Hercule Poirot 100 Years (1916 - 2016)

by Mark Place

  The radio context is also a clever addition to the story. Providing an instantly recognisable 1930s setting, there is a sense in which it is merely the ‘period fixture of the week’. Yet, it is also a nice embellishment on the theatricality of the masked ball so central to the murder plot. As the script points out, the ‘visual appearance’ of radio performers is unimportant, which makes the medium an appropriate counterpoint to the Harlequinade, where the right mask is enough to convince everyone (erroneously, as it turns out) of the identity of the person beneath. Having said that, Poirot’s decision to broadcast the denouement live on the radio is really unethical!

  Another nice dramatic touch is the way in which the murder is detected at midnight, amidst a flurry of patriotic union flag balloons and strains of Rule Britannia. This is a postcolonial touch, highlighting the evil and corruption at the heart of the empire’s ruling class. Similarly, the Uncle’s ‘success in bringing them [i.e. the porcelain figurines on which the harlequinade costumes are based] to this country’ points to a disregard for the traditions of the country from which they originate. The fiery passion of the Italians, which the porcelain figures personify in their exotic otherness, is imported in more ways than one – undercutting the idea of its intrinsic otherness, as well as the empire’s ability to maintain this foreign violence as ‘other’ by policing its borders effectually. The violence is pretty shocking too, with the camera lingering horribly on the very blunt butter knife with which Lord Cronshaw is eventually stabbed. Ugh.

  While the dramatisation comments on elements of its inter-war setting, however, it is also itself historically locatable as a product of the early 1990s. Specifically, it recalled to me the paranoia that surrounded the escalating war on drugs in the period. I’m not criticising this ‘war’, of course – it merely struck me that the crackdown on drug use, which was such a feature of media reaction to 1990s rave culture, is very much in evidence here. Christie’s tale doesn’t really comment on the drug-taking and drug-dealing that ultimately underlies the plot – it’s simply an anonymous mcguffin there to serve the needs of the murder plot’s mechanics. Here though, Poirot is given a vehement and livid reaction to the discovery that these young revellers have been using cocaine and Coco’s murder is definitely the result of her dealer giving her a fatal dose of the substance – a detail which (rather more convincingly, it must be said) is left ambiguous in Christie’s text. And while the mechanism of the story’s plot means that it nominally demonises the figure of the drug dealer, the TV adaptation has Poirot liken that figure to the devil himself. Indeed, in this version it is Chris himself who cuts off the second pompon, which he uses not only to replace the one missing on his own costume, but also to implicate his wife – a horrible action, very different from the story, in which Davidson’s wife cuts it off in order to safeguard her husband (here, Mrs Davidson’s defence of her husband merely involves her lying to protect him).

  Believe me, it is not my intention to defend the innocence of drug traffickers, nor to uphold Christie’s apparent belief in the appropriateness of an unquestioning devotion to one’s husband. Rather, I’m attempting to illustrate that most useful of maxims: always historicise. Whatever else it represents, the replacement of Mrs Davidson’s ‘natural’ and unquestioned devotion to her husband with a device that serves instead to demonise the figure of the drug dealer is a fascinating example of the way in which the socio-political priorities of texts change over time, yet never totally escape the immediate concerns of the period of which they are the product.

  The Affair At The Victory Ball (Book)

  This story first appeared in issue 1571 of The Sketch in March 1923. It was Agatha Christie’s first published short story and, for the rest of that year, there was barely an issue of The Sketch not featuring a tale of hers. Sadly, The Sketch is an appropriate name for the paper containing these early Poirot stories since this is, essentially, all we get – a ‘sketch’ of a plot, fleshed out with only the most basic character and dialogue notes and the occasional novel device (such as this story’s theatrical dénouement) to lend a little interest. That said, these plots are often very ingenious, providing the basis for longer stories, plays and novels later in Christie’s career. In this form, however, they are usually nothing more than plot summaries that have got a bit above themselves. I can’t comment on the story’s distinguishing characters, events and settings because that would be like focusing on the colour of an iPod skin or the particular shade of grey on an engine bolt. To all practical purposes they are no distinctions at all.

