Dianne Boardman does some digging on Agatha Christie’s much-loved detective, Poirot
Dianne Boardman celebrates the work of Agatha Christie and her famous fictional detective.
ISN’T it strange how just one conversation can alter your whole life? Such a thing happened over a century ago when a young woman, called Agatha, sat with her sister Madge on a dark night of World War I, discussing their passion for detective novels.
Agatha said she’d like to try her hand at a detective story herself.
Madge replied that they were too difficult and bet that she wouldn’t be able to do it.
In response to the challenge, Agatha sat down at her sister’s old typewriter and one of the world’s most famous fictional detectives was born.
Having trained as a pharmacist, Agatha was at the time working in a dispensary in a town full of Belgian refugees.
Everyone had great sympathy for them and this encouraged her to make her detective Belgian.
“Since I was surrounded by poisons,” Agatha said of the murder weapon, “perhaps it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method I selected.”
The birth of Hercule Poirot, the neat little man with an egg-shaped head, magnificent moustaches and superior little grey cells, who solved murders through psychology, provided Agatha not only with her first published book but a whole new career.
Yet the novel, “The Mysterious Affair At Styles”, was rejected by publishers several times until John Lane at the Bodley Head decided to take a chance on it, providing Agatha changed the way the detective denounced the murderer.
In the original version, Poirot was called to the witness stand in court to reveal what he knew but the publisher felt it too unlikely, and so Agatha rewrote it.
This time, she gathered all the suspects together in the drawing-room for the big reveal and so created a Christie hallmark.
The novel was first serialised in “The Times” in spring and summer 1920 – the first time they had accepted a first novel from an unknown author – then published in book form in the USA in October 1920, and in Britain in January 1921.
By that time Agatha was married to Archie Christie and they had a baby daughter.
She had no real intention of pursuing a writing career, but she agreed to sign a contract to provide a further five books.
In the story that launched them, the narrator is Captain Arthur Hastings, a British officer invalided from the Front during World War I, who goes to stay with friends at Styles St Mary to recuperate.
One day he runs into Belgian refugee Hercule Poirot, whom he had met during the war.
Hastings describes him as “a funny little man, a great dandy, but wonderfully clever.”
He is sad to see him limping badly and living with his fellow refugees on charity, so when a terrible poisoning occurs, Hastings, who has rather a fancy to become a detective, persuades the family to call Poirot in to find the culprit.
Investigating in an official capacity is Inspector Japp
of Scotland Yard, who has worked with Poirot in the past when criminals have fled to the continent.
He knows him for a celebrated detective and listens to him as far as his superiors allow, but it is Hastings, in his rambling way, who gives Poirot the idea that solves the case.
At the end of the story, Poirot says to Hastings, “We may hunt together again, who knows?”
They did hunt together again, of course – over and over again, for half a century, mostly alongside Japp, too, and later with the help of the efficient Miss Lemon.
And, when Hastings was unavailable, the crime writer Mrs Ariadne Oliver stepped in.
The Belgian detective’s final book, “Curtain:
Poirot’s Last Case”, was actually written during the dangers of World War II and sealed in a bank vault, to be published after Agatha’s death.
When a heart attack in 1974 prevented her from writing, she agreed to publish it, and it appeared in print just before she died.
This story takes Poirot’s life full circle as they return to Styles for one last case.
Hastings is nostalgic, recalling their first case and revealing the original family’s later fortunes, thereby closing the first story with the last.
Poirot’s last words from Agatha are in a letter to Hastings.
“We shall not hunt together again, my friend. Our first hunt was here – and our last . . .
“They were good days. Yes, they have been good days . . .” ■