by Anne Hart
… who could hold a candle to Countess Vera Rossakoff? A genuine Russian aristocrat, an aristocrat to her finger tips! And also, he remembered, a most accomplished thief – One of those natural geniuses –
With a sigh, Poirot wrenched his thoughts away from the flamboyant creature of his fantasy.
Though not the stuff of romantic fantasy, the manifestly substantial Ariadne Oliver was arguably the most interesting of Poirot’s friends and collaborators. Not only did she provide him with all sorts of refreshing theories on crime, but she provides Agatha Christie’s readers with unforgettable insights into the agonies of writing detective novels.
‘Am I interrupting, or anything?’ a caller asked in Cards on the Table:
‘Well, you are and you aren’t,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I am working, as you see. But that dreadful Finn of mine has got himself terribly tangled up. He did some awfully clever deduction with a dish of French beans, and now he’s just detected deadly poison in the sage-and-onion stuffing of the Michaelmas goose, and I’ve just remembered that French beans are over by Michaelmas.’
Poirot first met Mrs Oliver (as she was almost invariably called) at a literary dinner, but he did not really know her until they were brought together at Mr Shaitana’s seminal dinner party in 1937. ‘Let me introduce you – do you know Mrs Oliver?’ said their Mephistophelean host, and ‘the showman in him enjoyed the little start of surprise that Poirot gave,’ for Mrs Oliver was an extremely well-known crime writer and a celebrity in her own right:
She was not unduly modest. She thought the detective stories she wrote were quite good of their kind. Some were not so good and some were much better than others. But there was no reason, so far as she could see, to make anyone think she was a noble woman. She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people want to read. Wonderful luck that was, Mrs Oliver thought to herself.
Of her younger life we know that she had a grandmother and a great-aunt Alice, that she was sent to Paris to be ‘finished’, and that, in her own words, ‘I was quite determined to be a nun and later on I thought I’d be a hospital nurse.’ She first appeared in the Christie arena in the early 1930s, already middle-aged, widowed, and a ‘world-famous novelist’ in a short story, ‘The Case of the Discontented Soldier’.2 At that time she was a member of the staff of the extraordinary Parker Pyne, a retired civil servant turned detective-therapist whose speciality was putting worrisome predicaments to rights. In the personal columns of the morning papers his advertisement regularly appeared:
At 17 Richmond Street Mrs Oliver sat in a room at the top of the house ‘at a table on which were a typewriter, several notebooks, a general confusion of loose manuscripts and a large bag of apples’ thinking up happy endings for Mr Pyne’s clients – mere child’s play for someone who had already written ‘forty-six successful works of fiction, all best sellers in England and America, and freely translated into French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese, and Abyssinian.’3 Mrs Oliver’s job with Parker Pyne was only an interlude, however, and she soon took up her life as a full-time author once again.
Like Poirot and so many of his friends, in the matter of age Mrs Oliver led a charmed life. Over a span of forty years the only thing about her that seemed to change significantly was the way she did her hair. In Elephants Can Remember:
Mrs Oliver looked at herself in the glass … The trouble with Mrs Oliver was – and she admitted it freely – that her styles of hairdressing were always being changed. She had tried almost everything in turn. A severe pompadour at one time, then a windswept style where you brushed back your locks to display an intellectual brow, at least she hoped the brow was intellectual. She had tried tightly arranged curls, she had tried a kind of artistic disarray. She had to admit that it did not matter very much today what her type of hairdressing was, because today she was going to do what she very seldom did – wear a hat.
