Hercule Poirot

Hercule Poirot is Agatha Christie's first ever detective. He was Belgian and fled to England during World War I and became an inspector, only to retire and become a famous slueth.

Description
Poirot was a small and chubby little Belgian man. He has got neat appearance and always wore very particular clothes and had a little mustache. He often had a top hat and used a cane for a walker. He occasionally smoked cigarettes.

Personality
Poirot was a very insistent little man who believed ever so strongly in justice. He always outsmarted the police, for his "little grey cells," as he called them, were always working.

Poirot's assistants were Arthur Hastings (old friend), Miss Lemon (secretary), Japp (Chief Inspector), Ariadne Oliver (mystery writer), Bert Spence (Inspector), Colonel Race (friend), and Georges (trusted valet). Some occasional companions include Inspector Wheeler, Monsieur Bouc, Monsieur Giraud, Mr. Goby, and Harold Spence.

Poirot's Biography
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercule_Poirot 

"I suppose you know pretty well everything there is to know about Poirot's family by this time".[24] Christie made a point of having Poirot supply false or misleading information about himself or his background in order to assist him in obtaining information relevant to a particular case. In chapter 21 of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for example, Poirot talks about a mentally disabled nephew: this proves to be a ruse so that he can find out about homes for the mentally unfit, and in Dumb Witness, Poirot tells of an elderly invalid mother as a pretence to investigate the local nurses.

The character was in the Brussels police force by 1893.[25] A brief passage in The Big Four furnishes possible information about Poirot's birth or at least childhood in or near the town of Spa, Belgium: "But we did not go into Spa itself. We left the main road and wound into the leafy fastnesses of the hills, till we reached a little hamlet and an isolated white villa high on the hillside."[26] Christie strongly implies that this "quiet retreat in the Ardennes"[27] near Spa is the Poirot family home. Christie is purposefully vague, as Poirot is thought to be elderly even in the early Poirot novels, and in An Autobiography she admitted that she already imagined him to be an old man in 1920. At the time, of course, she had no idea she would be going on writing Poirot books for many decades to come.

Christie wrote that Poirot is a Roman Catholic,[28] and gave her character a strong sense of Catholic morality later in works.[29] Christie wrote little of Poirot’s childhood though in Three Act Tragedy she writes that he comes from a large family with little wealth.

Poirot’s police years

"Gustave […] was not a policeman. I have dealt with policemen all my life and I know. He could pass as a detective to an outsider but not to a man who was a policeman himself." — Hercule Poirot in "The Erymanthian Boar" (1940).

As an adult, Poirot joined the Belgian police force. Very little mention is made in Christie's work about this part of his life, but in "The Nemean Lion" (1939) Poirot himself refers to a Belgian case of his in which "a wealthy soap manufacturer […] poisoned his wife in order to be free to marry his secretary". We do not know whether this case resulted in a successful prosecution or not; moreover, Poirot is not above lying in order to produce a particular effect in the person to whom he is speaking, so this evidence is not reliable.

Inspector Japp gives some insight into Poirot's career with the Belgian police when introducing him to a colleague:

"You've heard me speak of Mr Poirot? It was in 1904 he and I worked together – the Abercrombie forgery case – you remember he was run down in Brussels. Ah, those were the days Moosier. Then, do you remember "Baron" Altara? There was a pretty rogue for you! He eluded the clutches of half the police in Europe. But we nailed him in Antwerp – thanks to Mr. Poirot here."[30]

Perhaps this is enough evidence to suggest that Poirot's police career was a successful one.

In the short story The Chocolate Box (1923) Poirot provides Captain Arthur Hastings with an account of what he considers to be his only failure. Poirot admits that he has failed to solve a crime "innumerable" times:

"I have been called in too late. Very often another, working towards the same goal, has arrived there first. Twice I have been struck down with illness just as I was on the point of success."

Nevertheless, he regards the case in "The Chocolate Box", which took place in 1893,[31] as his only actual failure of detection. Again, Poirot is not reliable as a narrator of his personal history and there is no evidence that Christie sketched it out in any depth.

It was also in this period that Poirot shot a man who was firing from a roof onto the public below.[32]

Poirot had retired from the Belgian police force by the time he met Hastings in 1916 on the case retold in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Career as a private detective

"I had called in at my friend Poirot's rooms to find him sadly overworked. So much had he become the rage that every rich woman who had mislaid a bracelet or lost a pet kitten rushed to secure the services of the great Hercule Poirot."[33]

During World War I, Poirot left Belgium for Britain as a refugee. It was here, on 16 July 1916, that he again met his lifelong friend, Captain Arthur Hastings, and solved the first of his cases to be published: The Mysterious Affair at Styles.[34] After that case Poirot apparently came to the attention of the British secret service, and undertook cases for the British government, including foiling the attempted abduction of the Prime Minister.[35] Readers were told that the British authority learned about Poirot's keen investigative ability from certain Belgian royals.

