Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot. Anne Hart

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      We now come to one of the strangest periods in Poirot’s life – a year of seclusion in the quiet village of King’s Abbot, a seclusion so complete as to drive the village Intelligence Corps, led by his neighbour, Miss Caroline Sheppard, close to despair. Who was he? Where had he come from? Why was he there? ‘Someone very like Caroline must have invented the questions on passports,’ observed Miss Sheppard’s brother. ‘The one thing we do know about him is that he is interested in the growing of vegetable marrows.’

      Vegetable marrows? Poirot? Had he gone quite mad? Was he pining for Hastings? Or the audacious Countess Rossakoff? Or both? Was a year spent virtually alone in a neat walled garden and an overheated sitting-room in King’s Abbot Poirot’s tidy version of a nervous breakdown? It is true that he was now comfortably off, his reputation assured by the recent publication of Hastings’s memoirs, but this period of self-imposed exile, with only the marrows and an ancient Breton housekeeper for company, was a curious episode indeed. Fortunately, one afternoon something snapped. In anger he threw his most impressive vegetable marrow over the garden wall (it landed with ‘a repellent squelch’) and re-entered the world. King’s Abbot, on the very day that Roger Ackroyd was murdered, was at last permitted to know that in its midst dwelt the most eminent detective in Europe.

      The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, published in 1926, is a Big House Mystery, and the man who by his own death inadvertently rescued Poirot from the marrows was a selfmade country squire, described by Dr James Sheppard, the narrator of this famous affair, as ‘the life and soul of our peaceful village’. Roger Ackroyd stabbed to death in his comfortable study was a Big Case, not only for Poirot but also for the history of detective fiction. It invariably leaves its readers shaken, and it certainly shook King’s Abbot.

      Poirot’s attempts at retirement now took a different form. The old housekeeper in the huge Breton hat was returned to her homeland and we hear no more of King’s Abbot. Rustication behind him, Poirot embarked on a life on the Riviera:

      ‘I take it, M. Poirot, that you no longer exercise your profession?’

      ‘That is so, Monsieur. I enjoy the world.’

      And so he did, and could be seen on many a fine day in Nice setting forth from his hotel in a white duck suit with a camellia in his buttonhole to lunch on fillet de sole à la Jeanette.

      The Mystery of the Blue Train, published in 1928, demonstrates, however, that Poirot’s retirement had not quite taken. The robbing and strangling of a beautiful heiress, Ruth Kettering, in a sleeping compartment of the Riviera-bound Blue Train, the request of her wealthy father that Poirot find her murderer, and the flattering gratitude of the French police at even a hint that the great detective might take an interest in the affair, soon had Poirot back in harness.

      A major event in The Mystery of the Blue Train, and an indication of Poirot’s new style, was his acquisition of an English valet, the wooden-faced George. From this time on Poirot no longer had to concern himself with the removal of grease spots and the brewing of hot chocolate, or depend for an audience on friends who might disappear to South America. For the rest of his long, long life he could depend on the faithful George.

      ‘You have a wide experience, Georges,’ murmured Poirot. ‘I often wonder having lived so exclusively with titled families that you demean yourself by coming as a valet to me. I put it down to love of excitement on your part.’

‘Not exactly, sir,’ said George, ‘I happened to see in Society Snippets that you had been received at Buckingham Palace. That was just when I was looking for a new situation. His Majesty, so it said, had been most gracious and friendly and thought very highly of your abilities.’¹⁶

      Poirot’s retirement to the Riviera was even briefer than his retirement to King’s Abbot. By 1929 he was back in London, though tentatively at first, on a case requiring temporary accommodation and an assumed name.

‘I take the flat in the name of Mr O’Connor,’ he announced to a neighbour startled at encountering ‘a little man with a very fierce moustache and an egg-shaped head’, and added, unnecessarily, ‘But I am not an Irishman.’ As it happened, his neighbour and her friends had just had the bad luck to discover a body. Resplendent in a handsome dressing-gown and embroidered slippers, Poirot, in ‘The Third Floor Flat’,¹⁷ had the mystery solved within a couple of hours.

      In ‘The Under Dog’ Poirot was firmly back in business (‘at this present time I have many cases of moment on hand’) and settled in a flat with George in attendance. From there he was summoned to the country by a recent widow, Lady Astwell, who, against all evidence, was convinced that her husband had been murdered by his inoffensive secretary. To uncover the truth Poirot subjected a large household to a reign of terror:

      ‘For two weeks now I have played the comedy, I have showed you the net closing slowly around you. The fingerprints, footprints, the search of your room with the things artistically replaced. I have struck terror into you with all of this; you have lain awake at night fearing and wondering; did you have a fingerprint in the room or a footprint somewhere?’

A strange little story is ‘Wasps’ Nest’¹⁸ in which Poirot took as his mission the solution of a murder before it even occurred. The setting is charming:

      John Harrison loved his garden, and it had never looked better than it did on this August evening, summery and languorous. The rambler roses were still beautiful; sweet peas scented the air.

      Two months later the stock markets crashed around the world. We can be sure, however, that Poirot, that canny practitioner of Flemish thrift, continued to sip his tisanes with equanimity. By the end of the 1920s he was a very rich man and remained so for the rest of his life. ‘I like not the sensational. For me the safe, the prudent investment … what you call the gilded edge.’

      NOTES

1 Later collected into books, sometimes with minor changes, many of these stories first appeared in magazines such as The Sketch (1923) and Blue Book (1923–25).

2 Also published under the title ‘Mr Davenby Disappears’.

3 Also published under the title ‘The Mystery of the Plymouth Express’.

4 A much expanded version of this story was published in 1937 under the title ‘The Incredible Theft’.

5 Also published under the title ‘The Mystery of the Clapham Cook’.

6 Also published under the title ‘The Curious Disappearance of the Opalsen Pearls’.

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