Agatha Christie’s Poirot

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Mark Aldridge 2020

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Source ISBN: 9780008296612

Ebook Edition © November 2020 ISBN: 9780008296629

Version: 2020-10-06

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

A Note from the Author

Foreword by Mark Gatiss

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE: THE 1920s

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Murder on the Links

Poirot Investigates

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Big Four

The Mystery of the Blue Train

Alibi

CHAPTER TWO: THE 1930s

Black Coffee

Austin Trevor as Hercule Poirot

Peril at End House

Lord Edgware Dies

Murder on the Orient Express

Three Act Tragedy

Death in the Clouds

The ABC Murders

Murder in Mesopotamia

Cards on the Table

Murder in the Mews

Poirot’s First Appearances on Television and Radio

Dumb Witness

Death on the Nile

Appointment with Death

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas

CHAPTER THREE: THE 1940s

Sad Cypress

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

Evil Under the Sun

Five Little Pigs

Poirot Returns to the Radio

The Hollow

The Labours of Hercules

Taken at the Flood

CHAPTER FOUR: THE 1950s

Mrs McGinty’s Dead

After the Funeral

Hickory Dickory Dock

Poirot Returns to the Airwaves

Dead Man’s Folly

Cat Among the Pigeons

CHAPTER FIVE: THE 1960s

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

Hercule Poirot

The Clocks

The Alphabet Murders

Third Girl

Hallowe’en Party

CHAPTER SIX: THE 1970s

Elephants Can Remember

Poirot on Radio and Television

Poirot’s Early Cases

Murder on the Orient Express

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

Death on the Nile

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE 1980s and 1990s

Evil Under the Sun

Thirteen at Dinner

Dead Man’s Folly and Murder in Three Acts

Murder by the Book

Appointment with Death

Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Series 1–6

The Centenary Celebrations

CHAPTER EIGHT: 2000 and BEYOND

Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Series 7–8

Murder on the Orient Express

Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Series 9–13

Reinventing Poirot

The Monogram Murders

Murder on the Orient Express

The ABC Murders

Death on the Nile

Epilogue

Key Names

Endnotes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Although arranged chronologically, this book is designed so that you may read it however you choose – whether from cover to cover, or by dipping into sections that you particularly want to find out more about (or, indeed, skip sections that you are less interested in). There are no major spoilers in the main text, although a handful are in the endnotes (and clearly signposted as such).

FOREWORD

What is required, of course, is order.

Order is paramount. Order is a good and beautiful thing. Order is what the little Belgian prizes above all things. But order is a hard thing to come by when assembling memories. What, you may ask yourself (standing in the metaphorical witness box of one of those tiresome trials which he himself never seemed to attend), was your first encounter with M. Hercule Poirot? A thrilling childhood viewing of And Then There Were None and the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films had taught me that Christie was very much up my street, but it was on foreign holidays (where Christie still seems to belong) that I first properly engaged with the little man with the egg-shaped head. The Mallorcan apartment we’d rented, you see, had the lot – a whole shelf of Christies with those incredibly scary Tom Adams covers and the strange, mustardy coloured pages of the foreign edition. The ABC Murders. Death on the Nile. Five Little Pigs. Hallowe’en Party. I can still remember one sultry Spanish evening, breathlessly explaining the plot of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd to my slightly bemused parents as we trudged home from the local tapas bar. Indiscriminately, I devoured them (the books, not my parents). There was no order, you see! No way of appreciating the incredible run of copper-bottomed classics that Christie produced in what was a genuine golden age of crime writing. Which is why it’s so pleasing to see each novel given a (spoiler-free) synopsis in Mark Aldridge’s delightful, detailed and compulsively readable history of the great detective. And also to see the pleasingly gushing reviews from the papers of the time (The Observer’s crossword-compiler ‘Torquemada’ is a particular delight). It’s thus possible to see Agatha Christie grow from a popular but easily dismissed sausage-machine into a national treasure.

