Agatha Christie's Poirot

by Anne Hart

  To discover the antecedents, the bona fides or otherwise, of the people involved, there also began the tête à têtes, ‘the little gossips’, at which Poirot, retentive as blotting-paper, was so adroit. ‘In the sporting phrase,’ as he was to say in Murder in Mesopotamia, ‘I run my eye over the possible starters.’ ‘It is always wise,’ he once coached Hastings, ‘to suspect everybody until you can prove logically, and to your own satisfaction, that they are innocent.’

  One mode that Poirot often adopted was what Japp called his ‘Father Confessor manner’. With what ‘engaging candour’, his voice ‘coaxing, almost tender’, his manner ‘persuasive and a little more foreign than he need have been’, could Hercule Poirot question witnesses! ‘See now, Mademoiselle,’ he said endearingly to Flora Ackroyd, ‘it is Papa Poirot who asks you this. The Old Papa Poirot who has much knowledge and much experience.’ Or: ‘Reconstruction of the crime, they call it, do they not?’ asked Parker, Roger Ackroyd’s butler, observing Poirot’s mysterious ways. ‘Ah! he knows something, the good Parker,’ cried Poirot admiringly. ‘He has read of these things.’ Or: ‘M. Poirot! M. Poirot! Oh, do believe me,’ cried Miss Russell, Roger Ackroyd’s housekeeper, breaking down. ‘Poirot got up and came to her. He patted her reassuringly on the shoulder. “But yes – but yes, I will believe. I had to make you speak, you know.”’ ‘It shows you,’ he said years later in After the Funeral:

  ‘the dangers of conversation. It is a profound belief of mine that if you can induce a person to talk to you for long enough, on any subject whatever, sooner or later they will give themselves away.’

  Another method was more aggressive. ‘With your help I propose to examine a witness,’ said Poirot to Dr Sheppard. ‘We will question him, we will put such fear into him that the truth is bound to come out.’ At what he lightly called a ‘little reunion’, he sat ‘at the head of the table, like the chairman of some ghastly board meeting’, and said severely:

  ‘I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to the seeker after it … Messieurs et mesdames, I tell you, I mean to know. And I shall know – in spite of you all.’

  And so this case, like many before and many to come, progressed relentlessly, if at times obscurely, towards the truth. There is nothing in detective literature so paradoxically soothing and suspenseful as watching Hercule Poirot, in the thick of a case, cleverly and mysteriously stirring the pot. In King’s Abbot, that summer, there were many contradictions to be found, and many doubts and incriminations to be encouraged. The local intelligence corps had to be worked through and the police kept on his side. ‘I was beginning to understand Poirot’s methods,’ wrote Dr Sheppard hopefully as he followed in his wake. ‘Every little irrelevancy had a bearing upon the whole.’ Later, when The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published, Hastings, far away in South America, must surely have felt a twinge of sympathy for Dr Sheppard on reading these words.

  At this stage of a case Poirot, in action more akin to a grasshopper than a foxhound, was apt to appear at his most foreign and incompetent. ‘He shook his head, puffed out his chest, and stood blinking at us,’ wrote Dr Sheppard. ‘Bit gone here,’ said Inspector Raglan, tapping his forehead. ‘I’ve thought so for some time. Poor old chap, so that’s why he had to give up and come down here.’

  Gradually, provoked by fear or guilt, people start to loosen up. Changes are rung on first stories. Hidden conflicts surface. Sometimes a second, or even a third murder occurs. Suddenly we are on shifting sands. Nothing is as we first thought. The first murder had been a great surprise and the day not long enough to talk of it, but now we are apt to eye everyone suspiciously.

  When a case reached this juncture, Poirot tended to play his cards very close to his chest, a habit that could prove extremely irritating to his colleagues. ‘He would throw out hints and suggestions,’ complained Dr Sheppard, ‘but beyond that he would not go.’ Said Poirot, when the plot in the Ackroyd case was becoming very thick indeed:

  ‘And, as you know, my friend, I much dislike to have to explain my little ideas until the time comes.’

  I smiled a little.

  ‘My friend Hastings, he of whom I told you, used to say of me that I was a human oyster. But he was unjust. Of facts, I keep nothing to myself. But to everyone his own interpretation of them.’

  So intense did his own concentration on these known facts become in the final stages of a case that Poirot often shut himself completely away. ‘I want to think,’ he insisted in Three Act Tragedy. ‘I ask of you twenty-four hours in which to think.’ ‘We are in darkness,’ he said in Murder on the Links:

  ‘A hundred conflicting points confuse and worry us. That is well. That is excellent. Out of confusion comes forth order.’

  Though not detailed in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, our yardstick case, we can be sure that towards the end of it Poirot carefully shut all the windows of his sitting-room, built up a fire in the grate, and gave himself over to complete immobility. With him would have gone food for the grey cells – his microscopic notebook, his neat lists of queries and trivia (tactfully compiled in his adopted language), and a puzzle box in his mind of clues, nuances, irrelevant remarks, coincidences, unrelated facts, stirrings of recognition, oddities, psychological hunches, and ‘little ideas’. Why was a bit of cambric and a goose quill found in the summer-house? Who lifted the lid of the silver table? Why was a marriage kept secret? This was the stuff of Poirot’s meditations, his ‘furiously to think’, as he built his card houses and primed himself with hot chocolate.

  The task of Poirot’s reveries was to hunt like a magpie through this accumulation of facts and thoughts, separating out this one, rejecting that one, holding up something for a closer look, sharply tapping something else to hear how it sounded. His genius lay in his ability to see what everyone else had seen and make new patterns and connections. ‘Arrange your facts. Arrange your ideas,’ he once counselled Hastings. ‘And if some fact will not fit in – do not reject it but consider it closely. Though its significance escapes you, be sure that it is significant.’

  In his progress towards the truth in his cases, Poirot was, of course, up against murderers who had done everything possible to lay false trails. Though he prided himself on his logical mind, a sure Poirot touch at a critical moment was the abandonment of logic – a tactic no murderer could possibly foresee. Poirot described such a leap in Elephants Can Remember:

  ‘The proofs are there, the motive, the opportunity, the clues, the mise en scène, it’s all there. A complete blueprint, as you might say. But all the same, those whose profession it is, know. They know that it’s all wrong, just like a critic in the artistic world knows when a picture is all wrong.’

  Suddenly – amid groans and mutterings – the key deception, the hitherto unseen link would be perceived and Poirot would know the murderer. In Murder on the Orient Express:

  … his eyebrows began to move slowly up his forehead. A little sigh escaped him. He murmured beneath his breath.

  ‘But after all, why not? And if so – why, if so, that would explain everything.’

  His eyes opened. They were green like a cat’s. He said softly: ‘Eh bien.’

  Obtaining the evidence to support a theory sometimes required setting a trap. This is the most suspenseful moment of many a Poirot case, particularly as those who are privy to the trap (including the readers) tend to have conflicting views as to who is to be caught. Poirot’s theatrical streak came wonderfully to the fore on such occasions. The more elaborate the trap, the more he relished it. In one case, with the connivance of a guest, he staged a mock death to flush out the murderer. In another he hired an actor to play a ghost. Sometimes – though he claimed not to be very brave – he staked himself out as the bait. ‘What I did,’ he said with importance in Evil Under the Sun, ‘was exceedingly dangerous – but I do not regret it. I succeeded!’

  In some cases the trap was sprung during the grandest scene of all – the unveiling by th
e master magician of the solution to the case. For such a dénouement Poirot liked to assemble together the entire cast of suspects as audience. ‘And then,’ as he explained in After the Funeral, ‘I make my little speech. And I sit back and see what happens …’ In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Dr Sheppard describes the opening moments of Poirot’s ‘little performance’:

  ‘The number is complete,’ said Poirot. ‘Everyone is here.’ There was a ring of satisfaction in his tone. And with the sound of it I saw a ripple of something like uneasiness pass over all those faces grouped at the other end of the room.

  In that company ‘of well-bred masks for faces’ was the murderer who, confident that all suspicions had been redirected elsewhere, contrived an air appropriate to a drawing-room court of inquiry. Poirot, simultaneously playing prosecution and defence, then conducted his captive audience step by step towards the solution, with frequent stops to examine red herrings drawn across his way. And, at exactly the right moment – and at considerable risk, as his hypothesis might still lack evidence – he played his trump card. ‘A new note crept into his voice,’ it is recounted in one case. ‘He was no longer a ridiculous little man with an absurd moustache and dyed hair, he was a hunter very close to his quarry.’ ‘Having lulled [him] into security,’ Poirot once said of a murderer, ‘I turned on him and did my utmost to make him lose his self-control.’

  Thus might a trap be sprung. ‘You damned interfering murdering lousy little worm!’ cried one killer at such a moment, his face ‘transformed, suffused with blood, blind with rage … He hurled himself forward, his fingers stretching and curling, his voice raving curses, as he fastened his fingers round Hercule Poirot’s throat …’

  At such times – as in most crises – Poirot was well prepared. At the ready, other players waited in the wings. Typically, with the drawing-room in confusion and the murderer unmasked, ‘two detectives from Scotland Yard emerged from the next room.’

  Sometimes, however, Poirot conducted a finale quite differently, and Scotland Yard’s time-honoured formula – ‘I warn you that anything you say may be used as evidence’ – was never uttered at all. In several cases he unashamedly took the law into his own hands and played judge and jury. Occasionally a murderer who, in his opinion, had performed a justifiable act was allowed to go free. Sometimes, following a private interview with Poirot, a timely suicide would occur. ‘I have my own way of regarding things,’ he said in Death in the Clouds:

  ‘What should you say the most important thing was to bear in mind when you are trying to solve a murder?’

  ‘Finding the murderer,’ said Jane.

  Norman Gale said: ‘Justice.’

  Poirot shook his head.

  ‘There are more important things than finding the murderer. And justice is a fine word, but it is sometimes difficult to say exactly what one means by it. In my opinion, the important thing is to clear the innocent.’

  In looking back on the Ackroyd case, Dr Sheppard wrote:

  Every one had a hand in the elucidation of the mystery. It was rather like a jigsaw puzzle to which every one contributed his own little piece of knowledge or discovery. But their task ended there. To Poirot alone belongs the renown of fitting those pieces into their correct place.

  Or, as Poirot himself once said, ‘Lay the mystery on my shoulders.’

  NOTES

  1 According to H.R.F. Keating in Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime, the term ‘grey cells’ is used in lieu of the word ‘brain’ by an entire African tribe.

  2 The careers of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot slightly overlap. Poirot solved the mysteries of Styles in 1916 (though an account of them did not appear until 1921). Holmes’s His Last Bow appeared in 1917. Poirot, though he owed so much to Sherlock Holmes, was surprisingly unappreciative of his talents, though full of admiration for his creator. In The Clocks Colin Lamb recorded Poirot’s thoughts on Holmes:

  ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, he murmured lovingly and uttered reverently the one word, ‘Maître!’

  ‘Sherlock Holmes?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, non, non, not Sherlock Holmes! It is the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that I salute. These tales of Sherlock Holmes are in reality farfetched, full of fallacies and most artificially contrived. But the art of the writing – ah, that is entirely different. The pleasure of the language, the creation above all of that magnificent character, Dr Watson. Ah, that was indeed a triumph.’

  3 A recurring antagonist during this period was the officious Inspector Miller who, much to Inspector Japp’s amusement, openly sneered at Poirot’s methods. Of him Poirot said: ‘He’s what they call the sharp man, the ferret, the weasel’.

  16

  THE CURTAIN FALLS

  ‘This, Hastings, will be my last case. It will be too, my most interesting case – and my most interesting criminal.’

  —Hercule Poirot, CURTAIN

  ‘You really are the limit, Poirot.’

  —Arthur Hastings, CURTAIN

  The famous Curtain,1 published in 1975, was indeed Poirot’s last case and saw yet one more return of Arthur Hastings from Argentina to relate, as in the beginning, the deeds of the master. For Hastings this drama began with the arrival of a letter from Poirot in the spring of 1974. Posted in the Essex village of Styles St Mary, it bore the stamp of the very post office at which Poirot and Hastings had been reunited in 1916:

  And does it not intrigue you, my friend, to see the address from which I write? It recalls old memories, does it not? Yes, I am here, at Styles. Figure to yourself, it is now what they call a guest house. Run by one of your so British old Colonels – very ‘old school tie’ and ‘Poona’ …

  I saw their advertisement in the paper, and the fancy took me to go once again to the place which first was my home in this country. At my age one enjoys reliving the past.

  Then, figure to yourself, I find here a gentleman, a baronet who is a friend of the employer of your daughter. (That phrase it sounds a little like the French exercise, does it not?)

  Immediately I conceive a plan. He wishes to induce the Franklins to come here for the summer. I in my turn will persuade you and we shall be all together, en famille. It will be most agreeable. Therefore, mon cher Hastings, dépêchez-vous, arrive with the utmost celerity. I have commanded for you a room with bath (it is modernized now, you comprehend, the dear old Styles) and disputed the price with Mrs Colonel Luttrell until I have made an arrangement très bon marché.

  The Franklins and your charming Judith have been here for some days. It is all arranged, so make no histories.

  A bientôt,

  Yours always, Hercule Poirot.

  Poirot’s letter was a most welcome diversion for poor Hastings as it arrived at a very sad time in his life. His wife, the ‘merry, laughing’ Cinderella, had recently died and ‘lay now in Argentine soil, having died as she would have wished, with no long drawn-out suffering, or feebleness of old age’. Hastings at once began packing for England:

  The prospect was alluring, and I fell in with my old friend’s wishes without demur. I had no ties and no settled home. Of my children, one boy was in the Navy, and the other married and running the ranch in the Argentine. My daughter Grace was married to a soldier and was at present in India. My remaining child, Judith, was the one whom secretly I had always loved best, although I had never for one moment understood her.2

  Thus, within a few weeks, Hastings found himself once again gazing upon Styles Court, the scene of the sensational Inglethorp murder of so long ago. ‘The park was much as I remembered it,’ he wrote, ‘but the drive was badly kept and much overgrown with weeds growing up over the gravel. We turned a comer and came in view of the house. It was unaltered from the outside and badly needed a coat of paint.’

  Inside, Hastings was ushered upstairs to the very room he had occupied years before. It appeared virtually unaltered, though part of it, as a sign of changed times, had been partitioned off to make a small bathroom. In due course, when he had encounte
red the lukewarm water that trickled from the taps of the new Styles, Hastings was to remember:

  … the clouds of steam which had gushed from the hot tap of the one bathroom Styles had originally possessed, one of those bathrooms in which an immense bath with mahogany sides had reposed proudly in the middle of the bathroom floor. Remembered, too, the immense bath towels, and the frequent shining brass cans of boiling hot water that stood in one’s old-fashioned basin.

  Directly across the corridor from Hastings was the room that had once been Lawrence Cavendish’s and had now been assigned to Poirot. ‘With my heart beating slightly faster’, Hastings rapped on the door.

  A sad sight met his eyes:

  My poor friend. I have described him many times. Now to convey to you the difference. Crippled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheeled chair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feelings by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious. There had been a time when I had been surprised to learn that the blackness of Poirot’s hair came out of a bottle. But now the theatricality was apparent and merely created the impression that he wore a wig and had adorned his upper lip to amuse the children!

  Poor Hercule Poirot. And even worse, as Hastings was eventually to learn, Poirot’s black hair now was a wig, and – the final indignity – the famous moustache fake! How could all this have happened in just the two or three years that had passed since last we saw him happily collaborating with Ariadne Oliver in that busy and interesting case, Elephants Can Remember? ‘When the very young girls come and talk to you kindly, oh so kindly – it is the end!’ he said mournfully to Hastings. His body crippled, his heart, as a doctor was soon to confide to Hastings, about to ‘go out – phut – at any moment’, there he sat in his wheelchair, nothing more than that ‘dear old Belgian fellow’ to the rest of the world, and cared for by a bovine new valet, Curtiss, a replacement for the faithful George, who had been summoned away by family illness. ‘I am a wreck,’ Poirot told Hastings. ‘Mercifully I can feed myself, but otherwise I have to be attended to like a baby. Put to bed, washed and dressed. Enfin, it is not amusing that.’