But it did come to something, and in the latter part of 1923 there must have been a great packing of valises and trunks at 14 Farraway Street, and Mrs Pearson must have wrung her hands at the loss of such a good tenant, as Hastings departed for marriage and a ranch in the Argentine.
Before these unsettling events occurred, were there long discussions over tisanes and whiskies and sodas in the joint sitting-room? Or did Hastings leave quite suddenly? Whatever the circumstances, it was a decidedly forlorn Poirot, mourning his friend who ‘has gone away across the sea to the South America’, whom the Endicott family invited to the country in the short story ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’.13
‘You are not like me, old and alone,’ lamented Poirot at the Endicotts’ Christmas, but he soon cheered up under the influence of crackling logs and snowmen, and honoured the occasion by donning a red waistcoat and treating the household to the capture of a pair of criminals about to make off with a famous jewel.
And what of Hastings? Fear not that he was forever lost to Poirot in ‘the free and easy life of the South American continent’, for on a morning a year and a half later we find him at the rail of a ship approaching the cliffs of Dover:
I had landed in France two days before, transacted some necessary business, and was now en route for London. I should be there some months – time enough to look up old friends, and one old friend in particular. A little man with an egg-shaped head and green eyes – Hercule Poirot! I proposed to take him completely by surprise.
Poirot was indeed surprised as, in the interests of an enormous commission, he was busy packing for a dreaded sea voyage to Rio. Tearful embraces concluded, he explained to Hastings:
‘And there was a second attraction – you, my friend. For this last year and a half I have been a very lonely old man. I thought to myself, why not? I am beginning to weary of this unending solving of foolish problems. I have achieved sufficient fame. Let me take this money and settle down somewhere near my old friend.’
How these two might have resolved all this we shall never know, as fate immediately intervened to plunge them into the all-consuming case of The Big Four.14 To meet this challenge, Poirot unpacked his enormous trunk and Hastings moved his luggage to Farraway Street. It was just like old times.
An earlier case, ‘The Veiled Lady’, had found Hastings musing on Poirot’s vanity:
He always imagines that the whole world is thinking and talking of Hercule Poirot … but I could hardly believe that his existence struck terror into the criminal world.
The Big Four proved Hastings wrong. In it Poirot found himself the chief adversary of an international conspiracy of four master criminals out ‘to destroy the existing social order’. This struggle became a duel to the death, an epic that saw such excitements as Poirot sacrificing his moustache to foil the enemy, Hastings sacrificing himself to save Poirot, the reappearance of the dashing Countess Rossakoff (Poirot’s ‘woman in a thousand’), and a premature funeral for Poirot at which he was mourned and buried. ‘World-wide unrest, the labour troubles which beset every nation, and the revolutions that break out in some’ loomed in the background.
While locked in combat with the Titans, Poirot ‘abandoned his private practice almost entirely’, and Hastings’s ‘business complications’, his reason for coming to England, fell by the way. ‘Little Cinderella as you call her, what does she say?’ asked Poirot uneasily after six months of the campaign had passed with no end in sight. Replied Hastings: ‘I haven’t gone into details, of course, but she understands.’
In the end it took Poirot and Hastings the better part of a year to save the world from anarchy. ‘The great case of my life,’ Poirot called it. ‘Anything else will seem tame after this.’15
Hastings, sailing away to Buenos Aires, no doubt thought so too. And, in the wake of The Big Four and Hasting’s second departure, Poirot made an extraordinary decision – he would leave Farraway Street, retire to the country, and devote the rest of his life to the scientific cultivation of vegetable marrows.
We now come to one of the strangest periods in Poirot’s life – a year of seclusion in the quiet village of King’s Abbot, a seclusion so complete as to drive the village Intelligence Corps, led by his neighbour, Miss Caroline Sheppard, close to despair. Who was he? Where had he come from? Why was he there? ‘Someone very like Caroline must have invented the questions on passports,’ observed Miss Sheppard’s brother. ‘The one thing we do know about him is that he is interested in the growing of vegetable marrows.’
Vegetable marrows? Poirot? Had he gone quite mad? Was he pining for Hastings? Or the audacious Countess Rossakoff? Or both? Was a year spent virtually alone in a neat walled garden and an overheated sitting-room in King’s Abbot Poirot’s tidy version of a nervous breakdown? It is true that he was now comfortably off, his reputation assured by the recent publication of Hastings’s memoirs, but this period of self-imposed exile, with only the marrows and an ancient Breton housekeeper for company, was a curious episode indeed. Fortunately, one afternoon something snapped. In anger he threw his most impressive vegetable marrow over the garden wall (it landed with ‘a repellent squelch’) and re-entered the world. King’s Abbot, on the very day that Roger Ackroyd was murdered, was at last permitted to know that in its midst dwelt the most eminent detective in Europe.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, published in 1926, is a Big House Mystery, and the man who by his own death inadvertently rescued Poirot from the marrows was a selfmade country squire, described by Dr James Sheppard, the narrator of this famous affair, as ‘the life and soul of our peaceful village’. Roger Ackroyd stabbed to death in his comfortable study was a Big Case, not only for Poirot but also for the history of detective fiction. It invariably leaves its readers shaken, and it certainly shook King’s Abbot.
Poirot’s attempts at retirement now took a different form. The old housekeeper in the huge Breton hat was returned to her homeland and we hear no more of King’s Abbot. Rustication behind him, Poirot embarked on a life on the Riviera:
‘I take it, M. Poirot, that you no longer exercise your profession?’
‘That is so, Monsieur. I enjoy the world.’
And so he did, and could be seen on many a fine day in Nice setting forth from his hotel in a white duck suit with a camellia in his buttonhole to lunch on fillet de sole à la Jeanette.
The Mystery of the Blue Train, published in 1928, demonstrates, however, that Poirot’s retirement had not quite taken. The robbing and strangling of a beautiful heiress, Ruth Kettering, in a sleeping compartment of the Riviera-bound Blue Train, the request of her wealthy father that Poirot find her murderer, and the flattering gratitude of the French police at even a hint that the great detective might take an interest in the affair, soon had Poirot back in harness.
A major event in The Mystery of the Blue Train, and an indication of Poirot’s new style, was his acquisition of an English valet, the wooden-faced George. From this time on Poirot no longer had to concern himself with the removal of grease spots and the brewing of hot chocolate, or depend for an audience on friends who might disappear to South America. For the rest of his long, long life he could depend on the faithful George.
‘You have a wide experience, Georges,’ murmured Poirot. ‘I often wonder having lived so exclusively with titled families that you demean yourself by coming as a valet to me. I put it down to love of excitement on your part.’
‘Not exactly, sir,’ said George, ‘I happened to see in Society Snippets that you had been received at Buckingham Palace. That was just when I was looking for a new situation. His Majesty, so it said, had been