Читать книгу Agatha Christie’s Poirot - Anne Hart - Страница 8

1 For reasons not explained, some researchers and obituaries have taken a mention in The Mysterious Affair at Styles that Poirot and Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard first met in Brussels in 1904, while working on the Abercrombie Forgery Case, as the year of Poirot’s retirement and have concluded that he was born between 1839 and 1844. Assumptions have then been made that he worked as a private detective in Belgium or France between 1904 and 1914. Adding to the confusion, a charming but suspect foreword to Hercule Poirot: Master Detective, an omnibus collection published in 1936, has Poirot stating: ‘I began work as a member of the detective force in Brussels on the Abercrombie Forgery Case in 1904.’ As we know Poirot joined the Belgian police force as a young man, this red herring would have us believe he was born about 1884 and arrived in England at about the age of thirty-two.

2 His family name was to cause difficulties later on. Pwarrit, Porritt, Peerer, Porrott and Prott were some of the ways the English attempted to pronounce it. On three different occasions, in the interests of subterfuge, Poirot himself garbled his name and gave it as Poirier, Pontarlier and Parotti.

3 First published as ‘The Clue of the Chocolate Box’ in The Sketch, 23 May 1923.

4 Some prefer to believe that a triple bluff was played in The Big Four and that Achille really did exist, despite Poirot’s assurances that ‘Brother Achille has gone home again – to the land of myths.’

5 This quotation is from ‘Christmas Adventure’, the first version of ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’.

6 In one of his last cases, Hallowe’en Party, Poirot expressed a slight change of mind: ‘There were times when he almost regretted that he had not taken to the study of theology, instead of going into the police force in his early days. The number of angels who could dance on the point of a needle; it would be interesting to feel that that mattered and to argue passionately on the point with one’s colleagues.’

7 Also published under the titles ‘The Clue of the Chocolate Box’ and ‘The Time Hercule Poirot Failed’. There is some confusion as to when this case actually occurred. In Cards on the Table, set in 1937, Poirot spoke of it as having happened ‘twenty-eight years ago’, which places it in 1909, but in Peril at End House he referred to it as ‘a bad failure in Belgium in 1893’.