In the younger generation people of fads and crazes might aspire to be ‘all S.A. and IT’, and in the older – like the Misses Tripp in Dumb Witness – to be ‘vegetarians, theosophists, British Israelites, Christian Scientists, spiritualists and enthusiastic amateur photographers’. Dinner parties might conclude with dancing to phonograph records, or with poker or bridge – in Cards on the Table Mrs Lorrimer declared: ‘I simply will not go out to dinner now if there’s no bridge afterwards!’ – or with earnest conversations, as deplored in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe:
‘Jane has changed a lot lately. Where does she get all these ideas?’
‘Take no notice of what Jane says,’ said Mrs Olivera.
‘Jane’s a very silly girl. You know what girls are – they go to these queer parties in studios where the young men have funny ties and they come home and talk a lot of nonsense.’
Fashion in clothes was a subject dear to Poirot’s heart, and in the 1930s he often found reason to regard his immediate world with satisfaction. ‘She really is a lovely girl,’ said Hastings of Thora Grey in The ABC Murders. ‘And wears very lovely clothes,’ mused Poirot. ‘That crêpe moracain and the silky fox collar – dernier cri!’. In Murder on the Orient Express he gazed with delight upon the Countess Andrenyi dressed in ‘a tight-fitting little black coat and skirt, white satin blouse, small chic black toque perched at the fashionable outrageous angle’. To match, there were plenty of sleek-headed men in well tailored clothes, though most of Poirot’s English circle tended to look askance at men (including Poirot) who paid too much attention to their appearance. ‘He was too well dressed – he wore his hair too long – and he smelt of scent,’ said Major Despard disparagingly of a murder victim in Cards on the Table.
The 1930s found Hercule Poirot at the height of his powers. For him it was to prove a decade of triumphs, la crème de la crème.
In Black Coffee,1 a play first staged in 1930, Poirot rescued for England a formula for the disintegration of atoms. This coup, and the solution to the after-dinner death of a brilliant scientist, Sir Claud Amory, was but the work of a few hours with the assistance of Hastings – presumably back on another business trip – and an enthusiastic Inspector Japp.
On his own once more, Poirot travelled to Lytcham Close, ‘one of the most famous old houses in England’, at the summons of the eccentric Hubert Lytcham Roche, a man of ungovernable temper and a fanatic for punctuality. As not infrequently occurred in Poirot’s cases, his announced arrival was slightly preceded by his client’s untimely death. For the first and last time, in ‘The Second Gong’,2 Hubert Lytcham Roche was late for dinner.
Fourteen full-length books are devoted to Poirot’s exploits in the 1930s, and the first two of these – Peril at End House, published in 1932, and Lord Edgware Dies,3 published in 1933 – find Arthur Hastings at his side. As a sort of appetizer to these major cases, Hastings first enjoyed collaborating in a shorter one, ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’,4 a macabre society murder which Poirot pronounced ‘an artistic masterpiece!’ On the perpetrator he bestowed the greatest of compliments:
‘It goes to my heart to hang a man like that. I may be a genius myself, but I am capable of recognizing genius in other people. A perfect murder, mon ami. I, Hercule Poirot, say to you. A perfect murder.
Epatant!’
Welcome as he was to Poirot, Hastings-watchers may find his frequent returns to England rather disconcerting. Wasn’t all that sailing back and forth terribly expensive? Could the ranch afford it? Didn’t Cinderella mind? One imagines her standing on the verandah gazing across the pampas, the cicharra singing, as Arthur and his steamer trunk depart once again for England. From scattered references one rather imagines her waving cheerfully. ‘Tiens!’ as Poirot was apt to say about mysteries. ‘C’est curieux, n’est-ce pas?’
Presumably Hastings sent Cinderella several postcards from the Majestic Hotel in St Loo, the ‘Queen of the Watering Places’ on the Cornish coast, where he and Poirot spent an unexpectedly eventful holiday in Peril at End House. Once again Poirot was in one of his retirement fits. Flattering appeals for help from the Home Secretary left him unmoved (‘I have retired! It is finished!’), but how could he resist intervening when only he could see that someone in St Loo was determined to murder a very independent young thing, Miss Nick Buckley?
Peril at End House was a slippery case. Unchaperoned young women partying and weekending and wearing watches filled with cocaine dumbfounded poor Hastings, but Poirot – who tended to be at his most avuncular at the seaside – took everything in his stride:
‘My friend Hastings is shocked,’ remarked Poirot. ‘You must be more careful, Mademoiselle. He is out of date, you comprehend. He has just returned from those great clear open spaces, etc., and he has yet to learn the language of nowadays.’
Poirot, with Hastings in tow, was soon back in London and accepting commissions from wealthy clients. In Lord Edgware Dies some of these clients’ requests were outside Poirot’s usual genre. He reluctantly acceded to Lady Edgware’s request that he ask her husband to give her a divorce (‘Of course if we were only in Chicago,’ she exclaimed, ‘I could get him bumped off quite easily’), but drew the line at accepting an overlapping commission from Lady Edgware’s next prospective mother-in-law, the Dowager Duchess of Merton, to stop Lady Edgware from marrying her son. The two men in question were a very rum lot in Hastings’s opinion. Lord Edgware was secretive, sneering, and had most peculiar tastes in art and literature, while the Duke of Merton, ‘A young man of monkish tendencies, a violent Anglo-Catholic … was supposed to care nothing for women.’
Poirot was preparing to cut and run on all this when the sensation of Lord Edgware’s murder broke upon London. There he lay in his handsome library, stabbed in the back of the neck, a challenge for Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard. But could Poirot, whose mind should have been elsewhere – the strange disappearance of an ambassador’s boots, for example – leave well enough alone? ‘To say I have the head of a pig is not pretty,’ Poirot exclaimed indignantly to Japp as he clambered aboard the case. Within a day or two of Poirot’s inspired solving of the Edgware affair, Hastings was ‘suddenly recalled to the Argentine’ and Poirot resumed his distinguished life as a consultant on matters of the greatest importance. ‘I belong to the world,’ he declared loftily, and we find him next journeying in the Middle East after ‘disentangling some military scandal in Syria’. On his way to Baghdad a diversionary case, ‘a fantastic crime’, plucked him from his course.
The narrator of Murder in Mesopotamia5 is Amy Leatheran, ‘a woman of thirty-five of erect, confident bearing’, temporarily employed as a nurse to Louise Leidner, the beautiful but overweight wife of the leader of the University of Pittstown’s expedition to Iraq. In what Nurse Leatheran was to call ‘the Tell Yarimjah business’, her assignment placed her in the compound of an archaeological team, a tense group of people that Poirot was to label ‘Mrs Leidner’s entourage’.
Mrs Leidner’s murder – predicted by herself – confounded the local authorities and brought Hercule Poirot jolting down the dusty track to Tell Yarimjah. Amy Leatheran described her first