Agatha Christie's Poirot

by Anne Hart

  Cinderella’s first taste of being left in charge came about a year and a half later when Hastings departed ‘hurriedly as a result of certain business complications’ to spend ‘some months’ in England. In London, like a homing pigeon, he made straight for ‘the old address’ and stayed there for almost a year. It was, as it turned out, the year of Poirot’s epic confrontation with the Big Four and Hastings clearly could not tear himself away. ‘You are a staunch friend, Hastings. It is to serve me that you remain on here,’ said Poirot, though once or twice he did inquire after ‘little Cinderella’. ‘I haven’t gone into details, of course, but she understands. She’d be the last one to wish me to turn my back on a pal,’ Hastings assured him.

  It soon transpired that the long arm of the Big Four could reach even as far as a ranch in Argentina for, in the midst of all the other excitements of the case, Hastings received the following cable from his foreman:

  ‘Mrs Hastings disappeared yesterday, feared been kidnapped by some gang calling itself big four cable instructions have notified police but no clue as yet.’

  I am sure that Cinderella and Hastings – his ‘deep tan’ long gone – had much to discuss when he finally returned home. What, one wonders, did the feisty Cinderella have to say when Hastings told her of the occasion when he had been duped into apparently sacrificing both their lives to save Poirot’s?

  Poirot himself had understandably been very moved by this:

  ‘You like not that I should embrace you or display the emotion, I know well. I will be very British. I will say nothing – but nothing at all. Only this … the honours are all with you, and happy is the man who has such a friend as I have!’

  Hastings had indeed displayed much courage in The Big Four and was suitably rewarded by a grateful England, for the next time we see his name officially listed it is as Captain Arthur Hastings, OBE in the play Black Coffee, his only adventure with Poirot that he himself did not narrate.

  In 1932 he returned yet again from ‘those clear open spaces’ to visit Poirot and immediately found himself gathering material for another short story, ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’, and a new book, Peril at End House. ‘How I wish I had been with you,’ he said wistfully on being told of a case that had occurred in his absence:

  ‘I too,’ said Poirot. ‘Your experience would have been invaluable to me.’

  I looked at him sideways. As a result of long habit, I distrust his compliments but he appeared perfectly serious. And after all, why not? I have a very long experience of the methods he employs.

  ‘What I particularly missed was your vivid imagination, Hastings,’ he went on dreamily. ‘One needs a certain amount of light relief. My valet, Georges, an admirable man with whom I sometimes permitted myself to discuss a point, has no imagination whatever.’

  But some of Poirot’s comments were not so subtle, and he and Hastings were soon at it again. In Peril at End House Hastings angrily exclaimed:

  ‘Do you suppose I’d have made a success of my ranch out in the Argentine if I was the kind of credulous fool you make out?’

  ‘Do not enrage yourself, mon ami. You have made a great succes of it – you and your wife.’

  ‘Bella,’ I said, ‘always goes by my judgement.’

  ‘She is as wise as she is charming,’ said Poirot.’2

  Despite such contretemps, Hastings’s appetite for playing Watson was whetted all over again, for he stayed on to hunt with Poirot in his next case, Lord Edgware Dies. From this he was ‘suddenly recalled to the Argentine’ and did not return to England for several years. With these two major cases fresh in his mind, he doubtless spent most of his evenings in the intervening time writing furiously.

  Hastings may well have needed the extra income he earned by his pen, for in the 1930s Argentina, like most other countries, found itself in difficulties. Of his next trip he wrote solemnly:

  It was in June of 1935 that I came home from my ranch in South America for a stay of about six months. It had been a difficult time for us out there. Like every one else, we had suffered from world depression. I had various affairs to see to in England that I felt could only be successful if a personal touch was introduced. My wife remained to manage the ranch.

  As before, the ostensible reason for Hastings’s trip seems to have been forgotten as soon as he entered Poirot’s sitting-room, though admittedly the ABC Murders, just under way, turned out to be an exceptionally exciting investigation. Six months later, in 1936, Hastings was back again in time to join in on an interesting country case, Dumb Witness.

