by Anne Hart
He also undertook cases in which there was a little or no monetary reward sheerly because the problem involved interested him.
By the mid-1920s Poirot had earned enough money to declare – as he would continue to declare for the rest of his life – that there was no need for him ever to accept a case again. Clearly he was a master of the art of attracting a wealthy clientele, charging it expensive fees, and managing his money wisely. How did he do it?
There are one or two hints that in the very early days of private practice Poirot may have advertised his services, but before long the rich and anxious who came knocking at his door arrived there because they had heard of him from their network of friends and acquaintances. In Murder in Mesopotamia, for example, the archaeologist, Dr Leidner, called in Poirot to investigate the murder of his wife because ‘I once heard a Mr Van Aldin speak of him in very high terms.’ Ten years after that, in Death on the Nile, old Miss Van Schuyler, ‘making a Royal Progress bedward’, paused to say, ‘I have only just realized who you are, Monsieur Poirot. I may tell you that I have heard of you from my old friend Rufus Van Aldin.’
All this occurred, of course, because Poirot himself delivered the goods. He patently solved difficult and embarrassing mysteries better than anyone else, and he was far more discreet about it than the police – or so his clients hoped. ‘Leave it in the hands of Hercule Poirot,’ he was apt to tell them reassuringly. ‘Have no fears. I will discover the truth.’ He invariably did, and sometimes no one was more astonished and dismayed than the client.
Another source of lucrative cases was the entree his reputation gave him to inner circles of power. Over the years he carried out a number of commissions for prime ministers, the Home Office, foreign governments, and large business houses, but in time he seems to have become bored with these politicians and insurance companies. In Peril at End House he waved away an urgent summons from Whitehall:
‘In all generosity I say: Let the young men have a chance. They may possibly do something creditable. I doubt it, but they may. Anyway they will do well enough for this doubtless tiresome affair of the Home Secretary’s.’
Some of his most interesting and satisfying cases were those undertaken on his own initiative and with no prospect of fees. ‘Many unlikely people came to consult Poirot,’ Hastings once wrote primly of clients who were not distinguished by birth or fortune. An even unlikelier lot – whether poor or rich – were those whom Poirot ruthlessly adopted as clients whether they wanted to be clients or not. ‘Pas un sou!’ he cried imperiously in Lord Edgware Dies. ‘When a case interests me, I do not touch money.’
Just such a case was Peril at End House, in which Poirot gallantly offered his services to an elfin and independent young woman who had been inexplicably shot at by an unknown assailant. Hastings described the scene:
‘You mustn’t be alarmed, Miss Buckley. We will protect you.’
‘How frightfully nice of you,’ said Nick. ‘I think the whole thing is perfectly marvellous. Too, too thrilling.’
She still preserved her airy detached manner, but her eyes, I thought, looked troubled.
‘And the first thing to do,’ said Poirot, ‘is to have the consultation.’
He sat down and beamed upon her in a friendly manner.
If one hired Poirot as one’s detective this consultation usually took place in his sitting-room. If desperate, a client might arrive at any time of day or night – ‘the door of our sitting-room flew open,’ wrote Hastings, ‘and a distracted female precipitated herself into the room.’ If the matter at hand was less urgent, one would make an appointment in advance and, in due course, find oneself waiting to be ushered into Poirot’s presence. In Third Girl:
He lifted his cup. ‘Show her in after five minutes.’
‘Yes, sir.’ George withdrew.
Poirot finished the last sip of chocolate. He pushed aside his cup and rose to his feet. He walked to the fireplace and adjusted his moustaches carefully in the mirror over the chimney piece. Satisfied, he returned to his chair and awaited the arrival of his visitor.
When seated, if the visitor was a new client, out would come his or her story – or, at least, the story the client wanted Poirot to hear. ‘M. Poirot. You’re the only man in the world who can help me …’ a newcomer might begin. In this process a good deal of sizing-up went on on both sides. ‘You are making up your mind – are you not? – whether I am a mere mountebank or the man you need,’ Poirot asked Carla Lemarchant who came to consult him in Five Little Pigs:
She smiled. She said, ‘Well, yes – something of that kind. You see, M. Poirot, you – you don’t look exactly the way I pictured you.’
‘And I am old, am I not? Older than you imagined?’
‘Yes, that too.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m being frank, you see. I want – I’ve got to have – the best.’
‘Rest assured,’ said Hercule Poirot, ‘I am the best!’
For his part, Poirot’s acceptance of a case, particularly when he was well established, was not a foregone conclusion. In The Big Four Hastings observed:
The time when his cases had drawn him from one end of England to the other was past. His fame had spread, and no longer would he allow one case to absorb all his time. He aimed more and more, as time went on, at being considered a ‘consulting detective’ – as much a specialist as a Harley Street physician.
This eminence, and his never-ending threats to retire, allowed Poirot to adopt a lofty stance when refusing a would-be client. ‘I must decline the case,’ he told an American magnate in ‘The Plymouth Express’, ‘because you have not been frank with me.’ In Murder on the Orient Express he turned down a huge commission because: ‘If you will forgive me for being personal – I do not like your face, M. Ratchett.’
When he did agree to act he was apt to include conditions which sometimes returned to haunt his client. ‘I accept,’ he told Alfred Lee in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, ‘but you comprehend, Mr Lee, there can be no drawing back. I am not the dog one sets on to hunt and then recalls because you do not like the game he puts up!’
With such acceptances came money. How much was it? ‘I ask myself only – is this affair sufficiently interesting for me to undertake?’ he might say grandly, but the fact remains that Poirot’s Mayfair flat, his expensive clothes, the salaries of George and Miss Lemon, his eventful holidays to the Mediterranean, and his occasional flings at ownership of Messarro Gratzs and weekend cottages all had to be paid for.
‘You realize that my fees are high?’ he warned on more than one occasion, but the delicate subject of what they would actually be was not openly discussed. A laughably small fee, such as the guinea Mrs Todd paid him in ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’, or an impressively large one, such as the twenty thousand dollars offered him in the early 1930s in Murder on the Orient Express, might be mentioned as extraordinary, but as a rule financial arrangements were phrased in emotional rather than businesslike terms. ‘Spare no expense!’ he might be directed. ‘My poor father – killed by someone – killed with the utmost brutality! You must find out, M. Poirot.’ Or: ‘All the dollars were made for my little girl – and now she’s gone, I’ll spend my last cent to catch the damned scoundrel that did it!’ Such was Poirot’s reputation that he was generally given carte blanche. No doubt, when such cases were wound up, a substantial statement of account, neatly typed on Poirot’s ‘thick and expensive’ writing-paper would shortly follow. ‘Nobility, chère Madame,’ he once remarked to a client attempting to bargain, ‘will not pay steamer and railway and air travel fares. Nor will it cover the cost of long telegrams and cables, and the interrogations of witnesses.’
All this said, and taking into account the many cases for which he has never received a fee, the fact remains that Poirot did earn a great deal of money. ‘You must be a millionaire by now,’ exclaimed Japp in Lord Edgware Dies. ‘What do you do with the money? Save it?’ ‘Assuredly I practise the thrift,’ replied Poirot. He lived well but he also knew pre
cisely where every penny went. There is a tiny scene in Dumb Witness in which, having torn up a letter just written, he ‘carefully placed the wetted stamp face downwards on the blotting-paper to dry’.
In ‘Double Sin’ Hastings accused him of meanness when he attempted to obtain a reduction in their railway fares. ‘My friend,’ replied Poirot, ‘it is not the meanness. It is the business sense.’ He saved his money and he invested it with care. In recounting the case of ‘The Lost Mine’, Hastings recorded the following conversation:
‘It is a curious thing,’ I observed, ‘but my overdraft never seems to grow any less.’
‘And it perturbs you not? Me, if I had an overdraft, never should I close my eyes all night,’ declared Poirot.
‘You deal in comfortable balances, I suppose!’ I retorted.
‘Four hundred and forty-four pounds, four and four-pence,’ said Poirot with some complacency. ‘A neat figure, is it not?’
‘It must be tact on the part of your bank manager. He is evidently acquainted with your passion for symmetrical details. What about investing, say, three hundred of it in the Porcupine oil-fields? Their prospectus, which is advertised in the papers today, says that they will pay one hundred per cent dividends next year.’
‘Not for me,’ said Poirot, shaking his head. ‘I like not the sensational. For me the safe, the prudent investment – les rentes, the consols, the – how do you call it? – the conversion.’
‘Have you never made a speculative investment?’
‘No, mon ami,’ replied Poirot severely. ‘I have not.’
Poirot’s professional expenses ranged from disbursements of petty cash (a ‘crisp piece of paper’ pressed into the hand of an informative valet, or the purchase of ‘two postcards, a book of stamps, and a piece of local pottery’ to win the confidence of a postmistress) to major outlays. ‘There are moments,’ he was on record as saying, ‘when economy should be abandoned.’ Though he saved a great deal of money by his habitual expedient of using his sitting-room as his place of business, he never stinted on the handsome commissions he paid out to the best freelance agents and investigators money could buy. ‘It is not for Hercule Poirot to run up and down the evil-smelling streets of Limehouse like a little dog of no breeding. Be calm. My agents are at work,’ he said with dignity in ‘The Lost Mine’. Over the years he hired all sorts of irregulars – an actor to impersonate a window cleaner in order to see and tell all, or a tramp who had a way with dogs to kidnap Countess Rossakoff’s terrible black hound. On occasion he even displaced the ever-available George when he felt someone with more specialized skills was needed. In The ABC Murders he told a visitor:
‘You may have noticed I had a new manservant to-day – a friend of mine – an expert sneak thief. He removed your pistol from your pocket, unloaded it, and returned it all without your being aware of the fact.’
Two of Poirot’s favourite and most expensive investigators were Joseph Aarons and Mr Goby. By profession Joseph Aarons was a theatrical agent, but he was always ready to sleuth for Poirot. ‘He, without doubt, will be able to put us in the way of finding out what we want to know,’ Poirot once told Hastings confidently. Aarons was one of Poirot’s agents in his clashes with the Big Four, and in Murder on the Links he solved the mystery of the disappearance of Hastings’s darling Cinderella. In ‘Double Sin’ Poirot interrupted a holiday to go to his aid:
‘Eh bien, Hastings, Joseph Aarons finds himself at Charlock Bay. He is far from well, and there is a little affair that it seems is worrying him. He begs me to go over and see him. I think, mon ami, that I must accede to his request. He is a faithful friend, the good Joseph Aarons, and has done much to assist me in the past.’
We have met the enigmatic Mr Goby before in these pages, ‘a small shrunken little man, so nondescript as to be practically non-existent’. His services as a purveyor of information were extremely expensive, but his army of informants, spread all over England and the Continent, always produced gratifying results. It may be remembered that Mr Goby had a disconcerting habit of directing all his remarks to inanimate objects. In After the Funeral he arrived to report to Poirot:
‘I’ve got what I could for you,’ he told the fire curb in a soft confidential whisper. ‘I sent the boys out. They do what they can – good lads – all of them, but not what they used to be in the old days. They don’t come that way nowadays. Not willing to learn, that’s what it is. Think they know everything after they’ve only been a couple of years on the job.
And they work to time. Shocking the way they work to time.’
He shook his head sadly and shifted his gaze to an electric plug socket.
After the Hastings era, the most constant of Poirot’s assistants was Felicity Lemon, his impressively efficient secretary. ‘How I miss my friend Hastings,’ Poirot once mourned:
‘He had such an imagination. Such a romantic mind! It is true that he always imagined wrong – but that in itself was a guide.’
Miss Lemon was silent. She had heard about Captain Hastings before, and was not interested. She looked longingly at the typewritten sheet in front of her.
Miss Lemon was irredeemably unromantic and seldom wrong. She was, moreover, the one person capable of intimidating Poirot. Though they often annoyed each other, he trusted her utterly:
She was a woman without imagination, but she had an instinct. Anything that she mentioned as worth consideration usually was worth consideration.
Like Ariadne Oliver, Miss Lemon had once been employed by the remarkable detective, Parker Pyne. She appeared briefly as his secretary – ‘a forbidding-looking young woman with spectacles’ – in two of his commissions, ‘The Case of the Middle-Aged Wife’ and ‘The Case of the Distressed Lady’. These short stories first appeared in 1932,1 but by 1935, just three years later, she was firmly established as Poirot’s secretary in ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’ In this case she is described as ‘forty-eight and of unprepossessing appearance’, which seems a distinctly unfair leap in time for poor Miss Lemon.
As with George, little can be discovered about Felicity Lemon apart from her employment by Poirot. There is a mention that her family once lived at Croydon Heath, and in Hickory Dickory Dock we meet her likeable sister, Mrs Hubbard, but apart from this we know nothing of her life beyond her small typing room. Perhaps this was where her true passion lay? ‘It was well known that the whole of Miss Lemon’s heart and mind was given, when she was not on duty, to the perfection of a new filing system which was to be patented and bear her name.’
Miss Lemon was invaluable to Poirot. ‘She was never tired, never upset, never inaccurate … She knew everything, she coped with everything. She ran Hercule Poirot’s life for him.’ She answered his phone, took impeccable dictation, paid his bills, answered many of his letters, and arranged his engagements. ‘You have made the necessary researches for me, the appointments, the necessary contacts?’ he asked her in Third Girl. ‘“Certainly,” said Miss Lemon. “It is all here.” She handed him a small brief-case.’
From time to time Poirot wrested Miss Lemon away from her typewriter to play detective. ‘Sublimely incurious by nature’, she took a dim view of these assignments. To her they seemed such a waste of time. As one would expect, however, she performed such outside duties with perfect efficiency. In ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’ she travelled at Poirot’s request to the village of Charman’s Green to interview a fishmonger – and reported to her employer afterwards at the Green Cat tea-rooms.
Miss Lemon was still typing Poirot’s letters beautifully and filing his papers flawlessly in the early 1970s in his penultimate case, Elephants Can Remember.2 ‘My much valued secretary, Miss Lemon …’ Though she must be well over one hundred by now, somehow one imagines Miss Lemon still going strong and being very good with electronic messages.
Typically, Poirot’s working day began ‘at ten o’clock precisely [when] he entered the room where Miss Lemon … sat awaiting her instructions’, pad and pencil at the ready for dicta
tion, the scheduling of appointments, and the acceptance or rejection of invitations. If a case so required, ‘cautiously worded’ advertisements would be drafted asking informants or mislaid relatives to communicate with Poirot’s solicitors, or the wording of telegrams – sometimes in code – decided upon. Poirot loved to send telegrams. ‘We have not seen M. Poirot today,’ Father Lavigny remarked in Murder in Mesopotamia. ‘I told him that Poirot had said he was going to be busy all day sending off telegrams,’ wrote Nurse Leatheran in her memoir.
He also liked the telephone. ‘Allô. Allô … Ah, good morning … Yes, it is I myself, Hercule Poirot.’ He was particularly fond of long-distance telephone calls. ‘It is romantic, you know, the transatlantic telephone. To speak so easily to someone nearly halfway across the globe.’3
These tasks concluded, Poirot then embarked on the main work of his day, and most of his days were very busy. ‘I am always punctual,’ he liked to point out. ‘The exactitude – always I observe it.’ On a hot summer’s day in Lord Edgware Dies, for example, Poirot and Hastings attended a useful luncheon party at Claridge’s from which ‘Poirot had to leave early, as he had an appointment. He was investigating the strange disappearance of an ambassador’s boots, and had a rendezvous fixed for half-past two.’ At twenty minutes to five he returned to his sitting-room, having solved the mystery of the ambassador’s boots with time to spare for a quick investigative visit to a hairdressers. No sooner was he home than the telephone rang with news of the main case at hand. ‘A few minutes later we were jumping into a taxi. Poirot’s face was very grave. “I am afraid, Hastings,” he said.’ At their destination, a maisonette in Kensington, Poirot’s fears were realized. The telephone caller lay dead, sprawled across a dining-room table. Then followed ‘the arrival of the police, the questioning of the other people in the house, the hundred and one details of the dreadful routine following upon a murder.’
Back home again, Poirot paced the sitting-room. ‘I could almost feel the waves of his furious concentration of thought,’ wrote Hastings. Presently Hastings dozed off and was awakened about nine o’clock by a cry. Poirot’s green eyes were shining: ‘I have been foolish. I have been blind. But now – now – we shall get on!’ And so they did, rushing by taxi to possible new evidence. After this foray they found themselves crossing Euston Road when the chance remark of a passer-by gave Poirot a blinding inspiration. Recalled Hastings:
