Hercule Poirot, the greatest sleuth (bar one) ever to stalk his prey through the body-littered pages, was born, I calculate, in 1844, only fourteen years after his native Belgium had broken away from Holland to become an independent kingdom. He died full of years, very full of years, in 1974, the circumstances of his demise – bizarre as even he, connoisseur of bizarre decease, could have wished – being reported some twelve months later as soon as his chronicler of old, Captain Arthur Hastings, could bring himself to set down the astonishing facts. Poirot departed this life then aged 130, or perhaps a bit more. It depends how old he is likely to have been when he retired, full of honour, from the Belgian Police in, we are told, 1904. A vigorous sixty then would have made him only 130, a more mature sixty-five would have brought him finally to 135, within sight indeed of all-time winner Abraham’s ‘a hundred three score and fifteen years’. But no one can tell. Poirot was always a little touchy on the subject of age. Precise figures are not to be found.
Not one of the records of his cases mentions dates definite enough to be of conclusive help. True, the affair of the Dead Man’s Mirror begins with a letter from Sir Gervase Chevenix-Gore, of Hamborough Close, Hamborough St Mary (Station: Whimperley. Telegrams: Hamborough St John) dated 24 September 1936. And it is also possible to fix the date on which Poirot attended Sunday Matins while solving so brilliantly the case it is convenient to call One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, or in America The Patriotic Murders. This must have been on 29 January 1939 since he joined in singing, in a hesitant baritone (and no wonder as he was probably aged 104) in that week’s Psalm 140. But mostly it is evidence such as the naming of a youth as Gary and the mention of a gardener’s television set in Dead Man’s Folly that enables us to say with conviction that his cases took place always about a year before the printed record was published.
So 1974 is the year of his final posthumous triumph, an affair that will be found to baffle with wonderful satisfaction almost everyone who reads it. It took place at Styles St Mary, scene of his first English murder. In my end is my beginning: it is fitting to quote T. S. Eliot, a poet who did not disdain to help himself verbatim from Conan Doyle’s The Musgrave Ritual for his Murder in the Cathedral.
And Poirot’s last words, whispered to his friend of many years, Captain Hastings, who had returned from the Argentine (at the youthful age, I estimate, of eighty-eight) were ‘Cher ami’. They thus neatly echoed the very first recorded words of the great Belgian sleuth uttered in 1916 (ascertainable date), ‘Mon ami, Hastings!’ Hard upon them came the first description of the ‘extraordinary looking little man’. We learn of his shortness of stature, ‘hardly more than five feet four inches’, of his way of nevertheless carrying himself with immense dignity, of the fact that his head was exactly the shape of an egg and that it was invariably perched a little to the left. And above all we learn of his moustaches, very stiff and military, waxed to the sharpest points, his pride and joy. And there was too the extreme neatness of his attire, indeed it is called ‘almost incredible’. We hear no mention at this time of his green eyes, but later we come across them often enough, getting significantly greener when a clue (often delectably misleading) rose up and at times even shining like a cat’s. But this was a phenomenon which in later, calmer days seems not to have been in evidence.
The extravagant gestures also escape mention at first encounter but later frequently horrify the staid English among whom the great detective came to spend his life. Occasionally (no, quite often) they are dextrously employed so as to knock over an ornament or similar object and thus prove something altogether startling. Once, a gesture more than usually ingenious, if a little hard to visualize, knocked off the pince-nez worn by the murderer’s faithful female accomplice in such a manner that Poirot was able to replace them by a pair he knew to have been worn by the killer, thus confirming, when the good lady failed to notice the substitution, an already formed hypothesis.
Poirot’s neatness was commented on at his first appearance, but it emerged only later that he almost invariably wore a correct black jacket, striped trousers and a bow-tie with, if the weather was anything less than hot, an overcoat and a muffler. And he had shiny boots, of patent leather, simultaneously acknowledging the paramount need to achieve a spotless appearance and declining to attain it in the properly British way, by the application of much polish and, if as was preferable a servant was doing the polishing, some spit. But those boots. How often our hero sacrificed their shininess in pursuing the criminal or in searching for some proof. Even when, in Evil Under the Sun, he substituted for them a pair of white suede shoes, which he wore with a suit of white duck and a panama hat, he found it necessary to besmirch their immaculateness by venturing almost to the edge of the sea. And how he hated the sea. It must have been only the necessity of crossing it that prevented him extending his triumphant career to the far side of the Atlantic.
