Poirot and Me

by David Suchet

  That only contrives to reveal Poirot’s fear of sea-sickness. As he tells Hastings in the original story, ‘It is the villainous sea that troubles me! The mal de mer – it is horrible suffering!’ He is in no hurry to climb aboard the warship, and insists that he will start his search for the Prime Minister in England. Hastings and the Leader of the House of Commons cannot understand it, but the little Belgian is unmoved.

  Poirot then outlines one of the central tenets of his attitude to solving a case, one which he returns to time and again.

  ‘It is not so that the good detective should act, eh?’ Dame Agatha had him say in her original story. ‘I perceive your thought. He must be full of energy. He must rush to and fro. He should prostrate himself on the dusty road and seek the marks of tyres through a little glass. He must gather up the cigarette-end, the fallen match? That is your idea, is it not?’

  Poirot fundamentally disagrees, and Dame Agatha has him say so firmly.

  ‘But I – Hercule Poirot – tell you that it is not so! The true clues are within – here!’ He tapped his forehead. ‘All that matters is the little grey cells within. Secretly and silently they do their part, until suddenly I call for a map, and I lay my finger on a spot – so – and I say: the Prime Minister is there! And it is so.’

  It is precisely the technique that Poirot depends on time after time.

  There is another element in The Kidnapped Prime Minister that reveals another of the similarities between Poirot and me: the question of the English class system.

  Throughout her stories, Dame Agatha was never afraid to criticise, and sometimes make fun of, the British upper class and their habits. As my character note number sixty-two about him puts it: ‘HATES the English class system.’ It is not just that Poirot calls tea ‘the English poison’, it is also that he is wary of accepting what might be called the British habit of respecting people of their own class, regardless of what the reality about them might be, and I must say I agree with him.

  Although he is a Belgian, a refugee who arrived during the First World War, he emulates the British in his clothes and his manners, considering himself like an English doctor in Harley Street, and is content to observe what he regards as their strange customs. But he does not care, and neither do I, for the British respect for class, and what are so often called ‘good chaps’. Time after time throughout his stories, Poirot rails against the British tendency to accept anything someone regarded as a ‘good chap’ says without a moment of hesitation.

  I agree with him. It is another area in which Poirot and I are as one. I don’t know exactly why that is, but it is absolutely true. Perhaps it has something to do with my parents, or my own sense of being an outsider, even though I was born in London, but it is there anyway, one more thing that links Poirot and me.

  In fact, it is Poirot’s dislike of the restrained attitude of the English upper class that lies at the heart of the last, and most important, film of my second series as Poirot – a story that reveals, as my character note number fifty-five says, ‘Doesn’t like the English “reserve”. Thinks the English are mad.’

  Chapter 7

  ‘I FELT THAT I HAD BECOME THE CUSTODIAN OF DAME AGATHA’S CREATION’

  The Mysterious Affair at Styles became our second two-hour television special at the end of the second series, and was scheduled to be broadcast to mark the centenary of Dame Agatha’s birth. Indeed, it premiered in England on 16 September 1990, exactly one day after the centenary of her birth in 1890, and almost fifteen years after her death in Oxfordshire in January 1976.

  What made it so significant for me, however, was that it was a television version of the very first crime novel Dame Agatha ever wrote, and the one that introduced the character of Hercule Poirot. It was a prequel to everything that I had done before in the nineteen stories we had already filmed.

  There was no doubt that London Weekend were intent on making it as fine a film as they possibly could. The script, once again by Clive Exton, felt like the screenplay for a feature film rather than a television special, not least in using a huge number of extras and vintage vehicles, which were needed to give a feeling of London in the First World War. The director was the talented fifty-year-old South African Ross Devenish, whose 1980 film Marigolds in August had won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival that year.

  Most of all, however, it gave me an opportunity to establish my Poirot from the very beginning of his career. The television audience may have seen the later Poirot, but they had never seen him as a younger man, shortly after he arrived in this country as a refugee from the German invasion of his native Belgium, forced to come to England to escape the carnage in his homeland.

  But this was not an especially cheerful Poirot story. This was a serious crime and a complex mystery, which was downbeat from the very beginning. One of the early scenes features a younger Lieutenant Hastings recovering from his war wounds in a ‘rather depressing’ convalescent home in England. In fact, when we first encounter him, Hastings and his fellow patients are watching a black and white newsreel about the latest battles on the Western Front, which is then followed by a brief item about the Belgian refugees that are flooding into England.

  It is just one of the many echoes in The Mysterious Affair at Styles of Dame Agatha’s own life as a young woman, as she had seen Belgian refugees billeted near her home town as the war began to take its toll.

  The story makes it worth recalling just a little about her upbringing. Born in the English seaside town of Torquay in September 1890, Agatha Miller started to write stories as a girl, during a bout of influenza, when her mother suggested that instead of telling stories – which she enjoyed doing – she should write them down. She did, and never lost the habit.

