Читать книгу Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot - Anne Hart - Страница 11

‘Monsieur Poirot here,’ said Japp. ‘Quite a good advertisement for a hair tonic, he’d be. Face fungus sprouting finer than ever. Coming out into the limelight, too, in his old age. Mixed up in all the celebrated cases of the day. Train mysteries, air mysteries, high society deaths – oh, he’s here, there and everywhere.’

—THE ABC MURDERS

For many the 1930s were disturbing years. Even among Poirot’s clients it was understood that most people were not as well off as before. Complained Elinor Carlisle in Sad Cypress: ‘Everything costs so much – clothes and one’s face – and just silly things like movies and cocktails – and even gramophone records!’ Some people actually became poor. ‘Darling,’ confided the Hon. Joanna South-wood in Death on the Nile,

‘if any misfortunes happen to my friends I always drop them at once! It sounds heartless, but it saves such a lot of trouble later! They always want to borrow money off you, or else they start a dressmaking business and you have to get the most terrible clothes from them. Or they paint lampshades, or do Batik scarves.’

In Poirot’s world the uncertain political times – the ‘question’ of India, the ‘troubles’ in China, agitation against the Establishment, ‘Bolshies, Reds, all that sort of thing’ – were spoken of over cocktails and at tea. Towards the end of the decade a Europe under the shadow of war brought talk of armaments, the race for Supremacy in the Air, Hitler and Mussolini, the Spanish Civil War, ‘days of crisis’.

In Chelsea flats Poirot was apt to encounter chairs made of webbing and chromium, and in country drawing-rooms even elderly hostesses made concessions to ‘modernity’ by allowing guests to smoke. Egypt in winter was expensive, Majorca was cheap, and ‘Paris doesn’t cut any ice nowadays. It’s London and New York that count,’ cried Jane Wilkinson in Lord Edgware Dies. Bottles of mouthwash could turn out to hold liquor instead, and gold-topped perfume bottles might hide cocaine. People now flew regularly across the Channel, and in one of Poirot’s cases air travel made possible the appearance of a surprise witness from New Zealand.

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 sight of him:

I don’t know what I’d imagined – something rather like Sherlock Holmes – long and lean with a keen, clever face. Of course, I knew he was a foreigner, but I hadn’t expected him to be quite as foreign as he was, if you know what I mean.

When you saw him you just wanted to laugh! He was like something on the stage or at the pictures. To begin with, he wasn’t above five foot five, I should think – an odd plump little man, quite old, with an enormous moustache, and a head like an egg. He looked like a hairdresser in a comic play!

And this was the man who was going to find out who killed Mrs Leidner!

Some years later Nurse Leatheran neatly settled her starched cuffs and wrote an excellent account of how Poirot solved the murder. As she neared her conclusion she observed laconically: ‘M. Poirot went back to Syria and about a week later he went home on the Orient Express and got himself mixed up in another murder.’

At the outset of this next adventure we glimpse Poirot, ‘of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache’, in danger of freezing to death on a winter morning on the platform of a Syrian railway station. Just behind him lay The Syrian Army Case (‘“You have saved us, mon cher,” said the General emotionally … “You have saved the honour of the French Army”’) and the crime passionnel of the Mesopotamian Murder Case. Just ahead a telegram awaited him in Stamboul recalling him to England on important business. And just beyond that, all unforeseen as he stamped his galoshes on the railway platform, lay an immobilization in snowdrifts aboard the most fabled train in detective literature.

Murder on the Orient Express⁶, published in 1934, was a lovely romp for Poirot – no outside interferences, no police, no need to rush elsewhere, and all set amidst the most comfortable of surroundings with excellent food and absorbing witnesses at hand. In this agreeable milieu Poirot solved one of his most famous cases, the stabbing in the next compartment of a notorious criminal recently acquitted in the United States of the kidnapping and death of little Daisy Armstrong, the child of famous parents. How grateful was the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits to Poirot for rescuing it from a potential embarrassment! And how grateful was Poirot for his snowbound diversion: ‘I was reflecting … that many hours of boredom lay ahead whilst we are stuck here.’

Three Act Tragedy,⁷ published in 1934, was a very sociable case. With an eye to the audience its cast busied itself with all sorts of camaraderie and hospitality (even Poirot rose to the occasion and gave a sherry party), while the nicotine which in turn dispatched three victims was neatly administered in an excellent martini, a glass of port, and a box of chocolates.

Tiens! Though pretending yet again to be semi-retired, how could Poirot resist rushing home from the Riviera when he heard all this? In this case, however, Poirot was at times gently upstaged by another small elderly man, Mr Satterthwaite:⁸

A dried-up little pipkin of a man, Mr Satterthwaite, a patron of art and the drama, a determined but pleasant snob, always included in the more important house parties and social functions – the words ‘and Mr Satterthwaite’ appeared invariably at the tail of a list of guests. Withal, a man of considerable intelligence and a very shrewd observer of people and things.

Poirot came to have a high regard for Mr Satterthwaite’s acute observation of the social scene, but in the end, the murderer in Three Act Tragedy unmasked, he insisted on having the last word. Said Mr Satterthwaite:

‘My goodness … I’ve only just realized it! That rascal, with his poisoned cocktail! Anyone might have drunk it! It might have been me!’

‘There is an even more terrible possibility that you have not considered,’ said Poirot.

‘Eh?’

‘It might have been me’.

‘If anyone had told me a week ago,’ said Inspector Japp, in September of 1934, ‘that I should be investigating a crime where a woman was killed with a poisoned dart with snake venom on it – well, I’d have laughed in his face!’ Poor Japp! He had come in all innocence to Croydon Aerodrome on the off-chance of catching a smuggler and had found himself confronted with the airliner ‘Prometheus’ just landed from Paris with the body of a French passenger murdered en route. Also on board, as a further annoyance, was an airsick Hercule Poirot who, although claiming to be the greatest detective in the world, had slept through the whole thing. ‘Luckily,’ said Japp, breathing heavily, ‘it’s one of those semiforeign cases.’

But who could the murderer be? wondered Japp, Poirot, and M. Fournier of the French Sûreté as they pondered the list of passengers. Could it be the chatty English mystery writer, whose most recent whodunit, The Clue of the Scarlet Petal, hinged on poisoned darts? Could it be Japp’s favourite suspects, two seedy-looking Frenchmen? (‘What you say is possible, certainly,’ murmured Poirot tactfully, ‘but as regards some of your points, you are in error, my friend. Those two men are not toughs or cutthroats, as you suggest. They are, on the contrary, two distinguished and learned archaeologists.’) Could it be – as initially decided by a xenophobic coroner’s jury – Hercule Poirot? (‘The coroner frowned. “Nonsense, I can’t accept this verdict.”’) And so on. There was no doubt that a very clever murder had been committed in mid air. ‘Our Irish stew’ was one more of the things Japp called Death in the Clouds,⁹ published in 1935. Poirot, once he had recovered from his airsickness, had a splendid time solving it.

A short story which first appeared in 1935 is ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, in which Miss Amelia Barrowby of Charman’s Green in Buckinghamshire wrote to request a consultation with Poirot, on ‘a very delicate family matter’, just before succumbing to strychnine poisoning. Besides the mystery of Miss Barrowby’s sad death, this story is memorable as landmark evidence of Poirot’s mounting press of business, for in it we are introduced for the first time to a very formidable person, Miss Lemon, who rejoices for the rest of this saga in the title of Confidential Secretary to Hercule Poirot.¹⁰ Like George the valet, Felicity Lemon fully met all her employer’s fanatical specifications for neatness and order (‘Her real passion in life was the perfection of a filing system beside which all other filing systems should sink into oblivion’) and, like George, while overlooked in the excitement of a number of cases, she served faithfully in the background for many more years.

Back from Argentina in June of 1935 came Arthur Hastings to find Poirot established in Whitehaven Mansions, ‘an outstanding building of modern flats’. Taking stock, the two men immediately began talking about each other’s hair. Inspector Japp, dropping by, had something to add. ‘Just a little bit thin on top, eh?’ he remarked tactlessly to Hastings, and Poirot made things even worse:

‘You know, Hastings, there is a little device – my hairdresser is a man of great ingenuity – one attaches it to the scalp and brushes one’s own hair over it – it is not a wig, you comprehend – but – ’

‘Poirot,’ I roared. ‘Once and for all I will have nothing to do with the beastly inventions of your confounded hairdresser’

and added, testily, that Japp – for whom Hastings had never had much affection – was ‘getting as grey as a badger’ and looking much older.