Mrs Oliver was large, had ‘an agreeable bass voice’, ‘fine eyes’ (sometimes concealed by massive glasses), and was ‘handsome in a rather untidy fashion’. On at least one occasion Poirot was called upon to extricate her from her small two-seater car, from which she emerged shaking herself ‘rather like a large Newfoundland dog’. She often felt insecure about her clothes and with endearing reason. At a large dinner in Dead Man’s Folly she is described in ‘iron-grey satin … like an obsolete battleship’, and in Cards on the Table:
She gave a deep sigh, pushed back her country hat to an unfashionable angle, looked down with approval at the tweeds she had remembered to put on [and] frowned a little when she saw that she had absent-mindedly retained her London high-heeled patent leather shoes …
When necessary, Mrs Oliver could speak in ‘a business-like committee-meeting manner’, but she drew the line at making speeches. ‘I know what I can do and I know what I can’t. I can’t make speeches. I get all worried and nervy and I should probably stammer or say the same thing twice.’ When complimented on her writing she invariably turned ‘purple with embarrassment’. ‘I only write very plain murders,’ she would say apologetically. Because she was a celebrity people were forever trying to interview her ‘about such subjects as student unrest, socialism, girls’ clothing, should sex be permissive, and many other things …’ Though to her ‘politics had always been anathema’, on one subject – the equality of women – Mrs Oliver was prepared to speak out. ‘But I wasn’t going to be out of it and let those three men have all the fun to themselves,’ she declared of the murder investigation in Cards on the Table, and she was perfectly prepared to endure all sorts of amused tolerance at her suggestion that it was time a woman headed Scotland Yard. ‘Women know about crime,’ she insisted.
Though she had many friends, and so many godchildren that she could hardly remember them all, Mrs Oliver was happiest when at home with:
A deal table, her typewriter, black coffee, apples everywhere … What bliss, what glorious and solitary bliss! What a mistake for an author to emerge from her secret fastness. Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations.
When Poirot first knew Mrs Oliver she lived in Harley Street on the top floor of a smart block of flats she airily described as ‘all among the nursing homes’, but later she seems to have moved to a house in Eaton Terrace. Wherever she lived her drawing-room and workroom were always exotically wallpapered. In time ‘a riot of birds and vegetable life’ gave way to a fruit pattern which had the effect, Poirot thought, of ‘rather like being in a cherry orchard’. No doubt he was also disconcerted to find, on occasion, that Mrs Oliver’s drawing-room was ‘very untidy’. This was caused by her habit of strewing apple cores and papers wherever she went, despite a series of protective and elderly maids – Milly, in The Pale Horse, ‘an efficient dragon who guarded her mistress from the onslaughts of the outside world’; Edith, in Third Girl, who rushed overdue manuscripts to the post office; and Maria, in Elephants Can Remember, who ‘always approved and gave praise’. ‘You look ever so smart,’ she would say reassuringly as Mrs Oliver fared forth to social ordeals.
She also had a series of secretaries. One of them, in Cards on the Table, ‘was so competent that it used to depress me … Then I tried having a thoroughly incompetent secretary, but, of course, that didn’t answer very well, either.’ Years later, in Elephants Can Remember, she mourned the departure of a secretary who had suited her perfectly (‘If I don’t get Sedgwick back, I shall go mad, thought Mrs Oliver to herself. I can’t deal with this thing if I don’t have Sedgwick’), and she regarded her new secretary, Miss Livingstone, with unease: ‘Every line of her face said, “I am very efficient.” But she wasn’t really, Mrs Oliver thought.’
Enormously successful, Mrs Oliver had a love-hate attitude towards her calling. ‘I’m in agony,’ she would cry, tugging her hair violently, but shortly after finishing one book she would begin another. ‘One actually has to think, you know,’ she
explained in Cards on the Table:
‘Some days I can only keep going by repeating over and over to myself the amount of money I might get for my next serial rights. That spurs you on, you know. So does your bank-book when you see how much overdrawn you are.’
In Mrs McGinty’s Dead there is an interesting scene in which Mrs Oliver encounters some of her books in a Penguin display at a village post office:
‘The Affair of the Second Goldfish,’ she mused, ‘that’s quite a good one. The Cat it was who Died – that’s where I made a blowpipe a foot long and it’s really six feet. Ridiculous that a blowpipe should be that size, but someone wrote from a museum to tell me so. Sometimes I think there are people who only read books in the hope of finding mistakes in them. What’s the other one of them? Oh! Death of a Débutante – that’s frightful tripe! I made sulphonal soluble in water and it isn’t, and the whole thing is wildly impossible from start to finish. At least eight people die before Sven Hjerson gets his brainwave.’
