Agatha Christie Page 17

  Well – Dame Agatha, alas, has gone. But she has left with us that pseudo-grandmother with all her manifold comic little charms – the gentle blue eyes that could cast so suspicious a glance, the soft pink cheeks flushing up with the horrid excitement of the chase, the fleecy white hair which occasionally turned back to grey, the failing eyesight which never deterred her from keenly observing, not to say occasionally downright spying, the increasing deafness which interfered not at all with the habit of eavesdropping, the twinges of rheumatism, the severer onset of arthritis, which still did not deter her from setting forth upon adventures which might have daunted many a centenarian less incapacitated than herself.

  Dear Miss Marple! – with her fleecy pink and white knitting (replaced by a scarf in purple crochet when any recent tragedy of a felonious nature suggested to her Victorian sense of propriety that a sort of half-mourning would be more fitting) – and her small, elegant economies. Miss Marple visited no picture galleries on her excursions to London (at nephew Raymond’s expense) and went to no museums, and ‘the idea of patronising a dress show of any kind would never have occurred to her’ – any more than, perhaps, to a good many of us. But she was fond of a ramble round the china and linen departments of the great stores, keeping a sharp lookout for anything ‘marked down’. It is agreeable to know that at our final parting, we leave her with no such cheese-paring necessities…

  For in Nemesis, the last book actually to have been written about her – the last to be published had been written many years before – arrangements for her future comfort have been most handsomely laid on. A proposition is set before her, which seems to leave her with very little information, or indeed, it may well seem to the astonished reader, any information whatsoever. The proposer, in a posthumous letter, recalls her, perhaps not surprisingly, as likely to be spending her time mainly in knitting – harking back to a moment of danger when she appeared at his bedside ‘in a cloud of pink wool’ charmingly described as a fascinator. (It must be hastily added that Miss Marple’s appearance at any gentleman’s bedside, with or without a fascinator, would be the rarest of events and would constitute in itself no threat whatsoever.) But it was then, the writer declares, that it became apparent to him – as in the same book it later becomes apparent to the Confidential Adviser to the Home Office aforementioned – that she has ‘a natural flair for justice, which in turn has led to a natural flair for crime’. He is accordingly bequeathing to her a sum of money – which proves to be no less than twenty thousand pounds – if she will successfully investigate a certain crime. As to what the crime is or what persons may be involved, he gives no hint at all, nor any suggestion as to how she may go about finding out for herself; he is wryly determined, it seems, to confound any possible curiosity on the part of the acting solicitor, and to this end denies her any word that might be useful to her in the proposed undertaking. But Miss Marple, though she repudiates the legal gentleman’s suggestions as to possible expenditure of the legacy once earned – a cruise, one of those excellent tours that can nowadays be arranged, replenishment of one’s cellars – does confess to very much enjoying a partridge, a whole partridge to oneself! – and a box of marrons glacés is an expensive taste which she has not hitherto been able to indulge. Possibly one might even treat oneself to a visit to the opera, entailing as that does a car to Covent Garden and back, and the cost of a night at a hotel (no doubt, though she does not confide this thought also, one could spend the following day before the first class travel back to St Mary Mead, in the linen and china shops, revelling in the luxury of not having to watch out for reductions). So the thought of the twenty thousand pounds is irresistible. Without one word as to how she is even to begin to go about it, Miss Marple accepts the challenge. And of course, inspiration comes, nebulous in the extreme indeed, but Miss Marple is off and into the upper air. ‘It seemed to me that there was an atmosphere there of sorrow, of deep-felt unhappiness, also an atmosphere of fear and a kind of struggling different atmosphere which I can only describe as an atmosphere of normality.’

  ‘Your last word interests me,’ says the Adviser to the – well, you know who.

  It was not entirely the last word. The last word has since appeared in a book written long before Miss Marple had come to this just reward. But she has it at least, and we leave her lapped in comfort. And what is so lovely is that she’s going to spend it all. We know of no other member of the family to whom she feels any obligation to make bequests in her turn, and nephew Raymond is, as he always has been, well enough provided for – and moreover in middle age is becoming so increasingly pompous and pleased with himself, as it seems to me, and more than necessarily unkind about Aunt Jane’s little foibles, that even she must be growing a little less fondly indulgent; I’m glad that from now on she’ll be independent of his holiday treats. And she will. ‘There is no point in saving at my age,’ she assures the protesting solicitors – who but a moment ago were pressing upon her those luxurious cruises, let alone stocking up on wines and spirits, but are now apparently growing apprehensive as to an onset of riotous living. ‘I mean, the point is to enjoy the things one never thought one would have the money to enjoy.’ To murmurings as to a possible rainy day – at the age of a hundred and one? – she replies with a touch of her old asperity that all she will need for a rainy day will be her umbrella. ‘I’m going to spend this money. I’m going to have some fun with it.’

  With all our hearts, having had so much fun with her, we will hope that she does.