  Then, when Agatha Miller was a teenager, she and her elder sister Madge were discussing a murder-mystery they were both reading when Agatha announced that she’d like to try her hand at writing a detective story. Madge challenged her to do it, while suspecting privately that she would never be able to. It was a challenge that the teenager never forgot.

  By the time she was in her very early twenties, however, the young Miss Miller had one or two other things on her mind, not least the fact that she was being pursued by a number of young men with offers of marriage. Indeed, she even became engaged to one in 1912, at the age of twenty-two, only to break it off when she fell in love with the dashing Lieutenant Archibald Christie, the son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service and then serving with the Royal Field Artillery.

  Less than eighteen months later, Agatha Miller married Archie, now Captain Christie, who had joined the newly formed Royal Flying Corps. The ceremony took place on Christmas Eve 1914, and war with Germany had begun just four months earlier. Captain Christie went back to the Western Front just two days later, while his new wife went to work in Torbay Hospital in Torquay, nursing some of the first casualties to come back from Flanders.

  After eighteen months, she transferred to the hospital’s dispensary, where she would acquire the extensive knowledge of poisons that would eventually appear in her novels – not least in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It was during the quieter periods in the dispensary, in 1916, that the new Mrs Agatha Christie started writing what would be her first detective story, about that affair at Styles.

  To do so, she drew on her new husband’s experiences of the war, and on her own, as a nurse on the home front, treating the wounded, while also being well aware that England had provided a new home for some Belgian refugees – a colony had been billeted near her home in the parish of Tor in Torbay.

  Why not make one of them her fictional detective, the young Mrs Christie thought to herself. Perhaps he could be a retired police officer from the Belgian force, not too young.

  So Hercule Poirot was born, and the new Mrs Christie allowed the then still thirty-year-old Hastings to encounter Poirot – whom he had met before the war in Belgium, while working in insurance – during a trip away from his convalescent home. Hastings is invit
ed to stay at a country house belonging to the family of his boyhood friend John Cavendish, Styles Court, a mile or so outside the fictional village of Styles St Mary in Essex.

  The house is owned by John Cavendish’s stepmother, who, although she is over seventy, has recently re-married the distinctly shady Alfred Inglethorpe, twenty years her junior. He is an ‘absolute bounder’, according to John Cavendish, because he has ‘a great black beard and wears patent leather shoes in all weathers’. So the mystery begins.

  Written and set during the ‘war to end wars’, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published in London in 1920, to quite extraordinary success, launching its author’s career as the ‘Queen of English crime fiction’ in the twentieth century. More important for me, it also launched Hercule Poirot as a fictional detective who would come to rival the great Sherlock Holmes in the public’s affection around the world.

  To my mind, the story and the screenplay of The Mysterious Affair at Styles are both Dame Agatha and Clive Exton at their very best. It was no accident that the book was a huge best-seller, because it contains an extraordinary number of ingenious puzzles and a remarkable set of characters who live on in the memory.

  But, as I said, The Mysterious Affair at Styles is not exactly a conventional Poirot. There is rather less of a twinkle in his eye than in some of the other stories. The background of the war makes it sombre in tone, and Poirot’s attempt to settle into a new land is no laughing matter. He and his fellow Belgian refugees are struggling to understand the ways of their adopted homeland.

  In television terms, it is even more unusual, because Poirot does not appear until eleven minutes of the film have passed. The old movie adage of ‘putting the money on the screen’ by making sure the leading actor appears as close to the opening as possible was completely ignored. Indeed, to establish it as something quite different from the rest of the series, The Mysterious Affair at Styles does not even begin with the series titles and Christopher Gunning’s unmistakable theme music. Instead, it opens like a feature film, with wounded soldiers near Parliament Square in London, nurses ushering them to and fro, and a military band marching past.

  It is only after that establishing scene that the action shifts to Hastings’ convalescent home, where he is watching the newsreel. There too London Weekend took a risk. The black and white footage he and his fellow patients are watching was controversial at the time because it showed their fellow soldiers dying in the trenches, not something a prime-time television programme would normally air, as it would be deemed too distressing for an audience before the nine o’clock watershed, which could well include children.

  After the newsreel, Hastings encounters his old friend John Cavendish, who invites him down to Styles – located in Wiltshire, rather than Essex, in Clive Exton’s screenplay, though I was never quite sure why. When Hastings arrives, he meets John Cavendish’s wife Mary and his younger brother Lawrence; a girl called Cynthia, a protégé of Mrs Inglethorp, who works in the dispensary of the local hospital (another parallel with Dame Agatha’s life); and Evelyn Howard, a lady in her forties who works for the mistress of the house as a general assistant.

  When Mrs Inglethorp suddenly dies an agonising death in bed – another risk for ITV, as her death is incredibly graphic in the film – it is first thought that she has had a heart attack, but the local doctor quickly spots that it is murder by poisoning. The police are called, and, inevitably, suspicion falls on Mrs Inglethorp’s new husband, Alfred, who is suspected by the family of being a bounty hunter, only interested in Mrs Inglethorp’s considerable fortune.

