Agatha Christie’s Poirot
It’s no surprise that The Bodley Head noted similarities between the Poirot of Styles and the now familiar Sherlock Holmes. For one thing, the emphasis on seemingly innocuous details that have a greater significance – such as ash in the fire grate, or the arrangement of apparently ornamental items – echoes the approach to solving mysteries advocated by the original consulting detective. But perhaps more significantly, the relationship between the detective and his less accomplished assistant (and narrator) has particularly close parallels – if Poirot is this story’s Holmes, then Hastings is most definitely its Watson. It’s through the eyes of Arthur Hastings, our establishment figure as an invalided captain who is recuperating near to Styles, that we first meet one of the Belgian refugees who are finding refuge away from the war being waged across the channel:[4]
Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible. I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandyfied little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police. As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.
This description of the odd-looking little Belgian would be solidified and repeated over the next five decades and more, and while events changed around him – characters, locales, even wars – he stayed fixed (mostly, at least – the mysterious limp is soon healed). Christie later felt exasperated when asked to clarify the physical details of Poirot, but recalled that she twice saw people who fitted the description. In a draft discussion of Poirot and his cases penned for a newspaper serialisation in 1938 she pondered:
Anyway, what is an egg-shaped head? Have I ever seen an egg-shaped head? When people say to me ‘Which way up is this egg?’ do I really know? I don’t because I never do see pictorial images clearly – but nevertheless I know that he has an egg-shaped head – covered with black, singularly black, hair – and I know his eyes occasionally shine with a strange light – and twice in my life I have actually seen him – once on a boat going to the Canary Islands – and once having lunch at the Savoy – and I have said to myself ‘Now if you had only the nerve you could have snapshotted the man on the boat and then when people have said ‘Yes, but what is he like?’ I could have produced the snapshot and said ‘This is what he is like’ and in the Savoy perhaps I could have gone to the man and explained the matter. But life is full of lost opportunities.[5]
In her autobiography, Christie remembered Poirot’s creation in terms of necessity – she needed a detective for her story, but also needed one unlike those that had gone before. Having dismissed the likes of a schoolboy investigator or a scientist, she found inspiration in the Belgian refugees who had settled near to her home. ‘People always think you have a real person starting you off, but it isn’t the case,’ she said later. ‘Some characters are suggested to you by strangers you’ve never spoken to – you see someone at a picnic and make up stories about them like a child. I was worried about finding a detective for my first book, and we’d had Belgian refugees at the beginning of the war, so I thought that quite a good idea. But I didn’t really know any.’[6]
Once the broad background of the detective had been settled, why not make this detective character a retired police officer, she reasoned. ‘What a mistake there,’ she later conceded, as Poirot must surely have been well over 100 by the time of his later cases.[7] Christie also decided to make him ‘very neat – very orderly’, before wondering ‘Is this because I was a wildly untidy person myself?’[8] Certainly she saw some elements of Poirot’s character as a reaction against her own personality. ‘If you are doubly damned – first by acute shyness and secondly by only seeing the right thing to do or say twenty-four hours late what can you do? Only write about quick witted men and resourceful girls whose reactions are like greased lightning!’[9]
All that was left was to decide his name. Christie fancied that, like Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft, the name should be a ‘grand’ one, and so she settled on the amusement of this small man being named Hercules. When a surname of Poirot was decided upon (Christie claimed not to remember how or why), Hercules didn’t seem to fit, and so the Belgian sleuth was christened Hercule instead.[10] Just as Holmes had been an outsider due to his egotistical attitude and obsessions, so Poirot can never truly blend into the scenery; he stands out from his English contemporaries while his idiosyncrasies allow much of society to underestimate his powers of deduction. The Bodley Head’s request to rework the courtroom setting of the ending to take place elsewhere would unwittingly reinforce this template of Poirot as an outsider. The original ending had the retired detective testifying in court at length, describing his solution to the case, which effectively made him part of the traditional system of law and order, rather than set apart from it as a private individual. Conversely, the final version leaves the likes of Inspector Japp (also introduced in this first novel) with the more mundane tasks of ensuring that the law is upheld and the villain prosecuted; for Poirot, the simple satisfaction of piecing together the puzzle can now be the prize.
The plot of Styles balances interesting and plausible elements (the nature of the poisoning, for example, is effectively depicted – unsurprisingly, given Christie’s familiarity with poisons from her wartime service in a dispensary) with first class misdirections and a vivid set of characters, alongside some less convincing elements that Christie would soon offer better examples of, such as a less than believable disguise and a highly unlikely disposal of key evidence. If the story sometimes requires an excessive suspension of disbelief then at least it happens infrequently and briefly, and the unconvincing elements soon fade away while the overarching story grips the reader as the puzzle pieces slot into place. Essentially, the novel is an exercise in distraction, as Christie works to keep the reader from looking too closely at some suspects and events by employing a layer of obfuscation from multiple characters and with a highly satisfying double bluff at its centre. Compared to her later novels, these distractions are overly complicated, as Christie seems to signify a slight lack of confidence in her technique by throwing in so many clues and red herrings that the reader would have to be very astute indeed to ignore them all and tread the correct path to the solution. The result is a busy mystery that shines because of the overall impression it leaves once the author shows her hand at the end.