  Hercule Poirot – A Companion Portrait H. R. F. KEATING

  Hercule Poirot, the greatest sleuth (bar one) ever to stalk his prey through the body-littered pages, was born, I calculate, in 1844, only fourteen years after his native Belgium had broken away from Holland to become an independent kingdom. He died full of years, very full of years, in 1974, the circumstances of his demise – bizarre as even he, connoisseur of bizarre decease, could have wished – being reported some twelve months later as soon as his chronicler of old, Captain Arthur Hastings, could bring himself to set down the astonishing facts. Poirot departed this life then aged 130, or perhaps a bit more. It depends how old he is likely to have been when he retired, full of honour, from the Belgian Police in, we are told, 1904. A vigorous sixty then would have made him only 130, a more mature sixty-five would have brought him finally to 135, within sight indeed of all-time winner Abraham’s ‘a hundred three score and fifteen years’. But no one can tell. Poirot was always a little touchy on the subject of age. Precise figures are not to be found.

  Not one of the records of his cases mentions dates definite enough to be of conclusive help. True, the affair of the Dead Man’s Mirror begins with a letter from Sir Gervase Chevenix-Gore, of Hamborough Close, Hamborough St Mary (Station: Whimperley. Telegrams: Hamborough St John) dated 24 September 1936. And it is also possible to fix the date on which Poirot attended Sunday Matins while solving so brilliantly the case it is convenient to call One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, or in America The Patriotic Murders. This must have been on 29 January 1939 since he joined in singing, in a hesitant baritone (and no wonder as he was probably aged 104) in that week’s Psalm 140. But mostly it is evidence such as the naming of a youth as Gary and the mention of a gardener’s television set in Dead Man’s Folly that enables us to say with conviction that his cases took place always about a year before the printed record was published.

  So 1974 is the year of his final posthumous triumph, an affair that will be found to baffle with wonderful satisfaction almost everyone who reads it. It took place at Styles St Mary, scene of his first English murder. In my end is my beginning: it is fitting to quote T. S. Eliot, a poet who did not disdain to help himself verbatim from Conan Doyle’s The Musgrave Ritual for his Murder in the Cathedral.

  And Poirot’s last words, whispered to his friend of many years, Captain Hastings, who had returned from the Argentine (at the youthful age, I estimate, of eighty-eight) were ‘Cher ami’. They thus neatly echoed the very first recorde
d words of the great Belgian sleuth uttered in 1916 (ascertainable date), ‘Mon ami, Hastings!’ Hard upon them came the first description of the ‘extraordinary looking little man’. We learn of his shortness of stature, ‘hardly more than five feet four inches’, of his way of nevertheless carrying himself with immense dignity, of the fact that his head was exactly the shape of an egg and that it was invariably perched a little to the left. And above all we learn of his moustaches, very stiff and military, waxed to the sharpest points, his pride and joy. And there was too the extreme neatness of his attire, indeed it is called ‘almost incredible’. We hear no mention at this time of his green eyes, but later we come across them often enough, getting significantly greener when a clue (often delectably misleading) rose up and at times even shining like a cat’s. But this was a phenomenon which in later, calmer days seems not to have been in evidence.

  The extravagant gestures also escape mention at first encounter but later frequently horrify the staid English among whom the great detective came to spend his life. Occasionally (no, quite often) they are dextrously employed so as to knock over an ornament or similar object and thus prove something altogether startling. Once, a gesture more than usually ingenious, if a little hard to visualize, knocked off the pince-nez worn by the murderer’s faithful female accomplice in such a manner that Poirot was able to replace them by a pair he knew to have been worn by the killer, thus confirming, when the good lady failed to notice the substitution, an already formed hypothesis.

  Poirot’s neatness was commented on at his first appearance, but it emerged only later that he almost invariably wore a correct black jacket, striped trousers and a bow-tie with, if the weather was anything less than hot, an overcoat and a muffler. And he had shiny boots, of patent leather, simultaneously acknowledging the paramount need to achieve a spotless appearance and declining to attain it in the properly British way, by the application of much polish and, if as was preferable a servant was doing the polishing, some spit. But those boots. How often our hero sacrificed their shininess in pursuing the criminal or in searching for some proof. Even when, in Evil Under the Sun, he substituted for them a pair of white suede shoes, which he wore with a suit of white duck and a panama hat, he found it necessary to besmirch their immaculateness by venturing almost to the edge of the sea. And how he hated the sea. It must have been only the necessity of crossing it that prevented him extending his triumphant career to the far side of the Atlantic.

  Under panama or correct bowler lay, brushed with enormous exactitude, the hair which remained till his dying day an unrepentant black. It must even under the panama in that summer immediately before the Second World War have needed frequent applications of ‘a tonic, not a dye’, but for the significance of that jetty coiffure at the very end you must read Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case for yourself. It produces not the least of the genuine and effective coups de théâtre that enlivened the long, long career.

  His manner of speech was as extravagant often as his gestures. It has been said of him that he broke into French for the easy phrases and was able to master English for the complex thoughts. But that is unfair, if only a little. Certainly he retained his inability to capture certain easy English idioms till the very end when he give us such simple delights as ‘the side of the bed manner’, fit to stand beside the early ‘money for the confiture, as you say’. And from time to time he did not forget to claim that his difficulties with English were in part assumed. They made people look on him as a foreigner, he would slyly point out, and thus someone in whom the outrageous could safely be confided since all Englishmen believe foreigners are naturally outrageous anyway.

