by Anne Hart
However, whether as a smokescreen or not, Poirot remained in his flat in London and continued accepting cases. Those recorded for posterity have nothing to do with the war.
The classic, Evil Under the Sun, published in 1941, is, in Poirot’s words, ‘like a mosaic – many colours and patterns – and every strange-shaped little piece must be fitted into its own place’. Its setting was the Jolly Roger, a pleasant hotel presiding over a small island tucked into the coast of Devon. In the August in which the events of Evil Under the Sun occurred:
There was one very important person (in his own estimation at least) staying at the Jolly Roger. Hercule Poirot, resplendent in a white duck suit, with a Panama hat tilted over his eyes, his moustaches magnificently befurled, lay back in an improved type of deck-chair and surveyed the bathing beach.
Every day, on this beach, Poirot’s fellow guests happily sunbathed in various states of undress. This agreeable scene was soon disrupted, and the social structure at the Jolly Roger rent, by the arrival of a guest more spectacular than all the others:
It would seem that she was too used to the invariable effect her presence produced. She was tall and slender. She wore a simple backless white bathing dress and every inch of her exposed body was tanned a beautiful even shade of bronze. She was as perfect as a statue.
‘Our Vamp’, as the more unappreciative guests came to call her, brought with her a number of surprising past associations and an unsettling little plot of her own in progress. In due course all these had to be sorted out by Poirot when someone strangled the Vamp – as she sunbathed, of course.
The short story, ‘Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds’,17 is a feast of plain English fare. The case began at the Gallant Endeavour Restaurant in Chelsea with a waitress, Molly, expressing amazement at the sudden change in the habits of an old customer, Mr Gascoigne:
‘I dare say you gentlemen will laugh at me,’ Molly flushed up, ‘but when a gentleman has been here for ten years, you get to know his likes and dislikes. He never could bear suet pudding or blackberries and I’ve never known him take thick soup – but on that Monday night he ordered thick tomato soup, beefsteak and kidney pudding and blackberry tart! Seemed as though he just didn’t notice what he ordered!’
‘Do you know,’ said Poirot (letting his French idiom slip a bit while eating turkey stuffed with chestnuts), ‘I find that extraordinarily interesting.’
‘The trouble with you is that you’ve started going to look for crime – instead of waiting for crime to come for you,’ said his friend, Mr Bonnington. He was quite right, as Poirot’s relentless pursuit of the mystery of Mr Gascoigne’s dinner demonstrates.
Poirot’s client in Five Little Pigs,18 published in 1942, was from Canada:
There had been nothing distinctive in the letter she had written. It had been a mere request for an appointment, with no hint of what lay behind that request. It had been brief and businesslike. Only the firmness of the handwriting had indicated that Carla Lemarchant was a young woman.
This determined young woman had come to England to re-investigate a dreadful murder. Sixteen years before, her father, a brilliant artist, had died from hemlock poisoning. Her mother, tried and convicted for murder, had died after a year in prison. A letter to her daughter, held in trust until her twenty-first birthday, protested her innocence.
‘I’ve heard about you,’ Carla said to Poirot:
‘The things you’ve done. The way you have done them. It’s psychology that interests you, isn’t it? Well, that doesn’t change with time. The tangible things are gone – the cigarette end and the footprints and the bent blades of grass. You can’t look for those any more. But you can go over all the facts of the case, and perhaps talk to the people who were there at the time – they’re all alive still – and then – and then, as you said just now, you can lie back in your chair and think. And you’ll know what really happened …’
Hercule Poirot rose to his feet. One hand caressed his moustache. He said, ‘Mademoiselle, I am honoured! I will justify your faith in me. I will investigate your case of murder. I will search back into the events of sixteen years ago and I will find out the truth.’
Finding that truth was no easy matter. It was difficult enough to sort out events of a September morning sixteen years before, but even more difficult was the reinterpreting of these events to arrive at a new conclusion.
This puzzle saw Poirot out of his armchair and working hard. Once old newspaper files had been read, and lawyers and police in retirement duly interviewed (‘Oh, damn it all, man … It’s all over and done with years ago. Of course she did it’), there remained for Poirot five witnesses to the circumstances surrounding the crime:
A jingle ran through Poirot’s head. He repressed it. He must not always be thinking of nursery rhymes. It seemed an obsession with him lately. And yet the jingle persisted:
‘This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed at home …’
The meat of this case – one of Poirot’s best – is the sum of the different accounts he extracted from the five witnesses of what each had seen and heard – or said they had seen and heard – on the day of the long-ago murder.
In the words of an elderly solicitor’s clerk consulted by Poirot in the course of his investigation:
‘That hemlock didn’t get into Mr Crale’s beer by accident. It was put there. And if Mrs Crale didn’t put it there, who did.”
A problem solved with much dispatch in ‘Poirot and the Regatta Mystery’,19 a short story first published in 1943, was the disappearance before all eyes of a famous diamond, ‘The Morning Star’, at a yachting party in Dartmouth Harbour. In the wake of this awkward evening, the guest most suspected sought out Poirot in London. Carefully noting all the facts his client could supply, Poirot wished him a good morning.