  By the time of the murder, however, Poirot has only appeared briefly. In my first scene Poirot is encountered leading a string of his fellow Belgian refugees through a local wood, instructing them on the wonders of the English countryside. The first glimpse of Poirot is of his spats treading careful through the leaves – and it is the very first time the audience hears his theme music gently rising in the background.

  When Poirot first appears in full view, he is telling his fellow Belgians about one local plant, the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’, which, he says, only opens during a lengthy period of good weather. Poirot then pauses, and gives a wry smile. ‘It is seldom seen open in this country.’

  We then see Poirot leading his troop of Belgians across a river bridge, while attempting to sing the famous First World War song ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, even though their voices are clearly not up to it – and Poirot is patently tone deaf. Nevertheless, it instantly conveys the group’s attempt to show loyalty to their new homeland. It is the only time that Poirot sings in the entire canon of his stories, which was a great relief, as I would not describe myself as a singer.

  Just two minutes later, Hastings meets Poirot in the local post office, where the little man is attempting to persuade the postmistress to arrange the spices in the shop to reflect their countries of origin – those from India to the east, those from Africa to the south, and so on – only for her to tell him that she knows exactly where all the spice jars are, and, besides, they all come ‘from the wholesaler’.

  The postmistress’s reaction pains Poirot deeply, because not having the jars and tins lined up in order of their size and placed in relation to their country of origin offends his sense of order and method, but there is nothing he can do. The story reveals that Hastings and Poirot have met before, when Hastings worked for Lloyd’s of London, and while Poirot was still serving with the Belgian police. Now in his sixties, he has since retired and is living in exile, because ‘the Boche have rendered my homeland uninhabitable’.

  It is not long after their encounter in the post office that Mrs Inglethorp dies and Hastings suggests recruiting Poirot to help in the investigation into her death. He goes to the cottage where he and his countrymen are staying and knocks on the door early in the morning. Poirot is in bed, but gets up and opens the window to talk to Hastings.

  It is to my eternal regret that this is one occasion when I totally let down the man I had become so close to. In the film, I open the window and look out without brushing my hair before doing so. Now, Poirot, the man I knew and loved, would never, ever, have done that. He would have brushed his hair carefully, no matter how urgent the knocking on his front door. To this day, I regret that I didn’t brush my hair before opening the window. Every time I see that scene, I feel I’ve let him down.

  Not surprisingly, the film’s costume designer was very anxious that I should look younger for my introduction in the story – after all, the action is taking place twenty years before most of the stories that I had already filmed – and so I wore a little less padding, and a bowler hat rather than a Homburg. I also wore a tie held in place by a silver ring at the throat, rather than a bow tie.

  But I kept every one of the mannerisms I had refined during the other films in the series, including his mincing walk and his tendency to keep his left hand firmly behind his back when he moves. ‘That is him,’ I told myself. ‘It is part of who he is, and has been throughout his life’.

  Privately, I was very glad I’d already filmed so many Poirots, for they gave me the confidence I needed to bring him alive in his first story. Had I filmed Styles first, I wonder if I would have had that same certainty about his character and his mannerisms. But my remaining true to the little man was made all the easier by Ross Devenish’s direction. He was a delight because he took an enormous interest in Poirot. He would come to my caravan on the set after we’d finished filming and sit for hours, talking to me about him.

  ‘Tell me who he is,’ Ross would say. ‘How does he feel? How does he think? How can we best bring him to life?’

  Now, I fully accept that it was becoming difficult for some of the directors who had come to work on the second series to deal with me. There is no denying it; I had become an actor who was desperate to hang on to what he believed was the only correct view of his character. I felt, by then, that I had become the custodian of Dame Agatha’s creation, and I was not going t
o allow anyone to dilute or alter anything that I felt strongly about. That made it difficult for some directors to deal with me – but that wasn’t the case with Ross, who only ever wanted to help me serve Poirot and his creator.

  I think that makes our version of The Mysterious Affair at Styles very special, for although it reveals Poirot’s eccentricity, his egotism, his extraordinary knowledge and his ironic sense of humour, it never once allows him to topple over and become a caricature. Ross and I wanted him to be as human as we possibly could make him.

  In the wake of Mrs Inglethorp’s death, Poirot accepts Hastings’ invitation to participate in the investigation without a moment’s pause, not least, he tells Hastings, because ‘she had kindly extended hospitality to seven of my country people, who, alas, are refugees from their native land . . . We Belgians will always remember her with gratitude.’

  It is at precisely this moment in the original story that Dame Agatha first describes Poirot, in some detail:

  ‘He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.’

  It was a description that I knew almost by heart, just as I remembered that when he first goes to Styles Court to inspect Mrs Inglethorp’s bedroom, the scene of her death, Dame Agatha describes him as having ‘darted from one object to the other with the agility of a grasshopper’. That phrase too was forever in my mind.

  Two other qualities that define him also appear in Dame Agatha’s first novel – her reference to Poirot’s ‘little grey cells’ and his assertion to Hastings: ‘I am not keeping back facts. Every fact that I know is in your possession. You can draw your own deductions from them.’