by Anne Hart
‘Everything interests me,’ he often said. Sometimes people were surprised at his mania for trivia. Recalled Nurse Leatheran of a conversation in Murder in Mesopotamia:
‘I like all the information there is,’ was Poirot’s reply.
And really, that described his methods very well. I found later that there wasn’t anything – no small scrap of insignificant gossip – in which he wasn’t interested.
Even if he had never become a detective, Poirot’s insatiable curiosity would have been a hallmark. ‘I am a gossip,’ he said chattily in Dead Man’s Folly. ‘I like to hear all about people.’
Entertaining, hospitable, full of irony, he was a good companion and could shake with ‘the most exquisite mirth’, ‘his high Gallic laugh’ filling the room. As Hastings knew to his cost, he was a terrible tease. ‘M. Poirot,’ said Jane Olivera in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, ‘I never know whether you’re serious or not.’ He was, of course, a memorable conversationalist and raconteur. In After the Funeral:
Graphically, with many gestures, he set forth the story … but with such embellishments as his exuberant nature suggested. One almost felt that Hercule Poirot had himself been an eye-witness of the scene.
An enormously important part of Poirot’s character was his kindness, and his cases are sprinkled with sympathetic advice to the unhappy and great acts of charity. In The Mystery of the Blue Train, for example, it is recalled how he once shielded a misled schoolgirl from suffering the consequences of a robbery, and in ‘The Arcadian Deer’ he put all business aside to reunite a village garage mechanic with a lost love. In moments of crisis or anxiety he could be a real refuge. In Evil Under the Sun, Christine Redfern, a young woman in distress,
… wept stormily and bitterly against Poirot’s accommodating shoulder. She said: ‘I can’t bear it … I can’t bear it …’
Poirot patted her arm. He said soothingly: ‘Patience – only patience.’
Despite his dismissal of sentimentality as ‘an English failing’, Poirot was a cautious romantic and matchmaking was his great hobby. It may be recalled that he had promised himself the pleasure of one day arranging a marriage ‘of great suitability’ for Hastings, who eluded all this by marrying Cinderella Duveen. Never one to be discouraged, Poirot pressed on, and his record at playing Cupid over the years almost equalled his success at solving crimes. ‘Murder, I have often noticed,’ he remarked in The ABC Murders, ‘is a great matchmaker.’
Many of his romantic interventions sprang from his determination to impose order on chaos. ‘It is droll the way they arrange the marriages over here,’ he observed in ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’.3 ‘No order. No method. Everything left to chance.’ Such haphazard proceedings were anathema to Poirot. ‘To arrange a good marriage, one must take more than romance into consideration,’ he lectured in Dead Man’s Folly. Death in the Clouds is an excellent example of Poirot as matrimonial agent. At the end of the case he was able to say:
‘In a year’s time there will be an announcement: “A marriage is arranged and will shortly take place between Lord Horbury and the Hon. Venetia Kerr.” And do you know who will have arranged that marriage? Hercule Poirot! There is another marriage that I have arranged too.’
‘Lady Horbury and Mr Barraclough?’
‘Ah, no, in that matter I take no interest.’ He leaned forward. ‘No, I refer to a marriage between M. Jean Dupont and Miss Jane Grey.’
To arrange all this required the skilful detachment of decent young Stephen Horbury (‘a sporting, out-of-door kind of man without anything spectacular in the way of brains’) from his unsuitable and philandering wife (‘And now, Lady Horbury, will you permit me to give you some advice? Why not arrange with your husband a discreet divorce?’) so he might marry his far more suitable neighbour and live happily ever after with ‘hunting, tea and muffins, the smell of wet earth and leaves, children’.
To ensure a match between pretty Jane Grey and the young archaeologist who Poirot decided would make her a suitable husband required removing her from the clutches of the wrong man (‘with the object of preventing a precipitate marriage, I took Mademoiselle Jane to Paris as my secretary’) and making a substantial donation to the archaeologist’s forthcoming expedition to Persia so Jane could join it.
After this it should come as no surprise, in Sad Cypress, to find Poirot and the stately housekeeper, Mrs Bishop,
… engaged in pleasant conversation on a really interesting theme – no less than the selection of a suitable future husband for Princess Elizabeth.
And with all this matchmaking, what of Poirot himself? This is a ticklish subject, for in all his cases there is never a mention that he ever seriously considered marriage or any relationship like it. Alas, then, for Amy Leatheran’s wonderings in Murder in Mesopotamia ‘if M. Poirot had a wife, and if he went on in the way you always hear foreigners do, with mistresses and things like that.’ From the very beginning, like Sherlock Holmes, Poirot was destined to live as a bachelor.4 And there is not much point, either, in looking speculatively at Poirot’s relationship with Hastings, or pouncing significantly on his occasional notice of male beauty – ‘Here,’ he thought in ‘The Arcadian Deer’, ‘was one of the handsomest specimens of humanity he had ever seen, a simple young man with the outward semblance of a Greek god.’ What evidence there is of Poirot’s thoughts on love and sex points towards women and, from all reports, they were thoughts from afar, for Poirot was doomed, like Sherlock Holmes, to love the unobtainable. As Irene Adler was always to Holmes the woman, so to Poirot was the Countess Vera Rossakoff. ‘What woman was there,’ he mused in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,
who could hold a candle to Countess Vera Rossakoff? A genuine Russian aristocrat, an aristocrat to her fingertips! And also, he remembered, a most accomplished thief – One of those natural geniuses –
At times he contrived to appear sad about all this. ‘I, Madame, am not a husband,’ he said to an inquirer in Dead Man’s Folly:
‘Alas!’ he added.
‘I’m sure there’s no alas about it. I’m sure you’re quite delighted to be a carefree bachelor.’
‘No, no, Madame, it is terrible all that I have missed in life.’
Or did he really believe this? The ménage he so lovingly created exactly suited his tastes and obsessions. Could any woman have borne it? ‘Once, Mademoiselle,’ he told a young neighbour in ‘The Third-Floor Flat’, ‘I loved a beautiful young English girl, who resembled you greatly – but alas! – she could not cook. So perhaps everything was for the best.’
Many of Poirot’s friends and clients were women. He enjoyed their company and liked springing to his feet, kissing their hands and being gallant and protective whether they wanted to be protected or not. He was especially kind to orphaned young women, such as Katherine Grey in The Mystery of the Blue Train and Elinor Carlisle in Sad Cypress. ‘Pauvre petite,’ he would worry.
Like Miss Marple and her formulae to explain gentlemen, Poirot was full of assumptions about women. Unlike Miss Marple, he also insisted on giving advice. ‘Les femmes,’ he would generalize loftily, ‘they are marvellous! They invent haphazard – and by miracle they are right’ … ‘It is very necessary for a woman to lie sometimes. Women must defend themselves, and the lie, it can be a good weapon’ … ‘Let me tell you something, Mademoiselle, in the course of my experience I have known five cases of women murdered by devoted husbands, and twenty-two of husbands murdered by devoted wives. Les femmes, they obviously keep up appearances better’ … ‘The heart of a woman in love will forgive many blows’ … and so on.
Sex, in Poirot’s opinion, was the ‘great force of nature’ but we are never permitted to presume that he matched action to words. ‘Dieu merci, I am not of an ardent temperament,’ he exclaimed in ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’, ‘It has saved me from many embarrassments’; and in ‘The Incredible Theft’, confronted by a coquettish maid who told him, ‘If I meet Monsieur on the stairs, be well assured that I shall not
scream’, he replied, ‘My child … I am of advanced years. What have I to do with such frivolities?’ And yet – and yet – those of us wishing Hercule Poirot his share of frivolities can, perhaps, take comfort in words once spoken to Hastings: ‘Do you not know, my friend, that each of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desires and aptitudes?’