Poirot must have blanched a bit when Mrs Oliver launched into tirades against her famous detective, Sven Hjerson:
‘Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got? These things just happen. You try something – and people seem to like it – and then you go on – and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life. And people even write and say how found you must be of him. Fond of him? If I met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than any I’ve ever invented.’
Sometimes, however, she was driven to protect him. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead she argued furiously with a playwright who, in adapting one of her books to the stage, proposed to turn Sven Hjerson into a Norwegian resistance fighter:
‘But, darling, if he’s sixty, you can’t have the tension between him and the girl – what’s her name? Ingrid. I mean, it would make him just a nasty old man!’
‘It certainly would.’
‘So you see, he must be thirty-five,’ said Robin triumphantly.
‘Then he can’t be Sven Hjerson. Just make him a Norwegian young man who’s in the Resistance Movement.’
‘But darling Ariadne, the whole point of the play is Sven Hjerson. You’ve got an enormous public who simply adore Sven Hjerson, and who’ll flock to see Sven Hjerson. He’s box office, darling!’
‘But people who read my books know what he’s like! You can’t invent an entirely new young man in the Norwegian Resistance Movement and just call him Sven Hjerson.’
‘Ariadne darling, I did explain all that. It’s not a book, darling, it’s a play. And we’ve just got to have glamour! And if we get this tension, this antagonism between Sven Hjerson and this – what’s-her-name? – Karen – you know, all against each other and yet really frightfully attracted –’
‘Sven Hjerson never cared for women,’ said Mrs Oliver coldly.
‘But you can’t have him a pansy, darling. Not for this sort of play. I mean it’s not green bay trees or anything like that. It’s thrills and murders and clean open-air fun.’
Always a stern critic, in his own book Poirot gave Mrs Oliver a mixed review, despite their long friendship. ‘I do not wholly approve of her works, mind you,’ he told Colin Lamb in The Clocks:
‘The long arm of coincidence is far too freely employed. And, being young at the time, she was foolish enough to make her detective a Finn, and it is clear that she knows nothing about Finns or Finland except possibly the works of Sibelius.
Still, she has an original habit of mind, she makes an occasional shrewd deduction, and of later years she has learnt a good deal about things which she did not know before.’
It has not gone unnoticed that both Poirot’s and Mrs Oliver’s first names had their origins in Greek mythology. Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, gave her cruel hero, Theseus, a ball of thread to guide him from the labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur. Some have seen a parallel in all this to the help Mrs Oliver gave Poirot in the six investigations in which they worked together – though Mrs Oliver, if she had been asked, would have scoffed at such an idea. ‘Yes, I suppose it is a Greek name,’ she said in Hallowe’en Party. ‘But nothing Ariadne-like has ever happened to me. I’ve never been deserted on a Greek island by my own true love or anything like that.’ Lovers she and Poirot certainly were not, but between the large and untidy Mrs Oliver and the small and orderly Poirot there flourished a lively friendship:
‘When my friend, Mrs Oliver, asks me to do anything, I always have to do it,’ said Poirot.
‘What nonsense,’ said Mrs Oliver.
Their friendship was such that each could be sure of finding exactly the right kind of encouragement and comfort-foods in each other’s sitting-rooms. In Elephants Can Remember:
‘Coffee,’ said Poirot. ‘Let coffee be prepared and some petits fours. I rather think I ordered some in lately from Fortnum and Mason.’
‘A liqueur of any kind, sir?’
‘No, I think not. I myself will have some Sirop de Cassis.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Mrs Oliver arrived exactly on time. Poirot greeted her with every sign of pleasure.
