by David Suchet
I wanted him to become even more human. My aim was to draw the audience even more into his character, so that they could understand that this idiosyncratic little man, who may have had his eccentric ways, was also enormously compassionate and capable of eliciting information from every single person he met. He had the great gift of making people feel flattered by the simple fact that he was politely talking to them and took pains to listen to what they had to say with great intensity.
I believe that if you listen well, you are a sympathetic person, and this was very much what I wanted to show in my Poirot. There is nothing better, to me, than someone who has the patience to listen carefully, and give what I call ‘good ear’. As my character note number twenty-seven said of him, ‘An excellent listener. Often disconcertingly silent. Lets other people do the talking.’
Taking infinite care to listen and talk to everyone, regardless of their class or status, Poirot represents everyman – and he shows it time after time throughout Dame Agatha’s stories. He is not Sherlock Holmes, dismissively lecturing a policeman or a wealthy landowner about their foolishness. Poirot cares about people too much for that. He sympathises with them, and shows that he does so, in story after story.
The more Poirot welcomes his fellow characters, the more the audience sympathise with him, and the more he extends his gentle control over everything around him, as if wrapping it all in his own personal glow. I believe he is unique in fictional detectives in that respect, because he carefully welcomes everyone – be they reader, viewer, or participant character – into his drama. He then quietly explains what it all means and, in doing so, he becomes what one critic called ‘our dearest friend’.
That was exactly what I was trying to do, and so it was very satisfying when the critic in question, Dany Margolies, put it into words: ‘In large part it’s the contradictions Suchet has given the character that make him so appealing. Poirot dislikes so many things, so craves perfection in his own life, yet Suchet’s interpretation feels such deep caring and empathy for humanity. He is brilliant, yet can communicate with everyone.’
That was my aim for the second series – to make my Poirot a man you would welcome to tea, who would not judge you, but who would listen to you and help you if you needed it. I think that began to emerge in Peril at End House.
End House demonstrates Dame Agatha’s skill as a storyteller, for she always does something that neither the reader nor the television audience ever quite expect. Like an expert magician – a character she frequently puts into her stories – she knows how to compel her audience to concentrate on one thing while she is working her spell on something else that perhaps they ignore or miss. She always knows her ending well before the denouement – and it would usually never have entered the audience’s head.
I have to confess at once that, even though I have become Poirot for millions of people around the world, even I cannot always work out the resolution to her mysteries before she tells me. Dame Agatha is too clever for me.
That is certainly true of Peril at End House, which ends in a séance after the reading of the fragile Miss Buckley’s will. Poirot reveals the identity of the murderer with a real coup de théâtre, but only after inviting Miss Lemon to summon the spirit world. The true identity of the killer is certainly not obvious to the audience. They need Poirot to reveal it. Then they can see the truth, but only after they have been gently led towards it.
That makes the ending of the story all the more powerful, when the killer describes Poirot as a ‘silly little man’ before adding, ‘You don’t know anything,’ when it is only too clear that he knows everything.
Peril at End House is such a fine mystery that the actor and playwright Arnold Ridley, author of The Ghost Train and star of BBC Television’s Dad’s Army, adapted it for the stage in 1940 with Francis L. Sullivan as Poirot. It opened at the Vaudeville Theatre in May 1940. Sadly it lasted for just twenty-three performances, in spite of receiving some positive reviews from the critics. Perhaps the theatre audience were looking for somewhat different fare as British troops were encircled on the French coast near Dunkirk.
Dame Agatha practises one of her ‘little deceptions’ on her readers and audience in Peril at End House – in which a character comes back to life after apparently dying – which was to reappear later. There is no doubt that she would, from time to time, repeat parts of her plots. That is hardly surprising, because I don’t believe any writer could possibly complete more than seventy stories without repeating themselves. But that does not dilute for one moment their capacity to intrigue, for Poirot is always left to explain the ‘how dunnit’ of the murder and, even more important, to reveal the motive – and how the killer’s mind truly works.
