Poirot and Hastings: A Rad Bromance
It would be difficult to find a “straighter” writer than Agatha Christie: Julian Symonds noted shortly after the novelist’s death that “few feminists or radicals are likely to read her.”7 But that is simply not true. As intimated above, Christie has attracted attention from feminists, and from LGBTQ+ readers.8 Moreover, since her first publication, Christie has enjoyed an almost universal fan-base. I would like to put Christie’s success down in part at least to her under-acknowledged comic touch. While her books appear profoundly conventional, formulaic and the opposite of subversive, they are constantly making fun of the conventions to which they appeal.
Christie’s detectives, beginning with Poirot, are at least mock-heroic. Traditional scholarship reads Christie as an author entirely faithful to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes formula, distinguished by the soundness of her puzzles. However, building on Alison Light’s suggestion that Christie exhibits “anti–Victorian and anti-nostalgic elements,” several commentators have considered her prose “self-consciously ironic,” and discussed Poirot as an “antiheroic feminised” critique of “male heroism.”9 The construction of acceptable maleness is a process clearly reflected in characters’ interactions with Poirot, who is able to solve crimes precisely because nobody takes him seriously, as they would a fit young Englishman. Furthermore, Poirot’s relationship to English masculinity is dependent on his relationship to Captain Hastings, described by Christie as a “stooge” with a patriotic military background.10
Christie acknowledged that she wrote “in the Sherlock Holmes tradition,”11 but her context was not Conan Doyle’s. Sherlock Holmes (first appearance, 1887) has become synonymous with national heroism in the late Victorian period. In “His Last Bow,” which Conan Doyle penned some time after receiving his knighthood for services to propaganda, Holmes prepares himself, and the nation, for the Great War. When Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920, Britain was recovering from the conflict. An enormous loss of life and the need for women to assume traditionally manly tasks with men displaced to the battlefield meant that, while war had formerly been idealized as something that “made men,” it became seen as something that “could destroy as well as make men.”12
An esoteric intellectual, Conan Doyle’s Holmes seems detached from everything but his investigations. When his sidekick, Dr. Watson, admires a woman’s beauty, Holmes says, “I did not observe.”13 Holmes is “not a whole-soul admirer of womankind,” but he does occasionally theorize about how he would treat a wife. This is important: it permits readers to accept his relationship with Watson, unsuspicious of their live-in closeness. Watson, moreover, is a ladies’ man, boasting of “an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents,” and frequently pointing out “attractive” or “beautiful” women.14 However, these moments never dominate the text and Holmes’s affection for Watson, while rarely mentioned, is afforded more actual space when it does feature.15 Such a vehement gaze at women insists upon straight, or more precisely non-homosexual, desire. Watson’s objectification of women is necessary in the context of his affection for Holmes, and it licenses the latter’s celibate misogyny, enacting an “intimate prohibition” that, for queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, characterizes “homosexual panic.”16
In some respects, Poirot is an anti–Holmes. He is introduced in Styles a few paragraphs after Captain Hastings has confessed to “a secret hankering to be a detective” like “Sherlock Holmes.” Hastings is puzzled by Poirot’s “extraordinary” appearance, his height, his effeminacy, and the fact that he used to be one of the most respected policemen in Europe.17 Poirot is, notably, Belgian, rather than French: he takes pride in correcting people on this count. Charles Brownson notes that Poirot’s Belgian-not-French status makes him, racially, “twice an outsider.”18 We may take this further, and suggest that it more deeply “others” Poirot as a hero. After all, French men were thought to be highly masculine and sexually assertive, with Robert Graves and others telling of French brothels on the front line during the war. It was French virility, not Belgian neutrality, that featured in British medical reports and American magazine editorials expressing concerns over the state of European masculinity. Making Poirot Belgian rather than French, Christie presents a less-than-threatening kind of foreign heroism, while also exploiting racial stereotypes. As a foreign but questionably manly hero, Poirot stands outside of, but also confirms, British masculine security. On a generic level, as the stock-detective with an unfamiliar but competent methodology, he similarly proves an inauthentic figurehead for the status quo he upholds.
Holmes’s “ignorance [is] as remarkable as his knowledge”: he does not know, for instance, that the earth orbits the sun, an ignorance he defends because it means there is more room in his brain for important information. Indeed, having learnt about the earth’s rotation, Holmes endeavors “to forget it,” discriminating knowledge before he can process it.19 On the contrary, Poirot weaves a tapestry out of overlooked clues. He solves his first case by observing that “the objects on the mantelpiece” are out of order and later identifies that a suspect who claims to have pricked herself on a rose is lying because the rose in question was thornless.20 The ability to notice people’s eating habits or conversational quirks is something he has picked up from women, because “women … see everything, they notice the little detail that escapes the mere man.”21 The details which Poirot appreciates are domestic and as Stephen Knight notes, “classically, and stereotypically female.”22 They are also overlooked by Poirot’s rivals. The kind of generic masculinity to which Christie responds, then, labels things too trivial to be of importance if they do not fit a pet theory. With Poirot’s openness to feminine codes of knowledge, detective fiction’s veracity is both undermined and opened up.