  This particular story opens with an acknowledgment that Poirot is now the star of his own ongoing series. Hastings begins tells us of the ‘notoriety’ that Poirot has gained in connection with ‘the Styles case’. He himself has been invalided out of the army after the Somme and, taking up residence with his old friend, has decided to lay the true facts behind some of Poirot’s cases before the public. As in Styles, Hastings’s idea of what constitutes Poirot’s most ‘interesting’ cases is connected with ‘the tremendous publicity given [the case] by the press’. This explains perhaps why Poirot appears to be at once a celebrity and a socialite, constantly mixing with the rich, famous and otherwise influential – this is what interests the press, so this is what informs the kind of ‘public interest’ that Hastings’s stories avowedly serve. In short, it is on Poirot the celebrity and public that Hastings’s narratives often focus. Here, for example, the victims are a young viscount (stabbed to death at a costume party) and his lover (a noted actress who has apparently killed herself by overdosing on cocaine). Hastings’s narratives have this in common both with the newspapers – both provide a discursive arena in which Poirot is drawn into the realm of celebrity and the fashionable zeitgeist. In the TV versions, this is exploited to the full as an opportunity to present a different contextual ‘theme’ every week (the country house, the race track, the golden age of the liners or the early days of radio and film).

  Also symptomatic of the tale’s establishment of Poirot as a recurring protagonist is the character’s vanity, which is more overtly signalled here than in Styles. At the outset we find him delicately applying a new pomade to his moustache. A certain harmless vanity was a characteristic of Poirot’s and fell into line with his general love of order and method. An idea of what Poirot means by ‘method’ is also indicated when he and Hastings interview Lord Cronshaw’s uncle, who has inherited the dead man’s estate: ‘You think he is the “wicked uncle” of the story-books, eh?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Me, I think he was most amiable towards us,’ said Poirot noncommittally.

  ‘Because he had his reasons!’

  Poirot looked at me, shook his head sadly, and murmured something that sounded like: ‘No method.’

  In these condensed narratives, Poirot less a character and more a caricature – a kind of cipher for explaining the mystery plot; a vessel in which to gather the clues. In the novels, we get a fuller, more organic picture of who he is, what people think of him, what he believes in and what motivates him, but here any unique characteristic is as superficial and cosmetic as a pomade applied to a moustache.

  The characterisation, like the narrative prose, is hurried, slapdash and clumsy. Japp, in particular, is now nothing more than a cipher. With little sense of an individual identity, he is there to serve the plot and nothing more. This leads to some careless inconsistencies. At one point, for example, he says that he doesn’t know what ‘the old Italian Comedy’ is – only to then proceed to give a very informed description of its main protagonists. Japp is also a more stereotypical mystery story policeman. He is the ancestor of the parasitic Lestrade, coming to Poirot for help with problems that are beyond him (even when, in reality, they wouldn’t be beyond most twelve-year-olds). I find it totally unbelievable for example, that, when dealing with a crime at a masked ball, Japp doesn’t ‘know the exact details of the costumes’ of those involved, nor can he ‘quite see what that has got to do with
it’. The point is that the narrative prose subsumes any characterisation – and both are subsumed totally to the demands of a plot that has to be unfolded with an extreme economy. Economy of style is usually Christie’s strongpoint, but the stylistic budget here is stretched to breaking point in order to cover the cost of the (admittedly clever) plot. As a result, Christie’s usual economy (a disciplined deployment of clear, no-frills prose which is its own skill and hence a perfectible style) devolves into a poverty not only of style and consequently of anything beyond the mere facts of the story related.

