not an Englishman,’ he said in. ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’.3 ‘In my country, Christmas, it is for the children’; and the mere thought of ‘a large, cold, stone manor house’ at that time of year hardly bore thinking of. Nevertheless, three times in his English career Poirot went against his better judgement and accepted invitations to Christmas in the country. The most memorable of these was spent with a delightfully hospitable family, the Laceys. Fortunately, ‘The temperature of the long drawing-room at Kings Lacey was a comfortable sixty-eight’, and the food that appeared in the dining-room was the best of old-fashioned fare. After Christmas dinner, Poirot – on a case as usual – paid a visit to the kitchen to wheedle information from the cook:

  ‘But you are a genius, Mrs Ross! A genius! Never have I tasted such a wonderful meal. The oyster soup—’ he made an expressive noise with his lips ‘—and the stuffing. The chestnut stuffing in the turkey, that was quite unique in my experience.’

  ‘Well, it’s funny that you should say that, sir,’ said Mrs Ross graciously. ‘It’s a very special recipe, that stuffing. It was given me by an Austrian chef that I worked with many years ago. But all the rest,’ she added, ‘is just good, plain English cooking …’

  ‘I am sure, Mrs Ross, you could manage anything! But you must know that English cooking – good English cooking, not the cooking one gets in the second-class hotels or the restaurants – is much appreciated by gourmets on the Continent, and I believe I am correct in saying that a special expedition was made to London in the early eighteen hundreds, and a report sent back to France of the wonders of the English puddings. ‘We have nothing like that in France,’ they wrote. ‘It is worth making a journey to London just to taste the varieties and excellencies of the English puddings.’

  On a holiday in Devon, in Evil Under the Sun, a jocular acquaintance, Horace Blatt, said to Poirot:

  ‘I know the cut of a fellow’s jib. A man like you would be at Deauville or Le Touquet or down at Juan les Pins. That’s your – what’s the phrase? – spiritual home.’

  Poirot sighed. He looked out of the window. Rain was falling and mist encircled the island. He said: ‘It is possible that you are right!’

  Horace Blatt was right. Though commissions occasionally took Poirot abroad, most of his trips to the Continent and the Middle East were intended as escapes to sun and pleasure, and when in this mode he liked to present himself as a man firmly retired. ‘My time is all holidays nowadays,’ he remarked airily in Three Act Tragedy. ‘I have succeeded. I am rich. I retire. Now I travel about, seeing the world.’

  The world for Poirot was anything that could be reached by train or by the shortest possible voyage on the Mediterranean. It is true that he once contemplated a trip by sea to South America, but once that was abandoned he surrendered completely to his conviction that he could never survive more than four days of mal de mer. Nor, in his later years, was flying any sort of an alternative. One or two experiences were enough. ‘I do not take aeroplanes,’ he said firmly in Dead Man’s Folly. ‘They make me sick.’

  The 1930s was the great era of Poirot’s trips abroad, and from the moment he set foot in Victoria Station he travelled in style. His trains, the pride of the Belgian-based Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits, were the great ones of Europe – the glamorous ‘Millionaire’s Train’, or le train bleu, which cradled its passengers from Calais to Nice in enamelled blue and gold sleeping cars, and the legendary trains of the Orient Express which offered passengers three routes across Europe in cars with inlaid panelling, velvet upholstery, and crystal chandeliers.4 The food, of course, was wonderful, and the murders that were apt to occur when Poirot was aboard a luxurious train were never allowed to interfere with it. In the dining-car in The Mystery of the Blue Train Poirot ‘dexterously polished one of the forks’ in anticipation of cordon bleu delights to come, and in Murder on the Orient Express he ‘found himself in the favoured position of being at the table which was served first and with the choicest morsels’.

  Poirot’s travels took him over much of Europe, but his favourite destination was the French Riviera, where at times he took up residence at the best of hotels. It was here, at restaurants and parties, and when ‘jauntily placing the minimum stake on the even numbers’ at the casino at Monte Carlo, that his smart white clothes came into their own.

  In Paris he liked to stay at the Ritz and dine in the evenings at restaurants such as the Samovar, whose proprietor, Count Alexis Pavlovitch, ‘prided himself on knowing everything that went on in the artistic world’.

  But not all his visits to Europe were so comfortable. For Poirot, who had no head for heights and quailed at ladders, an unforgettable case was ‘The Erymanthian Boar’, which required him to stay at a hotel which could only be reached by a funicular railway, was occupied by a gang determined to kill off the other guests, and where decent coffee was not to be had because of the difficulty of boiling water at high altitudes. ‘Problem at Sea’, when he should have known better, saw him seasick, of course, on a Mediterranean cruise, and of certain events in ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’ Hastings could only write sadly:

  I cut short his lamentations, by suggesting that we should start for the camp. We were to ride there on camels, and the beasts were patiently kneeling, waiting for us to mount, in charge of several picturesque boys headed by a voluble dragoman.

  I pass over the spectacle of Poirot on a camel. He started by groans and lamentations and ended by shrieks, gesticulations and invocations to the Virgin Mary and every saint in the calendar. In the end, he descended ignominiously and finished the journey on a diminutive donkey.

  Four of Poirot’s major cases of the 1930s coincided with commissions or holidays in the Middle East5. Poirot thoroughly enjoyed these expeditions and added a smattering of Arabic to his repertoire of languages, though in Dumb Witness Hastings observed tartly:

  Poirot’s travellings in the East, as far as I knew, consisted of one journey to Syria extended to Iraq, and
which occupied perhaps a few weeks. To judge by his present conversation one would swear that he had spent most of his life in jungles and bazaars and in intimate converse with fakirs, dervishes, and mahatmas.

  In Death on the Nile and Appointment with Death he fled the English winter to holiday in Egypt and Palestine. In anticipation he observed happily: ‘One can even voyage there now, I believe, by train, escaping all sea travel except the Channel.’ In Assuan he stayed at the Cataract Hotel, and in Jerusalem at the famous Solomon, his arrival as a celebrity duly noted by the local newspaper. At both the main topic of conversation was of murders recently perpetrated.

  ‘Decidedly, wherever I go, there is something to remind me of crime! Poirot once exclaimed, and it is a fact that wherever he travelled, in England or abroad, the murder statistics shot up amazingly. This phenomenon did not go unnoticed. In Evil Under the Sun Mrs Gardener, an American guest at the Jolly Roger, knew from the transatlantic tourist set all about Poirot’s reputation for presiding over ruined holidays:

  ‘I’ve just got to confess one thing, M. Poirot. It gave me a kind of a turn meeting you here – not that I wasn’t just thrilled to meet you, because I was, Mr Gardener knows that. But it just came to me that you might be here – well, professionally. You know what I mean? Well, I’m just terribly sensitive, as Mr Gardener will tell you, and I just couldn’t bear it if I was to be mixed up in crime of any kind. You see – ’

  Mr Gardener cleared his throat. He said: ‘You see, M. Poirot, Mrs Gardener is very sensitive.’

  The hands of Hercule Poirot shot into the air. ‘But let me assure you, Madame, that I am here simply in the same way that you are here yourself – to enjoy myself – to spend the holiday.’

  A pious hope! All of Mrs Gardener’s fears were, of course, soon realized.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Poirot in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, ‘I return for a short while to my own country – Belgium’. He took sanctuary there in ‘an isolated white villa’ in The Big Four, but beyond this (and the fact that he sent presents such as gloves, calendars and bonbons to his relatives at Christmas) we hear nothing further of Belgium. No doubt, as the years went by, the family and surroundings he had left there grew ever more distant – for when it was time to go home, it was to his beloved Whitehaven Mansions and his friends in England that Hercule Poirot’s thoughts turned.