To me, it is precisely this quality that so appeals to the public’s imagination when they see Poirot. Dame Agatha challenges her readers and viewers to exercise their own ‘little grey cells’ over her mysteries. She plays entirely fair, leaving clues in plain sight, if only the audience are clever enough to spot them, but she never, ever, patronises them.
As the filming of the second series went on in that summer of 1989, I came to realise the honesty and truthfulness in Dame Agatha’s approach more and more. And as a result, I became ever more determined that my Poirot should become a man with an infinite reservoir of empathy for his fellow human beings, and who wanted the world to know it. So I worked harder and harder to humanise him, and as I did so, I think I became closer and closer to Poirot himself.
Yet even so, we are not totally alike, I assure you. My strain of perfectionism certainly matches Poirot’s. In fact, we seemed to grow more alike in that respect the more I played him. But I have to admit that I had a problem with his egotism and vanity, qualities which I really don’t share with him. I may be an actor, but I am most certainly not, I hope, a vain one.
If anything, I suffer from what Sheila and I both call ‘repertory actor syndrome’. We both started in rep in the English provinces and have never forgotten the experience. Rep for us meant that we were never exactly sure where the next job – or the next penny – was coming from, and it made us very aware of exactly how precarious an actor’s life can be. As a result, neither Sheila nor I ever take anything for granted.
It was that worry which paralysed us when we didn’t know if there was going to be a second Poirot series. Could we afford to stay in our new house in Pinner?
But Peril at End House convinced me that there might just be a future for the little Belgian detective and me on television, for here we were making one of Dame Agatha’s full-length novels, in a stunning set of locations, with no expense spared – the vintage aeroplane at the opening was just one example of that. As the series got underway, I suddenly found myself thinking, ‘Perhaps we have a future, after all. Here is London Weekend making an episode that lasts longer than an hour, and they are clearly committed to it.’
In fact, Poirot also worries about money. In The Lost Mine, which was the third in the new series, the little man insists, ‘No one makes Poirot look a fool where money is concerned’ when he is confronted in his bank by the fact that he has an overdraft, rather than the precise sum of forty-four pounds four shillings and four pence which he always keeps in his current account. Then, in Double Sin, Poirot announces that he is ‘finished’ and ‘in retirement’ because no one has consulted him ‘for weeks’.
I knew exactly how he felt. When the telephone stops ringing and an actor doesn’t get any offers, he immediately starts to think of ‘retirement’. ‘No one wants me, so I will disappear,’ I would say to myself in the dark days when there were no parts. ‘I can’t bear to appear to be desperate. I should never have left Moss Bros.’
Money worries and fears about retirement were two things that Poirot and I had in common, but there was another. We both like disguises. Every character actor loves his costume, which helps him to become someone else, and Poirot liked not only his own clothes, which helped to define his character, but also – from time to time �
�� to use a disguise to help him achieve his end.
The Veiled Lady, the second film in the second series, demonstrates that perfectly. Poirot is asked to meet a mysterious woman – in a veil – in a London hotel. She turns out to be Lady Millicent Castle-Vaughan, played by Frances Barber, who is about to be married to the Duke of Southshire. The difficulty is that she is also being blackmailed over an indiscreet letter she wrote to a former lover some years earlier, which has fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous man called Lavingham, whom Hastings calls a ‘dirty swine’.
Ever anxious to help a lady in distress, Poirot decides to disguise himself as a locksmith – complete with elderly bicycle and black beret – to get into Lavingham’s Wimbledon home to find the offending letter and retrieve it, thereby bringing the blackmail to an end and saving Lady Millicent’s reputation. All does not go well, however, and Poirot ends up in the cells, only to be rescued by Chief Inspector Japp. The spirited chase involving Poirot, Hastings and Japp in the spectacular setting of the Natural History Museum in London, as part of the story’s denouement, was enormous fun to do.