  Indeed, his foreignness was an asset all round. Its comicality gave him a proper quantum of the endearing as well as allowing him to be invariably successful without becoming odious. He could boast too, a useful accomplishment for the detective when matters are to be explained. And he could listen at keyholes and read other people’s letters, things which no decent Englishman has ever been known to do. But when his fearful foreignness brought him to the verge of being altogether too ridiculous his being a Belgian foreigner rescued him. He came, one would recall, from that sturdy ‘gallant little’ country. He was all right. Let Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt, as chronicled in 1937 by Mr Michael Innes in Hamlet, Revenge, give tongue: ‘There is a very good man whose name I forget, a foreigner and very conceited – but, they say, thoroughly reliable.’ English has no word of greater praise for a fellow than that ‘reliable’.

  So Poirot became established in England, sharing London rooms at 14 Farraway Street with the faithful Hastings and with a landlady in attendance. He was conscious in these circumstances of certain similarities with a famous forbear, though Hastings sprouted no sudden medical qualification but had a job as secretary to an MP (name unspecified and political affiliation ignored) and the landlady emerged from total anonymity – no superbly named Hudson she – only by obligingly never laying breakfast or tea things with perfect symmetry and thus enabling Poirot to give vent to a characteristic trait.

  It was indeed at Farraway Street that Poirot paid his most explicit homage to his great forerunner, in the startling affair of The Big Four. At the height of that extraordinary case – well, it included not only a mysterious Chinaman, but darts tipped with fatal curare, a bid for world domination and as well an instant anaesthetic with, for good measure, the capture of faithful old Hastings by threatening to make away with his wife in a lingering fashion (‘My God, you fiend’) – Poirot announced that this was a matter so serious that it called for the intervention of his brother. ‘Your brother,’ Hastings cried in astonishment, ‘I never knew you had a brother.’ ‘You surprise me, Hastings. Do you not know that all celebrated detectives have brothers who would be even more celebrated than they are were it not for constitutional indolence?’ Thus Achille Poirot was born, to die in the last thrilling pages when it is revealed that Hercule had temporarily sacrificed even his moustaches in order to create him, much as a Mrs Christie might sacrifice her accustomed tone of steady probability for one wild jeu d’esprit, or, as Poirot might say, the game of the spirit.

  Hastings, who had been banished by a happy marriage to South America, returned for this escapade. But, dear arch-bumbler, he was soon sent packing again. The classic Holmes–Watson pattern has the great advantage of enabling a story-teller to have a detective who sees all but credibly does not tell all, but it is inclined to limit the type of case open to him when everything has to be seen through a dull pair of eyes. All too soon a useful device can become fossilized into a music-hall act.

  So Poirot established himself alone, except for a loyal manservant Georges to whom portentous phrases could be addressed at the height of a case without too much danger of any answering back. Poirot chose as his new domicile Whitehaven Mansions, a newly built block of flats pleasing to him for its extreme symmetry. At the beginning of The Labours of Hercules (somebody loved parallels, with classical stories, with nursery rhymes, with herself) after a little introductory matter explaining that Poirot now intended finally, finally, finally to retire but would like to end his career with twelve cases that happened to correspond to the twelve tasks that confronted his illustrious namesake, we read of his new abode (telephone: TRAfalgar 8137): ‘Hercule Poirot’s flat was essentially modern in its furnishings. It gleamed with chromium. Its easy-chairs, though comfortably padded, were square and uncompromising in outline.’ And there was ‘a piece of good modern sculpture representing one cube placed on another cube and above it a geometrical arrangement of copper wire’. How he worked at being the detective every decent Englishman loves to hate.

  But, of course, he did not retire. As one can tell from that sculpture, money was now rolling in. There were dozens of juicy clients, mostly only hinted at – a Home Secretary or two, various millionaires, a few princes and ‘the affair of the Ambassador’s boots’ (just a question of drug-smuggling, Poirot loftily explains). He could now indulge all his gastronomic whims to the full
and would voluntarily round off a long dinner that had ended with baba au rhum not with your Englishman’s glass of port but with, ugh, crème de cacao. And the tisanes and camomile tea which the fellow would insist on when he could not get the thick sweet chocolate which he preferred to ‘your English poison’: it was enough to make anybody throw down his seven and sixpence on the bookshop counter in sheer disgust.

  With wealth came influence. Now, in the 1930s, at the peak of success, describing himself no longer as a private detective but as ‘a consultant’ and still always threatening final, final, final, final retirement, he had at the beck and the call, as he might have said, a small host of useful people. Of course, replacing Hastings as his chronicler with another dull dog narrator (though he was a medical man) in that affair which caused an unparalleled sensation in 1926, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was not exactly a success, except in literary terms. ‘Some readers,’ said a certain Mrs Christie, ‘have cried indignantly “Cheating”, an accusation that I have had pleasure in refuting by calling attention to various turns of phrasing and careful wording.’