All posts tagged OCD

Aspects of Hercule Poirot

‘Now then, you old dog. I know you Frenchmen!’
Poirot said coldly: ‘I am not a Frenchman!’
(Evil Under The Sun)

‘I prefer the life of the innocent to the conviction of the guilty.’

Poirot’s appearance

Short. Egg-shaped head.

Eyes light up green when he’s excited / on the trail.

Poirot sat up suddenly in his chair. A very faint green light glowed in his eyes. He looked extraordinarily like a sleek, well-fed cat. (The Mystery of the Blue Train, Chapter 17)

Poirot is short

Sherlock Holmes is what people expect of a master detective – tall (a shade over 6 foot), commanding and authoritative. Whereas Poirot is short – everyone comments on it, on how ‘small’ he is i.e. against the masculine stereotype.

Poirot is dapper

When necessary, Holmes is a dab hand with his fists and ready to whip his fencing sword out of his walking stick. The new breed of action heroes born during the war – John Buchan’s Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot, along with Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond – are even handier with their fists or the nearest weapon. None of them mind getting filthy dirty driving cars or flying airplanes or hiding out on the boggy moors.

Poirot couldn’t be more the opposite of this if he tried. He is not only short, but abhors physical violence and, above all, he is dapper, almost an aesthete – endlessly preening his moustaches and absurdly fussy about even a speck of dust landing on his perfectly pressed trousers.

Poirot’s age

I don’t think it’s stated anywhere, but what is stated, repeatedly, is other characters considering him over the hill, antique. In fact Christie has characters use the same slang expression, ‘gaga’, in numerous books.

After a minute Rosamund said: ‘That little man—Poirot—is he really taking an active interest!’
Kenneth Marshall said: ‘Seemed to be sitting in the Chief Constable’s pocket all right the other day.’
‘I know—but is he doing anything?’
‘How the hell should I know, Rosamund?’
She said thoughtfully: ‘He’s pretty old. Probably more or less ga ga.’
(Evil Under the Sun, Chapter 9)

Here, as in other aspects of his character, Poirot is obviously lulling the other characters and, to some extent the reader, into a false sense of complacency about him – before, of course, he solves the whole thing.

Poirot’s address

His (fictional) address is 56B Whitehaven Mansions, Sandhurst Square, London W1.

In the long-running ITV series starring David Suchet, Poirot’s apartment block was represented by Florin Court, Charterhouse Square, London EC1.

Poirot’s egotism

‘My name is Hercule Poirot,’ he said quietly, ‘and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.’
(The Mystery of the Blue Train, chapter 17)

It amused her to see the little man plume himself like a bird, thrusting out his chest, and assuming an air of mock modesty that would have deceived no one.
(The Mystery of the Blue Train, Chapter 21)

‘You are – you are a detective, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Mademoiselle.’
‘A very well-known detective?’
‘The best detective in the world,’ said Poirot, stating it as a simple truth, no more, no less.(Appointment with Death, part 2, chapter 12)

‘Believe me – really – it would be better not to ask them. I am in good hands. Mr Seddon has been most kind. I am to have a very famous counsel.’
Poirot said:
‘He is not so famous as I am!’
Elinor Carlisle said with a touch of weariness:
‘He has a great reputation.’
‘Yes, for defending criminals. I have a great reputation – for demonstrating innocence.’
(Sad Cypress, part 2, chapter 11)

‘I want to show you, mademoiselle, that even in a small unimportant matter, I am something of a magician. There are things I know without having to be told.’
(Five Little Pigs, part 3)

Poirot’s foreignness

Because he is a foreigner in England, Poirot is outside the strict English class system. This allows him to make comic remarks about England’s appalling cuisine or the Englishman’s obsession with mindless sports. It also gives him leeway to intrude beyond the bounds of politeness which might restrain an English detective, as he explains to Roddy Welman in ‘Sad Cypress’:

Poirot said: ‘I apologize – I apologize deeply! It is so hard – to be a detective and also a pukka sahib. As it is so well expressed in your language, there are things that one does not say. But, alas, a detective is forced to say them! He must ask questions: about people’s private affairs, about their feelings.’
(Sad Cypress, part 2, chapter 6)

And it also exposes him to occasional xenophobia.

In the awesome majesty of Mrs Bishop’s black-clad presence Hercule Poirot sat humbly insignificant. The thawing of Mrs Bishop was no easy matter. For Mrs Bishop, a lady of Conservative habits and views, strongly disapproved of foreigners. And a foreigner most indubitably Hercule Poirot was. Her responses were frosty and she eyed him with disfavour and suspicion.
(Sad Cypress, part 2, chapter 4)

He is regularly described as making a ‘foreign’ gesture:

Hercule Poirot said:
‘But, then…?’
He spread out his hands in a wide, appealing foreign gesture.

Poirot is Belgian, not French

It may have been a semi-random stroke to make him Belgian – at the end of her life Christie could only remember it being something to do with the Belgian refugees who arrived in her home town of Torquay at the start of the war – but it had an interesting effect.

This is that most people think he is French and, when Poirot frostily reminds them that he is, in fact Belgian, it unnerves people. It puts them off their stroke. English people, specially in the 1920s and ’30s, had familiar received opinions about the French, but this need to correct almost everyone he speaks to, subtly gives him the advantage, subtly wrongfoots people, and indeed introduces the very notion of subtle distinctions, the noticing of which is very much Poirot’s profession.

Poirot’s method

  1. Trust no-one – everyone is a suspect until proven innocent.
  2. Every witness keeps something back, no matter how trivial, sometimes unconsciously.
  3. Seek out who the crime benefits.
  4. Use order and method to establish the facts and arrange them logically.
  5. Then employ ‘the little grey cells’ to come up with ‘little ideas’ i.e. draft theories, which connect the facts.
  6. Accept no theory which doesn’t accommodate all the facts i.e. don’t jump to conclusions or hold onto pet theories which there is evidence disproving.
  7. Finally, your theory must be congruent with psychology i.e. with the characters of the people involved.

Suspect everyone

‘I am a good detective. I suspect. There is nobody and nothing that I do not suspect. I believe nothing that I am told.’ (Chapter 35)

Arrange the facts in a logical order

  • ‘Let us arrange our facts with order and precision…’
  • ‘I mean nothing,’ said Poirot. ‘I arrange the facts, that is all.’
  • ‘It is nothing,’ said Poirot modestly. ‘Order, method, being prepared for eventualities beforehand—that is all there is to it.’ (all from The Mystery of the Blue Train)

Do not suppress awkward facts

Your theory must fit all the facts. If any facts stick out, do not ignore them (as Inspector Japp notoriously does), adapt your theory.

‘It is certainly curious,’ I agreed. ‘Still, it is unimportant, and need not be taken into account.’
A groan burst from Poirot.
‘What have I always told you? Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory—let the theory go.’
(The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Chapter 5)

And then, the theory you derive from all the facts must pass the final, most important threshold – it must comply with the psychology of the people involved, it must be psychologically plausible,

Poirot and psychology

Psychological plausibility is the last and most important criterion any theory must comply with.

‘The psychology, it is the most important fact in a case.’

In ‘Appointment with Death’ Colonel Carbury asks Poirot how he proposes to solve the murder mystery and Poirot gives a handy summary of his method:

‘By methodical sifting of the evidence, by a process of reasoning… And by a study of psychological probabilities.’ (p.127)

But Christie had a wide-ranging interest in psychology from the start, in at least 3 senses:

1. A key part of Poirot’s methodology is that, once you’ve assembled all the facts and data, the solution must not only fit the facts and evidence you’ve gathered, it must go further and have a psychological plausibility i.e. the person the evidence points towards must be psychologically consistent with a murderer.

The perfect solution must explain everything.

‘It was a solution that fitted the outer facts, but it did not satisfy the psychological requirements.’ (Chapter 28)

2. The psychological moment. In his reconstructions of murders, Poirot often points out that they occur at just the right moment, at a psychological tipping point.

3. General theories of psychological types or personalities e.g. the discussion of inferiority complexes and other complexes in ‘The ABC Murders’.

Dr Tanios was sitting in an armchair reading one of Poirot’ s books on psychology. (Chapter 23)

Or the extended discussion about human nature between doctors Gerard and King in ‘Appointment with Death’.

Poirot’s talking method

The best way to achieve this psychological accuracy, to know whether this or that action could have been performed by this or that character, is to let people talk – either in formal interview situations (which occur in so many of the novels soon after the murder) or in the numerous informal conversations Poirot happens to / manages to have with all the key characters. Let people talk long enough and sooner or later they will reveal themselves!

‘To investigate a crime it is only necessary to let the guilty party or parties talk.’ (Appointment with Death p.217)

Explained at greater length in Death in the Clouds:

‘What a horrible, tricky sort of person you are, M. Poirot,’ said Jane, rising. ‘I shall never know why you are saying things.’
‘That is quite simple. I want to find out things.’
‘I suppose you’ve got very clever ways of finding out things?’
‘There is only one really simple way.’
‘What is that?’
‘To let people tell you.’
Jane laughed.
‘Suppose they don’t want to?’
‘Everyone likes talking about themselves.’
‘I suppose they do,’ admitted Jane.
‘That is how many a quack makes a fortune. He encourages patients to come and sit and tell him things. How they fell out of the perambulator when they were two, and how their mother ate a pear and the juice fell on her orange dress, and how when they were one and a half they pulled their father’s beard; and then he tells them that now they will not suffer from the insomnia any longer, and he takes two guineas; and they go away, having enjoyed themselves – oh, so much – and perhaps they do sleep.’
‘How ridiculous,’ said Jane.
‘No, it is not so ridiculous as you think. It is based on a fundamental need of human nature – the need to talk – to reveal oneself.’
(Death in the Clouds, Chapter 16)

Poirot’s Eureka moment

Towards the end of every story, there’s a Eureka moment when the penny drops, and when Poirot always describes himself as a fool or imbecile for not seeing it sooner.

Then he uttered a grunt. ‘Imbecile that I am! Of course!’ (Dumb Witness, Chapter 23)

Poirot’s big reveal

‘You are probably wondering why I have gathered you all here this evening…

In the course of my association with Poirot I had assisted at many such a scene. A little company of people, all outwardly composed with well-bred masks for faces. And I had seen Poirot strip the mask from one face and show it for what it was – the face of a killer!
(Dumb Witness, Chapter 29)

Actually this classic scene doesn’t happen quite as often as legend suggests, only about 4 or 5 times in the 20 or so novels I’ve read.

Poirot likes to make things difficult

Early on in the books Inspector Japp accuses Poirot of deliberately making everything he’s involved with more difficult than it need be, and thereafter the phrase and accusation recur regularly as, for example, in this little exchange between Poirot and an exasperated Jane Olivera in ‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’.

‘Is she dead?’
‘I have not said so.’
‘She’s alive, then?’
‘I have not said that either.’
Jane looked at him with irritation. She exclaimed:
‘Well, she’s got to be one or the other, hasn’t she?’
‘Actually, it’s not quite so simple.’
‘I believe you just like making things difficult!’
‘It has been said of me,’ admitted Hercule Poirot.

Poirot’s OCD

I knew about obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) but it was only from reading around Poirot that I discovered the existence of symmetry OCD. According to the internet:

Symmetry OCD is a subtype of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) where individuals experience intense anxiety or distress related to the alignment, arrangement, or balance of objects and even their own actions. This can manifest as a need for things to be perfectly symmetrical, aligned, or ‘just right’, leading to repetitive behaviours like arranging, ordering, or touching items to achieve this perceived perfection.

Two points. 1) Obviously Poirot’s tendency to rearrange trivial household objects, on a mantelpiece or table top, is intended as an external corollary of his internal need to arrange the facts of a case with method and order and logic. All part of the same tendency. Everything in a case must be arranged just so:

‘But one does not like things that one cannot explain.’ (One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, p.217)

And again, in ‘Evil Under The Sun’:

‘My orderly mind, that is vexed by trifles!’ (Chapter 8)

But 2) the noteworthy thing about Poirot’s OCD is actually, I think, how restrained Christie is about it. In most of the novels there is only one minor momentary instance of Poirot rearranging things: blink and you’d miss it – and in some of the novels it’s not even mentioned at all. I.e. it’s done with surprising subtlety. Just one mention per book is enough to make the point.

Poirot took a little time to speak. Methodically he arranged an ash-tray or two and made a little heap of used matches. (Appointment with Death, p.127)

It’s in ‘Appointment with Death’ that we learn that Poirot insists on cleaning his own shoes. He takes everywhere his own little shoe-cleaning outfit and duster (AWD, p.150). Sweet.

Poirot’s house of cards

In ‘Peril at End House’ Poirot sends Hastings to buy a pack of cards so that he can sit quietly making houses of cards with them. Helps him think. Again, like the OCD, this is underplayed rather than over-used. In fact it only happens once in the 20 or so novels I’ve read.

That night, when I came into the sitting-room about ten o’clock, I found Poirot carefully building card houses – and I remembered! It was an old trick of his – soothing his nerves. He smiled at me.
‘Yes – you remember. One needs the precision. One card on another – so – in exactly the right place and that supports the weight of the card on top and so on, up.’
(‘Peril at End House’, Chapter 17)

Poirot smokes tiny cigarettes

Hercule Poirot, with care and precision, lighted a very tiny cigarette.
(Sad Cypress, part 2, Chapter 1)

Poirot… extracted his cigarette case and lit one of those tiny cigarettes which it was his affection to smoke.
(Evil Under The Sun, Chapter 2)

The bourgeois detective

Jane Olivera is a feisty young American woman who takes against Poirot from the start. But she is the only one who insults him in quite this way:

She paused, then, her agreeable, husky voice deepening, she said venomously: ‘I loathe the sight of you – you bloody little bourgeois detective!’
She swept away from him in a whirl of expensive model drapery. Hercule Poirot remained, his eyes very wide open, his eyebrows raised and his hand thoughtfully caressing his moustaches.
The epithet bourgeois was, he admitted, well applied to him. His outlook on life was essentially bourgeois, and always had been, but the employment of it as an epithet of contempt by the exquisitely turned out Jane Olivera gave him, as he expressed it to himself, furiously to think…
(One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, p.156)

Poirot’s sidekicks

Captain Hastings

Poirot is associated, not least because of the ITV dramatisations, with well-meaning but slow and dim sidekick Captain Arthur Hastings. Hastings appears in Christie’s very first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles – in fact he narrates it – before going on to appear in seven further novels:

  • The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
  • The Murder on the Links (1923)
  • The Big Four (1927)
  • Peril at End House (1932)
  • Lord Edgware Dies (1933)
  • The A.B.C. Murders (1936)
  • Dumb Witness (1937)

And there his presence ends until the final Poirot novel, Curtain which, although written in the early 1940s, wasn’t published until 1975.

Hastings obviously plays the role of the Dr Watson figure, the confidant to the great detective, allowing him to ponder the evidence and work through theories out loud, as it were, so that the reader can overhear every stage of the great man’s developing theory, which is half the fun of a detective novel. No sidekick, everything would be locked up in the great man’s mind.

In addition, Hastings is a comic character because he is consistently wrong, slow on the uptake and quick to draw completely the wrong conclusions. Somewhere Poirot explicitly states that he loves having Hastings around because whenever he makes a suggestion or theory, Poirot can be confident it’s wrong and remove it from his list.

But even as I read  the novels through, I myself became bored with Hastings. His dimness wears thin, as does his rather creepy habit of falling in love with any nubile young woman involved in the plot. I can see why Christie eventually dropped him altogether. There are 33 Poirot novels and Hastings appears in just eight.

Colonel Race

Christie’s maturing taste and style are reflected by the appearance of Colonel Race to play the sidekick role. As an Army officer and secret service agent, Race is a much more intelligent and reliable confidant, much more at Poirot’s own level of keen intelligence and insight. He plays a leading role in four novels:

  • The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)
  • Cards on the Table (1936)
  • Death on the Nile (1937)
  • Sparkling Cyanide (1945)

as well as being mentioned in Appointment with Death (1938).

So Poirot has sidekicks to confide in and share the sleuthing with in about 12 of the novels, meaning he is much more of a solo operator in the other 20 or so.

Poirot’s one woman

Sherlock Holmes admired just one woman, the one woman who had outwitted him, Irene Adler, who he ever afterwards refers to as ‘the Woman’.

Well, in another straight steal from Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie gives her world famous detective One Woman who he from time to time remembers with a wistful sigh. In the middle of ‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’, Poirot goes for a walk through Regents Park, noting the nursemaids and courting couples, young people everywhere:

They were chic, these little London girls. They wore their tawdry clothes with an air. Their figures, however, he considered lamentably deficient. Where were the rich curves, the voluptuous lines that had formerly delighted the eye of an admirer?

He, Hercule Poirot, remembered women… One woman, in particular – what a sumptuous creature – Bird of Paradise – a Venus… What woman was there amongst these pretty chits nowadays, who could hold a candle to Countess Vera Rossakoff? A genuine Russian aristocrat, an aristocrat to her fingertips! And also, he remembered, a most accomplished thief… One of those natural geniuses…

With a sigh, Poirot wrenched his thoughts away from the flamboyant creature of his dreams… (One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, p.186)

Poirot’s friends in high places

In ‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’, we learn that Poirot has friends in impressively high places – exactly like Sherlock Holmes he is said to have saved individual ministers’ bacon or even the entire government.

Poirot called at Scotland Yard and asked for Japp. When he was taken up to the Chief Inspector’s room: ‘I want to see Carter,’ said Hercule Poirot. Japp shot him a quick, sideways glance. He said:
‘What’s the big idea?’
‘You are unwilling?’
Japp shrugged his shoulders. He said: ‘Oh, I shan’t make objections. No good if I did. Who’s the Home Secretary’s little pet? You are. Who’s got half the Cabinet in his pocket? You have. Hushing up their scandals for them.’
Poirot’s mind flew for a moment to that case that he had named the Case of the Augean Stables. He murmured, not without complacence: ‘It was ingenious, yes? You must admit it.’
(One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, p.173)

Sentiments echoed by the CID officer in charge of the Elinor Welman case in ‘Sad Cypress’:

Inspector Marsden smiled indulgently. He said:
‘Got the present Home Secretary in your pocket, haven’t you?’
(Sad Cypress, part 2, chapter 8)

Poirot gets seasick

Miss Brewster, noting the glance, said kindly: ‘You’d soon get that off, M. Poirot, if you took a rowing‐boat out every day.’
‘Merci, Mademoiselle. I detest boats!’
‘You mean small boats?’
‘Boats of all sizes!’ He closed his eyes and shuddered. ‘The movement of the sea, it is not pleasant.’
‘Bless the man, the sea is as calm as a mill pond today.’
Poirot replied with conviction: ‘There is no such thing as a really calm sea. Always, always, there is motion.’
(Evil Under The Sun, Chapter 1)

Poirot’s pitilessness

At the end of ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, having established the identities of the murderers, Poirot famously (well, it’s famous if you know about it) lets them off, letting the authorities believe a false version of events. This is because the murdered man turns out to himself have been a disgusting child murderer and all the murderers had been affected by his terrible crime.