And then there is the sidekick. As Christie’s version of Watson, Hastings responds to his prototype’s masculinity. Poirot often complains that Hastings “prostate[s him]self before all [women] who are good-looking” while “psychologically … know[ing] nothing whatever about them.”23 The almost arbitrary silliness of Hastings’ gaze towards women is emphasized from the outset: in Styles, he falls madly in love with two unsuitable women. A few pages into the second novel he has already assessed every woman as a potential love interest, prompting Poirot to exclaim: “Already you have seen a goddess!”24
Like a number of heterosexual men, Hastings is strangely attracted to the male friend who so confidently eschews rituals which absorb Hastings himself. In the Sedgwickian sense, homosexual panic has been inevitable in patriarchal societies, which have encouraged “certain intense male bonds … not readily distinguishable from the most reprobated bonds.”25 The urge to find a female body to fall in love with qualifies and validates as un-perverted the intensity of affection between Hastings and his friend (or teacher, to whom he is a disciple). By The Big Four (1927), Hastings has married but left his wife in Argentina, with no communication, because he felt like living with Poirot. While over the course of the book, he grows to let Poirot touch him—“I … did not attempt to evade the embrace with which he overwhelmed me”26—he qualifies this closeness by falling in love with every auburn-haired woman he meets. Hastings’ wife, known as “Cinderella” because he sometimes forgets her name, is at one point believed to have been kidnapped, which upsets her husband—but he never goes to see how she is. By Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, Hastings’ wife has died and Hastings has joined Poirot, who feeds him cocoa, tucks him into bed and is known to Hastings’ daughter as “Uncle Hercule.” The close friendship between Poirot and Hastings rests on a parodic version of Holmes and Watson’s sexual coding. However, reading Hastings as an insecurely heterosexual figure helps us interpret the character’s parodic generic function in the context of masculinity’s frustrations and the limitations of human desire.
“What a woman!” The Countess Rossakoff
Small men, Chris
tie writes, are bound to find “big, flamboyant women” attractive.27 She is explaining Poirot’s fondness for a dubious Russian Countess, Vera Rossakoff. If the dandified Poirot is Christie’s response to Holmes, Rossakoff is a response to Irene Adler. Appearing in one story, Adler is one of Conan Doyle’s most popular characters, being the only woman his detective, Holmes, admires. A fairly androgynous jewel thief and blackmailer, she outwits Holmes by dressing as a boy in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” She earns his respect, permission to flee justice with a lover and the accolade “the woman,” distinguishing her from the rest of her sex but also, of course, making her a figurehead for palatable womanliness in the series.28
Also a jewel thief, Rossakoff is excessive—more “foreign” than Poirot—and she represents a heightened femininity that is performed rather than innate. That is to say, she enjoys dressing up, insisting that women should “try to please,” and is adamant that “to be content with what Nature has given you … is stupid!”29 Whereas Conan Doyle regretted not having injected humor into his fiction, Christie’s portrayal of Poirot’s “flamboyant” object of desire, as we shall see, is evidently comical.30 By exaggerating Rossakoff’s ornaments of femininity, and her feminine appeal to Poirot, Christie is able to mock a range of conventions, from femininity to class prejudice and the character’s narrative function as Poirot’s Adler.
Noting Christie’s adjectives for Rossakoff, “voluptuous, lush, exotic, and highly coloured,” Earl F. Bargainnier has observed that the orderly “Poirot’s taste in women is the exact opposite of that in furnishings.” This, he concludes, is why Rossakoff does not return after only a few appearances: she does not fit into Poirot’s world.31 Bargannier’s analysis insightfully draws attention towards the burlesque, unruly, extroverted nature of Rossakoff’s character and bearing. However, her incongruence with the rest of Poirot’s tastes is hardly an authorial mistake that Christie tried to undo by removing the character: the remarks quoted above about “small men” enjoying the company of “big, flamboyant women” appear in almost as many titles as Rossakoff herself. In this sense—if only in this sense—Christie presents Poirot’s attraction to Rossakoff as a deviation from his usual primness that is entirely consistent. The character’s “voluptuous” and “exotic” nature stands for over-the-top femininity. As Poirot himself routinely fails as a masculine hero, the type of woman who attracts him has to be more feminine than he is, lest he also be considered a failed heterosexual. As a result, however, Rossakoff’s performance of femininity is so heightened that it becomes self-parodic; a drag act, as shall be discussed. Like other prominent authors of the classical whodunit, Christie disapproved of detectives’ need for a “female interest.”32 By making Rossakoff forcefully feminine and incongruent with Poirot’s other interests, Christie draws attention towards the mechanical insincerity of sexual attraction in popular literature.