  After this, for reasons never explained, many years were to pass before the faithful Hastings would record another of Poirot’s cases or hear again his hunting cry: ‘Vive le sport.’ At the conclusion of Dumb Witness he sailed away in the company of Bob, the charming wire-haired terrier he had inherited during his visit, and we hear no more of him for a very long time. One imagines him at last settled down and, of an evening, wistfully poring over the latest book of Poirot’s exploits just sent from England.

  Oddly, over the years these two fast friends seemed at times to drift out of touch. ‘It is a long time since I have had news of him,’ said Poirot in The Clocks in the early 1960s. ‘What an absurdity to go and bury oneself in South America, where they are always having revolutions.’ He still missed Hastings very much – ‘My first friend in this country – and still to me the dearest friend I have.’

  In Lord Edgware Dies Hastings allowed himself to record an emotional moment:

  Then, as we sipped our coffee, Poirot smiled affectionately across the table at me.

  ‘My good friend,’ he said. ‘I depend upon you more than you know.’

  I was confused and delighted by these unexpected words. He had never said anything of the kind to me before. Sometimes, secretly, I had felt slightly hurt. He seemed almost to go out of his way to disparage my mental powers …

  ‘Yes,’ he said dreamily, ‘you may not always comprehend just how it is so – but you do often and often point the way.’

  I could hardly believe my ears.

  ‘Really, Poirot,’ I stammered, ‘I’m awfully glad. I suppose I’ve learnt a good deal from you one way or another –’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Mais non, ce n’est pas ça. You have learnt nothing.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said, rather taken aback.

  ‘That is as it should be … I do not wish you to be a second and inferior Poirot. I wish you to be the supreme Hastings. And you are the supreme Hastings. In you, Hastings, I find the normal mind almost perfectly illustrated …’

  I looked across the table at him. He was smoking his tiny cigarettes and regarding me with great kindliness.

  ‘Ce cher Hastings,’ he murmured. ‘I have indeed much affection for you.’

  I was pleased but embarrassed and hastened to change the subject.

  NOTES

  1 Besides Hastings’s thirty-four accounts, three other Poirot cases were recounted by first-person narrators: Dr Sheppard of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Amy Leatheran of Murder in Mesopotamia, and Colin Lamb of The Clocks.

  2 Celebrated sleuth though he was, Poirot apparently did not notice Hastings’s mistake in calling Cinderella by her sister Bella’s name. What was going on at the ranch?

  10

  THE DOMESTIC POIROT

  The flat was a modern one. The furnishings of the room were modern, too. The armchairs were squarely built, the upright chairs were angular. A modern writing-table was set squarely in front of the window and at it sat a small, elderly man. His head was practically the only thing in the room that was not square.

  —‘Dead Man’s Mirror’

  Poirot was an interior person; he loved his comforts and intensely enjoyed ruling and ordering his own small kingdom. He was always happiest at home, his desk symmetrically arranged, his wardrobe in perfect order, and the world beating a path to his door. It never seems to have occurred to him to carry out his practice as a private detective from
any place other than his sitting-room. There he received his clients, dispatched his agents, and held court. It was the centre of his web.

  It will be remembered that Poirot’s earliest years in England were spent in ‘rooms’ shared with Hastings, a comfortable arrangement hallowed by several generations of Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen. As tenants under a system halfway between lodgings and a separate establishment, each had his own bedroom and shared between them a sitting-room, to which their landlady brought their meals and their visitors.

  As will be recalled, Poirot’s first set of rooms – in which Hastings soon joined him on a more or less permanent basis – was of a modest ambience and administered by a landlady of decidedly brusque habits. Nevertheless the two friends enjoyed many happy times there. A cosy picture is provided by Hastings in ‘The Chocolate Box’:

  Poirot and I sat facing the hearth, our legs stretched out to the cheerful blaze. Between us was a small table. On my side of it stood some carefully brewed hot toddy; on Poirot’s was a cup of thick, rich chocolate which I would not have drunk for a hundred pounds! Poirot sipped the thick brown mess in the pink china cup, and sighed with contentment.