No such luck, though, for the Boynton family in ‘Appointment with Death’. When the evil matriarch, Mrs Boynton, is bumped off suspicion falls on all of them. It takes an outsider, Nadine, married to the (grown-up) son, to beg Poirot to stop his investigations and let the family, which has suffered so much, get on with their lives. But Poirot says no.

Nadine said passionately: ‘I have heard, M. Poirot, that once, in that affair of the Orient Express, you accepted an official verdict of what had happened?’
Poirot looked at her curiously. ‘I wonder who told you that.’
‘Is it true?’
He said slowly: ‘That case was… different.’
‘No. No, it was not different! The man who was killed was evil,’ her voice dropped, ‘as she was…’
Poirot said: ‘The moral character of the victim has nothing to do with it! A human being who has exercised the right of private judgment and taken the life of another human being is not safe to exist amongst the community. I tell you that! I, Hercule Poirot!’
‘How hard you are!’
‘Madame, in some ways I am adamant. I will not condone murder! That is the final word of Hercule Poirot.’
(Book 2, chapter 7)

Same thing happens in ‘Sad Cypress’. Dr Lord argues that even if the woman he loves, Elinor Welman, did murder Mary Gerrard, it was out of jealousy founded on love for the man Mary had won from her (Roddy). Love does funny things to people and so, on that basis, he wants Poirot to investigate the case and help get her off even if she did it. He says:

‘Supposing she was driven desperate? Love’s a desperate and twisting business. It can turn a worm into a fine fellow—and it can bring a decent, straight man down to the dregs! Suppose she did do it. Haven’t you got any pity?’
Hercule Poirot said:
‘I do not approve of murder.’
(Sad Cypress, part 2, chapter 1)

Poirot’s favourite foods

Poirot has a very sweet tooth. He always drinks chocolate for breakfast, a revolting habit according to Captain Hastings in ‘Dumb Witness’. And again:

George entered the room with his usual noiseless tread. He set down on a little table a steaming pot of chocolate and some sugar biscuits.
(One, Two, Buckle My Shoe)

But in ‘Evil Under The Sun’:

Hercule Poirot breakfasted in his room as usual off coffee and rolls.

Well, Christie isn’t on oath to be consistent.

In ‘Lord Edgware Dies’ we learn that Poirot’s favourite dessert is a Baba au Rhum i.e. rum baba.

Poirot’s favourite drink is the non-alcoholic sirop de cassis, ‘syrup of the blackcurrants’ as he puts it, or blackcurrant cordial, not unlike the English cordial, Ribena. In ‘Death on the Nile’ he drinks ‘a double orangeade full of sugar’. No wonder he’s so tubby.

I thought this sweet tooth was going to be ubiquitous but in xxx he also drinks wine and, being Francophone, it is hinted that he is a connoisseur, though this is nowhere dwelled on.

Poirot on English cuisine

‘The coffee in this country is very bad anyway—’ said Poirot.
‘I’ll say it is,’ agreed Mr Raikes with fervour.
‘But if you allow it to get cold it is practically undrinkable.’
(One, Two, Buckle My Shoe)

Like any sensible person, he dislikes tea, or at least the way the English make it, milky and sweet.

Nurse Hopkins was hospitable with the teapot, and a minute later Poirot was regarding with some dismay a cup of inky beverage.
‘Just made—nice and strong!’ said Nurse Hopkins.
Poirot stirred his tea cautiously and took one heroic sip.
(Sad Cypress, part 2, chapter 13)

Poirot’s watch

In her biography of Christie, Laura Thompson says she wasn’t a very humorous woman. Maybe, but her books are. Her books are full of delightful little comic touches. That’s why I read them.

Poirot glanced at his watch, a large grotesque turnip of a watch.
‘Family heirloom?’ enquired Carbury, interestedly.
‘But yes indeed, it belonged to my grandfather.’
‘Thought it might have done.’
(Appointment with Death, Chapter 15)

Poirot likes shoes and feet

‘I came out from my séance at the dentist’s and as I stood on the steps of 58 Queen Charlotte Street, a taxi stopped outside, the door opened and a woman’s foot prepared to descend. I am a man who notices a woman’s foot and ankle. It was a well-shaped foot, with a good ankle and an expensive stocking, but I did not like the shoe…’
(One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, p.215)

Later, in Evil Under The Sun, sitting with oldsters on the terrace of a hotel looking down on rows of half-naked sunbathers:

Major Barry said appreciatively: ‘Good‐looking fillies, some of ’em. Bit on the thin side, perhaps.’
Poirot cried: ‘Yes, but what appeal is there? What mystery? I, I am old, of the old school. When I was young, one saw barely the ankle. The glimpse of a foamy petticoat, how alluring! The gentle swelling of the calf – a knee – a beribboned garter –’
‘Naughty, naughty!’ said Major Barry hoarsely.
(Evil under the Sun, Chapter 1)

Poirotisms

I’ve mentioned how Poirot’s foreignness is raised a number of times. It can also be used for pure comic purposes, as when Christie has Poirot mangle an English proverb or common phrase, as he does at least once in every story. I’ve christened these comic malapropisms ‘Poirotisms’:

‘For the same reason, when she sets out the following day to get rid of the golf clubs, she continues to use the attaché-case as a – what is it – kippered herring?’
‘Red herring,’ Japp said.
(Murder in the Mews, Chapter 10)

Poirot held up a hand. ‘I do what you call explore all the avenues.’
(The Incredible Theft, Chapter 4)

‘Ah, yes, it is what you call the old gasp – no, pardon, the old wheeze, that – to come back for a book. It is often useful!’
(The Incredible Theft, Chapter 4)

‘One has, sometimes, a feeling. Faintly, I seem to smell the fish.’
(Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 1)

‘On the contrary, my friend, ‘any old lie,’ as you put it, would not do. Not with a lawyer. We should be – how do you say it? – thrown out with the flea upon the ear.’
(Dumb Witness, Chapter 13)

‘The only thing is – I am afraid.’
‘Afraid? Of what?’
He said gravely: ‘Of disturbing the dogs that sleep. That is one of your proverbs, is it not?’
(Dumb Witness, Chapter 18)

‘It is true that I am pig-headed – that is your expression, I think? Yes, definitely I have the head of the pig,’ said my friend meditatively.
(Dumb Witness, Chapter 21)

Poirot patted her reassuringly on the shoulder. ‘It was the narrow squeak – yes?’
(Dumb Witness, Chapter 26)

‘Bien,’ said Poirot, rising with the check in his hand. ‘We have done our part. Now it is on the knees of the gods.’
(Dumb Witness, Chapter 26)

‘The hotel’s half empty, and everyone’s about a hundred—’
She stopped—biting her lip. Hercule Poirot’s eyes twinkled.
‘It is true, yes, I have one leg in the grave.’
(Death on the Nile, Chapter 2)

Simon said boyishly: ‘You must tell us something about your cases on board the Karnak.’
‘No, no; that would be to talk—what do you call it?—the shop.’
(Death on the Nile, Chapter 4)

‘Up to a point it is all the clear sailing.’
(Death on the Nile, Chapter 16)

Poirot nodded. ‘But for the moment,’ he said, and smiled, ‘we handle him with the gloves of kid, is it not so?’
(Death on the Nile, Chapter 18)

‘I am talking about facts, Mademoiselle—plain ugly facts. Let us call the spade the spade.’
(Death on the Nile, Chapter 19)

Poirot said with a sigh: ‘Alas, the proverb is true. When you are courting, two is company, is it not, three is none?’
(One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, p.188)

Poirot is droll

‘Let us say that I shall have definite proof in my hands tomorrow.’ Dr Donaldson’ s eyebrows rose in a slightly ironical fashion.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow! Sometimes, M. Poirot, tomorrow is a long way off.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Poirot, ‘I always find that it succeeds today with monotonous regularity.’
(Dumb Witness, Chapter 27)

Poirot’s manservant

George, Poirot’s immaculate and extremely English manservant, opened the door.
(Dumb Witness, Chapter 23)

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by Simon on September 26, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Biography, Detective stories, Literary criticism
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Posted by Simon on September 26, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/aspects-of-poirot/

Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie (1943)

‘Correct me if I am wrong, Mr Poirot, but I think you are interested in—character, shall we say?’
Poirot replied: ‘That, to me, is the principal interest of all my cases.’

Hercule Poirot had the gift of listening…

‘Murder is a drama. The desire for drama is very strong in the human race.’

‘You are at least right in this – not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead.’

‘I want to show you, mademoiselle, that even in a small unimportant matter, I am something of a magician. There are things I know without having to be told.’

Three points about ‘Five Little Pigs’:

  1. It’s another nursery rhyme story
  2. It’s a cold case
  3. It’s a closed circle mystery

1. Nursery rhyme

Quite obviously this is another of the detective stories Christie concocted from, or constructed in order to parallel, a nursery rhyme (compare ‘Pocket full of Rye’, ‘Crooked House’, ‘Five Little Pigs’, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, ‘One, Two, Buckle my Shoe’, ‘Three Blind Mice’). It has five main suspects who correlate exactly to the five pigs in the rhyme:

This little piggy went to market.
This little piggy stayed at home.
This little piggy had roast beef.
And this little piggy had none.
And this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home.

2. Cold case

Poirot is called in to solve a murder which took place sixteen years earlier. Back then beautiful Caroline Crase was convicted of poisoning her husband, the high-living artist Amyas Crale and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the end she served just a year before dying in prison.

The motive for the crime was that Amyas was openly having an affair with a beautiful 20-year old woman, Elsa Greer, and just the day before, Elsa had openly taunted Caroline, claiming Amyas was going to divorce her and how soon the family home would be hers (Elsa’s). Various witnesses overheard Caroline saying that would never happen, that she would kill her husband first; and then, later, she was heard having a stand-up row with Amyas, in which she said she would kill him rather than let him run off with another woman.

The means was a poison called coniine, extracted from the plant spotted hemlock. This coniine was the product of a neighbour of the Crales’s, a man named Meredith Blake who had spent years experimenting with herbs, plant extracts and home-brewed medicines. The day before the death, this Meredith, along with his brother Philip, had come over to the Crales’ house for tea, and had delivered quite a monologue about his hobby, and about this poison in particular.

Next day Meredith discovered that his bottle containing coniine (a volatile poisonous compound found in hemlock and other plants) was suddenly half empty. After the death, a bottle with traces of coniine in was found in Caroline’s room. Her story was that, after hearing about its deadly properties, she had stolen some from Meredith’s laboratory, with a view to killing herself if the divorce went ahead. But what clinched her conviction was that this poison was discovered in a bottle of beer she personally brought and served to her husband as he painted a portrait of Elsa in the garden, and which the doctors quickly established as the painter’s cause of death.

Sixteen years later, her daughter, Carla Lemarchant, who was 5 at the time, and was taken away and looked after by relatives in Canada, comes of age (21) whereupon the family solicitor gives her a letter written by her mother claiming that she (Caroline) was innocent, and didn’t murder her father.

Whereupon Carla tracks down Hercule Poirot, meets and hires him to find the identity of the real killer and so clear her mother’s name. As Poirot explains for the umpteenth time, this kind of case suits him because all the forensic clues have long since disappeared and so it is a question almost entirely of psychology, of meeting and questioning the suspects, finding out about their lives and motives, and slowly figuring out who had the character and personality to be the murderer.

Poirot said placidly:
‘One does not, you know, employ merely the muscles. I do not need to bend and measure the footprints and pick up the cigarette ends and examine the bent blades of grass. It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think. It is this’ – he tapped his egg-shaped head – ‘this that
functions!’
(Chapter 1)

And, less obviously, he always needs to know about the personality of the murderee.

‘Have you ever reflected, Mr Blake, that the reason for murder is nearly always to be found by a study of the person murdered?’
‘I hadn’t exactly – yes, I suppose I see what you mean.’
Poirot said:
‘Until you know exactly what sort of a person the victim was, you cannot begin to see the circumstances of a crime clearly.’
He added:
‘That is what I am seeking for – and what you and your brother have helped to give me – a reconstruction of the man Amyas Crale.’

More about psychology, below.

3. Closed circle

According to Google AI:

A ‘closed circle mystery’ is a subgenre of detective fiction where a crime, usually a murder, occurs within a limited group of suspects who are isolated from the outside world. The core concept is that the perpetrator must be one of the individuals present, and the detective’s task is to identify the killer from this select group.

Thus Poirot quickly finds out that on the day of Amyas Crale’s death, there were five people at the couple’s home (Alderbury) who he proceeds, whimsically, to nickname the five little pigs.

The five little pigs

  1. Philip Blake – the pig who went to market – the younger Blake brother, stockbroker, lives at St. George’s Hill, ‘a prosperous, shrewd, jovial looking man – slightly running to fat’ – ‘a well-fed pig who had gone to market – and fetched the full market price’
  2. Meredith Blake – the pig who stayed at home – the older Blake brother who inherited the estate , a basic huntin’, shootin’ fishin’ squire but who has amused himself with amateur dabbling in herbalism and chemistry – he ‘resembled superficially every other English country gentleman of straitened means and outdoor tastes. A shabby old coat of Harris tweed, a weather-beaten, pleasant, middle-aged face with somewhat faded blue eyes, a weak mouth, half hidden by a rather straggly moustache’
  3. Elsa Greer – the pig who ate roast beef, Amyas’s painting model and the woman he was planning to leave his wife for – ‘a superb, slim, straight creature, arrogant, her head turned, her eyes insolent with triumph’ – ‘They’ve fed her meat all right,’ he [Depleach] said. ‘She’s been a go-getter. She’s had three husbands since then. In and out of the divorce court as easy as you please. And every time she makes a change, it’s for the better. Lady Dittisham – that’s who she is now. Open any Tatler and you’re sure to find her.’
  4. Miss Cecilia Williams – the piggy who had none – Angela’s governess, a small, elderly lady in a neat shabby dress, living in very straitened circumstances in a one-room flat, but buoyed up by her Victorian sense of duty and feminist loathing of men
  5. Angela Warren – the piggy who went wee wee wee – Caroline’s younger half-sister who, as a child, she threw a paperweight at and blinded in one eye (!) – has turned out a very distinguished woman: ‘traveller to weird places. Lectures at the Royal Geographical Society’

Schematic

Christie’s early novels are chaotic harum-scarum adventures. In the later 1920s and 1930s they become more structured. Murder on the Orient Express is a classic example of her taste for clarity and logical structure, with a chapter each devoted to the testimony of all the witnesses. ‘Five Little Pigs’ as another of the same type, its contents laid out with the clarity and logic of an official report, feeling almost like an engineer or architect’s schematic design for a novel.

Thus in book one, Poirot goes to interview the key figures form the trial 16 years earlier, the counsel for the defence, for the prosecution, a young solicitor involved in the trial, and the Crase family solicitor. Then he goes to see each of the five key suspects, in the same order as the nursery rhyme. He not only interviews them (with the thin excuse that he is involved in a book which is being written about the murder) but asks each of them to write their own account of what happened and why. And it is the five written statements by the five little pigs which make up part two of the book.

And then in part three, Poirot uses everything he’s learned in order to, as usual, create a detailed reconstruction of the crime which, at various points seems to incriminate every one of the piggies, before, of course, revealing the actual murderer with a flourish!

Book One

  1. Counsel for the Defence
  2. Counsel for the Prosecution
  3. The Young Solicitor
  4. The Old Solicitor
  5. The Police Superintendent
  6. This Little Pig Went to Market [Philip Blake]
  7. This Little Pig Stayed at Home [Meredith Blake]
  8. This Little Pig Had Roast Beef [Elsa Greer]
  9. This Little Pig Had None [Cecilia Williams]
  10. This Little Pig Cried ‘Wee Wee Wee’ [Angela Warren]

Book Two

  • Narrative of Philip Blake
  • Narrative of Meredith Blake
  • Narrative of Lady Dittisham
  • Narrative of Cecilia Williams
  • Narrative of Angela Warren

Book Three

  1. Conclusions
  2. Poirot Asks Five Questions
  3. Reconstruction
  4. Truth
  5. Aftermath

Christie makes it neat by attributing part of the schematic, diagrammatic layout of the text to Poirot’s own, well-known symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Thus towards the end, in part 3 chapter 2, we find Poirot telling himself he doesn’t really need to interview Miss Williams, but…

Really, when he came to think of it, he did not want to ask Angela Warren any questions at all. The only question he did want to ask her could wait… No, it was really only his insatiable passion for symmetry that was bringing him here. Five people – there should be five questions! It was neater so. It rounded off the thing better.

Cast

As well as the five little pigs, additional characters are:

  • Hercule Poirot
  • Carla Lemarchant – daughter of Caroline and Amyas Crale – named Caroline after her mother, her first and last names were changed when she was sent to Montral, Canada, to live with her aunt and uncle when her mother was sent to prison
  • John Rattery – Carla’s fiancé, a ‘ tall, square-jawed young man with the steady grey eyes’
  • Sir Montague Depleach – council for the defence i.e. defended Caroline Crase 16 years ago – ‘force, magnetism, an overbearing and slightly bullying personality. He got his effects by a rapid and dramatic change of manner. Handsome, urbane, charming one minute—then an almost magical transformation, lips back, snarling smile—out for your blood’
  • Quentin Fogg, K.C. – ‘thin, pale, singularly lacking in what is called personality. His questions were quiet and unemotional —but steadily persistent. If Depleach was like a rapier, Fogg was like an auger. He bored steadily. He had never reached spectacular fame, but he was known as a first-class man on law. He usually won his cases’
  • George Mayhew – junior solicitor in the firm representing Caroline
  • Edmunds – managing clerk of Mayhew’s firm of solicitors
  • Mr Caleb Jonathan – senior solicitor in the Crale family firm, retired to Essex
  • Ex-Superintendent Hale – leading officer on the Crale murder investigation

Locations

The three main properties are on the south Devon coast.

  • Handcross Manor – home of the Blake family, inherited home of Meredith Blake – just a short row across a creek from…
  • Alderbury – home of Amyas and Caroline Crale
  • Ferriby Grange – home of Lady Tressillian, where Angela is sent after Amyas’s death
  • Montreal, Canada – home of Uncle Simon and Aunt Louise Lemarchant, where 5-year-old Carla was sent to live after her mother went to prison

The psychology book

‘What is the meaning of all this nonsense?’ demanded Miss Williams.
‘It is to show you that it is the eyes of the mind with which one really sees…’

When he sets off to interview the five little pigs, Poirot needs a cover story. Saying he’s actively investigating a 16-year-old crime would raise lots of questions. So he comes up with the more plausible notion that he has been commissioned to write a book about classic crimes. The sales angle is that he’ll give the crimes a modern, psychological interpretation.