Despite the ‘advanced years’ he spoke of to the maid in ‘The Incredible Theft’, Poirot enjoyed phenomenally good health. From time to time, as the decades went by, the day when he would be finally and utterly old was imminently predicted by both friends and enemies, which is hardly surprising when one considers that he arrived in England at a pensionable age in 1916 and lived until the 1970s.5 If asked, I am sure Poirot would have attributed his fine health to the unremitting precautions he took against the English climate. Hastings summed this up in Curtain:
He had always been, in my opinion, extremely fussy about his health. Distrusting draughts, wrapping up his neck in silk and wool, showing a horror of getting his feet damp, and taking his temperature and retiring to bed at the least suspicion of a chill – ‘For otherwise it may be for me a fluxion de poitrine.’ In most little ailments, he had, I knew, always consulted a doctor immediately.
A picture of Poirot dealing with influenza is provided in ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’: ‘He was now sitting up in bed, propped up with pillows, his head muffled in a woollen shawl, and was slowly sipping a particularly noxious tisane’, his misery somewhat lightened by:
‘… a little paragraph to myself in Society Gossip. But yes! Here it is: “Go it – criminals – all out! Hercule Poirot – and believe me, girls, he’s some Hercules! – our own pet society detective can’t get a grip on you. ‘Cause why? ‘Cause he’s got la grippe himself!”’
Besides colds, Poirot’s other great fear was of seasickness – and later airsickness – which reduced him to a ‘wraith of his former self’. In ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’, when crossing the Channel with Hastings, Poirot performed ‘gymnastic endeavours’ as a counter-measure:
‘Leave me, my friend. See you, to think, the stomach and the brain must be in harmony. Laverguier has a method most excellent for averting the mal de mer. You breathe in – and out – slowly, so – turning the head from left to right and counting six between each breath.’
Apart from this affliction, and the recollection in Taken at the Flood of ‘sitting, very sick in my stomach’ during an air raid, Poirot’s digestion was a sturdy one. As he remarked on more than one occasion in the course of his demanding career, ‘Mercifully I have an excellent stomach.’
There are hints that Poirot had been more prone to illness earlier in life. In ‘The Chocolate Box’, reminiscing to Hastings about past cases, he recalled: ‘La bonne chance, it cannot always be on your side … Twice have I been stricken down with illness just as I was on the point of success’; and in Peril at End House he shuddered when the conversation turned to nursing homes: ‘It is not amusing there, the floors of green linoleum, the conversation of the nurses – the meals on trays, the ceaseless washing.’
In Poirot’s early years in England his doctor was a bustling, collaborating sort of man named Dr Ridgeway who lived just around the corner from 14 Farraway Street. Later Poirot seems to have preferred to patronize Harley Street specialists, though more for consultations on murder cases than for any ill health of his own. His doctors must have marvelled in their turn at this ageless patient who never needed spectacles, whose hearing was as keen as a cat’s, and whose only problems were his phobia about chills, the corns on his feet from his deplorably tight shoes, and ‘a certain protuberance in his middle’. In later years, perhaps, they may have lectured him on the dangers of the tiny Russian cigarettes he liked to smoke, though I am sure anyone having the temerity to do so would have received a reproving account of how, in The Big Four, a cigarette saved his life.
There is never a mention of Poirot and false teeth. With great trepidation he visited his dentist for a ‘twice-yearly overhaul’, to be told, as in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe: ‘Gums are in pretty good condition … Just a couple of fillings – and a trace of decay on that upper molar.’ Perhaps his good teeth were due to a habit observed in a restaurant in Death in the Clouds? – ‘Very delicately, so as not to offend English susceptibilities, Poirot used a toothpick.’
For a shock Poirot believed in brandy, for a cold or a headache hot tisanes, and for a drowning, as in Cards on the Table, he ‘stood by’ to administer artificial respiration. He himself had occasional accidents, but these were minor and usually self-inflicted to serve some devious purpose. In Peril at End House a heavy fall and a supposedly turned ankle brought ‘a decidedly pretty girl’ to his aid, and in Murder in Mesopotamia his loud lamentations when ‘I steb the toe’ tested a key theory of his on the case. On two occasions his sufferings bordered on martyrdom. From the days of the Big Four case he carried, well hidden by his moustaches, a small scar on his upper lip from an injury deliberately suffered in the interests of disguise; and in ‘The Under Dog’, to obtain blood as bait for an incriminating trap, he ordered George to stab his fingers with a scarf pin.