‘Will you call again in three days’ time? I think the whole thing will be quite satisfactorily cleared up by then.’
‘Are you joking, M. Poirot?’
‘I never joke on professional matters,’ said Poirot with dignity. ‘This matter is serious. Shall we say Friday at 11.30?’
A splendid weekend book, The Hollow,20 published in 1946, is presided over by an unforgettable hostess, Lucy Angkatell. In the words of her husband, Sir Henry Angkatell, a retired administrator and diplomat:
‘She gets away with things. She always has.’ He smiled. ‘She’s flouted the traditions of Government House – she’s played merry hell with precedence at dinner parties (and that, Midge, is a black crime!). She’s put deadly enemies next to each other at the dinner table, and run riot over the Colour question! And instead of raising one big almighty row and setting everyone at loggerheads and bringing disgrace on the British Raj – I’m damned if she hasn’t got away with it!’
But in The Hollow, in inviting for the weekend a group of friends and cousins already much entangled by loves and hates, even Lady Angkatell began to suspect she had gone a bridge too far.
‘I’ve asked the crime man to lunch on Sunday. It will make a distraction, don’t you think so?’
‘Crime man?’
‘Like an egg,’ said Lady Angkatell. ‘He was in Baghdad, solving something, when Henry was High Commissioner. Or perhaps it was afterwards? We had him to lunch with some other duty people. He had on a white duck suit, I remember, and a pink flower in his buttonhole, and black patent leather shoes. I don’t remember much about it because I never think it’s very interesting who killed who. I mean once they are dead it doesn’t seem to matter why, and to make a fuss about it all seems so silly …’
‘But have you any crimes down here, Lucy?’
‘Oh no, darling. He’s in one of those funny new cottages – you know, beams that bump your head and a lot of very good plumbing and quite the wrong kind of garden. London people like that sort of thing.’
So it was that on a fine September Sunday Poirot carefully latched behind him the gate of ‘Resthaven’, his new weekend cottage, and embarked on a second luncheon
with the Angkatells.
Upon arrival, and ushered to the swimming pool pavilion for a drink before lunch, he was not amused. ‘The passion of the English for sitting outdoors irritated Hercule Poirot’; and worse was to come, for as he emerged upon the scene a tiresome game appeared ready to begin:
He was annoyed and he was bored – oh! how he was bored! Death was not, to him, amusing. And here they had arranged for him, by way of a joke, a set piece.
For what he was looking at was a highly artificial murder scene. By the side of the pool was the body, artistically arranged with an outflung arm and even some red paint dripping gently over the edge of the concrete into the pool. It was a spectacular body, that of a handsome fair-haired man. Standing over the body, revolver in hand, was a woman, a short, powerfully built, middle-aged woman with a curiously blank expression.
Alas, this was no game – the case that followed was one of the most perplexing of Poirot’s career. For her part, Lady Angkatell rose to the occasion:
‘Of course, say what you like, a murder is an awkward thing – it upsets the servants and puts the general routine out – we were having ducks for lunch – fortunately they are quite nice eaten cold.’
And her servants backed her up magnificently. Said her butler, Gudgeon, when questioned by a police inspector about a revolver found lying on the hall table:
‘I don’t think it is loaded, sir. None of Sir Henry’s collection is kept loaded. And as for fingerprints, I polished it over with my handkerchief before replacing it, sir, so there will only be my fingerprints on it.’
‘Why did you do that?’ asked Grange sharply.
But Gudgeon’s apologetic smile did not waver.
‘I fancied it might be dusty, sir.’
Once the war was over, people in Poirot’s circle began talking about its effects. The time and setting of Taken at the Flood,21 published in 1948, is the late spring of 1946 in a village off the beaten track:
Warmsley Vale, tucked away amongst wooded hills … is in essence a microscopic old-fashioned market town now degenerated into a village. It has a main street of Georgian houses, several pubs, a few unfashionable shops and a general air of being a hundred and fifty instead of twenty-eight miles from London.
Here, with peace at last, the various households of the kindly and prosperous Cloade family were attempting to put their lives together again. Their houses needed repair, their servants had long disappeared, their incomes were being eroded by taxation, and life altogether – especially for the women – continued to be an unending treadmill of queues, shortages and ration coupons.
Adding to all this was another cross the Cloades had to bear. Trained for years to look to Gordon Cloade, the wealthy bachelor head of the family, for financial support, an air raid in the last year of the war had not only removed him from the scene but had left his immense fortune in the hands of his young and unsuitable new wife. Bewildered, impoverished and angry, the proud Cloades licked their wounds and wondered – aloud to each other, and secretly to themselves – what to do next.
Perched in his flat in London, Poirot had been hearing for some time of trouble brewing in Warmsley Vale. Indeed, one of the more scatty members of the family had already attempted to hire him to find evidence to disinherit Gordon Cloade’s bride:
‘M. Poirot,’ she said, ‘I have come to you under spirit guidance.’