  An example. Poirot’s eye for theatricality and Christie’s eye for the detective plot as essentially a way of analysing the narratives that control our lives are both well-served by this story, making it a fitting start to Poirot’s adventures as an ongoing series. Hence the literal theatricals of the dénouement, in which the suspects are all gathered in Poirot’s flat to view a tableau of the characters they each played at the Victory Ball – a masquerade that is instrumental in revealing the masquerade within a masquerade that lies at the heart of the murder: ‘And yet – you are all wrong! Your eyes have lied to you – as they lied to you on the night of the Victory Ball. To “see” things with your eyes, as they say, is not always to see the truth.’

  The problem, however, is that the melodrama here isn’t a commentary on the melodrama of the murder plot or on the relationship between crime and performance – it’s simply part and parcel of the sensationalism of the story itself. This is made comically apparent when the actual culprit, instead of denying his involvement, leaps up and yells ‘Curse you! How did you guess?’ even before Poirot has accused him. Given that he has just condemned himself to summary execution the action is a little difficult to swallow.

  But then I’m almost certainly being too hard on this story, which was never intended to do any more than sketch an interesting puzzle. It isn’t (as Christie’s best stories and novels are) an enjoyably sensational comment about crime and justice and the intricacies of their operation within a given socio-political context. It’s just a puzzle to be enjoyed formally on the level of a puzzle. Hence the way in which Japp’s arrest is presented as nothing more than a narrative formality, the dashes in the dialogue indicating the hurry with which he reads the prisoner his rights: ‘I arrest you Christopher Davidson – charge of murdering Viscount Cronshaw – anything you say will be used in evidence against you’. He might has well have said ‘I arrest you for murder – blah, blah, blah, you know the drill’ and ended it there. Indeed, given that the murder plot is the only basis for the tale existing at all and since this has been played out, it would not have been overly inappropriate of Christie herself to have ended the story right there and in those very words.

  Murder on the Links (1996) 103 mins (Film)

  Dramatised by Anthony Horowitz, Directed by Andrew Grieve

  Cast: David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, Hugh Fraser as Captain Hastings

  From the outset, the very ‘thirties’ title sequence announces loudly that this is definitely not 1923. We learn later that the film is set, along with most of the nineties Poirot episodes, in 1936. Clearly this was a busy year for Suchet’s version of the detective. The newsreel of the Beroldy trial of 1926, which opens the film, emphasises how long ago the novel’s temporal setting is in relation to the film’s setting – although this timeshifting doesn’t really affect the plot or atmosphere of the piece in the way it does with some of the other Poirot adaptations. The only plot change it necessitates is that Jack’s daggers are not made of aircraft wire, as in the novel, but have a distinctive blue sapphire in the hilt – a memento of his work at a South African mining firm, rather than of his experiences in the first world war, in which his film counterpart is too young to have taken part. The newsreel footage has a different function here than it did in the earlier Styles. As well as helping to give a sense of period detail, it is also one of the film’s many successful attempts to restructure the plot in order to streamline the story and clarify it for a TV audience. It’s a shrewd move and is much more believable than the novel’s clumsy ‘it all came flooding back…’ infodump. Another (welcome) example is that there’s only one Duveen – and, mercifully, she isn’t a trained acrobat. Also helpful is the fact that the lack of a first-person narrator allows the film to show us many of the clues (e.g. Jack’s love life, his fight with his father, the fact that Jack did not sail for Calais but was around on the night of the murder, the fact that Bella also possesses a dagger) rather than have characters relate them in mechanistic dialogues. This is an advantage that the visual medium has over the book, which helps to make the information easier to digest.

  While we’re on the subject of easily digestible visual images, there is certainly a preoccupation with theatricality in the adaptation, which I found interesting and which is, to some extent, a product of the way in which the novel has been adapted to a visual medium – arising directly out of the ‘show don’t tell’ attitude. For example, the ‘literary’ deception of Renauld’s letter with its carefully gauged postscript is replaced here with the dramatic deception of Renauld’s appointment with Poirot. That is, because the film has Poirot meet Renauld by chance in Deauville, rather than summon him from London, the literary conventions of the detective thriller utilised by Renauld in the letter he sends in the novel are replaced here by a similar use of the dramatic conventions of the TV detective drama. We see Renauld spot Poirot in a hotel lobby and looking… intrigued? Worried?