  On at least one occasion – ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’ – this first set of rooms was used to stage an elaborate reconstruction of a crime. Wrote Hastings:

  The preparations greatly intrigued me. A white screen was erected at one side of the room, flanked by heavy curtains at either side. A man with some lighting apparatus arrived next, and finally a group of members of the theatrical profession, who disappeared into Poirot’s bedroom, which had been rigged up as a temporary dressing-room.1

  Afterwards ‘a recherché little supper’, prepared, one suspects, by hands other than the landlady’s, was served to five bemused guests.

  With their incomes rising, Poirot’s and Hastings’s next set of rooms was at 14 Farraway Street, an address ‘not aristocratic’ and somewhere in central London. Here their surroundings were better appointed, and their landlady, Mrs Pearson – ‘that excellent Mrs Funnyface of yours’, Poirot’s doctor once called her – was a person of a more soft-spoken and tidy disposition.

  It was while living at Farraway Street that Poirot came into his own as the dernier cri. Of his clients he boasted in ‘The Adventure of “The Western Star”’: ‘One says to another: “Comment? You have lost your gold pencil-case? You must go to the little Belgian. He is too marvellous!” Everyone goes! Courez! And they arrive! In flocks, mon ami!’

  Hastings loved to stand at this sitting-room window and watch new clients arrive. From below would come the sound of the bell and, after a short interval, steps on the stairs, a tap on the sitting-room door, and the voice of Mrs Pearson, or that of ‘the little maid servant’, announcing a visitor. ‘Enter then,’ Poirot would call. Upon doing so, the visitor would have seen a very tidy sitting-room with, if the weather even threatened to be chilly, the windows tightly shut, a fire of logs or coal burning in the grate, and two comfortable armchairs ‘well drawn up to the fire’. On the wall by the fireplace hung a holder for matches, on the mantelpiece sat ‘a magnificent model of a foxhound’, a trophy of Poirot’s victory over Inspector Giraud of the Paris Sûreté, and a framed photograph of a recent prime minister inscribed with the words: ‘To my discreet friend, Hercule Poirot – from Alloway.’ Elsewhere in this room was Poirot’s writing-table, a telephone, a waste-paper basket, a bookcase, and, by the window, the table and chairs where Poirot and Hastings ate their meals. On one of the walls hung a framed cheque for a guinea, the fee with which Mrs Todd tried to dismiss Poirot in ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’, and on the wall by the door was a light switch that Poirot, fearing a booby trap by the Big Four, once turned on with an old galosh.

  At Farraway Street Poirot’s bedroom was again off the sitting-room. In ‘The Veiled Lady’ Poirot stationed Japp behind the door to listen in on a conversation, and in The Big Four an escapee from a mental asylum climbed in through one of its two windows and was followed, a few hours later, by an assassin who murdered the poor man as he lay upon the bed.

  This room seems to have been comparatively large, no doubt to accommodate Poirot’s commodious wardrobe. ‘The top of a wardrobe,’ he once told Hastings, ‘is an excellent place for brown paper and cardboard boxes. I have kept them there myself. Neatly arranged, there is nothing to offend the eye.’ On the bedroom mantel sat an eight-day clock.

  A bathroom and Hastings’s bedroom were on the same floor. ‘I was just out of my bath,’ recalled Hastings in The Big Four, ‘and indulging in pleasurable thoughts of breakfast when I heard Japp’s voice in the sitting-room. I threw on a bathrobe and hurried in.’

  These, then, were ‘the old familiar surroundings’ of which Hastings was to speak so nostalgically in later years. Not long after Hastings’s departure Poirot also moved away from Farraway Street, and one rather imagines pleasant Mrs Pearson wondering, as she readied their rooms for newcomers, if Hastings and Poirot – one off to South America with an acrobat and the other off to the country to raise vegetable marrows – had both taken leave of their senses.

  In the village of King’s Abbot, as we know, Poirot lived for close to a year in almost complete seclusion, devoting himself entirely to his strange agricultural mission. At the end of this time – about the year 1926 – he emerged to solve the murder of Roger Ackroyd, thus permitting us to see something of The Larches, the house he had taken in King’s Abbot.

