Poirot, 100 years on
How Agatha Christie, then in her mid-20s, created the character who would solve some of the genre’s most famous mysteries
Far from heralding the start of a glorious new roaring Twenties, as some optimists believed that it might, 2020 was more of a whimpering wreck. yet in my opinion — and, it is fair to assume, that of millions of others — it contained a centenary worth celebrating.
I raised a glass in honour of Agatha Christie, and toasted the 100th anniversary of the publication of her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Christie was 30 when Styles appeared in late 1920, four years after it was written and earning her the sum of £25. She went on to produce another 65 detective novels. Since her death 45 years ago, it has become increasingly impossible to imagine a world without her. Who does not know that there was a murder on the Orient Express? Who has not heard of The Mousetrap, the play whose 68-year run could be halted only by a pandemic? And who does not recognize the name of Hercule Poirot, the mustachioed Belgian detective who first appears in Styles?
Agatha Christie is one of those rare cultural figures who has become monolithic, like The Beatles. Like them, she was turned down at first. She was vague about how many publishers rejected Styles before its acceptance by The Bodley Head house, but whether the number was five or six they must all later have felt rather foolish. In her autobiography, a charming and occasionally disingenuous book, she wrote that she “hadn’t expected success,” yet the fact is that all writers secretly expect success. And, although a modest woman in some respects, she never lacked confidence in her abilities.
This self-assurance was very much instilled by her mother, Clara, the dominant force within her early life in upper-middle class Torquay, in southwest England. despite dreams of becoming an opera singer, Christie always wrote, as did her older sister Madge. Both were encouraged by Clara to believe they could achieve anything that they chose.
The scintillating Madge, who as a young woman was published in Vanity Fair, would have seemed by far the more likely to succeed. “There is no doubt,” as Christie put it in her autobiography, “that Madge was the talented one in our family.”
Meanwhile, Agatha wrote romantic poems, stories with a spiritual dimension, a naive output yet blessed with her great gift for readability, and the polar opposite of the highly rational, geometrically plotted works that would make her famous.
detective fiction gave her imagination the framework that it needed (although she never stopped writing the other stuff). She and the form grew together, to the point where they would become synonymous.
The tropes she deployed in her vivid, scenic way — such as the drawing-room denouement — became the tropes of the genre, although she would also make bold play with the template that she is perceived to have forged.
At her best, her solutions were conceptual — exploring the possibilities within the very notion of a solution — as, with a bravura twist upon the armature, she revealed that they all did it, or the policeman did it, or the apparent victim did it, or the person who could not have done it did it.
This deceptively simple brilliance was already present in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a murder mystery that ends with a double-turn of the screw whereby the impossible becomes possible. She worked hard at these coups — her notebooks make it clear — but at the same time she was, and remained, a wonderfully instinctive writer. Once the plot was in her head, she knew how to put it on the page and did so swiftly, succinctly, in a way that is ultimately defiant of analysis.
What led her to create this first novel? In the autobiography, Christie recalled a conversation in which both she and Madge confessed that they had thought of trying their hand at detective fiction. Madge never made the attempt, nor did she believe her sister could pull it off. Obviously, one does not write an intensely complicated book because of a casual, needling conversation. yet Christie was quietly rivalrous with her showier sibling, and it is credible that the seed was planted in this way.
Then, during the First World War, by which time she was married to her first husband Archie and working in a hospital dispensary at Torquay, she perceived a certain something in the properties of poisons that would form the nucleus of a murder plot.
She also considered the Belgian refugees who had been offered sanctuary in the town. “Why not make my detective a Belgian, I thought?” she wrote in her autobiography. “Hercule — Hercule Poirot. That was all right — settled, thank goodness.”
She envisaged him as neat, fussy, vain, his highly polished appearance the external expression of a clean, ordered brain. A fabulous line drawing, rather than a three-dimensional character, yet with an instant aliveness upon the page, and possessing the indefinable quality of connection with the reader.
The book got stuck halfway through, and Clara, ever the midwife to her daughter’s creativity, sent her to dartmoor for a fortnight to finish it. The original ending was all wrong, an amateurish courtroom scene that the Bodley Head told her to rewrite, and that in its new form became her first drawing-room denouement.
yet in other ways, not least its worldly treatment of extramarital dalliance, the book was quite remarkably sophisticated. And although Christie would improve as a writer, her particular genius was already wholly apparent.
Whether from extensive reading, hours spent deciphering mathematical equations with her father or — again — from sheer instinct, she had a peerless grasp upon the complexities of detective fiction, an ability to juggle timings, smoke red herrings and tie loose ends into elegant knots.
Then there was the issue of motive, which in her books is always the kernel of truth within an unrealistic artistic construct. Styles centres upon the murder of a rich old woman who has married a much younger man, and whose money renders her both powerful and vulnerable.
Christie, still in her mid-twenties, appraised the situation with a shrewd-eyed cynicism worthy of Miss Marple, who would make her first appearance in print seven years later.
For the moment, however, the stage belonged solely to Poirot, with his sprightly bombast and sexless charm. Over time, he would acquire more shading, more subtlety, although as a fictional detective he remained singular for his lack of hinterland.
unlike dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, he would not fall in love with a murder suspect; unlike Pd James’s Adam dalgliesh, he would not write great poetry in his spare time.
until his “death” in the 1975 novel Curtain, which earned him a famous obituary in the New york Times, he would be a detective, pure and simple. Like his creator, he had no desire to prove himself better than the genre that he inhabited. He was content merely to define it.