As was common during this era, the first appearance of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in print was as a newspaper serialisation rather than as a novel. In this case, Christie was paid £25 for the rights for the story to appear in The Times’s ‘Colonial Edition’, also known as The Weekly Times, between February and June 1920. By October 1920 the book was finally published as a novel in America, but not yet in Britain, which prompted Christie to write a letter to her publishers that dispensed with niceties and opened with a simple question: ‘What about my book? I am beginning to wonder if it is ever coming out’.[11] It’s worth bearing in mind that at this point a year had passed since the positive reader reports, and the wartime events of the story were threatening to make it feel like a period piece by the time it was available in bookshops. Meanwhile, Christie had gone into battle with The Bodley Head over a single detail, the spelling of the word ‘cocoa’. Christie correctly insisted on the final ‘a’, but (to use Christie’s own description) the ‘dragon’ at the publisher who oversaw such details insisted that ‘coco’ was correct. The debate might seem innocuous, but the memory of the incident was strong enough that Christie remembered it for her autobiography decades later. This seems to have been something of a turning point in the relationship between author and publisher – whereas Christie had earlier assumed that The Bodley Head would know best, she now knew that not to be true. ‘I was not a good speller, I am still not a good speller, but at any rate I could spell cocoa the proper way,’ she explained in her autobiography. ‘What I was, though, was a weak character. It was my first book – and I thought they must know better than I did.’[12]
Despite requesting pre-Christmas publication, it wasn’t until 21 January 1921 that the novel was made available in Christie’s own country, with the requested dedication to her mother, and a cover depicting characters in candlelight that Christie approved of, calling it ‘artistic and “mysterious”!’[13] The novel was well received, with The Church Times saying that ‘the book held the attention well’, while commending the first-time author for offering a surprising solution that the reader had not worked out beforehand. ‘Looking back, knowing the solution, it is possible to point to a good many faults,’ the review also claimed, but ‘a book of this type must be judged on the first reading.’[14] The Times Literary Supplement received the book even more warmly, with the reviewer writing that ‘The only fault in his book is that it is almost too ingenious … In spite of its intricacy, the story is very clearly and brightly told.’ Referring to the bet between Christie and her sister regarding the writing of a satisfying mystery, the review judged that ‘Every reader must admit that the bet was won.’[15]
Almost five years after it had been written, The Mysterious Affair at Styles had finally found an audience, quickly selling out of its initial run of 2,000 copies. Agatha Christie had continued her writing in the meantime – having signed a six-book contract with The Bodley Head, she had ‘nearly finished a second one’ by the end of 1920. This second novel, The Secret Adversary, was published in 1922, but it didn’t feature any characters from her first book. However, for her third novel Christie brought the Belgian detective with the egg-shaped head with her, ready to solve an even more complex case, having established a style of mystery writing that her publishers were keen to see repeated. ‘So I went on writing detective stories,’ she later said. ‘I found I couldn’t get out.’[16]
The Murder on the Links
(Novel, 1923)
While Arthur Conan Doyle had been the clearest influence on The Mysterious Affair at Styles it was another mystery writer, Gaston Leroux, who Christie claimed had had the biggest impact on the second Poirot novel, The Murder on the Links. Christie had enjoyed Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a locked-room mystery that had been first published as a novel in 1908 – in fact, she once claimed that it was the only mystery she’d read prior to Styles, apart from Sherlock Holmes. Regarding such influences, Christie later conceded that ‘When one starts writing, one is most influenced by the last person one has read or enjoyed’.[17] Her interest in Leroux’s style and story was combined with the influence of a real-life case in France in which the wealthy inhabitants of a house were attacked by an apparently random gang robbery, only for facts to emerge later that turn the story on its head, although in later years she felt that Leroux’s novel ‘reads rather peculiarly now’.[18] It may also be that Christie misremembered the influence of The Mystery of the Yellow Room on The Murder on the Links as, aside from the French setting and the use of rival detectives, Leroux’s mystery has rather more in common with The Mysterious Affair at Styles.[19] In an unpublished portion of her autobiography she ponders on a more straightforward reason for Poirot’s new locale: ‘I suppose I had been reading a lot of French detective stories lately, and it seemed to be rather fun to have one over there.’[20]
Whatever the origins, Christie had been encouraged to bring Poirot back to help solve this case, and in retrospect felt that she should have started to resist such demands. ‘Now I saw what a terrible mistake I had made in starting with Hercule Poirot so old,’ she wrote. ‘I ought to have abandoned him after the first three or four books, and begun again with someone much younger.’[21] Despite these later sentiments, Christie is perhaps rather clutching at straws here to justify her eventual frustration with the character himself – she had never been much concerned with accurate continuity or a definitive idea of the world of Poirot, and considering that readers have generally been unfazed by Poirot’s miraculous lack of ageing it hardly seems to be a good reason to have abandoned him.