Poirot blinked slightly.
‘Indeed, Madame. Perhaps you will take a seat and tell me –’
He got no further.
‘Both ways, M. Poirot. With the automatic writing and with the ouija board. It was the night before last. Madame Elvary ( a wonderful woman she is) and I were using the board. We got the same initials repeatedly H.P. H.P. H.P. … I racked my brains thinking of someone with those initials – I knew it must connect up with the last séance – really a most poignant one, but it was some time before I got it. And then I bought a copy of Picture Post (spirit guidance again, you see, because usually I buy the New Statesman) and there you were – a picture of you, and described, and an account of what you had done. It is wonderful, don’t you think, M. Poirot, how everything has a purpose? Clearly, you are the person appointed by the Guides to elucidate this matter.’
Poirot firmly declined the commission – ‘My fees,’ he said, to induce discouragement, ‘are very expensive. I may say enormously expensive!’ – but he kept his eye on the newspapers and, when a report of an unexplained death in Warmsley Vale appeared, and yet another Cloade sought his aid, the urge to be at the scene proved irresistible:
‘Come on, Lynn. We must get going. I expect M. Poirot wants to get back to town.’
Poirot said smilingly:
‘But I am not going back to town.’
‘What?’
Rowley stopped dead, giving a queer wooden effect.
‘I am staying here, at the Stag, for a short while.’
‘But – but why?’
‘C’est un beau paysage,’ Poirot said placidly.
Rowley said uncertainly, ‘Yes, of course … But aren’t you – well, I mean, busy?’
‘I have made my economies,’ said Poirot, smiling. ‘I do not need to occupy myself unduly. No, I can enjoy my leisure, and spend my time where the fancy takes me.’
NOTES
1 The twelve short stories that constitute The Labours of Hercules were first published separately in British and American magazines between November 1939 and September 1940. Some slight changes in text occurred in the stories’ final forms.
2 Also published under the title ‘The Case of the Kidnapped Pekinese’.
3 Also published under the title ‘The Invisible Enemy’.
4 Also published under the title ‘The Vanishing Lady’.
5 Also published under the title ‘Murder Mountain’.
6 ‘Who’s the Home Secretary’s little pet? You are. Who’s got half the Cabinet in his pocket? You have. Hushing up their scandals for them … Sometimes, Poirot, I think you haven’t any scruples at all!’ Scolded Inspector Japp in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. The fact that he knew about the Augean Stables case before it apparently happened is one of the quirks of Poirot chronology.
7 Also published under the titles ‘The Birds of Ill Omen’ and ‘Vulture Women’.
8 Also published under the title ‘Midnight Madness’.
9 Also published under the title ‘The Case of the Drug Peddler’.
10 Also published under the titles ‘The Girdle of Hippolyte’ and ‘The Disappearance of Winnie King’.
11 Also published under the title ‘Weird Monster’.
12 Also published under the title ‘The Poison Cup’.
13 Also published under the title ‘Meet Me in Hell’.
14 In Agatha Christie: A Biography, Janet Morgan cites Christie’s annoyance with the dust-jacket proposed by her publisher for The Labours of Hercules: ‘It suggests Poirot going naked to the bath!!! All sorts of obscene suggestions are being made by my family. I have, I hope, been tactful but firm. Put statuary on the cover but make it clear it is statuary – not Poirot gone peculiar in Hyde Park!!!’
15 See Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple by Anne Hart.
16 In Third Girl, published in 1966, Poirot concocted an elaborate reminiscence to win the confidence of Sir Roderick Horsefield, who had played a vital role in weapons development but whose memory was now slipping fast. ‘We have to go back so far as the last war. It was, I think, in Normandy the last time,’ Poirot told him. ‘What decisions we had to take! And what difficulties we had with security.’ Was Poirot speaking entirely from imagination?
17 First published in 1941 under the title ‘Poirot and the Regular Customer’.
18 Also published under the title ‘Murder in Retrospect’.
19 Also published under the title ‘The Regatta Mystery’, this is a surprising first cousin of an earlier short story, also entitled ‘The Regatta Mystery’, in which Parker Pyne solved an identical case.
20 Also publishe
d under the title Murder After Hours.
21 Also published under the title There is a Tide …
6
THE LAST THREE DECADES
He was the great, the unique Hercule Poirot, but he was also a very old man and his shoes were tight.
—MRS MCGINTY’S DEAD
The six years that passed between the setting in 1946 of Taken at the Flood and the publication in 1952 of Mrs McGinty’s Dead are evidence of Poirot’s continuing drift – at least as far as murder cases were concerned – into semi-retirement. Miss Lemon might work away as furiously as ever in her little room, but if all she had to type were reports on delicate missions for oil companies, and if Inspector Japp, his old companion in arms, would insist on retiring, life could seem very dull at times to Hercule Poirot. ‘I have leisure – too much leisure,’ he complained:
‘The retired financier takes up golf, the little merchant puts bulbs in his garden, me, I eat. But there it is, I come round to it again. One can only eat three times a day. And in between are the gaps.’