  We wonder whether he is planning a crime or fearful of becoming a victim of one. So when he protests to his secretary (in a manner obviously false) that everything is fine and he doesn’t need a detective, and when he later meets Poirot and confides in him that he is worried about becoming the victim of a serious conspiracy, the viewer might be forgiven for thinking that this explains his earlier reaction on seeing Poirot, much as the letter’s postscript convinces Hastings, in the novel, of the seriousness of their client’s fears. In fact, in both cases, Renauld has simply used the conventions of the medium (whether they be dramatic or literary) to construct a red herring and to try and convince Poirot of the kind of story he wishes to have him believe. Interestingly, Poirot’s line from the novel about the postscript being there ‘to create an impression […] the impression it very nearly did create’ is retained, but moved to a different context. In the film, it is used to indicate why the tramp was stabbed after his death. Yet the same point is being made – Renauld is constructing his own thriller in which he has cast himself as hapless murder victim. It is Poirot’s job, as ever, to look beyond social and cultural conventions about what murder looks like – susceptibility to which allows a deceptive impression so easily to be created – and to strip events down to a series of plain facts.

  The novel is the first instance of one of Poirot’s stock weapons of playing the culprits at their own game by staging a little play-acting of his own – and the film draws attention to this in a lovely way. Having already complimented Mrs Renauld’s performance upon hearing of the ‘death’ of her husband, Poirot gets her to use her talents to deceive the murderer into thinking that Jack Renauld is to be disinherited. Poirot’s shock at Mrs Renauld throwing wine in her son’s face and her little ‘look’ at Poirot is wonderful – ‘too much?’ it seems to say.

  Characters here are always being judged on the efficacy of their performance – their ability to create the illusion that one set of events not only happened, but happened in a particular kind of way. This constant play-acting makes the brutal fact of death all the more troubling and Mrs Renauld’s whimper of ‘it shouldn’t have been Paul’ is heartbreaking as a result. It’s chilling too as we realise that the film is apparently trying to construe Renauld’s murder as just deserts for his impetuous attempt to make reality into fantasy – as Poirot says, his death is a case of ‘fantasy becomes reality’.

  One of the less successful changes from book to film is that Giraud is an older man, so we don’t get the new methods versus ol
d theme of the book. This is unfortunate, because without the theme of old versus new methods it’s hard to believe that anyone would think Giraud the best detective in France – not least because he hasn’t a French accent (although, to be fair, this is conspicuous by its absence in all characters except Poirot). This extends to a wider lack in the film, which does not retain the book’s interest in what characterises Poirot’s unique methods as a detective. In the film, the show don’t tell attitude means that, occasionally, Poirot just knows things. One exchange goes: ‘How do you know all this Monsieur Poirot!’ ‘The eyes of Hercule Poirot – they see everything!’ Which, of course, is no answer at all. At least in the novel Poirot admits he’s basically guessing and that his method lies in trying out various possibilities until he finds one that accounts for every fact, regardless of whether there’s any tangible proof.

  Having said that, the film does use Giraud to come up with a marvellous fix for the plot hole of the lead piping. In the film, the detail of the tramp’s disfigurement is omitted and, it turns out, Poirot comments on the lead piping simply to annoy Giraud. The wager between Poirot and Giraud, whereby Poirot agrees to sacrifice his moustache if Giraud finds the killer before him, is also good fun. More abstractly, I also like the idea that Giraud falls in with precisely the theatricality that Poirot’s investigation sets out to dispel – he intends to arrest Jack ‘at the finishing line’ purely because of its narrative appropriateness. This wrongful arrest only succeeds in adding to the ‘musical comedy’ feel of the cycling theme, ensuring that it seems more and more like something out of Rogers and Hart’s The Girl Friend – a cheesy 1924 musical about a cyclist and his girlfriend/trainer who get into all sorts of hilarious scrapes.