After the war Poirot became a free agent and began undertaking civilian cases. He moved into what became both his home and work address, 56B Whitehaven Mansions, Charterhouse Square, Smithfield, London W1.[36] It was chosen by Poirot for its symmetry. (This building was in fact built in 1936, decades later than Poirot fictionally moved in.) His first case was "The Affair at the Victory Ball", which saw Poirot enter the high society and begin his career as a private detective.

Between the world wars, Poirot travelled all over Europe and the Middle East investigating crimes and murders. Most of his cases happened during this period and he was at the height of his powers at this point in his life. The Murder On the Links saw the Belgian pit his grey cells against a French murderer. In the Middle East he solved the cases of Death on the Nile, and Murder in Mesopotamia with ease and even survived An Appointment with Death. As he passed through Eastern Europe on his return trip, he solved The Murder on the Orient Express. However he did not travel to the Americas or Australia, probably due to his sea sickness.

"It is this villainous sea that troubles me! The mal de mer – it is horrible suffering!"[37]

It was during this time he met the Countess Vera Rossakoff, a glamorous jewel thief. The history of the Countess is, like Poirot's, steeped in mystery. She claims to have been a member of the Russian aristocracy before the Russian Revolution and suffered greatly as a result, but how much of that story is true is an open question. Even Poirot acknowledges that Rossakoff has told several wildly varying accounts of her early life. Poirot later became smitten with the woman and allowed her to escape justice.

"It is the misfortune of small, precise men always to hanker after large and flamboyant women. Poirot had never been able to rid himself of the fatal fascination that the Countess held for him."[38]

Although letting the Countess escape is morally questionable, that impulse to take the law into his own hands was far from unique. In The Nemean Lion, he sided with the criminal, Miss Amy Carnaby, and saved her from having to face justice by blackmailing his client Sir Joseph Hoggins, who himself was plotting murder and was unwise enough to let Poirot discover this. Poirot even sent Miss Carnaby two hundred pounds as a final payoff before her dog kidnapping campaign came to an end. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd he allowed the murderer to escape justice through suicide and then ensured the truth was never known to spare the feelings of the murderer's relatives. In The Augean Stables he helped the government to cover up vast corruption.

It could be suggested that in Murder on the Orient Express Poirot allows the murderers to escape justice as well, after he discovers that twelve different people stabbed the victim – Mr. Ratchett – in his sleep. This is because they were only carrying out the sentence of death that he would have faced had he not been acquitted on a technicality. It may also be because, since 12 people stabbed the victim, none was certain who delivered the killing blow. Ultimately a falsehood is made up to tell the police and the 12 perpetrators are allowed to go free.

After his cases in the Middle East, Poirot returned to Britain. Apart from some of the so-called "Labours of Hercules" (see next section) he very rarely travelled abroad during his later career.

Retirement

"That’s the way of it. Just a case or two, just one case more – the Prima Donna’s farewell performance won’t be in it with yours, Poirot."[39]

There is a great deal of confusion about Poirot's retirement. Most of the cases covered by Poirot's private detective agency take place before his retirement to grow marrows, at which time he solves The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It has been said that twelve cases related in The Labours of Hercules (1947) must refer to a different retirement, but the fact that Poirot specifically says that he intends to grow marrows indicates that these stories also take place before Roger Ackroyd, and presumably Poirot closed his agency once he had completed them. There is specific mention in "The Capture of Cerberus" to the fact that there has been a gap of twenty years between Poirot's previous meeting with Countess Rossakoff and this one. If the Labours precede the events in Roger Ackroyd, then the Roger Ackroyd case must have taken place around twenty years later than it was published, and so must any of the cases that refer to it. One alternative would be that having failed to grow marrows once, Poirot is determined to have another go, but this is specifically denied by Poirot himself.[40] Also, in "The Erymanthian Boar", a character is said to have been turned out of Austria by the Nazis, implying that the events of The Labours of Hercules took place after 1937. Another alternative would be to suggest that the Preface to the Labours takes place at one date but that the labours are completed over a matter of twenty years. None of the explanations is especially attractive.

In terms of a rudimentary chronology, Poirot speaks of retiring to grow marrows in Chapter 18 of The Big Four (1927), which places that novel out of published order before Roger Ackroyd. He declines to solve a case for the Home Secretary because he is retired in Chapter One of Peril at End House (1932). He is certainly retired at the time of Three Act Tragedy (1935) but he does not enjoy his retirement and comes repeatedly out of it thereafter when his curiosity is engaged. Nevertheless, he continues to employ his secretary, Miss Lemon, at the time of the cases retold in Hickory Dickory Dock and Dead Man's Folly, which take place in the mid-1950s. It is therefore better to assume that Christie provided no authoritative chronology for Poirot's retirement, but assumed that he could either be an active detective, a consulting detective or a retired detective as the needs of the immediate case required.

One thing that is consistent about Poirot's retirement is that his fame declines during it, so that in the later novels he is often disappointed when characters (especially younger characters) recognize neither him nor his name:

"I should, perhaps, Madame, tell you a little more about myself. I am Hercule Poirot."

The revelation left Mrs Summerhayes unmoved.

"What a lovely name," she said kindly. "Greek, isn't it?"[41]

Post World War II

"He, I knew, was not likely to be far from his headquarters. The time when cases had drawn him from one end of England to the other was past."[42]

Poirot is less active during the cases that take place at the end of his career. Beginning with Three Act Tragedy (1934), Christie had perfected during the inter-war years a sub-genre of Poirot novel in which the detective himself spent much of the first third of the novel on the periphery of events. In novels such as Taken at the Flood, After the Funeral and Hickory Dickory Dock he is even less in evidence, frequently passing the duties of main interviewing detective to a subsidiary character. In Cat Among the Pigeons Poirot's entrance is so late as to be almost an afterthought. Whether this was a reflection of his age or of the fact that Christie was by now heartily sick of him it is difficult to assess. There is certainly a case for saying that Crooked House (1949) and Ordeal by Innocence (1957), which are not Poirot novels at all but so easily could have been, represent a logical endpoint of the general diminution of Poirot himself within the Poirot sequence.

Towards the end of his career it becomes clear that Poirot's retirement is no longer a convenient fiction. He assumes a genuinely inactive lifestyle during which he concerns himself with studying famous unsolved cases of the past and reading detective novels. He even writes a book about mystery fiction in which he deals sternly with Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins.[43] In the absence of a more appropriate puzzle, he solves such inconsequential domestic problems as the presence of three pieces of orange peel in his umbrella stand.[44]

Poirot (and, it is reasonable to suppose, his creator)[45] becomes increasingly bemused by the vulgarism of the up and coming generation's young people. In Hickory Dickory Dock, he investigates the strange goings on in a student hostel, while in the Third Girl he is forced into contact with the smart set of Chelsea youths. In the growing drug and pop culture of the sixties, he proves himself once again, but has become heavily reliant on other investigators (especially the private investigator, Mr. Goby) who provide him with the clues that he can no longer gather for himself.

"You're too old. Nobody told me you were so old. I really don't want to be rude but – there it is. You're too old. I'm really very sorry."[46]

Notably, during this time his physical characteristics also change dramatically, and by the time Arthur Hastings meets Poirot again in Curtain, he looks very different from his previous appearances, having become thin with age and with obviously dyed hair.

Death

Poirot dies from complications of a heart condition at the end of Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, where he moves his amyl nitrite pills out of his reach, possibly out of guilt because he was forced to become the murderer in Curtain, although it was for the benefit of others. The 'murderer' he was hunting had never expressly killed anyone himself, but subtly and psychologically, he had manipulated others to kill for him. Poirot thus was forced to kill the man himself as otherwise he would have continued his actions and never been officially convicted since he never killed anyone in the eyes of the law. It is revealed at the end of Curtain that he fakes his need for a wheelchair (he wants to fool people into believing that he is suffering from arthritis to give the impression that he is more infirm than he is). His last recorded words are "Cher ami!", spoken to Hastings as the Captain left his room, though Poirot did speak subsequently to the 'murderer'. Poirot is then buried at Styles. His funeral is arranged by his best friend Hastings and his daughter, Judith, with Hastings reasoning that "Here was the spot where he had lived when he first came to this country. He was to lie here at the last."

While Poirot's actual death and funeral occurred in "Curtain", years after his retirement from active investigation, it was not the first time Hastings attended the funeral of his best friend. In "The Big Four" (1927) Poirot feigned his death and subsequent funeral in order to launch a surprise attack on the Big Four.

Major novels

Main article: Hercule Poirot in literature

The Poirot books take readers through the whole of his life in England, from the first book (The Mysterious Affair at Styles), where he is a refugee staying at Styles, to the last Poirot book (Curtain), where he visits Styles once again before his death. In between, Poirot solves cases outside England as well, including his most famous case, Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

Hercule Poirot became famous with the publication, in 1926, of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, whose surprising solution proved controversial. The novel is still among the most famous of all detective novels: Edmund Wilson alludes to it in the title of his well-known attack on detective fiction, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" Aside from Roger Ackroyd, the most critically acclaimed Poirot novels appeared from 1932 to 1942, including such acknowledged classics as Murder on the Orient Express, The ABC Murders (1935), Cards on the Table (1936), and Death on the Nile (1937). The last of these, a tale of multiple homicide upon a Nile steamer, was judged by the celebrated detective novelist John Dickson Carr to be among the ten greatest mystery novels of all time.

The 1942 novel Five Little Pigs (aka Murder in Retrospect), in which Poirot investigates a murder committed sixteen years before by analysing various accounts of the tragedy, is a Rashomon-like performance that critic and mystery novelist Robert Barnard called the best of the Christie novels.