by Anne Hart
Reaching the pavement I turned back to see Poirot standing in the middle of the road with buses bearing down on him from either side. Instinctively I put my hands over my eyes. There was a jarring of brakes, and some rich bus driver language. In a dignified manner Poirot walked to the curb. He looked like a man walking in his sleep.
Arriving home, Poirot flew to the telephone to summon yet another witness. With her departure he finally called it a day: ‘Nothing more this evening, my friend. Tomorrow morning, early, we will ring up Japp.’
In Hallowe’en Party, some thirty-six years later, Poirot’s working day was almost as busy (though at least during this one he later found time for an evening meal):
‘This afternoon my friend Spence is making an appointment for me to talk with the local Inspector at a suitable hour. I should also like a talk with the doctor here. And possibly the headmistress at the school …’
‘Do you know what you sound like?’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘A computer. You know. You’re programming yourself. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? I mean you’re feeding all these things into yourself all day and then you’re going to see what comes out.’
But there were times when Poirot seemingly did no work at all. Clients and assistants alike were apt to be seized with exasperation or panic upon discovering their great detective building houses out of cards or sitting aimlessly in an armchair. ‘He made mysterious absences, talked very little, frowned to himself, and consistently refused to satisfy my natural curiosity,’ complained Hastings in The ABC Murders. In ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’, as precious time ticked by, Hastings could hardly contain himself:
And for five long hours the little man sat motionless, blinking his eyelids like a cat, his green eyes flickering and becoming steadily greener and greener. The Scotland Yard man was obviously contemptuous, Major Norman was bored and impatient, and I myself found the time pass with wearisome slowness.
In ‘The Under Dog’ a client, Lily Margrave, ‘smoothed her gloves out on her knee with a nervous gesture’ at the sight of Poirot:
His occupation at the moment struck her as particularly childish. He was piling small blocks of coloured wood one upon the other, and seemed far more interested in the result than in the story she was telling.
In contrast to these private withdrawals to knit together the strands of a case, Poirot, when called upon to be a detective in the public eye, could be very professional indeed. Not surprisingly, a good deal of his time was taken up by inquests and trials. As he said in Five Little Pigs, ‘In the Assize Court, as on the playing fields of Eton, and in the hunting country, the Englishman likes the victim to have a sporting chance.’ Many a day was spent thus:
‘Hercule Poirot.’
Hercule Poirot entered the box, took the oath, twirled his moustache and waited, with his head a little on one side. He gave his name and address and calling.
‘M. Poirot, do you recognize this document?’
‘Certainly.’
And many an evening was spent dutifully talking about his profession. In Third Girl:
‘Bonjour, Madame – you are well, I hope?’
‘Oh, I’m all right.’ Ariadne Oliver’s voice came through in its usual cheerful accents … ‘It’s rather early to ring you up, but I want to ask you a favour.’
‘Yes?’
‘It is the annual dinner at our Detective Authors’ Club; I wondered if you would come and be our Guest Speaker this year. It would be very very sweet of you if you would.’
‘When is this?’
‘Next month – the twenty-third.’
A deep sigh came over the telephone.
In Hickory Dickory Dock a notice appeared on the bulletin board of a student youth hostel:
M. Hercule Poirot, the celebrated private detective, has kindly consented to give a talk this evening on the theory and practice of successful detection, with an account of certain celebrated criminal cases.
No doubt, when he returned home from such engagements, he would find on his desk a small pile of Miss Lemon’s impeccably typed letters awaiting his signature, and yet more incoming letters to read. ‘The evening post arrived about ten o’clock,’ noted Hastings in The ABC Murders, but often the available Poirot’s day did not end there. Sometimes Japp dropped by late at night for a chat, or the telephone would ring again. In ‘Yellow Iris’:
Poirot rose, glancing at his watch as he did so. The time was close to half past eleven. He wondered who was ringing him up at this hour. It might, of course, be a wrong number.
‘And it might,’ he murmured to himself … ‘be a millionaire newspaper proprietor, found dead in the library of his country house, with a spotted orchid clasped in his left hand and a page torn from a cookery book pinned to his breast.’
NOTES
1 And were later collected in Parker Pyne Investigates, 1934.
2 Oddly, despite all their years of service together, there is no record that George and Miss Lemon ever spoke to one another.
3 At Whitehaven Mansions in the 1930s Poirot’s telephone number was Trafalgar 8137, a unique privilege in view of the fact that for all other mortals no such London exchange existed. Poirot’s neighbours would have had to make do with the Whitehall exchange and, indeed, Poirot’s own telephone number was once given as Whitehall 7272 which is intriguingly similar to Whitehall 1212, the famous old Scotland Yard number.
15
THE DETECTIVE POIROT
‘… yet I am only taking you all on a journey – my journey towards the truth.’
—Hercule Poirot, MURDER iN MESOPOTAMIA
Detective: One whose occupation it is to discover matters artfully concealed.
—THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
‘Your mistress lies dead, and it is necessary that we should know all,’ Poirot tells a servant in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. ‘Nothing can bring her back to life, but we do hope, if there has been foul play, to bring the murderer to justice.’
At these solemn words, uttered by a little man in magician’s attire, the reader’s attention gives a sudden lurch. The hunt is up and there is a wonderful promise of suspense and conundrum to come. ‘The dog hunts rabbits. Hercule Poirot hunts murderers’ – in thirty-three books and fifty-six stories he practised his craft for all to see. The most important thing, surely, about Poirot, and the greatest fun in reading him, is that he was a superb detective.
Before the investigation came the crime. In the margins of the Poirot canon are any number of felonies short of homicide: kidnappings, blackmailings, robberies, espionage, drug peddling, embezzlements, frauds, forgeries, unlawful impersonations, confidence rackets, and so on, but at the centre are the murders – and the murderers. Inept murderers rarely warranted Poirot’s attention. The ones he pursued selected themselves by their sheer cleverness. Those chosen had, along the way, cunningly eluded all the usual authorities or had been so adroit that their crimes had gone unnoticed in the first place. Matching his wits against them was the great joy of Poirot’s life. ‘How do you know the murderer is of the first class?’ asked Amy Leatheran in Murder in Mesopotamia. ‘Because,’ replied Poirot, ‘if he were not, the whole truth would be plain to me at this instant – and it is not.’
Poirot’s murderers occasionally committed their deeds – particularly second or third murders – in the heat of the moment, but as a rule their crimes were carefully premeditated and their prey – usually friends or relatives – were dispatched, in Poirot’s words, ‘for gain, for fear or for love’. Sometimes their victims were genuinely mourned (in some later cases children were victims) but more often they were apt to be unlikeable people whose coups de grâce were greeted with sighs of relief. Whether as victims, murderers or witnesses, all hands involved tended to be members, or servants, of the upper classes.
Within these closed and seemingly secure circles the murderers struck in many ways. Sometimes the dinner table or a box of chocolates provided splendid opportunities. Over the years Poirot investigate
d a score or more of poisonings by arsenic, cyanide, strychnine, morphine, nicotine, prussic acid, adrenaline, procaine, dixitoxin or deadly germs. Knives, stilettos and daggers claimed some victims, and scarves, belts and clothes-lines dispatched others. There were several deaths from falls or drownings, a number of skulls crushed by heavy objects, and a good many fatal shootings. Two very bizarre murder weapons were a booby-trapped chess piece and an infected shaving brush. These dreadful deeds were often artfully camouflaged. Suicides were made to look like murders, murders made to look like suicides, and innocent people carefully framed. But, as Poirot pointed out, ‘Motive and opportunity are not enough … there must also be the criminal temperament!’ And luck. ‘I tell you, my friends,’ he declared in The ABC Murders, ‘however carefully planned, no crime can be successful without luck!’
As a rule, when Poirot sniffed murder in the air he would go to almost any lengths to stop it (‘It is much easier to catch a murderer than it is to prevent a murder,’ he said in The Labours of Hercules), but if murderers there had to be, Poirot liked them to be worthy of his mettle. ‘I tell you, my friend … This was a reasoned crime – a sane crime,’ he observed with respect in Appointment with Death. ‘This is not a crime well ordered and regular, such as a detective delights in,’ he complained in Murder on the Links. In due course he adopted further criteria. ‘I consider your crime not an English crime at all – not above-board – not sporting—’ he lectured the perpetrator of the ABC Murders.
To catch murderers, as Hastings pointed out in Murder on the Links, Poirot employed two crucial weapons:
‘Order’ and ‘Method’ were his gods. He had a certain disdain for tangible evidence, such as footprints and cigarette ash, and would maintain that, taken by themselves, they would never enable a detective to solve a problem. Then he would tap his egg-shapped head with absurd complacency, and remark with great satisfaction, ‘The true work, it is done from within. The little grey cells – remember always the little grey cells, mon ami!’
Oh, those repositories of all order and method, the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot!1 First introduced as a phenomenon in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (‘He tapped his forehead. “These little grey cells …”’), they were evoked so often by their owner in the earlier years of his English career that in Lord Edgware Dies Hastings protested:
I am afraid that I have got into the habit of averting my attention whenever Poirot mentions his little grey cells.
I have heard it all so often before.
In this matter Poirot seems to have taken Hastings’s advice for once, and in his later career we hear less and less about grey cells. For his part Japp rather missed the constant refrain. ‘Exert those cellular arrangements of yours I used to hear so much about,’ he urged Poirot in The ABC Murders.
By the rigorous employment of ‘sanity, logic, order and method’, it was Poirot’s unshakeable belief – as it had been the belief of his predecessor, Sherlock Holmes – that no murderer could escape. Unlike the hawkish Holmes, however, Poirot tended to avoid waging direct war against an adversary. He preferred, instead, to surround a suspect with a wide and carefully constructed net and sit in it, awaiting twitches.2
Which brings us next, in this examination of the detective Poirot, to psychology. Like the grey cells, in reading Poirot we tend to hear more about psychology in the 1920s and early 1930s than thereafter, but when he was its devotee no case could pass without a good dose of it:
‘Order and method! That is the first stage. To arrange the facts with neatness and precision. The next stage – ’
‘Yes?’
‘The next stage is that of the psychology.’
Poirot’s psychology was of the interactionist school. He passionately believed that the key to the identity of a murderer lay in the crime itself – (‘It is not the mere act of killing; it is what lies behind it that appeals to the expert’) and in the character of the victim (‘Because the victim was the kind of person he or she was, therefore was he or she murdered!’). When properly ordered grey cells discerned the inevitable pattern of psychological cause and effect in a case, it only remained to fit the appropriate suspect to the crime, regardless of apparently conflicting evidence. The crucial thing, to his tidy mind, was to see this method faithfully through, and the clues he built his deductions on were not so much tangible ones – the end of a cigarette or the print of a shoe – as the fleeting impressions and ideas from something let slip in a conversation, or glimpsed in a momentary expression of surprise on an onlooker’s face. ‘Women,’ he said grandiloquently in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,
‘observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together – and they call the result intuition. Me, I am very skilled in psychology. I know these things.’
In Murder on the Links Hastings protested:
‘But surely the study of fingerprints and footprints, different kinds of mud, and other clues that comprise the minute observation of details – all these are of vital importance?’
‘But certainly. I have never said otherwise. The trained observer, the expert, without doubt he is useful! But the others, the Hercule Poirots, they are above the experts! To them the experts bring the facts. Their business is the method of the crime, its logical deduction, the proper sequence and order of the facts; above all, the true psychology of the case. You have hunted the fox, yes?’
‘I have hunted a bit, now and again,’ I said, rather bewildered by this abrupt change of subject. ‘Why?’
‘Eh bien, this hunting of the fox, you need the dogs, no?’
‘Hounds,’ I corrected gently. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘But yet,’ Poirot wagged his finger at me, ‘You did not descend from your horse and run along the ground smelling with your nose and uttering loud Ow Ows?’
As Hastings and countless readers have learned over the years, Poirot had his own way of handling a case and, once started, he never gave up. ‘Good morning, mademoiselle,’ he greeted a surprised observer in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’ who had just discovered a muffled-up little man pacing around the herbaceous border beneath her bedroom window. ‘You now behold a detective – a great detective, I may say – in the art of detecting!’
How did the great detective pursue his art? A case of the utmost complexity is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and to track Poirot’s progress in it through the eyes and pen of its narrator, Dr James Sheppard, is one of the great treats of detective fiction.
A promising setting is provided by the village of King’s Abbot. ‘Our hobbies and recreations,’ wrote Dr Sheppard, ‘can be summed up in one word, “gossip”.’ In these pleasant surroundings an extraordinary event occurs, the inexplicable murder of King’s Abbot’s most prominent resident, Roger Ackroyd. Enter Hercule Poirot, who can rarely resist a case but likes to be persuaded:
‘Miss Ackroyd,’ I said, ‘wants you to – to –’
‘To find the murderer,’ said Flora in a clear voice.
‘I see,’ said the little man. ‘But the police will do that, will they not?’
‘They might make a mistake,’ said Flora. ‘They are on their way to make a mistake now, I think. Please, M. Poirot, won’t you help us?’
At the police station those in charge – who, after all, have had to deal with the actual blood and gore of the case – greeted Poirot’s arrival with less than enthusiasm. Said the chief constable:
‘Mr Ackroyd’s family must, of course, do what they see fit … But we cannot have the official investigation hampered in any way. I know M. Poirot’s great reputation of course, he added courteously.
This ‘of course’ was the harbinger of things to come. The Ackroyd case occurred comparatively early in Poirot’s English career, when dealings with the police could still be ticklish.3 In time Poirot would have most of the chief constables of England at his beck and call, and in London his sitting-room would become a sort of outpost of Scotland Yard,
but in King’s Abbot of the 1920s, he had to tread carefully. He generally liked the English police – he was, after all, ‘an old Belgian police dog’ himself – and he thought them ‘a brave and intelligent force of men’. On this occasion he said smoothly:
‘Above all things, I have a horror of publicity. I must beg, that in the case of my being able to contribute something to the solution of the mystery, my name may not be mentioned.’
Inspector Raglan’s face lightened a little.
So the hunt was on. Often, in a post-Hastings case, one of Poirot’s first actions was to recruit an assistant or two from within the situation. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd he recruited Dr Sheppard:
‘Do you really wish to aid me? To take part in this investigation?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ I said eagerly. ‘There’s nothing I should like better. You don’t know what a dull old fogey’s life I lead. Never anything out of the ordinary.’
‘Good, we will be colleagues then.’
Briefed by Dr Sheppard, Poirot’s first step was to assess critically the obvious evidence – ‘the blue letter you speak of, where was it when you left the room?’ … ‘will you kindly indicate to me the exact position of the dagger?’ … ‘how was the fire? Was it low?’ ‘We have cleared away the manufactured clues’. ‘Now for the real ones’, he was apt to say at this stage.
In finding these his patience was inexhaustible. Somehow, despite his many admonitions against the foxhound school of detection, if it was Poirot crawling on his hands and knees across the floor of a summer-house, or groping in a fish-pond, such activities magically became legitimate and part of ‘the method’.