‘It is proposed to rewrite the stories of certain bygone crimes – from the psychological angle. Psychology in crime, it is my speciality.’

As Poirot explains to Philip Blake, in the olden days the interest in crimes often focused on ‘romance’, about love triangles and so on. Nowadays, psychology is in the ascendant, and the reading public want to hear all about complexes and traumas etc. (This, by the way, is flatly disproved by Christie’s own works, which include very occasional references to actual psychology, to Freud, complexes and so on – but are still heavily reliant on love triangles, affairs, adultery, jealousy and so on.)

Obviously this handily chimes with Poirot’s own genuine interest in psychology and in the psychology of the five main suspects, so his cover story fits neatly with his actual interests.

‘My success, let me tell you, has been founded on the psychology – the eternal why? of human behaviour. That, Mr Blake, is what interests the world in crime today.’

Poirot uses his outsiderness

In previous novels we’ve seen Poirot consciously deploy his foreignness, his outsiderness, when it suits him, when it gives him a tactical advantage. In this novel he several times lays it on with a trowel, deliberately playing up his foreignness in order to play to his interviewees’ prejudices and lull them. For example when trying to inveigle himself with hale-fellow-well-met Philip Blake.

‘Of course you are. We all know that. The famous Hercule Poirot!’ But his tone held a subtly mocking note. Intrinsically, Philip Blake was too much of an Englishman to take the pretensions of a foreigner seriously.

So:

Hercule Poirot shrugged his shoulders. He was at his most foreign today. He was out to be despised but patronized.

Whereas with the other Blake brother, Meredith, the piggy who stayed at home and is a more traditional country squire:

Hercule Poirot prided himself on knowing how to handle an ‘old school tie’. It was no moment for trying to seem English. No, one must be a foreigner – frankly a foreigner – and be magnanimously forgiven for the fact. ‘Of course, these foreigners don’t quite know the ropes. Will shake hands at breakfast. Still, a decent fellow really…’

Poirot imagines Meredith Blake’s view of him:

Really a most impossible person – the wrong clothes – button boots! – an incredible moustache! Not his – Meredith Blake’s – kind of fellow at all. Didn’t look as though he’d ever hunted or shot – or even played a decent game. A foreigner.

But by playing up to this stereotype, Poirot lulls his interviewees into thinking he is stupid, they are clever, and so gets more information out of them.

Everyday sexism

The case, at least to start with, appears to be entirely about the eternal triangle, a married couple broken up by a young woman seducing the husband, and the murderous jealousy of the wronged wife. Which just triggers, in my mind, the tired conclusion: Humans, and their complete inability to manage their relationships! Why on earth are they called ‘adults’? How on earth do they think they can run a planet when they can’t even run their own relationships?

Anyway, the focus on sexual relationships means the novel lends itself to more than the usual quota of casual generalisations about the sexes, with the majority of them – rather inevitably – being unflattering comments about ‘women’.

Poirot said: ‘With women, love always comes first.’
‘Don’t I know it?’ said Superintendent Hale with feeling.
‘Men,’ continued Poirot, ‘and especially artists—are different.’

FOGG: ‘Very good looking, hard-boiled, modern. To the women in the court she [Elsa] stood for a type – type of the home-breaker. Homes weren’t safe when girls like that were wandering abroad. Girls damn full of sex and contemptuous of the rights of wives and mothers.’

Superintendent Hale said: ‘Oh, you know what women are! Have to get at each other’s throats.’

‘The girl [Elsa] was a good looker, all right,’ said Hale. ‘Lots of make-up and next to no clothes on. It isn’t decent the way these girls go about. And that was sixteen years ago, mind you. Nowadays one wouldn’t think anything of it. But then – well, it shocked me. Trousers and one of those canvas shirts, open at the neck – and not another thing, I should say!’

Philip Blake said: ‘I don’t know that there was much subtlety about it. It was a pretty obvious business. Crude female jealousy, that was all there was to it.’

‘Women will always see a private detective! Men will tell him to go to the devil.’ (Poirot)

‘There was Mrs Crale, there was Miss Williams, there was a housemaid. It is a woman’s job to pack—not a man’s.’ (Poirot)

And much more in the same vein, scores of casual generalisations about the character of all women, or all men, which have, maybe, become unacceptable in our time…

Countered by feminism

‘She was a great feminist and disliked men.’
(Angela Warren on Miss Williams)

The sweeping generalisations about ‘women’ made by pretty much all the men in the story are given a strong counter in the character of the impoverished old governess, Miss Williams, who is described more than once as a ‘feminist’.

For a brief moment you think Christie is fighting back against these sexist stereotypes. But then you realise that Miss Williams is herself a stereotype, a caricature of the dried-up old spinster, impoverished and bitterly anti-male. Poirot is interviewing her:

‘He was devoted to her as she was to him?’
‘They were a devoted couple. But he, of course, was a man.’
Miss Williams contrived to put into that last word a wholly Victorian significance.
‘Men—’ said Miss Williams, and stopped.
As a rich property owner says ‘Bolsheviks’ – as an earnest Communist says ‘Capitalists!’ – as a good housewife says ‘Blackbeetles’ – so did Miss Williams say ‘Men!’
From her spinster’s, governess’s life, there rose up a blast of fierce feminism. Nobody hearing her speak could doubt that to Miss Williams Men were the Enemy!

And Christie shows that feminists are just as capable of stereotyping and judging men as the chauvinist men are of stereotyping women.

‘Oh, I dare say you are a sentimentalist like most men—’
Poirot interrupted indignantly:
‘I am not a sentimentalist.’

It is of course a woman writing all this. And it’s worth making the point that all the ‘feminists’ in Christie’s novels are liable to be mocked. According to her biographer, Laura Thompson, Christie had no time for feminism. She associated it very much with anti-men i.e. misandrist attitudes (misandrist: ‘a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against men’) and this is precisely the attitude she attributes to Miss Williams. Christie thought it was as absurd for feminists to be anti-men as it was for what she called woman haters (what we nowadays call misogynists) to be anti-women. For her, the two extremes were equally as ridiculous.

Christie and stereotypes

But more broadly, the flagrancy of Miss Williams’ character reminds you all over again that Christie’s novels are made out of stereotypes. Certain ones – the stereotyping of women and, occasionally, of ethnic minorities, in Christie’s works – are what leap out to us because, a hundred years later, they are (still) the hot button topics of our day, drilled as we are at work and in all public spaces with the mantras of diversity and inclusion.

But Christie deploys stereotypical ‘wisdom’ or tropes about pretty much every human type and category. This reliance on stereotypical characters expressing stereotypical views is what makes her novels genre fiction and nowhere near ‘literature’.

Thus characters all make sweeping generalisations not only about men, women and numerous sub-types of men and women, but about servants, butlers, the police, lawyers, the entire criminal justice system, about children and teenagers, and many more…

Artists are usually careless about money matters…

Even Poirot sums up all the suspects as ‘types’ – for a start, describing them as ‘little pigs’ isn’t that flattering, is it? He thinks of Meredith as a typical country squire, of Philip Blake as a typical affluent stockbroker, of Miss Williams as a typical spinster, and so on.

And, of course, Poirot is very fond of making sweeping generalisations about criminals, about ‘the criminal mind’, murderers, and so on.

From one perspective Christie’s texts amount to a kind of battle or conflict between rival generalisations: Superintendent Hale’s generalisations about women or murder being rebutted by Poirot’s countervailing generalisations, all the characters sharing their prejudices about artists and ‘the artistic temperament’. In a sense every single conversation can be seen as a conflict of generalisations.

He looked a bit ashamed of himself. Men do when women pin them down in a corner.
(Philip Blake describing Amyas)

Then he calmed down a little and said women had no sense of proportion.
(Philip on Amyas again)

‘I have to admit that she looked incredibly beautiful that afternoon. Women do when they’ve got what they want.’
(Philip Blake)

‘It made him appear at a disadvantage, and men do not like appearing at a disadvantage. It upsets their vanity.’
(Miss Williams)

A study of Christie’s novels makes you realise just how much human conversation is made up of dodgy generalisations, very often based on a person’s own anecdotal evidence, or ‘someone told me x or y’ – or just picked up from the culture at large.

And realise just how much a person’s character can, in a sense, be defined by the generalisations or mental axioms they operate with. Most people’s generalisations aren’t meant to be taken in a statistically significant, scientific or logical way. They are just ways of expressing character, or mood. In a sense a person’s character is the totality of the generalisations they harbour. When Elsa says the following to Amyas:

‘I think you’re right about Spain. That’s the first place we’ll go to. And you must take me to see a bullfight. It must be wonderful. Only I’d like the bull to kill the man—not the other way about. I understand how Roman women felt when they saw a man die. Men aren’t much, but animals are splendid.’

That final axiom has no meaning or value whatsoever as objective information about the world. It is entirely an expression of her character and attitude, which are young and selfish, thoughtlessly cynical, conventionally rebellious. Meredith Blake, who gives us this quote, draws the correct conclusion:

I suppose she was rather like an animal herself – young and primitive and with nothing yet of man’s sad experience and doubtful wisdom.

But this is because he is a puppet in his creator’s hands. The supposed quote from Elsa, along with its sweeping generalisation, is entirely meant to characterise her, and Meredith’s comment is just an elaboration of the same point: a repetition of it in a different mode.

But since Elsa never existed, in fact none of these people ever existed, these kinds of generalisations should be seen as simply one of the techniques by which Christie creates the distinctions between the characters she’s inventing. Empty of intrinsic value or meaning, they are just rhetorical strategies associated with the textual entities referred to as characters.

Summary

In all my summaries of Christie’s novels I’ve broken off before the final act and never revealed whodunnit. I won’t here, either – except to say that the big reveal and explanation of whodunnit in lots of them, by far the majority, is often ridiculously contrived and complicated and often unbelievable. ‘Five Little Pigs’ has a claim to be one of the best of her novels because the revelation, when it comes, is not only not too preposterously contrived, but psychologically believable and convincingly bleak.

Credit

‘Five Little Pigs’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in January 1943.

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by Simon on September 12, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Detective stories, Novel
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Posted by Simon on September 12, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/09/12/five-little-pigs-agatha-christie/

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie (1938)

‘Marriage is an extraordinary thing – and I doubt if any outsider – even a child of the marriage – has the right to judge.’
(Hilda Lee, Chapter 4)

George Lee was solemn and correct. ‘A terrible business,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘A terrible, terrible business. I can only believe that it must – er – have been the work of a lunatic!’
(In almost all the books the villain is repeatedly made out to be a fiend, a demon etc, Chapter 9)

‘I myself am quite convinced that this crime was done by a maniac who somehow or other gained admittance to the house.’
(Ditto)

Sugden said: ‘Then you think someone is lying?’
Poirot sighed.
‘Mon cher, everyone lies – in parts like the egg of the English curate. It is profitable to separate the harmless lies from the vital ones.’
(Chapter 15)

Lydia said, almost impatiently: ‘It’s like a nightmare – so fantastic – I can’t believe it’s real!’
(The stock standard sentiment someone expresses in every Christie novel, Part 4)

‘There is in this crime such a restricted circle that it cannot possibly take long to arrive at the truth.’
(Handy expression of the ‘closed circle’ sub-genre of murder mystery, Part 5)

‘It is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violence for the reason that when their control does snap, it does so entirely!
(Daytime TV-level psychology, Part 6)

Background

‘Appointment with Death’ centred on a monstrously controlling old mother, Mrs Boynton. ‘Hercule Poirot’s Christmas’ circles round a horribly manipulative father, the Dickensian figure of old Simeon Lee.

In a big grandfather armchair, the biggest and most imposing of all the chairs, sat the thin, shrivelled figure of an old man. His long claw‐like hands rested on the arms of the chair. A gold‐mounted stick was by his side. He wore an old shabby blue dressing‐gown. On his feet were carpet slippers. His hair was white and the skin of his face was yellow. A shabby, insignificant figure, one might have thought. But the nose, aquiline and proud, and the eyes, dark and intensely alive, might cause an observer to alter his opinion. Here was fire and life and vigour. (Chapter 6)

Old Mr Lee made his fortune in South African mining (diamonds) where, it is strongly hinted, he was a ruthless operator who made bitter enemies. Having made his fortune he returned to Blighty and started a business in the Midlands based on a mining gadget of his own design, and doubled or trebled his money. He built himself a fine country house – Gorston Hall, Longdale, Addlesfield, ‘a good solid mass of red brick, unimaginative but solid’ – and married a wife, Adelaide.

She gave him four sons – Alfred, Harry, David and George – and a daughter, Jennifer. But as they grew up, they all watched old Simeon bully his wife, boasting about his numerous affairs, mocking her for her timidity and conventionality. The result was that his sons grew up hating their childhood and the family home which was filled with such unhappiness, and loathed their father for driving their mother to a sick room and then to an early death.

In revenge, none of the children turned out as their father intended. Harry was meant to go into the family firm but stole some money and ran off to have adventures. David ran off to London to become an artist, despite his father threatening to cut him off without a penny. He married Hilda.

Pompous, conventional George Lee, ‘a somewhat corpulent gentleman of forty‐one’, became an MP as his father had intended, and married Magdalene, 20 years his junior.

And Alfred stayed at home, managing the house and its servants with his wife, Lydia.

The plot follows a very conventional course, not only in terms of Christie’s own novels, but those of the scores of other detective story writers who flourished between the wars. First we meet the cast; then there is the murder; then the long, drawn-out investigation, then the totally unexpected reveal.

Key personnel

It is Christmas and grasping old multimillionaire Simeon Lee, holed up in his ugly old mansion, surprises his scattered sons and spouses by inviting them all to come and spend Christmas at the house. With various degrees of reluctance, the couples converge, being: Alfred and Lydia (already living with him); David and Hilda, up from London; George and young Magdalene, up from his rural constituency.

In addition, to everyone’s surprise, Simeon has managed to invite the black sheep of the family, David, who ran off to London to make his own way in the world.

In another surprise, Simeon has managed to track down and invite his grand-daughter, Pilar Estravados. She has a Spanish name because Simeon’s one daughter, Jennifer, ran off with a Spaniard, Juan Estravados (a Bohemian friend of David’s down in London), went to Spain, married, had this daughter, then died just a year ago. So Simeon has invited this classically Spanish, good-looking firebrand to the Christmas party, too.

Reading the novels, you are continually reminded how much Christie deals in stereotypes and stock types. Thus Pilar couldn’t be more flashing-eyed, Latin and hot-blooded if she tried.

The curve of Pilar’s red mouth curved upwards. It was suddenly cruel, that mouth. Cruel and greedy – like the mouth of a child or a kitten – a mouth that knew only its own desires and that was as yet unaware of pity.

‘She’s a beautiful creature, Pilar – with the lovely warmth of the South – and its cruelty.’
(Harry Lee, Chapter 10)

A faint smile came to Colonel Johnson’s lips, as his eyes took in the black gloss of her hair, the proud dark eyes, and the curling red lips. Very English! An incongruous term to apply to Pilar Estravados.
(Chapter 13)

And there is one more surprise which is that, back in South Africa in his youth, Simeon had a business partner, old Ebenezer Farr. Ebenezer is long gone but to Simeon’s own surprise his son, handsome, virile, outdoorsy Stephen Farr, has travelled all the way from South Africa, and arrives unexpectedly on their doorstep just before Christmas, claiming to be ‘just passing by’ – obviously suspicious behaviour.

It is an important fact that none of the family have met either Pilar or Stephen before. So one or both of them might be imposters.

As to the household staff, there is the ancient butler, Tressilian, who has been with the family for 40 years. And a new arrival, a personal nurse to old Simeon called Sydney Horbury. The narrative goes out of its way to describe the creepily silent way that Horbury creeps up on everybody. When he hears that a police inspector has been to visit the house, Horbury drops the (old and valuable) cup he is holding and turns pale. Well, he’s obviously got a dodgy past then.

The murder

After dinner on Christmas Eve the various members of the household scatter to different rooms, make phone calls, play the piano (David, playing Mendelssohn), are reading magazines, when suddenly everyone hears a violent commotion coming from Simeon’s room overhead (directly above the dining room, to one side of the drawing room) – bangs and thumps and what-have-you – followed by a blood-curdling scream.

They all rush up to the first floor only to find the door to Simeon’s room locked from the inside. The two most virile men, Harry and Stephen, have to use a big piece of furniture to batter the door down, and all the guests tumble into the room to discover: 1) a scene of amazing destruction, with furniture, vases and whatnot shattered and strewn everywhere, and 2) the body of wasted old Simeon lying in a pool of blood which has poured from his slashed throat. Someone has murdered him!

Motives

So, as always happens, a very bright light is suddenly shone on 1) circumstances leading up to the murder 2) everybody’s possible motives to commit the murder 3) a very detailed examination of everyone’s precise location in the minutes before the scream was heard, who was in which room and heard what etc.

But I need to back up and tell you about some additional facts which are highly relevant.

1) The new will On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Simeon had called his family together about 3.30, and they – and we – expected some kind of grand announcement, but instead it was to hear Simeon make a call to the family lawyer, Charlton, and tell him he intended to write a new will. Obviously, some or all of the sons and grand-daughter might have feared they would miss out in a new will.

In case I haven’t made it clear, Simeon actively enjoyed teasing and tormenting and occasionally straight out insulting all four of his sons, generating a lot of anger and resentment…

2) The angry sons Specifically, Simone had announced two new son-related facts: one was to tell an outraged Alfred that he has invited the brother he really dislikes, freewheeling Harry, to come and stay at the house, permanently. Alfred is ‘livid with rage’ (p.107). The other was to tell George the pompous MP that he is living beyond his means and that he intends to reduce his (already miserly) allowance, prompting George to say he doesn’t know how he’ll be able to make ends meet.

Add this to the fact that the narrative goes out of its way to describe the burning sense of grievance nurses by the artist son, David, against his father’s cruel treatment of his poor wife, and you have three angry sons, each with a clear motive.

3) The diamonds Several times we are shown the old miser in his inner sanctum opening his safe and taking out a bag of ordinary looking pebbles. Only he knows that they are all rough, uncut diamonds, worth up to £10,000 (according to the internet, worth something like £860,000 today). On the most significant occasion, he calls Pilar into his sanctum, partly because he appreciates her youth and beauty, partly to discover more about her life story. But during this interview he is prompted to take the diamonds out of the safe and show them to her. a) She initially doesn’t understand that these ordinary looking pebbles are in fact uncut diamonds but, when she does, is visibly impressed and, maybe, greedy. b) Their conversation is interrupted by Horbury knocking on the door to announce that tea is ready, so Simeon tells Pilar to ‘Put ’em back in the safe and bang it to.’ But the narrative carefully omits to tell us whether she does or not. Did she steal them?