The next film to be broadcast, The Lost Mine, opens with Hastings and Poirot playing Monopoly in Whitehaven Mansions, with Hastings winning comprehensively. The question of money, and in particular Poirot’s skill with it, is at the heart of the story. Indeed, their game of Monopoly lasts all the way through it, until, inevitably, it ends with Hastings bankrupt and Poirot triumphant. Along the way, however, Poirot finds his current account is overdrawn – something which he would never allow to happen, and neither would I incidentally – and the chairman of the bank, played by Anthony Bate, asks for Poirot’s help.
Once again, there was a rather spectacular setting, this time including the creation of Chinatown and a Chinese nightclub in the studio at Twickenham, which reminded me again of just how much London Weekend were spending on this series – certainly no less than the £500,000 per hour that they had spent on the first. With a Chinese victim, Wu Ling, and hints pointing to the opium trade in the East End of London, there are also echoes of the Charlie Chan mysteries, which were hugely popular at the time.
Dame Agatha’s story, with its Chinatown background, had first appeared in the American edition of her short stories called Poirot Investigates in 1925, and the first full-length Chan novel, The House Without a Key, appeared in the same year, although the American author Earl Derr Biggers had been working on him for almost six years. Like Poirot, Chan is an intelligent, honourable and benevolent detective, with a trace of eccentricity. He was to become a staple of American novels and films for the next three decades, often played by the Swedish actor Warner Oland. There are many similarities between the two detectives. Chan is always intensely polite and unthreatening, while often revealing the solution to his mysteries in a lengthy speech at the climax.
In sharp contrast to the exotic locale of Chinatown, the next film in the series, The Cornish Mystery, sees Poirot back in England, returning to the middle-class world of Clapham Cook. He is visited by Alice Pengelly, a distinctly nervous, not to say retiring, lady from Cornwall, who tells him that she gets stomach pains after every meal that she eats with her dentist husband Edward, but none when he goes away. Indeed, she is very afraid that she is being poisoned with weed killer, as she has found a half-empty jar in the house and the gardener insists that he has never used it.
‘We have here a very poignant human drama,’ Poirot confides to Hastings when Mrs Pengelly also tells him that she believes her husband is having an affair with his attractive blonde assistant. Hastings and Poirot travel down to Polgarwith in Cornwall the next day, only to discover that tragedy has already struck. Even though the good Chief Inspector Japp makes an appearance, and appears to have caught the murderer, things are not quite what they seem, as Poirot reveals.
The next three stories to be broadcast in the second series – though they were not shot in the order they were broadcast – were all comparatively slight, and I’m afraid the truth is that I was never really happy with Double Sin, The Adventure of the Cheap Flat and The Adventure of the Western Star. They all seemed a little flat to me, a little too one-dimensional compared to the others.
Poirot announces his ‘retirement’ at the beginning of Double Sin, and decides to take Hastings on holiday to the seaside at Charlock Bay, where they meet a young woman, Mary Durrant, who is going to show a client a case of valuable antique miniatures.
When they are stolen, Mary asks Poirot to investigate, but – because of his ‘retirement’ – he instructs Hastings to take over the case, although he also asks him to ‘tell me everything’. The lovely Elspet Gray, wife of Lord ‘Brian’ Rix, played Mary’s wheelchair-bound mother, and there is rather a fine denouement in the hotel dining room, but somehow the film did not quite ‘sing’ in the way that I wanted it to, in spite of Clive Exton’s fine script.
Sadly the same was true for The Adventure of the Cheap Flat, which starred Samantha Bond in one of her early television roles, six years before she became Miss Moneypenny to Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond. The plot revolves around two of Hastings’ friends, the Robinsons, who cannot believe their good luck in renting an expensive flat in a fashionable block for a tiny sum per month. Poirot is so intrigued that he decides to rent a flat in the same block himself – only to encounter an undercover FBI agent in pursuit of some secret plans for a submarine that may have been stolen by the Mafia. The FBI man pushes Chief Inspector Japp from his office at Scotland Yard, but it is Poirot who solves the mystery.
The Adventure of the Western Star is another of Dame Agatha’s trifles. The beautiful Belgian actress Marie Marvelle – whom Poirot much admires – has received threatening letters demanding the return of a spectacular diamond known as the Western Star, which is reputed to have once been the left eye of a Chinese god. Meanwhile, the wife of an English aristocrat, Lord Yardley, who owns a similar diamond, known as the Eastern Star, has also received threatening letters demanding the return of their stone.
Poirot travels to meet Lord and Lady Yardley, but fails to prevent a daring robbery, and then races back to London, only to find that the Western Star has also been stolen. Engaging enough, and with a delightful portrait of Poirot becoming ever more excited about meeting Marie Marvelle, it depends on another of Dame Agatha’s magical subterfuges. Poirot may have enjoyed the chase to find the diamonds, but I cannot say I was very happy with my own performance.
Western Star did, however, give me an opportunity to demonstrate Poirot’s passion for cooking, when he serves Hastings supper and watches him eat with ill-concealed delight, all the while explaining the importance of exactly the right ingredients. It was my one opportunity in the story to bring out his humanity. For the rest, however, I felt uncomfortable and rather too near a parody in my desire to do Poirot’s passion for Miss Marvelle justice.
Some people tend to see Poirot as one-or two-dimensional, but those who do so are almost always the ones who have never read the books. If you do read them, you realise at once that there are certainly three dimensions to his character. And every time I played him, I tried to bring those extra elements of Poirot’s character to the surface, reflecting the different dimensions revealed in Dame Agatha’s own stories about him.
Andrew Grieve, who directed the two remaining one-hour films in the second series, The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim and The Kidnapped Prime Minister, and who would go on to become a stalwart, positively revelled in Poirot’s complexities, and has always been a delight to work with. It made Prime Minister one of my favourite Poirots of all, because the little man proves that no matter how idiosyncratic he may appear, he is exactly right, proving everyone else – particularly the British political establishment – wrong. Andrew had clearly read both stories, and wanted to talk to me at length about Poirot. He allowed me to explore the nuances in his character. There is no denying that Mr Davenheim is a quite delicious mystery, which opens with Hastings, Japp and Poirot at a theatre on location, watching an illusioni
st (another of Dame Agatha’s magicians) – and the theme of illusions remains throughout the story. Banker Matthew Davenheim disappears one afternoon on his way to post a letter, after he gets home from his office, and Poirot tells Japp that he will solve the mystery before the police – without even leaving his flat.
In the story, Poirot delights in teaching himself magic tricks, as well as building a spectacular house of cards, while comfortably ensconced at Whitehaven Mansions. As he explains to Hastings, ‘Non, mon ami, I am not in my second childhood. I steady my nerves – that is all. This employment requires precision of the fingers. With precision of the fingers goes precision of the brain.’ An expert was brought in to help me hone my skills in manipulating cards, which was rather fun, though I don’t think I would make a good magician.
The only irritation on the horizon is that he is also looking after a rather talkative parrot, a bird that Poirot hates. Hastings, meanwhile, is indulging his appetite for driving fast cars at Brooklands race track in Surrey. The delicious script was written by David Renwick, who would go on shortly afterwards to write the hugely successful BBC television comedy One Foot in the Grave.
In The Kidnapped Prime Minister Andrew allowed me to expand on Poirot’s supreme confidence in himself. The story first appeared in a London illustrated weekly, the Sketch, in April 1923, as part of a series of twelve, but was quickly included in the collection of Dame Agatha’s stories, Poirot Investigates, which was originally published in the United States.
Set against the background of the Versailles Peace Conference in the wake of the ending of the First World War, it opens with the kidnap of the British Prime Minister, who is on his way to address a League of Nations disarmament conference near Paris and is intent on stopping any possibility of German re-armament. Alone with his chauffeur, the Prime Minister boards a ferry to Boulogne, but disappears in France. The British government ask for Poirot’s help and put a destroyer at his disposal to transport him to France immediately.