Under panama or correct bowler lay, brushed with enormous exactitude, the hair which remained till his dying day an unrepentant black. It must even under the panama in that summer immediately before the Second World War have needed frequent applications of ‘a tonic, not a dye’, but for the significance of that jetty coiffure at the very end you must read Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case for yourself. It produces not the least of the genuine and effective coups de théâtre that enlivened the long, long career.
His manner of speech was as extravagant often as his gestures. It has been said of him that he broke into French for the easy phrases and was able to master English for the complex thoughts. But that is unfair, if only a little. Certainly he retained his inability to capture certain easy English idioms till the very end when he give us such simple delights as ‘the side of the bed manner’, fit to stand beside the early ‘money for the confiture, as you say’. And from time to time he did not forget to claim that his difficulties with English were in part assumed. They made people look on him as a foreigner, he would slyly point out, and thus someone in whom the outrageous could safely be confided since all Englishmen believe foreigners are naturally outrageous anyway.
Indeed, his foreignness was an asset all round. Its comicality gave him a proper quantum of the endearing as well as allowing him to be invariably successful without becoming odious. He could boast too, a useful accomplishment for the detective when matters are to be explained. And he could listen at keyholes and read other people’s letters, things which no decent Englishman has ever been known to do. But when his fearful foreignness brought him to the verge of being altogether too ridiculous his being a Belgian foreigner rescued him. He came, one would recall, from that sturdy ‘gallant little’ country. He was all right. Let Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt, as chronicled in 1937 by Mr Michael Innes in Hamlet, Revenge, give tongue: ‘There is a very good man whose name I forget, a foreigner and very conceited – but, they say, thoroughly reliable.’ English has no word of greater praise for a fellow than that ‘reliable’.
So Poirot became established in England, sharing London rooms at 14 Farraway Street with the faithful Hastings and with a landlady in attendance. He was conscious in these circumstances of certain similarities with a famous forbear, though Hastings sprouted no sudden medical qualification but had a job as secretary to an MP (name unspecified and political affiliation ignored) and the landlady emerged from total anonymity – no superbly named Hudson she – only by obligingly never laying breakfast or tea things with perfect symmetry and thus enabling Poirot to give vent to a characteristic trait.
It was indeed at Farraway Street that Poirot paid his most explicit homage to his great forerunner, in the startling affair of The Big Four. At the height of that extraordinary case – well, it included not only a mysterious Chinaman, but darts tipped with fatal curare, a bid for world domination and as well an instant anaesthetic with, for good measure, the capture of faithful old Hastings by threatening to make away with his wife in a lingering fashion (‘My God, you fiend’) – Poirot announced that this was a matter so serious that it called for the intervention of his brother. ‘Your brother,’ Hastings cried in astonishment, ‘I never knew you had a brother.’ ‘You surprise me, Hastings. Do you not know that all celebrated detectives have brothers who would be even more celebrated than they are were it not for constitutional indolence?’ Thus Achille Poirot was born, to die in the last thrilling pages when it is revealed that Hercule had temporarily sacrificed even his moustaches in order to create him, much as a Mrs Christie might sacrifice her accustomed tone of steady probability for one wild jeu d’esprit, or, as Poirot might say, the game of the spirit.
Hastings, who had been banished by a happy marriage to South America, returned for this escapade. But, dear arch-bumbler, he was soon sent packing again. The classic Holmes–Watson pattern has the great advantage of enabling a story-teller to have a detective who sees all but credibly does not tell all, but it is inclined to limit the type of case open to him when everything has to be seen through a dull pair of eyes. All too soon a useful device can become fossilized into a music-hall act.
So Poirot established himself alone, except for a loyal manservant Georges to whom portentous phrases could be addressed at the height of a case without too much danger of any answering back. Poirot chose as his new domicile Whitehaven Mansions, a newly built block of flats pleasing to him for its extreme symmetry. At the beginning of The Labours of Hercules (somebody loved parallels, with classical stories, with nursery rhymes, with herself) after a little introductory matter explaining that Poirot now intended finally, finally, finally to retire but would like to end his career with twelve cases that happened to correspond to the twelve tasks that confronted his illustrious namesake, we read of his new abode (telephone: TRAfalgar 8137): ‘Hercule Poirot’s flat was essentially modern in its furnishings. It gleamed with chromium. Its easy-chairs, though comfortably padded, were square and uncompromising in outline.’ And there was ‘a piece of good modern sculpture representing one cube placed on another cube and above it a geometrical arrangement of copper wire’. How he worked at being the detective every decent Englishman loves to hate.
But, of course, he did not retire. As one can tell from that sculpture, money was now rolling in. There were dozens of juicy clients, mostly only hinted at – a Home Secretary or two, various millionaires, a few princes and ‘the affair of the Ambassador’s boots’ (just a question of drug-smuggling, Poirot loftily explains). He could now indulge all his gastronomic whims to the full and would voluntarily round off a long dinner that had ended with baba au rhum not with your Englishman’s glass of port but with, ugh, crème de cacao. And the tisanes and camomile tea which the fellow would insist on when he could not get the thick sweet chocolate which he preferred to ‘your English poison’: it was enough to make anybody throw down his seven and sixpence on the bookshop counter in sheer disgust.
With wealth came influence. Now, in the 1930s, at the peak of success, describing himself no longer as a private detective but as ‘a consultant’ and still always threatening final, final, final, final retirement, he had at the beck and the call, as he might have said, a small host of useful people. Of course, replacing Hastings as his chronicler with another dull dog narrator (though he was a medical man) in that affair which caused an unparalleled sensation in 1926, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was not exactly a success, except in literary terms. ‘Some readers,’ said a certain Mrs Christie, ‘have cried indignantly “Cheating”, an accusation that I have had pleasure in refuting by calling attention to various turns of phrasing and careful wording.’
But for everyday assistance he now had the impeccably efficient Miss Lemon as secretary and if the rough work of detection was to be done the Home Office was always now ready to oblige with instant labour and the Chief Constable of almost every county was in his debt. Major This or Colonel That was invariably ready to let this brilliant amateur in on an investigation, especially since they were generally conducting them themselves with more military panache than cerebral ingenuity. But most of Poirot’s information came from Detective Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard, little dark, ferret-faced Jimmy Japp, as he is called when first we meet him at Styles Court. He too managed to go on tracking down criminals over an awesome length of time. More than thirty years after the first collaboration he was still at the Yard, though now a Chief Inspector (there’s rapid promotion for you, and after all those successes for which Poirot had let him take the credit), though by that time he had learnt to say ‘Monsieur’ instead of ‘Moosier’.
Perhaps it is right to add to the list of Poirot’s affiliates Mrs Ariadne Oliver, the celebrated author of detective stories, a lady who bore a noticeable resemblance to that other celebrated crime author, Dame Agatha Christie. And also had some distinct differences, such as hair that was often windswept and a magnificent booming contralto where Dame Agatha possessed, according to one of her biographers, ‘a rather high soprano voice’. Poirot and Mrs Oliver collaborated in a number of cases, Dead Man’s Folly, Third Girl, and Elephants Can Remember. This last, clearly describing a period not long before its publication in 1972, recorded Poirot’s penultimate triumph. He would then have been about 127 and did complain from time to time about the effects of age. But his ‘little grey cells’ – that famous and eventually self-mocked phrase which became the term for the brain adopted by a whole African tribe – were still in fine working order and Poirot was still mightily proud of their powers.
Pride, even cockiness, was perhaps his chief characteristic. In Murder in the Mews he himself says to the good Japp: ‘If I committed a murder you would not have the least chance of seeing how I set about it,’ a boast not to be fulfilled till the very curtain fell. But the cockiness is not without justification. Poirot is truly shrewd. Listen to him: ‘To deceive deliberately – that is one thing. But to be so sure of your facts, of your ideas and of their essential truth that details do not matter – that, my friend, is a special characteristic of particularly honest persons.’ And there are dozens of other examples every bit as perceptive.
The shrewdness sprang from an unalterable belief in the rational. ‘We shall know! The power of the human brain, Hastings, is almost unlimited.’ And it is this constant appeal to the rational, expressed or implied, that was perhaps the reason for the tremendous popularity of the accounts of his adventures when the world outside was increasingly swept by gusts of irrationality.
‘Order and method’ was ever his cry. And, though on occasion he might spot a clue which lesser investigators had missed, he vehemently denounced frenzied searching for clues as such. As early as Murder on the Links, his second recorded case, he asked the faithful Hastings if he ever went fox-hunting. ‘A bit.’ ‘But you did not descend from your horse and run along the ground smelling with your nose and uttering loud “Ow, ows”?’ Hastings solemnly took the point, though as a matter of recorded fact on at least two occasions later Poirot did actually use his own nose in a plainly clue-hunting way, once indeed to smell the cigarette smoke that was not there, classic instance.
He liked to work by hitting on a series of ‘little ideas’. That, he used to say, was the first stage. Then the second stage would come, when a little idea proved correct. ‘Then I know!’ It was usually at the ‘little ideas’ stage that he would produce one of those lists of marvellously obscure questions. Why did the paper bag which he had seized on from the drawing-room waste-paper basket smell of oranges? Simple. It had been brought into the room under pretext of containing oranges so that at the right moment it could be inflated and popped so as to sound like a pistol shot fired at a time when the murderer could not have got to the place where the murder happened.
Little ideas enabled Poirot to conquer one of the gravest problems that can face the Great Detective: how not to solve, since one is pretty well omniscient, each puzzle the moment its facts have been made clear. By having small, but always properly startling, successes early on Poirot could postpone the great success till decently near the end of the book. Then it was: ‘Quick, Hastings. I have been blind, imbécile. Quick, a taxi.’ On occasion he described himself as triple imbecile, and once he admitted to thirty-six times imbecile.
The rational in Poirot reflected a basic seriousness. ‘I have a bourgeois attitude to murder. I disapprove of it.’ He goes so far, in ‘The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman’, one of his shorter exploits, as to claim: ‘Never do I pull the leg.’ That was just not true: he used to tease poor gawping Hastings unmercifully.
Finally, as in the Who’s Who which Poirot so frequently pulled from his shelves when a possibly illustrious client was observed approaching, let us list the great man’s ‘recreations’. They included bridge (one whole adventure, Cards on the Table, is ingeniously devoted to it and he has a characteristically shrewd observation about those women players who declare with total confidence ‘And the rest are mine’) and detective fiction, of which to judge by his remarks in The Clocks he was an omnivorous devourer.
But there is one other area of interest (to those of us of a later vintage than Poirot – and given that natal date who could be otherwise? – of almost mandatory importance, though it has yet to be included in the Who’s Who questionnaire): ‘sexual proclivities?’ Well, Poirot was, of course, never married, but if we run along the ground smelling with the nose on that track various ‘little ideas’ do spring up. Why, for instance, was he quite so fond of a duffer like Captain Hastings? Hastings, naturally, bumbled through their long friendship in total innocence. ‘The embrace,’ he remarked when in ‘The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan’ Poirot had threatened to put his arms round him, ‘was merely figurative – not a thing one is always sure of with Poirot.’ Indeed, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles ‘suddenly clasping me in his arms, he kissed me warmly on both cheeks’.
Next, snuffle up an attitude to the opposite sex which, set aside some conventional words of praise, was always apt to be indifferent (with the exception of that significantly ample figure the Countess Rossakoff, encountered in several of the adventures) and was more than once actively hostile. ‘Histoire de femmes,’ he exclaimed with biting contempt in the wake of the departing film star Mary Marvell in ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’. Even more significantly in After the Funeral he observed with savage brevity: ‘Women are never kind, though they can sometimes be tender.’
One type of woman, it comes now as no surprise to find, he was always ready to find tender. In the closing pages of Murder on the Links he solemnly advises Jack: ‘Go to your mother.’ Tell her everything, he urges. ‘Your love for each other has been tested in the fire and not found wanting.’ To the Dowager Duchess of Merton he declares: ‘I comprehend the mother’s heart.’ To Lady Yardly, almost as well-born, he says with a low bow, and in simple French: ‘Vous êtes bonne mère.’ No wonder that when a few minutes later Lady Yardly was found senseless on the floor after her great diamond had vanished she was, in Hastings’ words, ‘aptly ministered to by Poirot, who is as good as a woman in these matters’.
But there is one more clue. Think about that passage in Peril at End House where, addressing the Modern Miss heroine, he says: ‘To me the natural thing seems to have a coiffure high and rigid – so – and the hat attached with many hairpins – là-là-là-et là’ executing four vicious jabs in the air. ‘When the wind blew,’ he added ‘it was agony – it gave you the migraine.’ Now has the ‘little idea’ progressed to the point of ‘I know’? We shall never learn the answer. Poirot has taken his secret to the grave. And, of course, to know is the last thing we really want. Let him rest in peace, aged 130.