But just who is Hercule Poirot? Albert Finney’s spluttering, sinister pug-in-a-hairnet Poirot? Peter Ustinov’s clubbable, delightful, portly Poirot? David Suchet’s avuncular, twinkling Poirot, his little grey cells owning many a childhood? John Moffatt on the radio? Austin Trevor? Charles Laughton? Kenneth Branagh? There have, you see, been an awful lot of Poirots, although, as Mark Aldridge demonstrates, few actually met with Dame Agatha’s approval. Leading us by an infectiously learned hand, Mark travels all the way from Styles to Styles, from the detective’s faltering beginnings right through to his creator’s demise – and beyond. To the rich afterlife which has propelled Poirot into the front rank of fictional detectives and into one of the most beloved characters in popular culture. Mark’s text is peppered with fascinating fragments from Christie’s correspondence and that of her family. Her own sometimes crotchety response to publishers, editors and (most entertainingly) fans, as well as unpublished portions of her autobiography. There are wonderful blind alleys and curious near-misses all along the way. Did you know that Orson Welles played Poirot and Dr Sheppard? That there was a 1962 TV pilot in which Martin Gabel’s Poirot watches TV in the back of his car? That Ronnie Barker played Poirot (straight) at the Oxford Playhouse? It’s a feast for both the dyed-in-the-moustaches fan and the newcomer alike, a testament to a still-thriving industry born of sheer talent, hard work and what we would now call brand management. Mark brings order to a sometimes chaotic narrative, along the way nailing the unique, Sunday-night charm of the Suchet series and the reasons why the Ustinov Evil under the Sun is still the best time anyone can have in the cinema.

And though he mysteriously describes Spice World – The Movie as a ‘classic comedy caper’, he rightly dismisses the version of Appointment with Death which I myself was in. Some crimes even Papa Poirot cannot forgive.

MARK GATISS

London. 2020

INTRODUCTION

Mes amis, we have cause for celebration. The great Hercule Poirot, the incomparable private detective, has now been entertaining us for a full century. Ever since The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written by Agatha Christie during the First World War and first published in 1920, the reading public has keenly followed the Belgian detective’s adventures as he investigated mysteries throughout the highs and lows of the following decades.[1] We have seen Poirot solve mysteries on trains, ships, and even a plane, with the results usually delivered to a warm critical and popular reception. He has solved cruel murders, uncovered international conspiracies, and found missing jewels for relieved owners. While doing this, he has sometimes been ably assisted by friends including Captain Hastings, Inspector Japp, his valet George, secretary Miss Lemon, and crime writer Ariadne Oliver – but it is always Poirot’s own little grey cells that are needed to solve the crimes.

Some have tried to tell Poirot’s life story by weaving together the scraps of information found in dozens of stories written across more than half a century, but any attempt to create a conclusive biography of the detective is a futile task. Many ‘facts’ are irreconcilable, and there are gaps and contradictions alongside extraordinary anti-ageing abilities. Even Christie often had to double check details of Poirot’s life with her agent, and so it’s no surprise that there are inconsistencies. Thankfully, this doesn’t matter, because to make Poirot real would be to make him mundane and minimise his brilliance as a creation. This creative force, and the woman behind it, is what this book celebrates and explores.

Following the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie’s stories only grew in popularity before reaching a productive peak in the 1930s, a decade that saw a dozen novels starring Poirot, before the pace slowed a little, with the detective finally being retired by his creator in 1975’s Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. Christie had actually prepared Poirot’s swan song during the dark days of the Second World War, although she continued to place him in new stories for the next three decades, with this final manuscript designed to be published after her death. In the event, Christie would outlive her creation by a few months, as she died in January 1976. In total, she had created mysteries for Poirot to solve in thirty-three novels, dozens of short stories, and a handful of plays that would variously debut on the stage, radio and television.[2]

However, the story of Poirot does not end there. While Agatha Christie fiercely protected her creation throughout her life, by the 1970s there were signs that Poirot had the potential to become a mainstay of multiple media, with the big budget 1974 film adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express kickstarting a franchise of sorts. Later decades also saw a long running television series and one-off screen dramas, as well as faithful radio productions. But Poirot’s reach has even moved beyond these traditional outlets for adaptations, as he has also appeared in almost every conceivable artistic form, from graphic novels to computer games and animations. Meanwhile, some of his lesser-known adventures have been uncovered and published to new audiences, and 2014 saw the first official original Poirot novel to be written by someone other than Christie, as Sophie Hannah took readers back to the golden age of detective fiction for what was to become the first in a series of new Poirot mysteries.[3] In short, Poirot has never really gone away, and is as popular as ever.