From the days of poultices to the era of tranquillizers Poirot defied his age until close to the end, and his occasional complaints of feeling old and mournful tended to be experiments in retirement gone wrong rather than anything medically amiss. Running nimbly up and down stairs, walking briskly to every goal, for him image was all. ‘At my age,’ he explained in Three Act Tragedy, ‘one’s preoccupation is to arrange one’s goods well in the shop window.’
In this, as in almost everything else, he succeeded. In The Mystery of the Blue Train, regarding this self-possessed complete little man who enjoyed life immensely, did exactly what he liked, and kept a great many secrets to himself, young Katherine Grey mused that ‘there was something very attractive about M. Hercule Poirot.’ Millions would agree with her. It is not the easiest run in life to be an eccentric and diminutive alien. Poirot did it very well – and to well-deserved applause.
NOTES
1 In films, over the years, Poirot has been played in different ways by Austin Trevor, Tony Randall, Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov. It is this biographer’s opinion, however, that Poirot himself would have found much to approve of in David Suchet’s recent portrayal in the London Weekend television series, Agatha Christie’s Poirot.
2 The second version.
3 The first version.
4 In recalling a discussion with a playwright on the adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd to the stage, Agatha Christie wrote firmly, ‘I much disliked his first suggestion, which was to take about twenty years off Poirot’s age, call him Beau Poirot and have lots of girls in love with him.’
5 ‘In due course I saw what a terrible mistake I had made in starting with Hercule Poirot so old,’ wrote Agatha Christie in her autobiography, though in doing so she created a heartening model for everyone over sixty-five.
8
THE ENGLISH WORLD OF HERCULE POIROT
‘Oh, you English! With nous autres it is different.’
—Hercule Poirot, MURDER ON THE LINKS
It is 1939 and Poirot is visiting his dentist:
It was a room furnished in quiet good taste and, to Hercule Poirot, indescribably gloomy. On the polished (reproduction) Sheraton table were carefully arranged papers and periodicals. The (reproduction) Hepplewhite sideboard held two Sheffield plated candlesticks and an epergne. The mantelpiece held a bronze clock and two bronze vases. The windows were shrouded by curtains of blue velvet. The chairs were upholstered in a Jacobean design of red birds and flowers.
In one of them sat a military-looking gentleman with a fierce moustache and a yellow complexion. He looked at Poirot with an air of one considering some noxious insect. It was not so much his gun he looked as though he wished he had with him, as his Flit spray.
There is no doubt that in the English garden Poirot appeared as an aberrant insect. In the foreground
people are playing tennis, but here, on the rose bush, is something strange. From his vantage on the rose bush there lay before Poirot a landscape made to order, a mildly precious realm of good taste periodically invaded by murderers. ‘Hopelessly bourgeois’, Poirot enjoyed all this very much. ‘Je suis un peu snob,’ he murmured in The Hollow. In the English garden and drawing-room – be it Mayfair, the suburbs or the country – he found his natural hunting and gathering ground. There was, as that Old Etonian, Hastings, pointed out, ‘nothing of the Socialist about Poirot’. His entrée, despite his alien manners and clothes, was his enthralling ability to solve insoluble crimes and unmask and repel the invaders. For this he expected rich clients to pay handsomely, and when their troubles were over many of them became his patrons. In Five Little Pigs Meredith Blake, an ‘English country gentleman of straitened means and outdoor tastes’, gazed in bewilderment upon a caller bearing letters of introduction:
As he had often felt lately, things were not what they used to be. Dash it all, private detectives used to be private detectives – fellows you got to guard wedding presents at country receptions, fellows you went to, rather shamefacedly, when there was some dirty business afoot and you had to get the hang of it.
But here was Lady Mary Lytton-Gore writing: ‘Hercule Poirot is a very old and valued friend of mine. Please do all you can to help him, won’t you?’ And Mary Lytton-Gore wasn’t – no, decidedly she wasn’t – the sort of woman you associate with private detectives and all that they stand for. And Admiral Cronshaw wrote: ‘Very good chap – absolutely sound. Grateful if you will do what you can for him. Most entertaining fellow – can tell you lots of good stories.’