4) An inspector calls Somebody did, because the last big fact relevant to the case is that later the same afternoon, old Simeon realised the diamonds were missing from the safe and contacted the local police. He rang the local police station at around 5.10pm and asked the local top officer, Superintendent Sugden, to call round later, say around 8pm. So at around 8pm Sugden arrives, tells the butler an anodyne story that he’s calling for contributions to some police charity – but goes up to his room to see Simeon who tells him the diamonds are missing and that it is either someone in his family, or an outsider.

Simeon tells the inspector to come back later, in an hour’s time, around 9.15, because he himself will first hold a family conference and see whether he can deal with the theft just within the family.

So the inspector promises to do this and does, indeed, return to the house at 9.15, and knocks on the door just as the horrible scream and supposed murder of Simeon takes place. Thus he is on the spot immediately and is among the crowd round the door to Simeon’s room when it is broken down, and observes very closely everyone’s words and actions on the spot, at the scene, in the immediate minutes following the discovery of the body.

Enter Poirot

Guess what? World famous detective Hercule Poirot just happens to be taking a holiday in the neighbourhood (in the fictional county of ‘Middleshire’) so the Chief Constable of Middleshire, Colonel Johnson, invites him to the station to ask if would be prepared to help with the investigation. It would be a shorter, different book if he said no but Poirot, of course, says yes – although he tactfully realises he must work closely with and not step on the toes of the chief investigating officer, Superintendent Sugden.

The interview board

Things proceed in the familiar way, with Poirot, Inspector Sugden and Chief Constable Johnson setting up a kind of interview board in a small study of the big house (p.91), and calling all the family members in, one by one, to interview them about their backstories, their resentments against the murdered man, and their precise actions and locations at the time of the murder.

And once the formal interviews are over Poirot, of course, moves to the next stage of his process, which is to contrive to have more informal chats with each member, on the tried and trusted basis that:

‘In conversation, points arise! If a human being converses much, it is impossible for him to avoid the truth!’ (Chapter 15)

Cast

Lee family

  • Mr Simeon Lee – owner of Gorston Hall, Longdale, Addlesfield, an invalid, mostly confined to his room with rheumatoid arthritis
  • Alfred Lee – son, married to Lydia and still living at home
  • Lydia Lee – Alfred’s practical wife – ‘an energetic, lean greyhound of a woman. She was amazingly thin, but all her movements had a swift, startled grace about them’
  • David Lee – ran away to London to become an artist and married…
  • Hilda Lee – ‘An over‐stout dumpy middle‐aged woman—not clever—not brilliant—but with something about her that you couldn’t pass over’ – ‘solid comfortable strength’
  • George Lee – MP for Westeringham, ‘a somewhat corpulent gentleman of forty‐one. His eyes were pale blue and slightly prominent with a suspicious expression, he had a heavy jowl, and a slow pedantic utterance’
  • Magdalene Lee – George’s wife, 20 years younger, ‘a slender creature, a platinum blonde with plucked eyebrows and a smooth egg‐like face. It could, on occasions, look quite blank and devoid of any expression whatever’ – ‘meretricious airs and graces’
  • Pilar Estravados – daughter of Lee’s daughter Jennifer i.e. his grand-daughter
  • Stephen Farr – ‘very handsome. She liked his deeply bronzed face and his high‐bridged nose and his square shoulders’
  • Tressilian – elderly butler, white‐haired and slightly bowed, been with the family 40 years
  • Sydney Horbury – male nurse attendant to Mr Lee

Outsiders

  • Colonel Johnson – Chief Constable of Middleshire
  • Superintendent Sugden – ‘a large handsome man. He wore a tightly buttoned blue suit and moved with a sense of his own importance’
  • Police doctor
  • Mr Charlton – the family lawyer, ‘an old‐fashioned type of solicitor with a cautious blue eye’
  • Doris Buckle – young lady Horbury took to the cinema on the fatal evening i.e. his alibi

Bored old people

In ‘Appointment with Death’, old Mrs Boynton is described as bored with her total control over her terrified step-children, and so having come on holiday to the Holy Land as it was risky, to take a chance and play with her control over them.

In exactly the same way, old Simeon Lee is described as being bored and wanting to amuse himself by messing with his family.

‘The poor old one, he sits in his chair and he has lost the diversions of his younger days. So he invents a new diversion for himself. He amuses himself by playing upon the cupidity and the greed of human nature—yes, and on its emotions and its passions, too!’ (Poirot, Chapter 10)

Stereotyping

All Agatha Christie’s stories are made out of clichés and stereotypes (the miserly old man, the devoted family retainer, the dutiful son, the wild son, the glamorous young wife etc etc) – it’s just that they’re handled with enough style and brio to lull you into accepting them.

Obviously it applies to gender stereotypes as well: the characters are all recognisable types, as obvious in their way as types in restoration comedy – a couple of strapping young chaps, a weak artistic man, a pompous male MP, contrasted with a platinum blonde, a plump mumsy woman, a practical efficient woman, and the Spanish firebrand.

And this brings us to national and ethnic stereotypes. The figure of Pilar can’t be mentioned without one or other character adding their tuppence to the pile of national stereotypes. If you like cartoons and caricatures, they’re very amusing.

Magdalene said: ‘I can’t help feeling that the manner of my father‐in‐law’s death was somehow significant. It – it was so very unEnglish.’
Hercule Poirot turned slowly. His grave eyes met hers in innocent inquiry.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The Spanish touch, you think?’
‘Well, they are cruel, aren’t they?’ Magdalene spoke with an effect of childish appeal. ‘All those bull fights and things!’
(Part 4, Chapter 1)

Bookishness

All Christie’s novels contain characters comparing their events and characters to events and characters in detective stories. This has puzzled me a bit – I think it’s in order to emphasise their artificiality which, in a funny way, ends up making you suspend disbelief and accept their preposterous plots and outrageous explanations more readily.

Colonel Johnson stared at Sugden for some minutes before he spluttered: ‘Do you mean to tell me, Superintendent, that this is one of those damned cases you get in detective stories where a man is killed in a locked room by some apparently supernatural agency?’ (Chapter 8)

What was it that the señorita picked up?’
Sugden sighed.
‘I could give you three hundred guesses! I’ll show it to you. It’s the sort of thing that solves the whole mystery in detective stories! If you can make anything out of it, I’ll retire from the police force!’ (Part 4, II)

This is a very rare example of a Christie novel which doesn’t namecheck Sherlock Holmes at least once.

Poirot’s OCD

Considering it’s so famous, there are remarkable few instances in each novel of Poirot’s symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) i.e. his compulsion to rearrange household objects until they are just so. Only one or two in each novel. They’re one of the score or so stock phrases, moments or clichés which she knows she has to include in each novel but learned to deploy at just the right moment, crystallising a mood or scene. Thus after they’ve interviewed half a dozen of the family, the Chief Constable turns to Poirot and asks his opinion, triggering a moment while Poirot fiddles with the stuff in front of him while he, in parallel, arranges his thoughts into a similar order and symmetry.

Hercule Poirot leaned forward. He straightened the blotter in front of him and flicked a minute speck of dust from a candlestick. (Chapter 10)

Poirot and Wittgenstein

In his later philosophy, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein concluded that many problems of philosophy were caused by taking the wrong view or perspective. If you could only find the right perspective, if you viewed them from the correct angle, the problem wasn’t so much solved as simply disappeared. Same with Poirot. Thus, having called the family together to make the Big Reveal, Poirot first enumerates all the facts surrounding the murder which come to looked, even to Poirot, more and more fantastical and improbable – until, as so often, he realised that he was approaching the entire thing from the wrong angle.

‘So now we arrive at the point where not only the behaviour of the murderer is extraordinary, but the behaviour of Simeon Lee also is extraordinary! And I say to myself: “This thing is all wrong!” Why? Because we are looking at it from the wrong angle. We are looking at it from the angle that the murderer wants us to look at it…’ (Part 6)

Change your vantage point, move your ground, think the same evidence through from a completely different position, perspective or angle and… all the problems disappear: the mystery is solved. Just as Wittgenstein thought most philosophical problems simply evaporated, if you view them from the correct perspective.

Comedy

In my opinion the most important thing about Agatha Christie’s novels is that they are comedies. The psychology is paper thin, the characters teeter on being caricatures, the plots are cunning at the expense of being wildly improbable. The one ordinary. non-ridiculous thing about them is the warmth and good humour and occasional downright funniness of many of the characters.

Poirot may be a great sleuthing genius but his real significance is as a wonderful comic creation. Here he is comparing moustaches with the superintendent, in a little scene designed to play his vanity and foreign foppishness off against another of Christie’s caricature bluff, no-nonsense English officials (cf Inspector Battle, Colonel Race, Colonel Carbury et al).

He said, and there was a wistful note in his voice: ‘It is true that your moustache is superb… Tell me, do you use for it a special pomade?’
‘Pomade? Good lord, no!’
‘What do you use?’
‘Use? Nothing at all. It – it just grows.’
Poirot sighed.
‘You are favoured by nature.’ He caressed his own luxuriant black moustache, then sighed.
‘However expensive the preparation,’ he murmured, ‘to restore the natural colour does somewhat impoverish the quality of the hair.’
Superintendent Sugden, uninterested in hair‐dressing problems, was continuing in a stolid manner…

Marriage

According to the internet:

Shakespearean comedies frequently conclude with multiple marriages, symbolizing resolution and happiness. Plays like As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing feature several couples tying the knot, often after overcoming obstacles and misunderstandings.

Over three hundred years later this is just as true of Agatha Christie’s detective novels / comedies.

I know that real aficionados revel in the very complicated plots, the intricate interlocking of multiple characters all with plausible motives etc. But to someone raised on Shakespeare, what’s really noticeable is how – like comedies from the ancient Greeks, the Romans, through Shakespeare into 18th sentimental comedy, Victorian novels and beyond – in a sense all of that detective stuff is just fol-de-rol, stuff, padding designed to deliver a good old-fashioned marriage of the bright young heroes and heroines.

This was true of the endings of:

1. ‘Death on the Nile’: wherein Cornelia Robson announces her engagement to Dr Bessner (much to the chagrin of rival suitor Ferguson and Cornelia’s cousin, Miss Van Schuyler) while sweet Rosalie Otterbourne and hapless Tim Allerton become engaged.

2. ‘Appointment with Death’: wherein the psychologist Sarah King marries Raymond Boynton, Carol Boynton marries Jefferson Cope, and Ginevra Boynton marries Dr Gerard, a festival of weddings!

3. Same here: the two young people we met right at the start, on a train to Middleshire – Pilar and Stephen – have all along been attracted and, in the last few pages, we learn are going to get married and move back to South Africa.

And even the bickering siblings and bad-tempered couples are reconciled exactly as in a Shakespearian comedy. Alfred and Lydia agree they’ll sell the house where so much unhappiness has happened and he, tentatively, apologises for being such a heel.

Alfred said gently: ‘Dear Lydia, how patient you have been all these years. You have been very good to me.’
Lydia said: ‘But, you see, Alfred, I love you…’

Sweet and lovely happy endings all round. Well, it was Christmas :).

Credit

‘Hercule Poirot’s Christmas’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in 1938.

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Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie (1937)

‘Charles wouldn’t kill anybody. He’s a very careful man.’
‘All the same, Mademoiselle, it is the careful men who commit the cleverest murders.’
(Murder in the Mews, chapter 6)

‘You are hopeful of success, M. Poirot?’ Lord Mayfield sounded a trifle incredulous.
The little man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why not? One has only to reason – to reflect.’
(Poirot emphasising the importance of thinking, reflecting and pondering, The Incredible Theft, chapter 4)

‘This affair,’ he said, ‘is more complicated than it appears.’
(The classic statement which someone makes about the murder mystery in every Christie story, The Incredible Theft, chapter 4)

‘Leave it to Hercule Poirot. The lies I invent are always most delicate and most convincing.’
(Poirot’s immense self confidence, The Incredible Theft, chapter 4)

‘Good-morning, mademoiselle. Yes, it is as you say. You now behold a detective – a great detective, I may say – in the act of detecting!’
(Poirot gently mocking himself in Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 11)

‘Oh la la!’ cried Poirot. ‘I have been a fool, but a fool!’ The other stared at him.
‘I beg your pardon, M. Poirot?’
‘It is that a portion of the puzzle has become clear to me. Something I did not see before. But it all fits in. Yes, it fits in with beautiful precision.’
(The Eureka moment that occurs in every Poirot story, The Incredible Theft, chapter 5)

‘After breakfast,’ he said, ‘I will explain. I should like everyone to assemble in Sir Gervase’s study at ten o’clock.’
(The classic ‘you’re probably all wondering why I called you all together here this evening…’ moment, Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 12)

‘Murder in the Mews’ is a volume of four long short stories, some of them worked up from short stories previously published in magazines into 80-page novellas, long enough to require chapters.

  1. Murder in the Mews
  2. The Incredible Theft
  3. Dead Man’s Mirror
  4. Triangle at Rhodes

Murder in the Mews

It is Fireworks Night as Poirot and Inspector Japp are walking back to Poirot’s house. They take a short cut through a mews (Bardsley Garden Mews) and Japp jokes that it’s a good night for a murder because nobody would hear a shot.

Not to the reader’s complete surprise, next morning Poirot receives a phone call telling him that, guess what, there was a shot in that very same mews the night before, only it appears to have been a suicide.

So Poirot meets Japp at the murder scene and they start their investigation. 14 Bardsley Garden mews was shared by two young women, a Miss Jane Plenderleith and a youngish widow, Mrs Allen. Miss Plenderleith got home after being out of town for a few days (weekend with the Bentincks in Essex), knocked at her housemate’s door, discovered it was locked, called the police who came round, broke down the door and discovered Mrs Allen’s body on the floor, with a fatal gunshot wound to the head and the gun in her hand.

Except that the gun wasn’t really gripped, it had more the appearance of being placed in her hand. And, more tellingly, the shot is to her left temple whereas the gun was placed in her right hand. I.e. it’s an anatomically impossibility.

So Poirot and Japp set out to work in tandem but with their different approaches, interviewing the flatmate, Mrs Allen’s MP fiancé, various neighbours in other houses along the mews etc. The story is by way of being a nice comparison of the styles of the two men (something we have, of course, seen in quite a few of the novels) and so contains a number of familiar tropes e.g. Japp thinking Poirot is going soft / too old, when he dwells on apparent trivia.

‘Eh bien,’ said Poirot. ‘I shall complete my search for the unimportant. There is still the dustbin.’ He skipped nimbly out of the room. Japp looked after him with an air of disgust.
‘Potty,’ he said. ‘Absolutely potty.’
Inspector Jameson preserved a respectful silence. His face said with British superiority: ‘Foreigners!’
Aloud he said: ‘So that’s Mr Hercule Poirot! I’ve heard of him.’
‘Old friend of mine,’ explained Japp. ‘Not half as balmy as he looks, mind you. All the same, he’s getting on now.’
‘Gone a bit gaga as they say, sir,’ suggested Inspector Jameson. ‘Ah well, age will tell…’ (Chapter 4)

Poirot’s foreignness

Note how Japp’s slur on Poirot’s age is combined with Jameson’s smug contempt for Poirot’s foreignness, his outsiderness. But this ‘foreignness’ is very flexible; it has multiple purposes.

Poirot mocks the British A foreignness which comes into play a bit later when Christie has Poirot gently mock the English class system, as he does in quite a few of the novels, especially round ideas of being pukka or playing cricket, the right sort etc. Here’s Poirot interviewing Miss Plenderleith, who tells him that:

‘Charles has got a very good nose for anybody who isn’t well, quite – quite – ‘
‘And Major Eustace was not what you call quite – quite – ?’ asked Poirot.
The girl said dryly: ‘No, he wasn’t. Bit hairy at the heel. Definitely not out of the top drawer.’
‘Alas, I do not know those two expressions. You mean to say he was not the pukka sahib?’
A fleeting smile passed across Jane Plenderleith’s face, but she replied gravely, ‘No.’ (Chapter 6)

Poirot deploys his foreignness strategically, playing it up when he sees that it might be a way of getting round an interviewee, buttering them up or making them lower their defences. Here is Japp introducing Poirot to the MP:

‘By the way, let me introduce M. Hercule Poirot. You may have heard of him.’
Mr Laverton-West fastened himself interestedly on the little Belgian.
‘Yes-yes-I have heard the name.’
‘Monsieur,’ said Poirot, his manner suddenly very foreign. ‘Believe me, my heart bleeds for you. Such a loss ! Such agony as you must be enduring! Ah, but I will say no more. How magnificently the English hide their emotions.’ He whipped out his cigarette case. ‘Permit me – Ah, it is empty, Japp?’ (Chapter 7)

The point of this little bit of play-acting is to lull Laverton-West into tendering one of his cigarettes because the brand of cigarette stubs found in the murdered woman’s bedroom turn out to be an important clue.

Xenophobes hate Poirot’s foreignness And in moments of anger, Brits can use his foreignness against Poirot, as when their interviewing makes Major Eustace lose his temper.

‘Who are you, I’d like to know?’ Eustace turned and spat the words at him. ‘Some kind of damned dago! What are you butting in for?’ (Chapter 8)

Plot

It’s a sort of chamber piece because all the clues are at the scene, in the bedroom where the body was found, and the solution is relatively straightfoward, concerning a troublesome man, Major Eustace, who had been calling to see Mrs Allen over the past year or so…

Cast

  • Hercule Poirot
  • George – Poirot’s immaculate man-servant
  • Inspector Japp
  • Inspector Jameson – assisting Japp
  • Dr Brett – police doctor, time of death etc
  • Miss Jane Plenderleith – a dark, efficient-looking young woman of twenty-seven or eight’; drives an Austin Seven; plays golf
  • Mrs Barbara Allen – the dead woman, married young (17) in India; husband, then baby daughter both died; came to England; years later was engaged to be married to…
  • Charles Laverton-West MP – ‘a man of medium height with a very definite personality. He was clean-shaven, with the mobile mouth of an actor, and the slightly prominent eyes that so often go with the gift of oratory. He was good-looking in a quiet, well-bred way’
  • Mrs Hogg – ‘I’m not one to gossip’ style working class neighbour
  • Fred Hogg – small boy and eye witness to a late-night visitor to the house
  • Major Eustace – someone Mrs Allen met in India, ‘ a man of forty-five, military bearing, toothbrush moustache, smartly dressed and driving a Standard Swallow saloon car’; ‘ a tall man, good-looking in a somewhat coarse fashion. There was a puffiness round the eyes small, crafty eyes that belied the good-humoured geniality of his manner’

Poirot’s obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)

Poirot explains why he makes such efforts to solve the mystery of the missing attaché case:

‘My friend, an affair must be rounded off properly. Everything must be explained.’