Neither Christie nor Poirot had been idle since the publication of Styles, with Christie introducing the young investigators Tommy and Tuppence in the novel The Secret Adversary, while keeping Poirot alive in the pages of British magazine The Sketch, which had commissioned a series of short stories, published from March 1923 (more of which shortly). Although it would be a few years before Christie felt that she was a full-time professional author, she and Archie hadn’t neglected the most important business of being a writer, as they consistently wrote to The Bodley Head in order to ensure that the royalties received were accurate and punctual (which, judging by the surviving correspondence, they rarely were). For Poirot’s second novel, we are once more told the story through the eyes of Hastings, whose self-aware opening ruminates on the best way to captivate the reader from the off. In this case, a trip on the Calais express train results in a fortuitous meeting that eventually results in marriage for Hastings, but not before some baffling murders are solved. While Styles had seen Christie telling a story that, in summary, would eventually be revealed to be rather straightforward, albeit operating between layers of red herrings and misdirection, The Murder on the Links has a clever but convoluted tale at its core. Christie herself would later acknowledge that her early books could be ‘unnecessarily complicated, with quantities of clues and subplots’.[22] Perhaps there’s also the sense of a difficult second Poirot novel for Christie, as the author seems to be working out and developing her style, in this case even more determinedly operating sleights of hand to ensure that she is always one step ahead of the reader. However, the reader may take solace from the fact that they generally feel one step ahead of Hastings, making deductions that he misses, often due to his rather short-sighted attitudes and dismissal of key evidence.
Readers who are familiar with the genial Hastings of most adaptations may be surprised to see his misanthropic side, occasionally apparent in Styles but even more evident here. While Hastings may share rooms with Poirot, this is no good-natured and jovial relationship. Instead, Hastings is rather defensive and dismissive, often seeming to be rather irate with Poirot, although it isn’t always clear if we should be siding with his more questionable opinions or not: ‘A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a Billingsgate fishwoman blush!’ By the time we are re-introduced to Poirot we have insight into his methods that start to differentiate him from the evidence-based detective of Styles, as we’re now told that ‘He had a certain disdain for tangible evidence, such as footprints and cigarette ash, and would maintain that, taken by themselves, they would never enable a detective to solve a problem. Then he would tap his egg-shaped head with absurd complacency, and remark with great satisfaction: “The true work, it is done from within. The little grey cells – remember always the little grey cells, mon ami.”’ However, there’s little time for rumination, as the book heads straight into its central mystery, as Hastings and Poirot travel to France, having been summoned by a potential client to discuss an urgent matter in person, only to arrive and discover that he has been found dead on the local golf course that morning, stabbed in the back. Before the mystery is solved another person will meet their demise, while Poirot looks to the past to help solve the case, as the cast of characters (and suspects) discuss all manner of evidence while being overheard by others, leading to an overly tangled web of deceit and misunderstandings. However, in 1969 the crime author Michael Gilbert introduced a reissue of the book, and found such misdirection to be a positive trait: ‘If you have not read the book before, I would be willing to bet that you will still be doubtful of the killer one page before it is revealed to you. All the craft of Miss Christie is employed in this book, and when she is in form her bowling is practically unplayable.’[23]
We learn more about our two protagonists throughout the book, as Poirot’s presence and somewhat enigmatic questioning and examinations irritates rival local detective Giraud, while Hastings finds love in the form of Dulcie Duveen, whom he nicknames ‘Cinderella’. Christie wasn’t sentimental about the coupling: ‘If I had to have a love interest in the book, I thought I might as well marry off Hastings!’, she wrote in her autobiography. ‘Truth to tell, I think I was getting a little tired of him. I might be stuck with Poirot, but no need to be stuck with Hastings too.’[24]
The Murder on the Links was initially serialised under the title The Girl with the Anxious Eyes in The Grand magazine from December 1922 before its British publication as a novel in May 1923. Christie had been dissatisfied with the cover for The Secret Adversary, and this time she stipulated her recommended design in a letter to her publisher: ‘I suggest for the cover a green patch of grass on the links, the grave and near it the man’s body with a dagger sticking out of it.’[25] Once presented with the publisher’s chosen design she was annoyed enough that she recalled the disagreement in her autobiography decades later. ‘Apart from being in ugly colours, it was badly drawn, and represented, as far as I could make out, a man in pyjamas on golf-links, dying of an epileptic fit.’[26] In the end, a different cover was used for publication, no doubt due to the strength of Christie’s feelings regarding the original version. As a result of this sort of dispute, three titles into her six book contract with The Bodley Head Christie’s dissatisfaction was starting to solidify into an exit plan, with the aim of finding a better – and more rewarding – outlet for her creative labours.