Poirot, of course, was secure with his hairdresser and a black bottle of REVIVIT.

But more important matters were soon at hand – the extraordinarily senseless serial murders recounted in The ABC Murders, published in 1936. Poirot had been hoping for just such a case to enliven Hastings’s visit:

‘As soon as I heard you were coming over I said to myself: Something will arise. As in former days we will hunt together, we two. But if so it must be no common affair. It must be something’ – he waved his hands excitedly – ‘something recherché – delicate – fine …’ He gave the last untranslatable word its full flavour.

‘Upon my word, Poirot,’ I said. ‘Any one would think you were ordering a dinner at the Ritz.’

The puzzle of the ABC killings, in which the date and whereabouts of each murder was ghoulishly announced to Poirot before it was committed, made for an exciting summer. For Poirot it was an interesting departure from his usual type of case, the crime intime: ‘Here, for the first time in our association, it is cold-blooded, impersonal murder. Murder from the outside.’ For Hastings it was, no doubt, a welcome change from worrying about the ranch. What a splendid return! What a ‘cream of crime’! Who cared, after all, if one was going a trifle bald?

The ABC murderer was caught in November, just one month short of Hastings’s return to Argentina, and in June of the following year we find him back again enjoying ‘the roar of London’ from Poirot’s sitting-room window and making notes for the narration of a new case:

But though Miss Arundell’s death surprised no one, something else did. The provisions of her will gave rise to varying emotions, astonishment, pleasurable excitement, deep condemnation, fury, despair, anger and general gossip. For weeks and even months Market Basing was to talk of nothing else!

Thus began Dumb Witness,¹¹ published in 1937, in which Poirot, to Hastings’s horror, told many lies to find the killer of Miss Emily Arundell, an upright and shrewd Victorian, whose death would never have been investigated had she not, in a fatally delayed letter, asked Poirot to undertake unspecified investigations on her behalf.¹²

In Market Basing, Hastings was very drawn to the late Miss Arundell’s household. Of her drawing-room he wrote:

A faint fragrance of pot-pourri hung about it. The chintzes were worn, their pattern faded garlands of roses. On the walls were prints and water-colour drawings. There was a good deal of china – fragile shepherds and shepherdesses. There were cushions worked in crewel stitch. There were faded photographs in handsome silver frames. There were many inlaid workboxes and tea caddies. Most fascinating of all to me were two exquisitely cut tissue-paper ladies under glass stands. One with a spinning-wheel, one with a cat on her knee.

He was also very taken with her amiable wire-haired terrier, Bob. In the end the orphaned dog was given to Poirot but Hastings quickly claimed him as a spoil of war. ‘My word, Poirot, it’s good to have a dog again,’ he said, and off he went, back to Argentina. This time, for whatever reasons and however homesick, Hastings did not return to England for many years.

It was probably in this same year that the three cases recorded in the short stories ‘Problem at Sea’, ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, and ‘Murder in the Mews’ occurred.¹³. In all three of these, as so often happened to Poirot, his presence at or near scenes of murder was a direct result of futile attempts to take restful holidays or lead a calm social life.

In ‘Problem at Sea’¹⁴ his determination to escape was clearly a case of masochism:

‘Are you enjoying this trip, M. Poirot?’

‘Frankly, no. It was an imbecility to allow myself to be persuaded to come. I detest la mer. Never does it remain tranquil – no, not for a little minute.’

Before long, however, Poirot was enjoying himself very much as he graphically explained to a captive audience in the main lounge just how it was that disagreeable Mrs Clapperton came to be murdered in her locked cabin while the ship was docked in Alexandria.¹⁵

Surely, though, in ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, one could expect a little peace in the kind October sun? But even here, uneasily surveying the emotions surging just below the surface at his quiet hotel, ‘M. Poirot perceived the inevitable shaping of events to come’ – the duty to solve, while on holiday, a crime passionnel.

And could any meal with Inspector Japp – like one on a Guy Fawkes night for example – not lead to a murder investigation?

Turning off the main road, the two men passed into the comparative quiet of a mews. They had been dining together and were now taking a short cut to Hercule Poirot’s flat.

As they walked along the sound of squibs was still heard periodically. An occasional shower of golden rain illuminated the sky.

‘Good night for a murder,’ remarked Japp with professional interest. ‘Nobody would hear a shot, for instance, on a night like this.’

How true! Nor was Japp alone in such thoughts, as subsequent events in ‘Murder in the Mews’ proved.

Poirot had murmured in The ABC Murders:

‘Supposing that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four; while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and, intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?’

Just such a closed circle puzzle is set in Cards on the Table, published in 1936,¹⁶ in which a diabolical host, the fashionable Mr Shaitana, who ‘existed richly and beautifully in a super flat in Park Lane’, invited to dinner four people he was convinced were secret murderers, and four others well known for detection: the celebrated Hercule Poirot, the venerable Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, the popular detective fiction writer, Ariadne Oliver, and a distinguished veteran of the Secret Service, Colonel Race.¹⁷ After dinner Mr Shaitana arranged two tables of bridge. The four famous sleuths were sent to the smoking room:

‘Five diamonds. Game and rubber,’ said Colonel Race. ‘Good for you, partner,’ he said to Poirot. ‘I didn’t think you’d do it. Lucky they didn’t lead a spade.’

‘Wouldn’t have made much difference, I expect,’ said Superintendent Battle, a man of gentle magnanimity.

He had called spades. His partner, Mrs Oliver, had had a spade, but ‘something had told her’ to lead a club – with disastrous results.

Meanwhile in the drawing-room, alone with his four suspected murderers, something much more disastrous was happening to Mr Shaitana. While seated by the fire he was deftly slain with a jewelled stiletto. Which of the four did it?

With only the bridge scores as a tangible clue, with three fine collaborators in Superintendent Battle, Mrs Oliver and Colonel Race, and with the removal, by Mr Shaitana’s untimely death, of ‘the only moustache in London, perhaps, that could compete with that of M. Hercule Poirot’, it is no wonder that Agatha Christie observed, in a foreword to Cards on the Table, that this was one of Poirot’s favourite cases.

A year later, far from Mr Shaitana’s drawing-room, Poirot encountered Colonel Race again on a steamer on the Nile. Poirot was once more in pursuit of a holiday. (‘This winter I shall visit Egypt, I think … One will escape from the fogs, the greyness, the monotony of the constantly falling rain’), and Colonel Race, a man ‘usually to be found in one of the outposts of Empire where trouble is brewing’, was in pursuit of a political agitator; but these goals were forgotten in the excitement of three murders committed in quick succession as the Karnak churned toward the Second Cataract.

‘A journey on a swift-moving river, between dangerous rocks, and heading for who knows what currents of disaster …’ Thus did Hercule Poirot predict the course of events in one of his most famous cases, Death on the Nile,¹⁸ published in 1937. At first acquaintance the passengers on the Karnak seemed a pleasant enough lot – Poirot certainly enjoyed the company of Mrs Allerton, for example, ‘one of the most charming people I had ever met’ – but as he and Colonel Race pursued their murder investigations some very nasty secrets came to light. ‘So many conflicting hates and jealousies and envies and meannesses. It is like a cloud of flies, buzzing, buzzing …’

Poirot’s next case, Appointment with Death, unfolded in Palestine and Jordan. As it follows on the heels of Death on the Nile, it is fair to assume that both cases occurred on the same eventful holiday, and that Poirot proceeded from the Karnak on the Nile to the Solomon Hotel in Jerusalem and thence to Amman. With him he brought a letter of introduction from Colonel Race to Colonel Carbury, an administrative ‘power’ in Transjordania. Raising his eyes from Race’s letter, Colonel Carbury, a devotee of detective fiction, smiled hopefully upon his guest:

‘Tell me, d’you ever find your own special job has a way of following you around?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Well – to put it plainly – do you come to places expecting a holiday from crime – and find instead bodies cropping up?’

‘It has happened, yes – more than once.’

‘H’m,’ said Colonel Carbury, and looked particularly abstracted.

Then he roused himself with a jerk.

‘Got a body now I’m not very happy about,’ he said.

The body was that of an American tourist, the autocratic Mrs Boynton – ‘a distorted old Buddha – a gross spider in the centre of a web!’ – whose life had been universally pronounced as ruinous to all around her, and whose sudden death, while surrounded by her family in a tourist encampment at Petra, now raised a most disagreeable question: had someone slain the dragon?

In the course of his investigations Poirot enjoyed fulfilling Colonel Carbury’s every expectation of how a detective should behave:

‘You desire to know, do you not, Colonel Carbury, who killed Mrs Boynton? (That is, if she was killed and did not die a natural death.) Exactly how and when she was killed – and, in fact, the whole truth of the matter?’

‘I should like to know that, yes.’ Carbury spoke unemotionally.

Hercule Poirot said slowly:

‘I see no reason why you should not know it!’

And promising a solution within twenty-four hours, Poirot commenced to unravel the tangled web at Petra, thereby encountering a ménage of tourists who, when their minds were not on Mrs Boynton’s death, tended to discuss questions of the day: the League of Nations, the enmity of the Arabs toward the Jews, the menace of white slavers and drug dealers, and the benefits or otherwise of psychotherapy.

But Colonel Carbury was only concerned with the whodunit writing itself before his very eyes:

‘I suppose you couldn’t do the things the detective does in books? Write a list of significant facts – things that don’t seem to mean anything but are really frightfully important – that sort of thing?’

‘Ah,’ said Poirot kindly. ‘You like that kind of detective story? But certainly, I will do it for you with pleasure.’

He drew a sheet of paper towards him and wrote quickly and neatly: SIGNIFICANT POINTS.

In one respect Hercule Poirot’s Christmas,¹⁹ published in 1938, is reminiscent of ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ of the early 1920s – the outset of each case finds Poirot ill at ease with country Christmas cheer and gazing gloomily upon a blazing Yuletide fire. In ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ he had been in mourning for a Hastings departed to the Argentine. In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, in the home of Colonel Johnson, the Chief Constable of Middleshire and a friend from the Three Act Tragedy case, his secret lamentations were all for his neck. In the absence of central heating it was, he felt sure, dreadfully at risk from cold draughts.

Inevitably, an alarming distraction soon came to hand. ‘Damn it all!’ cried the Chief Constable. ‘Case of murder! On Christmas Eve too!’ This led to Poirot’s posthumous introduction to a neighbouring millionaire, the tyrannical Simon Lee, whose neck – cut neatly through the jugular vein – had suffered a far greater misfortune than Poirot’s that Christmas Eve.

The surviving members of the Lee family, as described by Colonel Johnson, were of a mode familiar to Poirot from many an earlier case:

‘All the same, it’s incredible, you know. Here’s a particularly crude and brutal murder – and whom have we as suspects? Alfred Lee and his wife – both charming, well-bred, quiet people. George Lee, who’s a member of parliament and the essence of respectability. His wife? She’s just an ordinary modem lovely. David Lee seems a gentle creature and we’ve got his brother Harry’s word for it that he can’t stand the sight of blood. His wife seems a nice, sensible woman – quite commonplace. Remains the Spanish niece and the man from South Africa.’

Well, there they all were. As Poirot commented, as he set to work, on Christmas Eve there is apt to be ‘a great amount of strain’ in families.

Two cases of this busy period, described in the short stories ‘Yellow Iris’ and ‘The Dream’, took place in London and mercifully required no more than the summoning of taxis to bring Poirot to the scenes of impending crimes.

Nevertheless, the affair of the ‘Yellow Iris’ did tear him away, on a chilly night, from the contemplation of his beloved electric radiator to the far less certain pleasures of a champagne supper at a fashionable restaurant. Here – according to an anonymous phonecall – someone at a table decorated with yellow irises was in danger of being murdered. Dutifully insinuating himself into this lively scene, Poirot encountered hazards of his own. Seated beside a well-known South American dancer, he murmured:

‘Señora, as the evening advances I become more brave. If you would dance with me now –’

‘Oh, yes, indeed. You are – you are ze cat’s whiskers, M. Poirot. I inseest on dancing with you.’

‘You are too kind, Señora.’

Altogether it turned out to be a tense evening. So quickly and cleverly did Poirot foil a murderer, however, that his amour propre returned in a rush:

‘Señora, as the evening advances I become more brave. If you would dance with me now – ‘

‘Oh, yes, indeed. You are – you are ze cat’s whiskers, M. Poirot. I inseest on dancing with you.’

‘You are too kind, Señora.’

Poirot found events in ‘The Dream’ far less exciting. In this case a summons for help took him to the somewhat déclassé mansion of a reclusive millionaire, Benedict Farley, a man constantly tormented by a dream that at exactly twenty-eight minutes past three he will shoot himself. Poirot firmly declined the case (‘For that, Monsieur Farley, I should recommend Napoleon’s Book of Dreams – or the latest practising psychologist from Harley Street’), but within a week Farley’s dream had come true, and Poirot was summoned again. Gathered together were Farley’s widow, his daughter, his secretary, his doctor and a police inspector. Poirot heard out their stories, sat back, and inquired:

‘One more question, Mrs Farley. Had your husband good sight?’

‘No. Not without his glasses.’

‘He was very short-sighted?’

‘Oh, yes, he was quite helpless without his spectacles.’

‘He had several pairs of glasses?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah,’ said Poirot. He leaned back. ‘I think that that concludes the case …’

There was silence in the room. They were looking at the little man who sat there complacently stroking his moustache.

It is clear from a number of contemporary references that Poirot’s next investigation, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,²⁰ published in 1940, takes place in the first half of the catastrophic year of 1939. Hints of dangers in Europe – Communists and Fascists, arms dealers and assassins, spies and counter-spies – surface like piranha throughout this complex affair. As for England, there is much talk of preserving a solvent economy and conservative values at all costs, the Prime Minister is shot at, and the Imperial Shirts ‘march with banners and have a ridiculous salute’.

Disturbing as all this was, at the outset of the case Poirot was preoccupied with anxieties of his own:

There are certain humilating moments in the lives of the greatest of men. It has been said that no man is a hero to his valet. To that may be added that few men are heroes to themselves at the moment of visiting their dentist.

Hercule Poirot was morbidly conscious of this fact.

He was a man who was accustomed to have a good opinion of himself. He was Hercule Poirot, superior in most ways to other men. But in this moment he was unable to feel superior in any way whatever. His morale was down to zero. He was just that ordinary, that craven figure, a man afraid of the dentist’s chair.

‘It is a beautiful thought,’ said a deliriously happy Poirot half an hour later to a taxi driver, ‘that I have been to the dentist and I need not go again for six months.’ But even as he was digesting a celebratory lunch, George handed him the telephone: ‘It’s Chief Inspector Japp, sir.’ Astonishingly, within an hour of Poirot’s departure, Mr Morley, his chatty and inoffensive dentist, had committed suicide.

Or was it murder? Or espionage? Or a monstrous double bluff of which poor Mr Morley was but an accidental victim? Steadily gathering victims, and paced by a familiar nursery rhyme, the case advanced like a juggernaut. Who was he really up against, Poirot began to wonder. Was he trying to avenge his dentist? Or was he, in fact, trying to save England? When Japp was called off the case by the highest authority, Poirot soldiered on alone:

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.

‘Will there be anything else, sir?’

‘I am in great perplexity of mind, George.’

‘Indeed, sir? I am sorry to hear it.’

Hercule Poirot poured himself out some chocolate and stirred it thoughtfully.

When the case was all over, Poirot found himself exhausted. ‘Is it possible,’ he said to himself with astonishment, ‘that I am growing old?’

The murder in Poirot’s last case of the 1930s occurred on 27 July 1939, and his investigation of it is superbly recounted in Sad Cypress, published in 1940. It is a story of letters and wills, love and greed.

The centrepiece of Sad Cypress is the trial for murder of a young woman, Elinor Carlisle. Caught in a love triangle, her rival poisoned, the evidence against her is overwhelming. When all appears lost, a friend and would-be lover calls in Poirot.

It was a most tactful and beguiling Poirot, looking ‘very Londonified’ and ‘wearing patent leather shoes’, who descended upon the village of Maidensford to interview a majestic housekeeper, a lovelorn garage mechanic, and a confused under-gardener. The re-examination of old evidence over many cups of tea became, at times, a game of cat and mouse. To win the confidence of the housekeeper, for example (‘for Mrs Bishop, a lady of conservative habits and views, strongly disapproved of foreigners’), Poirot had to play a trump card:

He recounted with naive pride a recent visit of his to Sandringham. He spoke with admiration of the graciousness and delightful simplicity and kindness of Royalty.

Mrs Bishop, who followed daily in the court circular the exact movements of Royalty, was overborne. After all, if They had sent for Mr Poirot … Well, naturally, that made All the Difference. Foreigner or no foreigner, who was she, Emma Bishop, to hold back where Royalty had led the way?