  Apart from the vegetable marrows in their walled garden, the most distinctive feature of this establishment during Poirot’s regime was his ancient Breton housekeeper. Apparently speaking no English, wearing an ‘immense Breton cap’, and employed in a strange country by a hermit, one cannot help wondering what sort of life she led. ‘I believe,’ said Caroline Sheppard of her mysterious neighbour, ‘Mr Porrot’, ‘that he’s got one of those new vacuum cleaners.’ While it is easy to imagine Poirot as one of the first in England to own a vacuum cleaner, it is harder to imagine this ancient housekeeper actually using it.

  It will come as no surprise to learn that the little sitting-room at The Larches was ‘arranged with formal precision’. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Dr Sheppard describes a call:

  Poirot sprang up to meet me, with every appearance of pleasure. ‘Sit down, my good friend,’ he said. ‘The big chair? This small one? The room is not too hot, no?’

  I thought it was stifling, but refrained from saying so. The windows were closed, and a large fire burned in the grate.

  ‘The English people, they have a mania for the fresh air,’ declared Poirot. ‘The big air, it is all very well outside, where it belongs. Why admit it to the house?’

  The finale of this famous case took place in this room, a stage carefully set for what Poirot liked to call ‘my little performance’:

  On the table were various sirops and glasses. Also a plate of biscuits. Several chairs had been brought in from the other room.

  Poirot ran to and fro rearranging things. Pulling out a chair here, altering the position of a lamp there, occasionally stooping to straighten one of the mats that covered the floor. He was specially fussy over the lighting. The lamps were arranged in such a way as to throw a clear light on the side of the room where the chairs were grouped, at the same time leaving the other end of the room, where I presumed Poirot himself would sit, in a dim twilight.

  When, at the end of the Ackroyd affair, Poirot abandoned the marrows and re-entered the world, he went off for a short time to live with considerable flair in a hotel on the French Riviera. It was during this period that the imperturbable and ‘intensely English’ George, previously the valet of the late Lord Edward Frampton, agreed to become Poirot’s man-servant after reading in Society Snippets that the little detective had been received with much graciousness at Buckingham Palace. Thereafter, the doors where Poirot lived were answered with ‘a low murmured colloquy’, hot chocolate appeared as if by magic, and his trousers were always perfectly pressed.


  George (or Georges as Poirot often called him) hovered in the background for the rest of Poirot’s life. Laconic, unemotional, and endlessly efficient, George’s last name is never revealed and the only aspect of his private life that we ever learn is that he had an aged father who lived in Eastbourne.

  Besides anticipating Poirot’s every wish, answering the door and the telephone, waiting on guests, running errands, and endlessly ironing, pressing and sponging, ‘my good George’ was a useful, if somewhat diffident, conveyor of information. In Third Girl:

  Master and servant looked at each other. Communication was sometimes fraught with difficulties for them. By inflexion or innuendo or a certain choice of words George would signify that there was something that might be elicited if the right question was asked.

  Often the ‘something’ had to do with social status. ‘Good evening, sir,’ said George to Poirot in Mrs McGinty’s Dead:

  ‘There is a – gentleman waiting to see you.’

  He relieved Poirot deftly of his overcoat.

  ‘Indeed?’ Poirot was aware of that very slight pause before the word gentleman. As a social snob, George was an expert.

  Contrary to what one might expect, George, in his wooden way, patently enjoyed being a gentleman’s gentleman to a bourgeois detective. Perhaps he enjoyed the novelty of it all. In ‘The Apples of the Hesperides’ it is observed that ‘It was the habit of Hercule Poirot to discuss his cases with his capable valet, George’, even though, as Poirot pointed out in Peril at End House, George had ‘no imagination whatever’. It was as a captive audience and a weathervane that George was so valuable and, when pressed into more active service, he was no mean detective himself. In ‘The Lernean Hydra’:

  Poirot said, ‘Have you seen this compact before, Georges?’

  George stepped forward.

  ‘Yes, sir. I observed this person … purchase it at Woolworth’s on Friday the 18th. Pursuant to your instructions I followed this lady whenever she went out. She took a bus over to Damington on the day I have mentioned and purchased this compact. She took it home with her. Later the same day she came to the house in which Miss Moncrieffe lodges. Acting as by your instructions, I was already in the house. I observed her go into Miss Moncrieffe’s bedroom and hide this in the back of the bureau drawer. I had a good view through the crack of the door. She then left the house, believing herself unobserved.’