The police just need enough evidence to secure a conviction; Poirot, driven by his OCD / personal predilections, needs to understand every ramification of a case, and tie off every lose end, as Japp mocks:

‘Though what this attaché-case business has to do with the crime I can’t imagine. I can’t see that it’s got anything at all to do with it.’
‘Precisely, my friend, I agree with you – it has nothing to do with it.’
‘Then why… No, don’t tell me! Order and method and everything nicely rounded off! Oh, well, it’s a fine day.’ (Chapter 9)

Bookish references

‘How long has she been dead?’
‘She was killed at eleven thirty-three yesterday evening,’ said Brett promptly. Then he grinned as he saw Japp’s surprised face.
‘Sorry, old boy,’ he said. ‘Had to do the super doctor of fiction!’ (Chapter 2)

Sherlock Holmes reference

As I’ve pointed out in my reviews of all the novels, Christie felt compelled to make at least one jokey reference to Sherlock Holmes in every one of her stories. Here there are two:

‘Damnation!’ Japp said. ‘I knew there was something. But what the devil is it? I searched that case pretty thoroughly.’
‘My poor Japp – but it is – how do you say, obvious, my dear Watson‘?’ (Chapter 9)

At the climax:

‘It was odd, very odd, that the room should smell – as it did, perfectly fresh.’
‘So that’s what you were getting at!’ Japp sighed. ‘Always have to get at things in such a tortuous way.’
‘Your Sherlock Holmes did the same. He drew attention, remember, to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time – and the answer to that was there was no curious incident. The dog did nothing in the night-time.’ (Chapter 10)

Cars

Major Eustace drives a Standard Swallow saloon car, Miss Plenderleith drives a Baby Austin Seven.

Baba and sirrop and chocolate

Poirot’s favourite dessert is a Baba au Rhum i.e. rum baba.

His favourite drink is the non-alcoholic sirop de cassis, ‘syrup of the blackcurrants’ or blackcurrant cordial, not unlike the English cordial, ‘Ribena’.

Poirot always drank chocolate for breakfast – a revolting habit.
(Captain Hastings telling us in ‘Dumb Witness’)

Payoff

‘Not murder disguised as suicide, but suicide made to look like murder!’
‘Yes, and very cleverly done, too. Nothing over-emphasised.’

2. The Incredible Theft

We are among the posh, the ‘top drawer’ of society, at a dinner party given by Lord Mayfield with half a dozen posh guests. The dinner has two purposes. In attendance is Air Marshal Sir George Carrington and he has come to discuss with Lord M ‘a discovery that will probably revolutionise the whole problem of air defence’ which was, of course, of burning importance in the troubled mid-1930s as the shades of war deepened. That’s how it’s described initially, but then this morphs into repeated references to ‘the new bomber’, its design and specification.

The second aspect of the evening is the presence of Mrs Vanderlyn. She is a very attractive mature lady who has had no fewer than three husbands, rather comically one each from each of Britain’s possible enemies, Italy, Germany and Russia, is reputed to have ‘contacts’ in each of those countries, and lives a luxury life far beyond her apparent income. In other words, as Lord Mayfield explains to Sir George, she is probably a spy. The thing is no-one’s been able to pin anything on her. And so this dinner is not only the pretext for a chat about the new bomber between the two chaps, but by way of being bait to persuade Mrs V to take a risk, to come out into the open, and to be caught. At which point she can be arrested, interrogated and neutralised.

But all this is hidden behind the gentle manners of a posh dinner party and so, after dinner, the ladies retire, the chaps drink port and smoke cigars, then reconvene in the drawing room to play some hands of bridge. By then it’s late and most of the party retire to bed, while Sir George and Lord M go for a stroll on the terrace outside his office (which has french windows opening onto it).

It’s while during this stroll that they see a shadowy figure nip out of his study and into the night. Moments later they re-enter the study where Lord M’s secretary, Mr Carlile has gathered the technical specifications of the new bomber for the men to discuss.

Except it isn’t there! When Lord M leafs through the papers, he asks where the spec has gone, Carlile insists he just put it there but then himself can’t find it. When quizzed, he says 5 minutes earlier he heard a woman’s scream, and ran into the hall to find Mrs Vanderlyn’s maid standing on the stairs claiming she’d seen a ghost. It took a few minutes to calm here down and send her backstairs to bed, at which point Carlile returned to the study and Lord M and Sir George entered it.

It must have been during those few minutes of his absence that someone darted into the study, stole the specifications, and this was the figure the old chaps saw nipping off into the darkness. Someone has stolen the ‘discovery that will probably revolutionise the whole problem of air defence’!!

So guess who Sir George advises Lord Mayfield to call in to solve the mystery and get the plans back? Clue: his name begins with P and ends in oirot.

Cast

  • Lord Mayfield – ‘a big man, square-shouldered, with thick silvery hair, a big straight nose and a slightly prominent chin. It was a face that lent itself easily to caricature’
  • Lady Julia Carrington – ‘a woman of forty, tall, dark and vivacious. She was very thin, but still beautiful. Her hands and feet in particular were exquisite. Her manner was abrupt and restless, that of a woman who lived on her nerves’
  • Air Marshal Sir George Carrington – Lady Julia’s husband, ‘still retained the bluff breeziness of the ex-Naval man’
  • Mrs Vanderlyn – ‘an extremely good-looking blonde. Her voice held a soupçon of American accent, just enough to be pleasant without undue exaggeration’
  • Mrs Macatta MP – ‘a great authority on Housing and Infant Welfare. She barked out short sentences rather than spoke them, and was generally of somewhat alarming aspect’; a feminist
  • Reggie Carrington – 21 and completely uninterested in Housing, Infant Welfare and indeed any political subject – ‘ the weak mouth camouflaged by the rather charming smile, the indecisive chin, the eyes set far apart, the rather narrow head’
  • Mr Carlile – Lord Mayfield’s private secretary, ‘a pale young man with pince-nez and an air of intelligent reserve’, been with his lordship for nine years
  • Mademoiselle Leonie – Mrs Vanderlyn’s attractive young French maid

Foreignness

Once again Poirot’s foreignness is brought up:

Lord Mayfield said slowly: ‘Why drag in a wretched foreigner we know nothing about?’
But I happen to know a lot about him. The man’s a marvel.’

And:

‘By the Lord, George, I thought you were too much of an old John Bull to put your trust in a Frenchman, however clever.’
‘He’s not even a Frenchman, he’s a Belgian,’ said Sir George in a rather shamefaced manner. (Chapter 3)

And:

‘To send for a queer foreigner like this seems very odd to me,’ said Reggie. ‘What has been taken, Father?’

Christie’s comic feminists

The book before this, ‘Cards on the Table’, is notable for the advent of a kind of avatar of Christie, an alter ego, the fictional female author of detective stories Mrs Ariadne Oliver who also happens to be a passionate and outspoken feminist. Well, there’s an echo of her here in the character Mrs Macatta, who is an MP, an ardent advocate of social reform, and a feminist. At least she’s quick to criticise men:

‘Lord Mayfield has brains,’ allowed Mrs Macatta. ‘And he has carved his career out entirely for himself. He owes nothing to hereditary influence. He has a certain lack of vision, perhaps. In that I find all men sadly alike. They lack the breadth of a woman’s imagination. Woman, M. Poirot, is going to be the great force in government in ten years’ time.’ (Chapter 6)

Nearly as critical of men as she is of women who don’t agree with her:

Poirot invited Mrs Macatta’s opinion of Mrs Vanderlyn – and got it.
‘One of those absolutely useless women, M. Poirot. Women that make one despair of one’s own sex! A parasite, first and last a parasite.’
‘Men admired her?’
‘Men!’ Mrs Macatta spoke the word with contempt. ‘Men are always taken in by those very obvious good looks.’

So she despises all men, and all women who don’t share her beliefs, and it all leads up to a call for the entire nation to be subjected to sweeping moral reform:

‘The evils of gambling, M. Poirot, are only slightly less than the evils caused by drink. If I had my way this country should be purified.’
Poirot was forced to listen to a somewhat lengthy discussion on the purification of England’s morals.

Tempting to say that feminists haven’t changed that much in the past 90 years, still the same unquestioning self-confidence, the dismissal of anyone who disagrees as morally deficient, still the same ambition to bring about a sweeping moral transformation, ban porn, overthrow the patriarchy, abolish the male gaze, end domestic abuse – no doubt all eminently worthy aims, and just as achievable as Mrs Macatta’s goals of ending drunkenness and immorality.

That’s my contentious view. What isn’t contentious is that Christie deliberately made her feminist characters figures of fun. She found full-on feminist views good material for humour.

Interviews

For sure there are physical clues to be found and assessed but the core of the stories is Poirot’s lengthy interviews with the other characters / suspects. There’s a deep connection between the way he interrogates the characters and the art of the author herself. In a non-genre novel we get to understand the characters via their interactions in different settings. Whereas the Christie-style detective story, the characters are lined up as in a queue, sometimes literally in a queue, waiting to go one by one into the room where they will be interviewed by the moderator figure. This happens in Murder on the Orient Express, Death in the Clouds and again, here, where, the day after the robbery, Poirot makes his base in the study and then interviews each of the other characters one by one. This, not their interactions with each other, is how we find out about them.

It is very schematic, isn’t it? It’s almost like a diagram of a novel rather than a full, proper novel. In works like this and ‘Orient’ you see the narrative process reduced to its bare bones:

  • mysterious event (murder or theft) occurs
  • all the suspects are interviewed one by one at length
  • the solution and explanation are revealed

Maybe it’s because the essence of the narrative is so samey that Christie was able to knock out such an impressive number of stories. Obviously the settings, characters and details change in every one. And yet, on the deepest level, they’re all the same.

Poirot’s symmetry OCD

Poirot went back to the fireplace and carefully rearranged the ornaments on the mantelpiece. (Chapter 7)

3. Dead Man’s Mirror

This is the longest of the three stories at 108 pages. On the face of it another murder mystery, it is also an extended satire on the foibles and eccentricities of the poshest of the English aristocracy.

Eccentric old Gervase Chevenix-Gore, last male descendant of a family which dates back to the Norman Conquest. The setup is simple. At his flat in London Poirot receives a letter from Gervase asking him to come and see him at the grand family home, as he suspects he is the victim of a fraud but must manage the matter with discretion. But when Poirot (having taken the train from London) arrives at the house, arriving just as the gong for dinner has been sounded to the dozen or so members of family and house guests all assembled there – Gervase doesn’t show up and when they break down the locked door of his study, they find him slumped at his desk, gun in hand, shot through the head, an obvious case of suicide. His desk faced a mirror and the bullet had gone through his skull and shattered this mirror.

However, only Poirot (and the reader) know that Gervase sent the letter inviting him down and so had no reason to commit suicide; the opposite, we would have expected him to be waiting to engage Poirot and explain what he wanted him to do.

So, in the time-honoured style, Poirot and Major Riddle set about interviewing all the family and guests, an entertaining assemblage of florid characters. Who had a motive? Who had the opportunity etc? As you would expect, the more the pair dig, the more cross-currents and motivations they discover, not least in the terms of the dead man’s will, often the first place to start in the murder of a rich old man. As Poirot puts it:

‘Do you not agree, my friend, that the more we learn, the less and less motive we find for suicide? But for murder, we begin to have a surprising collection of motives.’ (Chapter 8)

Surprising to Poirot maybe. Not to anyone who’s read an Agatha Christie story.

The mirror as metaphor

There’s generally very little symbolism in a Christie story. So I was struck when the mirror is used as a metaphor for the complexity of the situation which Poirot and Riddle (inevitably) uncover:

‘What the devil –’ began Major Riddle, and ended rather hopelessly: ‘It gets more and more difficult to keep track of this business.’
Poirot nodded. He had picked up the little piece of earth that had fallen from Ruth’s shoe and was holding it thoughtfully in his hand.
‘It is like the mirror smashed on the wall,’ he said. ‘The dead man’s mirror. Every new fact we come across shows us some different angle of the dead man. He is reflected from every conceivable point of view. We shall have soon a complete picture…’ (Chapter 10)

Cast

Preliminary

  • Hercule Poirot
  • Mr Satterthwaite – expert on the aristocracy, who we’ve met in ‘Three Act Tragedy’

At the house

  • Gervase Chevenix-Gore
  • Vanda Chevenix Gore – his wife, ‘an Arbuthnot, very handsome girl. She’s still quite a handsome
    woman. Frightfully vague, though. Devoted to Gervase. She’s got a leaning towards the occult, I believe. Wears amulets and scarabs and gives out that she’s the reincarnation of an Egyptian Queen’ – thinks she’s a reincarnation of Hatshepsut and before that, was a priestess in Atlantis’
  • Ruth Chevenix-Gore – adopted daughter: ‘they’ve no children of their own. Very attractive girl in the modern style’ – ‘a well-chiselled nose, slightly aquiline, and a clear, sharp line of jaw. Her black hair swept back from her face into a mass of little tight curls. Her colouring was of carnation clearness and brilliance, and owed little to make-up. She was, so Hercule Poirot thought, one of the loveliest girls he had seen’ – ‘a devilishly attractive girl. Has played havoc with most of the young fellows round here’
  • Hugo Trent – Gervase’s nephew – ‘Pamela Chevenix-Gore married Reggie Trent and Hugo was their only child’ – in ‘the Blues’ i.e. The Royal Regiment of Horse Guards – ‘ a moustache and an air of modest arrogance’
  • Susan Cardwell – house guest, ‘rather a good-looking girl with red hair’
  • Colonel Bury – an old friend of the family’, ‘almost a tame cat about the house. Kind of A.D.C. to Lady Chevenix-Gore’, ‘follows her about like a dog’
  • Mr Forbes – an old friend and the family lawyer, both devoted to Vanda back in the day – very proper and formal, ‘I never guess’ – wears a pince-nez
  • Godfrey Burrows – Gervase’s secretary, ‘ good-looking, and knows it. Not quite out of the top drawer’ – turns out he thinks Gervase’s attitude was feudal and ridiculous
  • Miss Lingard – ‘little, middle-aged prim woman’, research assistant for the history of his family which Gervase has been writing for the last six months
  • Captain Lake – Sir Gervase’s agent for the estate, ‘a tall, fair-haired man in a lounge suit’
  • Snell – the butler

The investigation

  • Major Riddle – Chief Constable of the fictional county of Westshire, ‘a tall, spruce-looking man’
  • the police surgeon – ‘a lank elderly man with grizzled hair’
  • police inspector – ‘a tall impassive-faced man in plain clothes’
  • Mr Forbes – family lawyer

Bookish references

‘It’s all very well, Poirot. But the evidence is clear enough. Door locked, key in his own pocket. Window closed and fastened. I know these things happen in books – but I’ve never come across them in real life.’ (Chief Constable Riddle, Chapter 5)

Or the movies:

‘You’re getting a bit too sensational, I think, Poirot.’
‘You think what I suggest is too like the pictures? But life, Major Riddle, is often amazingly like the pictures.’ (Chapter 8)

The tribulations of being rich

Christie’s stories testify, now and then, to the impact of the 1930s Depression, pointing out that all wealthy people have taken a hit. The Chevenix-Gore family lawyer in this story, says the family fortune has been impacted. More impactful, though, was some bad investment advice given him by his friend Colonel Bury. When they interview him, Bury justifies himself against his friend’s reproaches:

‘Didn’t seem to realise that the whole world was going through a period of crisis. All stocks and shares bound to be affected.’ (Chapter 8)

While the lawyer draws a general, and amusing, conclusion:

Mr Forbes sighed. ‘Retired soldiers are the worst sufferers when they engage in financial operations. I have found that their credulity far exceeds that of widows and that is saying a good deal.’ (Chapter 6)

Poirot is old

We (well I) are hoodwinked into thinking Poirot is a reasonably agile, late-middle-aged man by the image of sprightly dapper David Suchet in the extensive ITV adaptations. And yet the texts themselves often tell a different story, emphasising that Poirot is, quite simply, ‘a small, elderly man’.

The revelation

You can’t help smiling when, at the conclusion of his investigations, Poirot asks the household to convene in the study for his big explanation which he kicks off with the classic phrase:

‘I have asked you all to come here so that you may hear the true facts of Sir Gervase’s suicide.’ (Chapter 12)

It’s as enjoyably, reassuringly formulaic as panto.

4. Triangle at Rhodes

‘Human nature is simply fascinating. Don’t you think so, M. Poirot?’
(posh Miss Lyall accidentally puts her finger on Poirot’s central axiom, Chapter 1)

Improbably, Poirot is on holiday on the Greek island. He is of the old school which believes in completely covering your body in the sun. Beside him sits:

Miss Pamela Lyall, who sat beside him and talked ceaselessly, represented the modern school of thought in that she was wearing the barest minimum of clothing on her sun-browned person.

There’s another nugget of social history, when one of the characters laments that Rhodes is such a long way to travel from England. Yes but just imagine, says, Miss Sarah Blake, if it was easier to get to:

‘Yes, but then it would be awful. Rows and rows of people laid out like fish on a slab. Bodies everywhere!’ (Chapter 1)

Which is exactly what started to happen in the 1970s with the advent of package holidays and has been happening ever since. Fifty years of over-tourism.

Anyway, this Miss Lyall thinks that people watching is the most fascinating hobby. Surprisingly, maybe, Poirot observes that people in the end fall into very obvious types or categories and rarely act out of character. In a downbeat way, he says it becomes, in the end, quite boring. The sea is more varied and interesting.

So Poirot was advised to come to Rhodes in October, out of season, when the hotels would be empty. Instead he is distressed to discover seven or eight English guests and among them two squabbling couples.

Valentine Chantry has been a world famous model for 16 years or so, with a succession of flashy husbands and now proceeds to drive the latest one, a brutish naval commander, Tony, wild with jealousy, by flirting outrageously with gullible young Douglas Gold, much to the disgust of Gold’s wife, Marjorie.

So the two men fancy the same honeypot woman (Valentine) making up one of the oldest relationship stereotypes in the world, the Eternal triangle.

Poirot unhappily observes all this happening but it delights another hotel guest, the catty, humorous Miss Pamela Lyell, the one with no attachments who loves watching people. In conversation with Poirot, she even humorously teases out of him that he fears there might be a murder!

So then the murder actually takes place. The male characters are sitting round. Gold has bought the first round of drinks, including a pink gin for the commander. In come the women who have been off on an outing. Tony Chantry chivalrously offers to buy drinks. When his wife asks for a pink gin, he pushes the one in front of him over to her and goes up to the bar. She drains the glass to the dregs then comes over funny, turns blue and dies. As she cries out the commander comes running back and shouts at Douglas that that drink was intended for him, Tony. When the police are called they indeed find the rest of the poison (‘A form of stropanthin. A heart poison’) in Gold’s jacket pocket.

So it looks like an open and shut case. Gold, twisted any way she wanted him by Valentine, wanted to poison Tony Chantry to get him out of the way so he could marry Valentine, but his plan went disastrously wrong when Tony unexpectedly handed over his (poisoned) drink to Valentine.

Except that that’s not what happened at all. And in the short seven-page final chapter, Poirot explains to an amazed Miss Lyall a completely different and true explanation of what really happened and why.

Cast

  • Hercule Poirot
  • Miss Pamela Lyall – ‘whose principal interests in life were the observation of people round her and the sound of her own voice’
  • Miss Sarah Blake – her friend
  • Valentine Chantry – now 39, famous model since she was 16, staggeringly beautiful, had 5 husbands etc
  • Commander Tony Chantry – ‘a commander in the navy… silent, dark, with a pugnacious jaw and a sullen manner. A touch of the primeval ape about him’
  • Mr Douglas Gold – 31, ‘extremely good-looking, in an almost theatrical manner. Very fair, crisply curling hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, narrow hips. He looked more like a young man on the stage than a young man in real life, but the moment he opened his mouth that impression faded. He was quite natural and unaffected, even, perhaps, a little stupid’
  • Mrs Marjorie Gold – 35, ‘ a small woman-rather like a mouse. She was not bad-looking, indeed her features were regular and her complexion good, but she had a certain air of diffidence and dowdiness that made her liable to be overlooked’
  • old General Barnes – ‘a veteran who was usually in the company of the young’

Bookishness

The General chuckled. ‘She’s finding him a little bit difficult! One of the strong, silent men you hear about in books.’ (Chapter 2)

Poirot’s egotism and modesty

And though Hercule Poirot was a conceited little man where his profession was concerned, he was quite modest in his estimate of his personal attractions. (Chapter 2)

‘Every woman adores a fascist’

[Mr Gold] said to Poirot, ‘That man’s a brute!’ And he nodded his head in the direction of the retreating figure of Commander Chantry.
‘It is possible,’ said Poirot. ‘Yes, it is quite possible. But les femmes, they like brutes, remember that!’
Douglas muttered: ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he ill-treats her!’
‘She probably likes that too.’ (Chapter 2)

5. Language

Poirotisms

I’ve mentioned how Poirot’s foreignness is raised a number of times. It can also be used for pure comic purposes, as when Christie has Poirot mangle an English proverb or common phrase, as he does at least once in every story:

‘For the same reason, when she sets out the following day to get rid of the golf clubs, she continues to use the attaché-case as a – what is it – kippered herring?’
‘Red herring,’ Japp said.
(Murder in the Mews, Chapter 10)

Poirot held up a hand. ‘I do what you call explore all the avenues.’
(The Incredible Theft, Chapter 4)

‘Ah, yes, it is what you call the old gasp – no, pardon, the old wheeze, that – to come back for a book. It is often useful!’
(The Incredible Theft, Chapter 4)

‘One has, sometimes, a feeling. Faintly, I seem to smell the fish.’
(Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 1)

1930s slang

  • bad hat – bad man
  • gasper – basic cheap make of cigarette
  • old cock! – Japp’s Cockney / vulgar term of affection, cruder version of ‘old chap’
  • pukka sahib – literally ‘genuine master’, metaphorically ‘good chap’, approved by the British upper middle-class value system
  • legal wallah – wallah is a Hindi term meaning ‘in charge’ so in British India came to be used in association with a profession or action e.g. ‘rickshaw-wallah’; Major Riddle is asserting his membership of the ruling class of the Empire by consciously using imperial slang, in this case referring to the family lawyer, Mr Forbes

Posh diction

According to Christie, posh people like Lord Maybury use contemporary slang but emphasise their superiority to it by using quotation marks:

  • ‘She’s an American subject. I know that she’s had three husbands, one Italian, one German and one Russian, and that in consequence she has made useful what I think are called “contacts”.’
  • ‘I know,’ Lord Mayfield continued, ‘that in addition to having a seductive type of beauty, Mrs Vanderlyn is also a very good listener, and that she can display a fascinating interest in what we call “shop”.’
  • ‘You see, George, to use the language of the movies, we’ve nothing actually “on” the woman. And we want something!’

Related is:

‘Do you yourself approve of Mr Burrows?’ The colonel delivered himself of the opinion that Godfrey Burrows was slightly hairy at the heel, a pronouncement which baffled Poirot completely, but made Major Riddle smile into his moustache.
(Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 8)

The same phrase as was used in ‘Murder in the Mews’. Maybe Christie had heard it somewhere and it amused her enough to slip it into the speech of several posh chaps.

Changing definitions of age

In ‘Cards on the Table’ Mrs Lorrimer is considered an old woman at 63.

‘But I am 56, my boy. In another four years I shall probably be a nasty old man continually haunting the society of unwilling debutantes.’
(Lord Mayfield in The Incredible Theft)

Charity

There are lots of reasons for Christie’s runaway bestselling status:

  • the narratives are written with beautiful clarity and zip along at speed
  • the large casts of posh characters appeal to the same audiences who love Downton Abbey and other early 20th century costume dramas i.e. a kind of vicarious snobbery
  • the books (much more than the often clumsy TV and movie adaptations) are always beamingly good humoured, and sometimes very funny
  • although one or two people are ‘murdered’, these alleged murders are totally unlike the sickening, disgusting murders of real life – they are accepted by one and all as ‘tokens’ in an entertainment, conventionalised events designed to deliver all the other psychological / reading pleasures I’ve listed – only very rarely does a murder really upset the story’s characters and cut through to the reader, the most obvious example being the teagirl, Betty Barnard, killed in The ABC  Murders which devastates her poor family

Lastly, there is an air of charity and forgiveness about them. There are lots of other things about it but, in the end, the most notable thing about ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ is that Poirot, understanding their motives, lets all the murderers off, lying to the police so that they can get away.

Same in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’. When the murderer is revealed, so is her sad story and the nobility of her motivation. When she piteously begs Poirot not to reveal the truth of her identity, he charitably agrees.

Despite the ostensible subject matter of murder, the tone of the narratives, and the attitude of most of the characters and, above all, of the master character, Poirot, is one of understanding, compassion and forgiveness. I think it’s this quality which makes them somehow such comforting and reassuring reads.

Credit

‘Murder in the Mews’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1937 by the Collins Crime Club.

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Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie (1935)

‘You’ve got a knack of turning up in the most unexpected places, M. Poirot.’
‘Isn’t Croydon aerodrome a little out of your beat, my friend?’ asked Poirot.
‘Ah, I’m after rather a big bug in the smuggling line. A bit of luck my being on the spot.’
(Inspector Japp explaining away the improbable coincidence that he is at Croydon Airport to greet the airliner on which there’s just been a murder, instead of on his normal beat in back London)

‘Rum business, this,’ he said. ‘Bit too sensational to be true. I mean, blowpipes and poisoned darts in an aeroplane—well, it insults one’s intelligence.’
(Dramatising summary from Inspector Japp)

‘The whole thing is a bit of a teaser.’
(Japp, puzzled as usual)

‘Every minute this case gets more puzzling,’ cried Fournier.
(Talking up the story’s mystery and atmosphere, Chapter 11)

‘It amazes me – the whole thing seems almost – unreal…’
(More talking up)

‘I have the feeling very strongly, Mademoiselle, that there is a figure who has not yet come into the limelight – a part as yet unplayed — There is, Mademoiselle, an unknown factor in this case. Everything
points to that…’’
(Adding depth to the mystery, Chapter 22)

Jane thought to herself with a touch of misgiving: ‘He’s French, though. You’ve got to look out with the French, they always say so.’
(Wise words, Chapter 13)

‘Ah, but, you see, an answer depends on the questions. You did not know what questions to ask.’
(Exactly what we’re learning about handing artificial intelligence – Poirot, Chapter 11)

Sensationalism dies quickly – fear is long-lived.’
(The wisdom of the old pro’, Chapter 16)

‘Mon cher, practically speaking, I know everything.’
(Poirot’s modesty)

‘If you ask me,’ said Mrs Mitchell, ‘there’s Bolshies at the back of it.’
(The comedy prole view, Chapter 19)

The setup

The regular Tuesday plane service from Le Bourget airdrome outside Paris to Croydon Airport south of London takes off with 11 passengers in First Class, and a similar number in Second Class. A few minutes before it’s due to land the steward shakes a sleeping woman who lolls forward onto her table. Marie Morisot is dead. He calls a doctor who confirms she’s dead.

Surreptitiously, Poirot has snuck up behind the stewards and the doctor, and points out that the dead woman has a red mark on her neck. Furthermore, he bends down to reveal a small dart at her feet, with a fluffy body and a thorn-like tip. Ms Morisot was murdered by a dart from a blowpipe! The American thriller writer, Clancy, is excited to see something he’s read and written about so often, in real life.

Anyway, who would want to murder Ms Morisot? And on an airplane flight? And with a blowpipe?

On landing they are met, improbably enough, by Poirot’s old friend Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard – Christie contrives an explanation about him being transferred to the anti-smuggling force to explain it – then they get down to the nitty gritty of interviewing each of the passengers, giving us readers a handy pen profile of each of them – full name, age, address, occupation and so on. Very much like the similarly stage-managed questioning of all the suspects on the Orient Express.

A few days later there’s the official inquest when the same series of witnesses are called to the stand and questions along with the local cops and doctor. Afterwards the young couple, Jane Grey and Norman Gale repair to a tea room where, after seeing off an offer by a redtop journalist to author a story about the murder, they decide to embark on the amateur investigation which feature in so many of Christie’s novels and Christie gives them a conveniently phrased excuse:

‘Murder,’ said Norman Gale, ‘doesn’t concern the victim and the guilty only. It affects the innocent too. You and I are innocent, but the shadow of murder has touched us. We don’t know how that shadow is going to affect our lives.’ (Chapter 5)

The main early revelation which opens the door, is the arrival of French Surete officers who reveal that the apparently harmless old French lady who’s been murdered is in fact a notorious loan shark to the aristocracy and professional classes. She loans these people small fortunes but her security is never a house or assets, it is knowledge about their intimate affairs. I.e. they take the loan knowing that if they don’t pay it back on time, she will leak the compromising information she has on them.

So any number of people, and possible other passengers on the plane, might have been in this position of having taken out a loan, being unable to repay it, and taking the desperate step of bumping off old Mme Morisot.

But there is a second obvious gainer from her death, her 25-year-old daughter, Anne Morisot, who is set to inherit her mother’s fortune of over £100,000.

As usual there are the customary clichés of the genre: characters telling each other that this form of murder was incredible, impossible, almost a miracle. Then, later, the conventional statement that the murderer must be a cunning devil, a fiend, a calculating fiend etc – none of which help in the detection, but all of which help to jack up the tension, deepen the atmosphere, make the whole thing a more intense reading experience.

Cast

On the flight

  • Seat No. 2 Madame Giselle aka Marie Morisot, ‘one of the best-known moneylenders in Paris’
  • No. 4 James Ryder – managing director of the Ellis Vale Cement Company
  • No. 5 Monsieur Armand Dupont
  • No. 6 Monsieur Jean Dupont – son, both ‘returned not long ago from conducting some very interesting excavations in Persia’
  • No. 8 Daniel Clancy – small American writer of detective stories
  • No. 9 Hercule Poirot –
  • No. 10 Doctor Bryant – a Harley Street specialist on diseases of the ear and throat (there’s always one on hand to verify the murderee is in fact dead)
  • No. 12 Norman Gale – dentist from Muswell Hill
  • No. 13 The Countess of Horbury
  • No. 16 Jane Grey – hairdressers assistant in a beauty salon in Bruton Street (location of Mrs Dacres’ dress shop in ‘Three Act Tragedy’), won £100 and used it to take a holiday in France
  • No. 17 The Honourable Venetia Kerr –
  • Henry Mitchell – chief steward on the airliner Prometheus
  • Ruth, his wife – ‘a buxom, highly complexioned woman with snapping dark eyes’
  • Albert Davis – second steward

Afterwards

  • Chief Inspector Japp – ‘an erect soldierly figure in plain clothes’
  • Constable Rogers – assistant to Japp
  • Dr James Whistler – doctor for Croydon Airport
  • Maître Alexandre Thibault – French lawyer for Madame Giselle
  • Mr Winterspoon – chief Government analyst and an authority on rare poisons
  • Detective-Sergeant Wilson
  • Monsieur Fournier of the Sûreté – ‘a tall thin man with an intelligent, melancholy face’

In Paris

  • Elise Grandier – the dead woman’s confidential maid, ‘a short stout woman of middle age with a florid face and small shrewd eyes’, who burned her mistress’s papers, as instructed, but kept Madam’s little black book which she hands over to Poirot
  • Old Georges the concierge of Morisot’s apartment – a woman came to visit her the night before the flight (and her murder) but his eyesight is failing and he didn’t notice her face
  • M. Gilles – Chief of the Detective Force at the Sûreté
  • Zeropoulos – Greek antique dealer who reported the sale of a blowpipe and darts three days before the murder, ‘a short, stout little man with beady black eyes’
  • Jules Perrot – clerk at the Universal Airlines office in Paris where Morisot’s plane ticket for England was bought, who turns out to have been bribed to make sure she was on the 12 noon flight
  • Madame Richards – Marie Morisot’s married daughter and heir

Back in England, at Horbury Chase

  • Stephen, Lord Horbury – another one of Christie’s dim English aristocrats: ‘Stephen Horbury was twenty-seven years of age. He had a narrow head and a long chin. He looked very much what he was—a sporting out-of-door kind of man without anything very spectacular in the way of brains. He was kind-hearted, slightly priggish, intensely loyal and invincibly obstinate’
  • Madeleine – Lady Horbury’s maid
  • ffoulkes, ffoulkes, Wilbraham and ffoulkes – the Horbury family solicitors, latest in a long line of gently mocked lawyers to the aristocracy

In London

  • M. Antoine – owner of the boutique where Jane Grey works, real name was Andrew Leech, whose claims to foreign nationality consisted of having had a Jewish mother
  • Gladys – Jane’s friend, ‘an ethereal blonde with a haughty demeanour and a faint, faraway professional voice. In private her voice was hoarse and jocular’ – she calls the boss ‘Ikey Andrew’ which isn’t very nice
  • Miss Ross – the nurse in Norman Gale’s dentist practice in Muswell Hill

Bookish

In previous reviews I’ve developed the idea that Christie having her characters regularly compare their situations and scenarios to the stereotypes and clichés of detective stories (or movies) serves several purposes. 1) It pre-empts criticism from critics or readers who may be tempted to complain about the corny (or preposterous) plot developments. 2) But at the same time it draws attention to the artificiality of the whole genre and nudges you away from even trying to compare anyone or anything that happens to ‘real life’, gently nudging you into the entirely fictional land of Detective Stories, where anything can happen, where anyone can disguise themselves as anyone else in order to carry out the most ludicrously complicated crimes.

Hence the succession of ‘nudges’ in this story.

‘It beats me,’ he said. ‘The crudest detective story dodge coming out trumps!’ (Japp, Chapter 3)

‘What an extraordinarily rum little beggar,’ said Gale. ‘Calls himself a detective. I don’t see how he could do much detecting. Any criminal could spot him a mile off. I don’t see how he could disguise himself.’
‘Haven’t you got a very old-fashioned idea of detectives?’ asked Jane. ‘All the false beard stuff is very out of date. Nowadays detectives just sit and think out a case psychologically.’
‘Rather less strenuous.’
‘Physically, perhaps; but of course you need a cool, clear brain.’ (Chapter 4)

‘Hullo, old boy,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a pretty near squeak of being locked up in a police cell.’
‘I fear,’ said Poirot gravely, ‘that such an occurrence might have damaged me professionally.’
‘Well,’ said Japp with a grin, ‘detectives do turn out to be criminals sometimes – in story books.’ (Chapter 6)

‘I’d like to do something,’ he said. ‘If I was a young man in a book I’d find a clue or I’d shadow somebody.’ (Chapter 14)

‘Anyway, we have heard something. Somebody – a woman – is going to be silenced, and some other woman won’t speak. Oh, dear, it sounds dreadfully like a detective story.’ (Chapter 14)

But as well as the usual arch references to the clichés and stereotypes of detective novels, this story actually features a writer of detective stories, who Japp immediately suspects and which gives him (and other characters) the opportunity to sound off about the iniquity of detective story writers.

‘Clancy let out that he bought a blowpipe. These detective-story writers… always making the police out to be fools… and getting their procedure all wrong. Why, if I were to say the things to my super that their inspectors say to superintendents I should be thrown out of the Force tomorrow on my ear. Set of ignorant scribblers! This is just the sort of damn fool murder that a scribbler of rubbish would think he could get away with.’ (Chapter 3)

‘I don’t think it’s healthy for a man to be always brooding over crime and detective stories, reading up all sorts of cases. It puts ideas into his head.’ (Chapter 7)

Or allows Clancy to make digs at the most famous detective of all:

‘Ah,’ said Mr Clancy. ‘But, you see, I have my methods, Watson. If you’ll excuse my calling you Watson. No offence intended. Interesting, by the way, how the technique of the idiot friend has hung on. Personally I myself think the Sherlock Holmes stories grossly overrated. The fallacies – the really amazing fallacies that there are in those stories –’

And generally satirise her own profession, by summarising the truly ludicrous plot Clancy is planning to elaborate from the plane murder and, when Poirot hesitantly suggests that it’s a bit melodramatic, explains that:

‘You can’t write anything too sensational,’ said Mr Clancy firmly. ‘Especially when you’re dealing with the arrow poison of the South American Indians. I know it was snake juice, really; but the principle is the same. After all, you don’t want a detective story to be like real life? Look at the things in the papers – dull as ditchwater.’

And you only have to consider the plots of some of Christie’s own novels or, for some reason the James Bond novels pop into my head, to know the truth of this generalisation.

Poirot’s method

In each Poirot novel the great Belgian repeats the key elements of his procedure: 1) to educate newcomers, 2) to please existing fans by repeating all his best moves. These are:

  1. trust no-one – everyone is a suspect until proven innocent
  2. every witness keeps something back, no matter how trivial, sometimes unconsciously
  3. seek out who the crime benefits
  4. use order and method to establish the facts
  5. then employ ‘the little grey cells’ to come up with ‘little ideas’ i.e. draft theories, which connect the facts
  6. accept no theory which doesn’t accommodate all the facts i.e. don’t jump to conclusions or hold onto pet theories which there is evidence disproving
  7. finally, your theory must be congruent with psychology i.e. with the characters of the people involved

Throughout the text he iterates these principles:

Suspect everyone

‘Shall I tell you something, Mademoiselle Grandier? It is part of my business to believe nothing I am told – nothing that is, that is not proved. I do not suspect first this person and then that person. I suspect everybody. Anybody connected with a crime is regarded by me as a criminal until that person is proved innocent.’ (Chapter 10)

Order and method

‘If one approaches a problem with order and method there should be no difficulty in solving it—none whatever,’ said Poirot severely. (Chapter 18)

‘You jump about a good deal.’
‘Not really. I pursue my course logically with order and method. One must not jump wildly to a conclusion. One must eliminate.’ (Chapter 19)

‘I proceed a step at a time, with order and method…’ (Chapter 21)

‘There must be in all things order and method. One must finish with one thing before proceeding to the next.’ (Chapter 24)

Little grey cells

‘Close your eyes, my friend, instead of opening them wide. Use the eyes of the brain, not of the body. Let the little grey cells of the mind function…Let it be their task to show you what actually
happened.’ (Chapter 9)

All the facts

‘I proceed always in the simplest manner imaginable! And I never refuse to accept facts.’ (Chapter 21)

Psychology

‘Ah, M. Poirot, that is your little foible. A man like Fournier will be more to your mind. He is of the newest school – all for the psychology. That should please you.’
‘It does. It does.’ (Chapter 11)

Japp’s cockneyisms

Japp’s being a class down from the posh aristocrats or upper middle-class protagonists, is indicated by his phraseology and vocabulary.

‘I suppose that little writer chap hasn’t gone off his onion and decided to do one of his crimes in the flesh instead of on paper?’

‘Everybody’s got to be searched, whether they kick up rough or not; and every bit of truck they had with them has got to be searched too – and that’s flat.’

‘If you ask me, those two toughs are our meat…. you must admit they don’t look up to much, do they?’

‘You don’t say so,’ said Japp with a grin.

Christie does the plebs.

‘That’s all right, old cock,’ said Japp, slapping him heartily on the back. ‘You’re in on this on the ground floor.’ (Chapter 6)

‘Just as well she wasn’t on that plane,’ said Japp drily. ‘She might have been suspected of bumping off her mother to get the dibs.’ (Chapter 7)

Several times Poirot actively objects to Japp’s offensive terminology, for example when, instead of asking whether he has an idea, he crudely accuses Poirot of having a ‘maggot’ in his brain. Is it me, or does Christie make Japp noticeably coarser and cruder in this book?

‘That’s the Honourable Venetia. Well, what about her? She’s a big bug.’ (Chapter 7)

‘Yes, she’s the type of pigeon to be mixed up with Giselle.’

Japp’s role

As usual Japp is positioned as not only crude in his speech and manner (beside the dapper, restrained Poirot, ‘exquisitely dressed in the most dandiacal style’) but as intellectually crude and limited, too.

Japp always jumps to rash conclusions, takes against suspects (often on the simple basis that they’re foreigners, the long deep Farageist thread in the English character). In every novel he mocks Poirot:

Japp whispered to Norman: ‘Fancies himself, doesn’t he? Conceit’s that little man’s middle name.’ (Chapter 26)

And accuses Poirot of over-thinking things, of actively preferring to make things complicated.

Take the way he dismisses Poirot’s insistence on the subtleties of psychology:

‘It is most important in a crime to get an idea of the psychology of the murderer.’
Japp snorted slightly at the word psychology, which he disliked and mistrusted. (Chapter 7)

The net result is that when you read any opinion offered by Japp, you must immediately consider the opposite to be likely or, more accurately, you immediately suspect Christie is using him to dismiss a possibility which, later on, we will find out is in fact true.

Poirot’s OCD

Poirot did not answer, and Fournier asked curiously: ‘It gives you an idea, that?’
Poirot bowed his head assentingly. ‘It gives rise to, say, a speculation in my mind.’
With absent-minded fingers he straightened the unused inkstand that Japp’s impatient hand had set a little askew… (Chapter 7)

Poirot did not answer for a moment or two; then he took his hands from his temples, sat very upright and straightened two forks and a saltcellar which offended his sense of symmetry. (Chapter 25)

It’s actually referred to nowadays as symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Poirot’s comic English

Obviously there are hundreds of examples of  this, mostly fairly humdrum. But I laughed at:

‘Let us have an end of what you call in this country the fool-tommery.’

These novels are, essentially, comedies.

1930s locutions

‘She was an – an absolute – well, I can’t say just what she was through the telephone.’ (Chapter 21)

Through the telephone?

He looked at her sharply. ‘He attracts you – eh – this young man? Il a le sex appeal?’

In a later novel, a character abbreviates this to S.A.

Poirot explains a fundamental human need

‘What a horrible, tricky sort of person you are, M. Poirot,’ said Jane, rising. ‘I shall never know why you are saying things.’
‘That is quite simple. I want to find out things.’
‘I suppose you’ve got very clever ways of finding out things?’
‘There is only one really simple way.’
‘What is that?’
‘To let people tell you.’
Jane laughed.
‘Suppose they don’t want to?’
‘Everyone likes talking about themselves.’
‘I suppose they do,’ admitted Jane.
‘That is how many a quack makes a fortune. He encourages patients to come and sit and tell him things. How they fell out of the perambulator when they were two, and how their mother ate a pear and the juice fell on her orange dress, and how when they were one and a half they pulled their father’s beard; and then he tells them that now they will not suffer from the insomnia any longer, and he takes two guineas; and they go away, having enjoyed themselves – oh, so much – and perhaps they do sleep.’
‘How ridiculous,’ said Jane.
‘No, it is not so ridiculous as you think. It is based on a fundamental need of human nature – the need to talk – to reveal oneself.’

While mocking the widely known practice of psychoanalysis, Poirot concedes its basis on a fundamental human need. Elsewhere, it is explicitly raised and mocked.

‘Ah, yes, the flute… These things interest me, you understand, psychologically.’
Mr Ryder snorted at the word psychologically. It savoured to him of what he called that tom-fool business psychoanalysis. (Chapter 18)

But he reiterates his ‘compulsion to talk’ theory right at the book’s end:

‘It is my experience that no one, in the course of conversation, can fail to give themselves away sooner or later… Everyone has an irresistible urge to talk about themselves.’ (Chapter 26)

The press

Christie’s attitude to the British press may be gauged from the fact that in an earlier novel she names a national newspaper the Daily Shriek and this novel features a journalist from the Weekly Howl.

Drugs and drug addicts

I’m impressed by the ubiquity of illegal drugs in these stories: cocaine features in ‘Peril at End House’, while morphine crops up in:

Cocaine is here again, as Lady Horbury is revealed to be a user. Indeed at the very opening of the story we are given her internal monologue:

‘My God, what shall I do? It’s the hell of a mess – the hell of a mess. There’s only one way out that I can see. If only I had the nerve. Can I do it? Can I bluff it out? My nerves are all to pieces. That’s the coke. Why did I ever take to coke? My face looks awful, simply awful…’ (Chapter 1)

Christie’s cats

On the evidence of Christie’s novels, the word cat was widely used slang in the 1920s and ’30s for a bitchy, critical woman.

‘My face looks awful, simply awful. That cat Venetia Kerr being here makes it worse. She always looks at me as though I were dirt. Wanted Stephen herself. Well, she didn’t get him! That long face of hers gets on my nerves. It’s exactly like a horse. I hate these county women.’
(Lady Horbury’s internal monologue, Chapter 1)

Venetia thought, ‘She has the morals of a cat! I know that well enough. But she’s careful. She’s shrewd as they make ’em.’ (Chapter 12)

Stephen had been fond of her, but not fond enough to prevent him from falling desperately, wildly, madly in love with a clever calculating cat of a chorus girl…

However this meaning is interfered, like two beams of different coloured light intersecting, by the fact that Poirot, when he is on the trail, when he is excited by a breakthrough, is always described as developing green glowing eyes like a cat. Then sometimes there are just actual cats. So the two charged meanings overlap with each other, as well as the ordinary common or garden one, amusingly.

Meals

Novels very rarely indeed describe meals. They describe the events and the boring conversation, but rarely the actual dishes. So I note them when they occur. Thus Poirot in Paris suggests to Fournier they go for a ‘simple’ lunch.

‘A simple but satisfying meal, that is what I prescribe. Let us say omelette aux champignons, sole à la Normande – a cheese of Port Salut, and with it red wine.’

While in London, after interview Clancy, he takes Jane and Norman for:

Poirot ordered some consommé and a chaud-froid of chicken.

Muddle

JAPP: There you are again – unsatisfactory. The whole thing is a muddle.’
POIROT: ‘There is no such thing as muddle – obscurity, yes – but muddle can exist only in a disorderly brain.’

Wish I could have introduced Poirot to E.M. Forster whose novels are about nothing but muddle.

‘Every woman adores a fascist’ (Sylvia Plath)

Poirot laments that sweet Jane Grey was so strongly attracted by Norman Gale who turned out to be a serial killer.

‘A killer,’ said Poirot. ‘And like many killers, attractive to women.’ (Chapter 26)

The theme was aired in 1928’s ‘Murder on the Blue Train’ where young Ruth Kettering is attracted to Comte Armand de la Roche precisely because he has such a bad reputation. And in ‘Three Act Tragedy’ where the heroine’s mother, Lady Mary Gore fell for a wrong ‘un despite all her father’s warnings, and laments that:

‘There doesn’t seem to be anything that warns girls against a certain type of man. Nothing in themselves, I mean. Their parents warn them, but that’s no good – one doesn’t believe. It seems dreadful to say so, but there is something attractive to a girl in being told anyone is a bad man. She thinks at once that her love will reform him.’
(Lady Mary, Chapter 14)

Her daughter, Egg, is a chip off the old block who falls in love just as inappropriately, with an older man, with Sir Charles, who turns out to be a murderer.

It’s tempting to attribute the belief that good women are attracted to bad men to Christie herself, but I’m more inclined to think it’s one of the many standard clichés and stereotypes which she placed and positioned in order to construct her preposterous stories.

Credit

‘Death in the Clouds’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1935 by the Collins Crime Club.

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Posted by Simon on August 4, 2025

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Lord Edgware Dies by Agatha Christie (1933)

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.
(Captain Hastings tiring of Poirot – and he had another 24 novels and 30 years still to go)

‘I understood that you were an investigator of – crime, M. Poirot?’
‘Of problems, Lord Edgware. There are problems of crime, certainly. There are other problems.’ (Chapter 4)

‘Hastings, I would give a great deal to know what is behind that affair. There is something – I swear there is something.’
(The ‘there’s more to this than meets the eye’ trope, Chapter 4)

Poirot related the steps we had taken and the conclusion we had. (simple description of the theory-making that most of the books mostly consist of, Chapter 16)

‘The butler! Really, you surprise me.’ (one of the story’s many red herrings, Chapter 17)

It would awaken suspicion in an oyster. (Chapter 8)

Poirot made sympathetic noises, somewhat suggestive of a hen laying an egg. (Chapter 17)

‘Sorry, M. Poirot.’ He wiped his eyes. ‘But you did look for all the world like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.’ (Chapter 22)

‘Lord Edgware Dies’ is Agatha Christie’s seventh Hercule Poirot novel. It is once again narrated by his comically dense sidekick, Captain Hastings, who Poirot routinely insults and mocks but who he also needs to help him solve his cases, as he at one point explains (see below).

Setup

One morning George Alfred St. Vincent Marsh, fourth Baron Edgware, is found dead in the study of his home near Regent’s Park. He had been stabbed in the neck from behind while he was sitting at his desk. The doctor says he was stabbed the evening before. On that evening the butler had locked up because he thought the master had gone to bed.

Both his butler and maid testify that earlier on the fateful evening they saw Lord Edgeware’s disaffected wife, the famous American actress Jane Wilkinson, arrive, go into his study, spend some time with him, then sweep out. Now Jane stands to benefit from the murder since she inherits Edgeware’s fortune so she becomes suspect number one.

The only trouble is that she has a watertight alibi: she was at a dinner party hosted by Sir Montagu Corner out in Chiswick in the company of a dozen others, for the whole evening.

Now, the narrative had opened with Poirot and Hastings at the theatre attending a performance by the noted American female impressionist Carlotta Adams, which included an utterly convincing impersonation of Jane Wilkinson, her walk, and accent and mannerisms. Aha.

There’s lots of other clutter and confusion about the case so it takes Poirot a few hours to realise that it wasn’t Wilkinson who the butler and maid saw going into Lord Edgware’s study, it was Carlotta, impersonating Wilkinson. Someone paid Carlotta to do an impersonation of Wilkinson, dress like her, walk like her and visit her husband during the hours when the murder was committed, in order to implicate her.

As soon as Poirot realises this, he realises that Carlotta herself is in danger from the real murderer and races in a taxi with Hastings to her rooms but arrives too late. Carlotta herself has been found dead that same morning, apparently from an overdose of the sleeping draught, veronal.

We learn that earlier on the fatal evening, Wilkinson had been loudly telling her friends that she was too tired to go to Lord Corner’s dinner. Only at the last minute did she change her mind and decide to go.

So someone in Wilkinson’s close personal circle was under the impression she would be at home alone all evening, so that if they paid Carlotta to impersonate her visiting Edgware, and then somehow murdered Edgware soon afterwards, the guilt would fall very clearly on Wilkinson. She would be convicted for the crime and the inheritance would go to someone else depending, as always, on the precise terms of Edgware’s will.

Two people obviously stand to gain, namely 1) Miss Geraldine, Edgware’s daughter by his first wife (who ran off and left him) and who, Poirot discovers, hated her father with a passion; or his nephew, Captain Ronald Marsh, a ne’er-do-well who, in the standard way, led a dissolute lifestyle, had run up gambling debts, who had asked his uncle for a loan a few months earlier but had instead had his allowance cut off, so was bubbling with anger and revenge.

But the plan had gone awry because of Jane’s whimsical impetuousness i.e. changing her mind at the last minute and going to Corner’s dinner, contrary to everything she has been telling her friends. This is why the murderer’s plan had gone horribly wrong.

There is another major factor I haven’t mentioned yet. This is that, on the day Lord Edgware was murdered, Poirot had actually been to see him. At dinner after the theatre where they’d watched Carlotta perform, the night before, Poirot and Hastings had ended up at the same restaurant (the Savoy) as Jane Wilkinson (who had been at the same performance and so watched herself being lampooned) and she came over to their table. She introduced herself and, after initial chat, had asked Poirot if she could commission him for a simple task: could he go see Lord Edgware and persuade him to grant her, Wilkinson, a divorce. She has hated her marriage to Edgware who she describes as a sadistic monster, and has tried countless lawyers and arguments, but all have fallen on deaf ears.

So the next day Poirot and Hastings go to visit Edgware which gives us a sense of the man himself and the strange atmosphere of his household. I’m not sure how much Christie could say, just how much she was hampered by the censorship of the day, but the strong implication is that Edgware was a pervert: 1) his bookshelves are packed with classics of sadism and medieval torture; 2) his butler is an improbably beautiful young man (shades of Oscar Wilde and Dorian Grey); and 3) as they depart Hastings casts a glance back into his study and sees Edgware has an extraordinary primal expression of rage on his face.

That suave, smiling face was transformed. The lips were drawn back from the teeth in a snarl, the eyes were alive with fury and an almost insane rage. (Chapter 4)

Poirot concludes:

‘I fancy that he is very near the border line of madness, Hastings. I should imagine he practises many curious vices and that beneath his frigid exterior he hides a deep-rooted instinct of cruelty.’ (Chapter 4)

Anyway, personal impressions aside, the remarkable thing about the visit is that, far from putting obstacles in their way, Edgware immediately agrees to divorce Wilkinson and goes on to say that he wrote her a letter to that effect six months earlier. Both Poirot and Hastings are flabbergasted and so is Wilkinson when they report back to her. What had changed his previously obstructive attitude, and who had been concealing it from Wilkinson i.e. did someone intercept the letter he wrote her?

As usual with my Christie reviews, I’ll stop summarising there, just as the text enters the world of theories and speculations, as not only Poirot and Hastings develop theories, but so does Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard, not to mention secondary characters such as Miss Geraldine, as Captain Marsh (who now inherits the title Lord Edgware), Wilkinson’s former lover Bryan Martin, and so on and so on.

The text consists of visits to all these secondary characters, the new information and clues they provide, and the ever-changing theories they trigger among the investigators. until the reader is thoroughly confused and Poirot dramatically pulls the rabbit out of the hat and (in what Hastings calls his ‘lecture’ voice) reveals whodunnit and how.

Cast

  • Jane Wilkinson, Lady Edgeware — talented young American actress well known in London; impulsive and supremely egotistical, knowing or caring nothing for anyone else, for example, supremely disinterested in who murdered her husband or why; she lives at the Savoy Hotel
    • Ellis, her maid ‘a neat middle-aged woman, with glasses and primly arranged grey hair’
  • Carlotta Adams – ‘an American girl with the most amazing talent for single-handed sketches, unhampered by make-up or scenery’; ‘Soft, dark hair, eyes a rather colourless pale blue, pale face, and a mobile, sensitive mouth. A face that you liked but that you would find it hard to know again, if you were to meet her, say, in different clothes.’
    • Alice Bennett – Carlotta’s servant, who finds her dead in bed the morning after Lord Edgware is murdered
  • Miss Jenny Driver – friend of Carlotta’s, runs a hat shop in Moffatt Street, just off Bond Street, named Genevieve. ‘A small vivacious creature with flaming red hair’, ‘She was a pugilistic little creature. She reminded me in some ways of a fox terrier’
  • Bryan Martin – movie star, ‘a tall, extremely good-looking man, of the Greek god type’, at one time Jane Wilkinson’s boyfriend, but now she’s moved onto the rich Lord Merton
  • The Duke of Merton – ‘A young man of monkish tendencies, a violent Anglo-Catholic, he was reported to be completely under the thumb of his mother, the redoubtable dowager duchess. His life was austere in the extreme. He collected Chinese porcelain and was reputed to be of aesthetic tastes. He was supposed to care nothing for women’ – ‘twenty-seven years of age. He was hardly prepossessing in appearance, being thin and weedy. He had nondescript hair, going bald at the temples, a small, bitter mouth and vague, dreamy eyes. There were several crucifixes in the room and various religious works of art. A wide shelf of books seemed to contain nothing but theological works. He looked far more like a weedy young haberdasher than like a duke.’
  • Lord Edgeware – ‘a tall man of about fifty. He had dark hair streaked with grey, a thin face and a sneering mouth. He looked bad-tempered and bitter. His eyes had a queer, secretive look about them.’ “I enjoy the macabre. I always have. My taste is peculiar.”
  • Alton, Lord Edgeware’s butler – ‘one of the handsomest young men I have ever seen. Tall, fair, he might have posed to a sculptor for Hermes or Apollo. Despite his good looks, there was something vaguely effeminate that I disliked about the softness of his voice’
  • Miss Carroll – Lord Edgware’s secretary, ‘a pleasant, efficient-looking woman of about forty-five. Her fair hair was turning grey, and she wore pince-nez, through which a pair of shrewd blue eyes gleamed out on us.’
  • Miss Geraldine Marsh, LE’s daughter – ‘a tall, slender girl, with dark hair and a white face’, ‘tall, thin, white-faced girl, with her big haunting black eyes’
  • Captain Ronald Marsh – Lord Edgware’s nephew, ‘extravagant. Got into debt. There was some other trouble’ – inherits the title on his uncle’s death
  • Mr Widburn – ‘a tall, cadaverous man’ visiting London who’s know Lord E and also Sir Montague Corner
  • Mrs Widburn – ‘a plump, fair, gushing soul’
  • Mr Moxon – Wilkinson’s solicitor
  • Dr Heath – doctor who attended on Carlotta, ‘a fussy elderly man somewhat vague in manner’
  • Sir Montagu Corner – whose dinner party Jane Wilkinson attended the evening her husband was murdered. ‘He had a distinctly Jewish cast of countenance, very small, intelligent black eyes and a carefully arranged toupee. He was a short man—five foot eight at most’
  • Donald Ross – an actor they meet at Sir Montagu’s house, ‘a young fellow of about twenty-two, with a pleasant face and fair hair’
  • Corner’s butler – ‘a tall, middle-aged man of ecclesiastical appearance’
  • The taxi driver – ‘an old man with a ragged moustache and spectacles. He had a hoarse, self-pitying voice’

Poirot’s approach

‘Do you not know, my friend, that each one of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desires and aptitudes? Mais oui, c’est vrai. One makes one’s little judgments – but nine times out of ten, one is wrong.’ (Chapter 1)

Poirot’s process has two parts, which can be summarised as:

  1. order and method – do all the facts fit into the theory?
  2. psychology – even if your theory corresponds with all the facts, do the actions ascribed to people match their psychology; are they psychologically plausible?

1. Order and method

Throughout the story Poirot is sharply contrasted with hapless Inspector Japp. Japp displays indefatigable energy, rushing all over the place, insisting on interviewing not only the major characters but tracking down peripheral figures no matter how marginally connected with the key events. In fact Poirot does his fair share of interviewing, too, but Christie is at pains to show how, having once assembled the key facts, Poirot spends just as much time in reflection, on pondering a narrative which takes account of all the facts, no matter how inconvenient.

‘I have noticed that, when we work on a case together, you are always urging me on to physical action, Hastings. You wish me to measure footprints, to analyse cigarette ash, to prostrate myself on my stomach for the examination of detail. You never realize that by lying back in an armchair, with the eyes closed, one can come nearer to the solution of any problem. One sees then with the eyes of the mind.’ (Chapter 1)

On several occasions we see Japp excitedly outlining his theory of events to Poirot and when Hastings or Poirot point out facts which don’t fit the narrative, Japp simply ignores them, sweeps them aside, says he’ll sort them out later.

POIROT: You think that covers all the facts?
JAPP: Well, naturally there are a lot of things we don’t know yet. It’s a good working hypothesis to go on with… (Chapter 16)

Japp skimps and settles for second best, a good enough fit:

‘Pity there’s no apparent motive, but a little spade work will soon bring it to light, I expect.’

‘No, I’m more than ever convinced it was the Adams girl. I’ve got nothing to prove it as yet, though…’

But it’s precisely these kinds of facts, the inconvenient details, the details which don’t fit and which Japp ignores, which Poirot spends his time sitting in an armchair revolving over and over in his mind till he can integrate them into a finished story.

‘There is something here I do not comprehend…’ (Chapter 25)

This is what he means by his much repeated mantra of reducing all the evidence to order and method.

‘But come, let us walk along the Embankment. I wish to arrange my ideas with order and method.’ (Chapter 4)

Japp thinks you must be always doing, finding, interviewing, examining the site etc – but he doesn’t devote nearly enough energy to reflecting on the evidence that he finds. His over-abundant energy is directly linked to his impatient, slapdash approach to theory. As the novel progressed I began to notice how many times they face off about this:

POIROT: You have a furious energy, Japp. It amazes me.
JAPP: Yes, you’re getting lazy. You just sit here and think! What you call employing the little grey cells. No good; you’ve got to go out to things. They won’t come.
(Chapter 17)

And Poirot to Japp:

‘You have the confidence—always the confidence! You never stop and say to yourself: ‘Can it be so?’ You never doubt—or wonder. You never think, “This is too easy!”’

2. Psychological consistency

Even when he and Hastings have devised a theory or narrative which accounts for most of the facts, there’s a last major stumbling block or test which is: do the actions ascribed to people in the theoretical model fit what we know about them? Are they psychologically plausible?

On numerous occasions the narrative perfectly matches what they know of the events, but Poirot still resists closure because he is convinced that so-and-so may be a thief but is not a murderer. Not only the facts must be explained by the theory, but the theory must match the psychology of the actors, as observed and analysed by Poirot. Over the years this has become the most interesting part, for him.

‘The psychology of character is interesting,’ returned Poirot, unmoved. ‘One cannot be interested in crime without being interested in psychology. It is not the mere act of killing; it is what lies behind it that appeals to the expert.’ (Chapter 1)

It’s this insistence on a believable psychology which separates Poirot most from the police. The police are only looking for enough evidence to secure a conviction whereas Poirot wants all the evidence plus psychological plausibility. And it’s this which he means when he refers to his much repeated phrase of employing the ‘little grey cells’ of the brain to solve a crime, rather than a magnifying glass or fingerprints.

‘At such moments the brain should be working feverishly, not sinking into sluggish repose. The mental activity — it is so interesting, so stimulating! The employment of the little grey cells is a mental pleasure. They and they only can be trusted to lead one through fog to the truth.’ (Chapter 1)

Poirot sings the power of the human brain:

‘Yes, yes, we can know. We shall know! The power of the human brain, Hastings, is almost unlimited.’ (Chapter 26)

Although that said, there are moments when Poirot’s egotism takes over and his claims to psychological expertise sound ridiculous.

‘Yes, Madame la Duchesse, I understand very well. I comprehend the mother’s heart. No one comprehends it better than I, Hercule Poirot.’ (Chapter 19)

It’s because all the facts have to fit together and the psychology of the players has to be right, that Poirot is so hard to please, hence his many laments on the same lines:

‘This seems the plain sailing and the above board. But there is something wrong. Somewhere or other, Hastings, there is a fact that escapes us. It all fits together, it is as I imagined it, and yet, my friend, there is something wrong.’ (Chapter 20)

As Japp is quick to complain:

‘The truth is you like things to be difficult. Here’s your own theory proved, and even that does not satisfy you. You are an odd sort of cove… Nothing ever satisfies you.’ (Chapter 20)

And:

‘He’s always been fond of having things difficult. A straightforward case is never good enough for him. No, it’s got to be tortuous.’ (Chapter 22)

3. Withholding his hand

I suppose there’s one final aspect to it all, which is that Poirot plays his cards very close to his chest, close as an oyster’, as Japp puts it. He doesn’t give much away and waits till the last minute to make his Big Reveal. To some extent this is just a function of the detective story as a genre, which strings people along until it’s quite ready to give up its secrets.

‘I wish you’d tell me what your theory – or your little idea – is?’
Poirot shook his head gently.
‘That is another rule. The detective never tells.’ (Chapter 17)

Poirot’s OCD

‘We will go round at once, my friend,’ he said; and, lovingly brushing an imagined speck of dust from his hat, he put it on his head. (Chapter 11)

Poirot’s obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is obviously assigned to him as a physical correlative of the mental obsession by which everything, every fact and observation and detail, must fit into the theory, with no discrepancies, nothing left out, nothing ruining the finished pattern of the story. It’s a simple enough device but, if anything, it’s noticeable how little she mentions it, only 3 or 4 times in this novel.

He greeted us both heartily. ‘Just going to have breakfast, I see. Not got the hens to lay square eggs for you yet, M. Poirot?’ This was an illusion to a complaint from Poirot as to the varying sizes of the eggs which had offended his sense of symmetry. (Chapter 5)

Old married couple

Hastings moans about Poirot like his wife, as if they are a married couple who get on each other’s nerves. This is humorous or, after a while, a bit tiresome, depending on taste.

Japp groaned. I felt a sneaking sympathy with him. Poirot can be intensely irritating at times. (Chapter 5)

I have a horror of doing anything conspicuous. The only thing that affects Poirot is the possibility of the damp or the heat affecting the set of his famous moustache.
(Chapter 10)

Poirot has the most irritating habit of joking at the wrong moment. (Chapter 12)

For example, it is obviously meant to be comic that he has had enough, more than enough, of listening to Poirot going on and on about the importance of ‘the little grey cells’, in fact he’s heard it so often that he thinks he will go mad if he has to hear it one more time.

I had fear an allusion to the little grey cells and was thankful to be spared it. (Chapter 3)

‘My questions, mon ami, are psychological. The little grey cells of the brain—’
‘Poirot,’ I said desperately. I felt that I must stop him at all costs. I could not bear to hear it all over again. (Chapter 14)

Hastings’s weakness for young ladies

As entirely predictable as Poirot’s catchphrases, his immense self-regard and stroking his moustaches, is Captain Hasting’s weakness for attractive young women. Considering that he’s married (he got married (he got married in the second Poirot novel, The Murder on the Links) and considerably older than these young women, it is all in questionable taste. Here he is finding himself haunted by a brief glimpse of Miss Geraldine in Lord Edgware’s house.

I recalled the startled face of the girl who had stood in the doorway. I could still see those burning dark eyes in the white face. That momentary glimpse had made a great impression on me. (Chapter 12)

And here is Poirot, just as predictably mocking his friend’s weakness.

‘You have always the tender heart, Hastings. Beauty in distress upsets you every.’ (Chapter 14)

And:

‘For the last hour I have been in a ladies’ beauty parlour. There was a girl there with auburn hair who would have captured your susceptible heart at once.’ (Chapter 25)

Hastings’s usefulness

And yet for all his mocking, Poirot needs Hastings to help him function, and this novel contains the fullest explanation yet of why:

‘No human being should learn from another. Each individual should develop his own powers to the uttermost, not try to imitate those of someone else. I do not wish you to be a second and inferior Poirot, I wish you to be the supreme Hastings. And you are the supreme Hastings. In you, Hastings, I find the normal mind almost perfectly illustrated.’
‘I’m not abnormal, I hope,’ I said.
‘No, no. You are beautifully and perfectly balanced. In you sanity is personified. Do you realise what that means to me? When the criminal sets out to do a crime his first effort is to deceive. Whom does he seek to deceive? The image in his mind is that of the normal man. There is probably no such thing actually —it is a mathematical abstraction. But you come as near to realizing it as is possible. There are moments when you have flashes of brilliance, when you rise above the averse, moments (I hope you will pardon me) when you descend to curious depths of obtuseness, but, take it all for all, you are amazingly normal. Eh bien, how does this profit me? Simply in this way. As in a mirror I see reflected in your mind exactly what the criminal wishes me to believe. That is terrifically helpful and suggestive.’ (Chapter 14)

And his stupidity

There are examples too many to mention where Poirot does or says something and Hastings thinks he’s losing it, barking up the wrong tree, is getting old and losing his powers. In every case, it is Hastings who is wrong. Here’s an example. They ask Jane Wilkinson’s maid, Ellis, to come for an interview. Half way through:

His hand, running aimlessly along the mantelshelf, caught a vase of roses and it toppled over. The water fell on Ellis’s face and head. I had seldom known Poirot clumsy, and I could deduce from it that he was in a great state of mental perturbation.

By this stage we have learned that whenever Hastings concludes anything, it is wrong. Poirot, of course, spilled the vase onto Ellis to that, in the confusion, he could swap her glasses for a pair found near the body of the murdered Carlotta. I.e. it was a cunning plan which Hastings completely misunderstood.

One major challenge with reading the Poirot novels is putting up with the fact that Hastings is meant to know him better than anyone, spends decades in his company, observes him in calm or stressful situations thousands of times, and yet continually, from start to end of every novel, completely misunderstands and misinterprets everything that Poirot does.

The text’s bookishness

‘Nothing here,’ Japp was saying. And Poirot replied with a smile: ‘Alas! not the cigarette ash —nor the footprint —nor a lady’s glove—nor even a lingering perfume! Nothing that the detective of fiction so conveniently finds.’ (Chapter 7)

‘The police are always made out to be as blind as bats in detective stories,’ said Japp with a grin. (Chapter 7)

‘I called to see my uncle yesterday morning. Why? To ask for money. Yes, lick your lips over that. And I went away without getting any. And that same evening — that very same evening — Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a bookstall.’
(The wastrel nephew, Captain Marsh, Chapter 13)

‘I always find alibis very enjoyable,’ he remarked. ‘Whenever I happen to be reading a detective story I sit up and take notice when the alibi comes along.’ (Chapter 13)

‘You are like someone who reads the detective story and who starts guessing each of the characters in turn without rhyme or reason.’ (Chapter 14)

‘”Having no reason to fear the truth,” as the heroes in books always say.’ (Ronnie Marsh, Chapter 21)

‘I see, Holmes,’ I remarked, ‘that you have tracked the ambassadorial boots.’ (Chapter 25)

Or pulp:

‘You could have knocked me over with a feather when he stepped up to the man and said: “I believe you,” for all the world as though he were acting in a romantic melodrama.’ (Japp describing Poirot’s behaviour, in Chapter 22)

Poirot’s rum Baba

We went to a little restaurant in Soho where he was well known, and there we had a delicious omelette, a sole, a chicken and a Baba au Rhum of which Poirot was inordinately fond.
(Chapter 14)

Bon mots

Sir Montagu was the type of man to whom intelligence consisted of the faculty of listening to his own remarks with suitable attention.

Dope

Drugs played a big part in the novel before this one, ‘Peril End House’, in which a major character, Frederica ‘Freddie’ Rice, is a recovering drug addict, introduced to it by her hardened addict husband (‘He was completely debased. He was a drug fiend. He taught me to take drugs. I have been fighting the habit ever since I left him’); and chocolates laced with cocaine nearly kill off the lead character, Magdala ‘Nick’ Buckley.

Drugs aren’t nearly so central here, but are casually mentioned. When the actor, Donald Ross, discusses Carlotta’s death, he says he read in the newspaper that she overdosed.

‘You knew Carlotta Adams, did you not?’
‘No. I saw her death announced in the paper tonight. Overdose of some drug or other. Idiotic the way all these girls dope.’ (Chapter 15)

And:

‘There’s been a mention in the papers of the little gold box with the ruby initials. Some reporter wrote it up. He was doing an article on the prevalence of dope-taking among young actresses. Sunday paper romantic stuff.’

Cocaine: moral panics about drugs (and sex) are always with us.

Christie’s butlers

I think it’s in ‘The Seven Dials Mystery’ that there are three different butlers – rulers of three different posh houses, each depicted with Christie’s droll sense of humour – and they alerted me to look out for the butlers in all her books – not as important contributors to the plot, but for adding to the comedy and humorous tone of the stories. Lord Montagu’s butler is ‘a tall, middle-aged man of ecclesiastical appearance’ and later:

The butler inclined his head and withdrew, pontifical to the last. (Chapter 15)

It’s against this backdrop of old, discreet, almost invisible family retainers, that Lord Edgware’s butler, young and Adonis-like, shines out all the more vividly (and suspiciously).

Antisemitism?

I’ve highlighted the slurs or questionable descriptions of Jewish characters which litter Christie’s novels. This is no exception. Sir Montagu Corner is one.

I looked with some interest at Sir Montagu Corner. He had a distinctly Jewish cast of countenance, very small, intelligent black eyes and a carefully arranged toupee. He was a short man—five foot eight at most, I should say. His manner was affected to the last degree…

As we sipped [brandy] Sir Montagu discoursed. He spoke of Japanese prints, of Chinese lacquer, of Persian carpets, of the French impressionists, of modem music and of the theories of Einstein. Then he sat back and smiled at us beneficently. He had evidently thoroughly enjoyed his performance. In the dim light looked like some genie of medieval days. All round the room were exquisite examples of art and culture.

And now, Sir Montagu,’ said Poirot. ‘I will trespass on your kindness no longer but will come to the object of my visit.’ Sir Montagu waved a curious claw-like hand.
‘There is no hurry. Time is infinite.’

‘Claw-like hand’? I take the point that Montagu is a caricature, like all Christie’s characters, in this case an oddity, an eccentric, a super-refined millionaire who has retired from the city to his suburban retreat where he lives in a rarefied atmosphere of luxury and aesthetic perfection, a detective story Des Esseintes. But still… there is a noticeable anti-Jewish vibe in all her novels. Here’s Inspector Japp:

‘Captain Marsh now, his lordship as now is. He’s got a motive sticking out a yard. A bad record too. Hard up and none too scrupulous over money. What’s more he had a row with his uncle yesterday morning. He told me that himself, as a matter of fact, which rather takes the taste out of it. Yes, he’d be a likely customer. But he’s got an alibi for yesterday evening. He was at the opera with the Dortheimers. Rich Jews. Grosvenor Square.’

Why mention that they’re Jews? Because he’s just being factual, painting details, in the same way he didn’t really have to specify Grosvenor Square. But it’s there. Like an occasional nudge in the ribs and knowing smile.

Clichés and stereotypes

But then her books are made out of stereotypes and tropes, of all kinds of types, genders, ethnicities.

In ‘Peril At End House’, old Sir Matthew Seton is said to be ‘the second richest man in England’. I laughed out loud when I read in this story that Jane Wilkinson’s inamorato, Lord Merton, is ‘one of the richest men in England’. Nothing but the best for Agatha. Well, if you’re going to have rich people, they might as well be stereotypical rich people.

It’s yet another reminder of how the stories are assembled from a relatively limited range of stock types and scenarios (the old millionaire, the resentful daughter, the wastrel son, the contested will, and so on and so on). What’s so impressive is the way Christie managed to recombine the same 20 or so stock types and stereotypes over a career spanning nearly 60 years.

The fiend!

Hard to pick the top cliché where so many jostle for attention, but one which stood out in the previous one in the series, ‘Peril at End House’, is the way Christie gets Poirot to hype up the murderer, to make them out to be a Moriarty, a Napoleon of crime, a Satan, a fiend in human form etc. It happens in the final stretches of the novel as a deliberate and obvious way of ramping up the tension, excitement and entertainment. If you succumb to it, that is. In ‘Peril’ we had:

‘Oh! the devil! The clever, cruel devil! To think of that! Ah, but he has genius, this man, genius!’ (Peril at End House, Chapter 17)

Here Poirot melodramatically declares:

‘The murderer, see you, Hastings, is as cunning as a tiger and as relentless.’ (Chapter 26)

Recycling

In ‘Peril at End House’ Hastings is shocked when Poirot reads someone else’s private correspondence.

‘Poirot,’ I cried, scandalised. ‘You really can’t do that. It isn’t playing the game.’
‘I am not playing a game, mon ami.’ His voice rang out suddenly harsh and stern. ‘I am hunting down a murderer.’ (Chapter 13)

Exactly the same reaction here, when Poirot reads a letter Lord Merton is writing.

‘It’s not – not playing the game.’
‘I do not play games. You know that. Murder is not a game. It is serious.’ (Chapter 18)

Credit

‘Lord Edgware Dies’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1933 by the Collins Crime Club.

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by Simon on July 25, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 25, 2025

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