Such was Poirot’s affection for Mrs Oliver that for her he broke a lifetime’s cardinal rule. To her goes the honour of being the only adult – apart from servants – that Poirot ever addressed by first name. ‘And who are you?’ he asked a distraught telephone caller in Hallowe’en Party:
The voice, a female one, seemed surprised.
‘Don’t you know?’ it said incredulously.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘You are my friend Ariadne.’
Much of their sleuthing together sprang from Mrs Oliver’s habit of discovering murder mysteries that had nothing to do with the one she was currently writing. In rushing with them to Poirot she greatly enlivened his old age, although, as with his other colleagues, he often deplored her methods and conclusions. He had to concede, nevertheless, that her ‘original if untidy mind’ sometimes inspired him. In Dead Man’s Folly:
‘It is extraordinary,’ said Poirot, and his voice was awed. ‘Always you give me ideas. So also did my friend Hastings whom I have not seen for many, many years. You have given me now the clue to yet another piece of my problem.’
In addition to her cases with Poirot, Mrs Oliver did some worthwhile sleuthing on her own in a most interesting book, The Pale Horse, published in 1961.4 In it she unerringly put her finger on the secret of her success:
‘Oh Chelsea!’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Everything happens there, I believe. Beatniks and sputniks and squares and the beat generation. I don’t write about them much because I’m so afraid of getting the terms wrong. It’s safer, I think, to stick to what you know.’
‘Such as?’
‘People on cruises, and in hotels, and what goes on in hospitals, and on parish councils – and sales of work – and music festivals, and girls in shops, and committees and daily women, and young men and girls who hike round the world in the interests of science, and shop assistants –’
‘You enjoy life altogether, don’t you?’ someone once asked her. ‘Yes, I do,’ she replied. ‘I suppose it’s the feeling that one never knows what might be going to happen next.’
Ah, this Mrs Oliver of blessed memory!
NOTES
1 It has, of course, been speculated that Poirot was the father of Countess Rossakoff’s son. Taking all that we know about Poirot into consideration, this seems very unlikely. At the very least, it is well documented that he was carefully chaperoned by Hastings at the Carlton Hotel.
2 This story, and another in which Mrs Oliver is mentioned, ‘The Case of the Rich Woman’, were first published in magazines in 1932. They were later included in a collection, Parker Pyne Investigates, published in 1934 (also published under the title Mr Parker Pyne, Detective).
3 The prolific Mrs Oliver was famously absent-minded. Several years later she told Superintendent B
attle she had written a mere thirty-two books. By 1961, in The Pale Horse, she thought she had written ‘fifty-five at least’.
4 In The Pale Horse Mrs Oliver encountered Hugh and Rhoda Despard, whom she and Poirot had first met some twenty-five years before in Cards on the Table, as well as the unforgettable Mrs Dane Calthrop and the Rev. Dane Calthrop, friends of Miss Jane Marple in The Moving Finger.
14
THE AVAILABLE POIROT
‘But you’re right at the top of the tree, aren’t you, M. Poirot? … I mean you’re the sort of person royalty calls in, or the Home Office or duchesses.’
—Gladys Nevill, ONE, TWO, BUCKLE MY SHOE
From the moment he set his pointed shoes upon the soil of England, it must have been painfully clear to Poirot that he had to begin earning his living all over again. Gone was his comfortable life in Brussels with imminent prospects of a handsome retirement. Instead, as he later told Hastings, he suddenly found himself ‘existing by charity in a foreign land’.
As we know, after a brief period of haven in the cottage at Styles, Poirot solved the sensational murder of his benefactor with great flourish and shortly thereafter took up residence in London as a private detective. Though his practice began modestly, it says as much for Poirot’s business acumen as it does for his detective skills that within a few years he became the most fashionable – and expensive – private detective in London. Such was his success that he never seems to have given a thought to returning to Belgium, and such was his curiosity that he undertook many cases for which he earned no money at all. In ‘Double Sin’ Hastings describes these early years:
My little friend was a strange mixture of Flemish thrift and artistic fervour. He accepted many cases in which he had little interest owing to the first instinct being predominant.