The Times Literary Supplement considered the novel to be ‘a most complicated affair, the unravelling of which by the Belgian detective provides the reader with an enthralling mystery story of an unusual kind.’[27] The Observer cited Christie as the frontrunner in the competition of new mystery writers, saying that ‘she has an unusual gift of mechanical complication’. Its review also carried a note of warning about such a talent, saying that ‘it is a mistake to carry the art of bewilderment to the point of making the brain reel’ and that ‘it is possible to be fatigued with wandering up and down blind alleys’.[28] However, it was a succinct review in the Daily Express that most clearly alluded to Christie’s elevated status as a mystery writer with only her third novel. ‘The Murder on the Links is one of the best mystery stories I have read,’ it said. ‘Miss Agatha Christie stands in a class by herself as a writer of detective stories.’[29]
Poirot Investigates
(Short stories, 1924)
By January 1923 Agatha Christie was already making plans that looked beyond The Bodley Head. At the request of Bruce Ingram, the editor of British magazine The Sketch, she had compiled a collection of short stories featuring Poirot, which she also sent to an agent in order to find suitable international periodicals for their publication. While The Bodley Head seemed unsure of the short stories’ relevance to them, Christie was arranging serialisations of the collection in the United States and India, while she was exploring ways to curtail her contract with her current publisher as soon as possible.[30] Although The Bodley Head had accepted her standalone thriller The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), they had refused a manuscript called Vision, a story that Christie had written around fifteen years earlier. A typescript for an unpublished short story called Vision survives, but at fourteen pages it’s rather unlikely to be the same one that was sent to her publishers as a potential novel, but it may well have provided the basis for an expanded version. The surviving version opens atmospherically (‘As the night mail for Scotland steamed out of St Pancras, Roden West felt a subtle sense of relief steal over him. A sensation as of the loosening of a chain’) before exploring our protagonist’s feelings for another character, Nina, after which the story moves into the realms of science fiction, with a thought transference process that has the potential for dramatic consequences that are not properly explored or explained in a story that feels incomplete. If this tale was indeed expanded and sent to The Bodley Head, then it’s obvious why it would have been rejected as it’s quite unlike Christie’s previous novels.[31]
The Bodley Head’s refusal to consider Vision led to a dispute over whether Christie could count this as one of the six books stipulated by the contract.[32] In truth, Christie had never expected Vision to be published, but was using it as leverage to ensure that the forthcoming collection of Poirot short stories would be accepted as one of the contracted books.[33] She would win that portion of the fight, and Poirot Investigates was eventually counted as the fifth book of the six-book deal, although not before some stern words had been exchanged when it came to the nature of the contract: ‘I do not want to include cinema, dramatic or foreign rights,’ Christie scolded them, disputing their automatic inclusion without consultation or agreeable terms.[34]
In all, twenty-four Poirot short stories were published by The Sketch during 1923, in two sequences of twelve. Once more narrated by Hastings, they offer a substantial range of quality and ingenuity. Often they are light confections, and those that are most successful have germs of genius that Christie would later revisit and exploit in more substantial works. It’s certainly worth remembering that the stories were designed to be read in the context of a magazine that elsewhere deals with the lighter end of society and fashion; there was no expectation for weightier matters to be brought into the publication via these mysteries, and on these terms the stories work extremely well. As a collection they are best enjoyed in small doses. Of the initial run of stories from The Sketch only eleven were selected for inclusion in Poirot Investigates, and Christie initially suggested only eight.[35] Three of these, ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’, ‘The Million Dollar Bond Robbery’ and ‘The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan’, are reasonably straightforward stories of thefts, generally hinging on one important piece of misdirection, which Poirot reveals to the reader without too much effort being expended. There’s also ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’, which opens with the unfortunate claim that ‘war and the problems of war are a thing of the past’, and has the British government rush to Poirot for help. Intriguing deaths are the focus of ‘The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor’, ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ and ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’, which result in satisfying cases for Poirot, even if one of them relies on a questionable understanding of psychoanalysis. In 1936 ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ was reprinted in several newspapers, this time as part of a series of stories selected by Christie’s peer in detective fiction authorship, Dorothy L. Sayers. Sayers introduced the story by discussing Poirot: