Two people have helped me enormously in the writing of this book. Peter Hart’s knowledgeable, rigorous and witty editing has saved me from many a pitfall (the ones that remain are entirely of my own digging), and Vernon Barber’s encouragement and assistance from the very beginning made the whole enterprise possible. I am grateful as well to Debbie Edgecombe for her heroic and intelligent deciphering of a seemingly interminable number of drafts and revisions. I would also like to thank Brian Stone, my astute and encouraging agent, Bob Comber, his assistant, Nancy Grenville, who gave discerning attention to the final draft, Christopher Burton, who kindly pursued the mystery of Poirot’s telephone numbers in the archives of British Telecom, and Pamela Hodgson who helped so much in the final stages.
Finally, at risk of appearing precious, I would like to thank Hercule Poirot. In my preoccupation for almost two years with this endearing and elegant little detective, there have been many moments of trepidation and exasperation. At the end of it all Poirot is firmly in my heart, a delightful condition I share with millions of readers. All of us are indebted to his inspired creator and sternest critic, Agatha Christie.
Anne Hart
‘My name,’ said Poirot, contriving as usual to make the simple statement sound like the curtain of the first act of a play, ‘my name is Hercule Poirot.’
—THE LABOURS OF HERCULES
That benevolent despot, Hercule Poirot, who to this day keeps a firm grasp on the affection of countless subjects, made his debut as a fully formed foreign eccentric on page 34 of his creator’s first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. On page 35 Cynthia Murdoch of Styles Court made a pioneer English attempt to describe him. ‘He’s a dear little man,’ she said.
Her remark was to stand the test of time wonderfully well, though not everyone who was to meet Poirot over the next six decades – especially not those attempting to cover up crimes – would agree with her. ‘You unutterable little jackanapes of a foreigner!’ more than one was to cry, purple with rage. Poirot himself would have been annoyed if he had heard Cynthia’s remark. ‘My name is Hercule Poirot,’ he was apt to say to those not appropriately impressed, ‘and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.’
A number of Christie scholars have debated his origins. The most important clues, of course, have been provided by Agatha Christie herself. In 1916, in her twenty-sixth year, she set herself the task of writing a detective novel:
Who could I have as a detective? I reviewed such detectives as I had met and admired in books. There was Sherlock Holmes, the one and only – I should never be able to emulate him. There was Arsène Lupin – was he a criminal or a detective? Anyway, not my kind. There was the young journalist Rouletabille in The Mystery of the Yellow Room – that was the sort of person whom I would like to invent … then I remembered our Belgian refugees. We had quite a colony of refugees living in the parish of Tor … Why not make my detective a Belgian? I thought. There were all types of refugees. How about a refugee police officer? A retired police officer. Not too young a one …
Anyway, I settled on a Belgian detective. I allowed him slowly to grow into his part. He should have been an inspector, so that he would have a certain knowledge of crime. He would be meticulous, very tidy … always arranging things, liking things in pairs, liking things square instead of round. And he should be very brainy – he should have little grey cells of the mind – that was a good phrase: I must remember that – yes, he would have little grey cells.
Other possible predecessors and contemporaries have been suggested: G. K. Chesterton’s Hercule Flambeau, Robert Barr’s Eugène Valmont, A. E. W. Mason’s Inspector Hanaud, Marie Belloc Lowndes’s Hercules Popeau, and inevitably – despite Agatha Christie’s disclaimer – Sherlock Holmes.
Like Holmes, Poirot was vain, brilliant, and a bachelor; like Holmes he possessed, in Arthur Hastings, a faithful Watson; and, as readers will discover, there occur from time to time in the Poirot canon situations and frames of mind distinctly Holmesian. ‘Ah, well,’ as Poirot himself said complacently in Cards on the Table, ‘I am not above stealing the tricks of others.’ He knew perfectly well who he was. He was the one and only, the unique Hercule Poirot. If he had been asked about origins, I imagine him stroking his moustaches, his eyes as green as a cat’s. ‘Once upon a time,’ he might have replied, with an imperious wave of his hand, ‘there was born in the kingdom of Belgium a baby with an egg-shaped head …’
The kingdom of Belgium was – and still is – a neat, cautious, Catholic country that knows what it’s about. Family businesses flourish. Education and the arts are taken seriously and so is food. Its restaurants are well known to gourmets and its pastry chefs are famous.
Its capital, Brussels – the city where Poirot was probably born, and certainly flourished for many years – possesses what is probably the most beautiful and sociable square in Europe, the Grand Place. Here, high atop the magnificent Hôtel de Ville, a gilded figure of St Michael watches over the city. It is perfectly possible that, once upon a time, St Michael watched a procession of Poirots taking a new baby to church to be christened.
When was Hercule Poirot born? In what he himself would have called ‘supreme exercises of imagination’, a number of serious attempts have been made to pinpoint one improbable year or another. Usually these calculations depend on a remark of Poirot’s in Three Act Tragedy that he was ‘due’ to retire from the Belgian Police Force at the time of the outbreak of the First World War. Making an undocumented guess at a retirement age of sixty to sixty-five years, the conclusion has then been reached that he was born between 1849 and 1854.1
Tempting as it is to reconstruct a chronological Poirot in this matter of age – particularly as he was still flourishing in the early 1970s – I suspect that Agatha Christie, and Poirot himself, would have been amused by all this arithmetic. In context, Poirot seems to be a man in his late fifties or early sixties when he arrives in England and somewhere in his mid-eighties in Curtain, his last case. That close to sixty years of elegant ageing elapsed between, with never a diminution of his grey cells, was a tour de force for his adroit creator and one of Poirot’s great charms. ‘Men have as many years as they feel,’ says an Italian proverb. In this matter of years, and of his age at any particular time, Poirot was always extremely – and wisely – reticent.
In The Labours of Hercules Dr Burton, a Fellow of All Souls College, ruminated on Hercule Poirot’s first name. ‘Hardly a Christian name,’ he pointed out. ‘Definitely pagan. But why? That’s what I want to know. Father’s fancy? Mother’s whim?’ Whether moved by fancy or whim, the Poirots showed no timidity. In an inspired moment they delved into Greek mythology and named their son after Hercules the Strong, the mightiest of the ancient heroes. Poirot himself loved his name; it was to prove a glorious compensation for his diminutive size. ‘It is the name of one of the great ones of this world,’ he boasted in The Mystery of the Blue Train.2
All his life Poirot preferred privacy and was particularly unforthcoming about his earlier (and long) life in Belgium. References to his past are rare, but in Three Act Tragedy we are permitted an insight into his childhood: ‘See you, as a boy I was poor. There were many of us. We had to get on in the world.’ One glimpses the Poirots again, hard-working and close-knit, in his lifelong devotion to The Family. ‘I am very strong on the family life, as you know,’ he declared to Hastings