Rossakoff is introduced in “The Double Clue,” a 1923 short story. Jewels have been stolen, and Poirot believes the most likely suspect to be a Russian countess about whom little is known: she may be an imposter, he reasons.33 However, after meeting Rossakoff, he revises his opinion. Although Poirot usually visits suspects, Rossakoff invades his space by calling on him and Hastings at home. She is introduced as
a whirlwind in human form [who] invaded our privacy, bringing with her a swirl of sables (it was as cold as only an English June day could be) and a hat rampant with slaughtered ospreys. Countess Vera Rossakoff was a somewhat disturbing personality.34
As presented, the woman is something more than human, her intimidating “personality” initially presented through reference to her clothes and subsequently in terms of her vocal “flood of volubility” and the “exotic scent” she leaves upon sweeping out of the room.35
Like a male drag artist, Rossakoff takes normal feminine signifiers to discordant excess. She does not simply have a sable coat, but “a swirl of sables” which connects with her body, as the swirling makes it part of the “whirlwind in human form” that Hastings claims she is. Even her hat is personified when it is described as “rampant,” and not just with feathers but with “slaughtered ospreys”: Christie, who had a passion for sable coats and was no campaigner for animal rights, draws attention to life and action in relation to traditionally static objects of clothing. Killed animals here contribute to the countess’s vitality and quality of life: Christie presents one living body constructed from corpses. The coat also prompts Hastings’ aside, a clichéd remark about English weather, so as an object it introduces an introspective gaze from the narrator asserting his gendered and national identity. On Rossakoff, bodies are theatrical properties, creating “disturbing” power.
Rossakoff’s intimidating presence and the emphasis on clothes in establishing her character represent extremes of exotic confidence and artistic allure akin to those in a drag performance. A male drag artist who exaggerates the ornaments of femininity thereby emphasizes her own maleness beneath the dress, so drag can “mock traditional femininity and heterosexuality.”36 For a male-to-female drag act to be successful, the spectator must be convinced that beneath the woman’s clothes sit men’s genitals: part of the performance is the recognition of “the man beneath the skirt,” untwining sex and gender, exposing femininity as mere artifice.37 Drag takes the performative aspects of gender to hyperbolic excess, undermining the spectacle of gender itself. Gail Hawkes claims that
if “drag” is verbal shorthand for the performative use of gendered dress codes to subvert the hegemonic twining of gender and sexuality, then we can speak in this sense, of dress as performance, of women “dragging up as women,” or of men “dragging up as men.”38
Robert Tyler suggests that the actress “[Greta] Garbo ‘got in drag’ whenever she took some heavy glamour part.” Acting, for Tyler, is “all impersonation, whether the sex underneath is true or not.”39 To an extent, Rossakoff’s whole character can be considered a “heavy glamour part.” With her exaggerated performance, Rossakoff exerts power over men and draws attention to the elements of her identity that allow this.
Before meeting her, Poirot is able to suggest that Rossakoff may be not a real countess but one of many “immigrants”: “Any woman can call herself a Russian countess.”40 After their first meeting, he comments on her “real enough” sable: “Could a spurious countess have real furs? My little joke, Hastings…. No, she is truly Russian, I fancy.”41 The clothes are real so the woman is real. This may be a “joke” but Poirot insists that Rossakoff is “truly Russian” whereas before he had doubted that she was truly a countess. Poirot has to twist his premise to reach the desired conclusion. In fact, Rossakoff is described with the same language used of contemporary burlesque and drag artists.42 The female impersonator Bert Savoy, who died the year “The Double Clue” was published, was described by one contemporary critic as “flamboyant, loud, bawdy” and “swish.” “He would wear jewelry of an exaggerated size.”43 The “overt sexuality” of his female persona was emphasized by the exaggerated nature of his corset, wig and draping gowns. This is equally a description of Rossakoff, the woman whose “very flamboyance attract[s] Poirot,” whose “magnificent shoulders” are carried with “a magnificent gesture.”44 Rossakoff here must necessarily be an exotic fantasy: for the notoriously bourgeois Poirot, this means being an aristocrat. Poirot discounts his suspicion that Rossakoff might not be a real countess without admitting to the fact that she seems inauthentic. Rossakoff’s femme du monde femininity is only attractive insofar as it is caricatured.
The two eccentrics’ paths cross a few times in short stories, and Poirot frequently recalls the countess, usually when judging young women unfavorably against her standard: in Hickory Dickory Dock (1958), for instance, he makes the against-the-grain observation that “girls of today” do not wear enough make-up, his mind “dart[ing] to the memory of the Countess Vera Rossakoff. What exotic splendour there, even in decay!”45 Certainly, the last time Poirot and Rossakoff meet, the latter objects with rigor to
“girls” who “do not even try” to attract men, and in response Poirot admires her “heavy Titian tresses” and “corset laced tight”; “it was undeniable that she, at least, was still trying and trying hard!”46 By now, she owns an underground nightclub, appropriately named Hell. Poirot sees her in Hell and they never meet again.
Rossakoff, then, is remembered as forbidden fruit, ripe in decay. She appeals to Poirot, proud polisher of the bachelor button, as an unreal and entirely artificial woman. To paraphrase the influential gender theorist Judith Butler, it is only via a stylized performance of woman-ness that Rossakoff is welcomed into the macho world of the detective novel. This is the Holmesian model, in parody.
Miss Lemon, the Mechanical Woman
The Ageless Agatha Christie Page 13