Any biography of Agatha Christie will show her to be a determined person. Born Agatha Miller in 1890, her early life is difficult to fathom for many of us in the twenty-first century, especially with its (by modern standards) baffling interplay between wealth and poverty – she was part of a family with the trappings of the upper-middle classes, including servants and a beloved home, while they also appeared to teeter on the edge of destitution. Even the day-to-day events of Christie’s life as a child feel like they are from such a distant age that it seems incredible that anyone experiencing them would still be working and publishing new material as late as the 1970s. Christie would later claim that she had ‘a very lazy youth’. She recalled that her father, Frederick Miller, was ‘a gentleman of substance who never did a hand’s turn in his life – and a most agreeable man. I never went to school. I had nothing much to do but wander around the garden with a hoop, which was in turn a horse or ship, making up stories. It was a very happy and satisfying life; you did a certain amount of work but on the whole it was play all the time. Leisure is a great stimulant of the ideas. Boredom is a better one.’[4]

The creative stimulation provided by this boredom meant that Christie was no stranger to story writing as a child, especially when it was encouraged by her mother while young Agatha was suffering from the flu. ‘I suppose I was trying things, like one does,’ she later recalled. ‘I first tried to write poetry. Then a gloomy play – about incest, I think … some of the writing wasn’t too bad but the whole thing was pretty poor.’[5] These stories included one called ‘The House of Beauty’, which she later claimed was ‘the first thing I ever wrote that showed any sign of promise’.[6]

In around 1908 Christie completed her first novel, called Snow Upon the Desert (‘I can’t think why,’ she claimed dismissively).[7] Although never published, the typescript still survives and offers an insight into the juvenilia of Christie, as she penned a lengthy story (at nearly 400 pages) concerning a group of people who are involved with the ‘coming out’ into society of young women in Cairo, just as Christie had done in 1907. While certainly overlength (this was likely the book she later referred to as ‘a long, involved, morbid novel’), with a winding story of relationships between vaguely connected characters, there are several smaller moments or turns of phrase that indicate Christie’s growing talent, such as one character being described as ‘as indiscreet as a babbling brook’, while young dreamer Melancy Hamilton wishes for more when confronted with the mundanity of day to day life, as she complains about dull discussions of breakfast choices – ‘eggs were so painfully prosaic’, she thinks, before despairing ‘That people could talk of eggs when there were blue skies and waters, and picturesque locals to watch’. Like a young Christie, Melancy fantasises about interesting lives and adventures, and we are told that ‘to a discerning observer she expressed infinite possibilities’.

In Snow Upon the Desert, Melancy Hamilton has come to Cairo in the hope that it will help the deafness affecting her – initially she is only hard of hearing in a crowd, but with indecent haste she is completely deaf by the end of the first third of the book. It’s probably telling that by the time Christie had finished writing this story she felt encumbered by this heroine of her own making, as she realised that her deafness made dialogue very difficult, and perhaps this character’s enforced insularity also explains the book’s propensity for rather overwritten meditations on characters’ thought processes. In the end the author found a straightforward solution to her woes, as she granted Melancy a miraculous recovery of her hearing upon the character’s return to England. We might see some parallels with Hercule Poirot himself here – another character whose traits she would come to dislike and felt restricted by. Could there even be a predecessor of this later difficult creation in Snow Upon the Desert’s brief description of ‘a little foreign looking man’ who lunches with some of the characters at one point? Certainly, we see forerunners of some other characters, most significantly in the two young lovers Tommy and Crocus, who decide to elope and then go on to solve a minor mystery in the final act. Their sparring relationship and gung-ho attitudes seem to mark them out as early versions of Tommy and Tuppence, the excitable investigators who meet in Christie’s second published novel, The Secret Adversary, and then marry.[8]

The typescript of Snow Upon the Desert was read by the novelist Eden Philpotts and the literary agency Hughes Massie, and both offered helpful advice, but it was not deemed good enough to publish. Nevertheless, Christie persevered with her writing when time allowed. Eventually, it was a bet with her sister, Madge, that paved the way for Poirot’s debut. This bet, made in 1916, concerned the difficulty – or otherwise – of writing a mystery novel. ‘At the time my sister and I used to argue a lot whether it was easy to write detective stories,’ Christie later recalled. By this point, in the midst of the First World War, her life had inevitably moved on, and she was now working in a hospital dispensary to help the war effort having married Archibald Christie on Christmas Eve 1914, when she was twenty-four. The possibilities of writing her own piece of detective fiction clearly fired her imagination. ‘It was never a definite bet,’ Agatha Christie clarified in her autobiography. ‘We never set out the terms – but the words had been said.’ This is where Christie’s determination would come to be so valuable. ‘I thought perhaps now is the time for writing a detective story: I had a good idea going round about medicine. Then I had a holiday from hospital. Mother said “Why don’t you go and stay on Dartmoor if you are going to write that book?” I think I spent three weeks in a hotel by myself, going for walks. I don’t think I spoke to anyone and I managed to finish The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I got it typed; I can’t say I had high hopes. I started sending it to publishers. And it started coming back.’[9]

High hopes or not, the result of this bet would eventually transform Christie’s life, and the world of detective fiction.