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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ find Arthur Hastings at his side. As a sort of appetizer to these major cases, Hastings first enjoyed collaborating in a shorter one, ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’,⁴ a macabre society murder which Poirot pronounced ‘an artistic masterpiece!’ On the perpetrator he bestowed the greatest of compliments:

      ‘It goes to my heart to hang a man like that. I may be a genius myself, but I am capable of recognizing genius in other people. A perfect murder, mon ami. I, Hercule Poirot, say to you. A perfect murder.

      Epatant!’

      Welcome as he was to Poirot, Hastings-watchers may find his frequent returns to England rather disconcerting. Wasn’t all that sailing back and forth terribly expensive? Could the ranch afford it? Didn’t Cinderella mind? One imagines her standing on the verandah gazing across the pampas, the cicharra singing, as Arthur and his steamer trunk depart once again for England. From scattered references one rather imagines her waving cheerfully. ‘Tiens!’ as Poirot was apt to say about mysteries. ‘C’est curieux, n’est-ce pas?’

      Presumably Hastings sent Cinderella several postcards from the Majestic Hotel in St Loo, the ‘Queen of the Watering Places’ on the Cornish coast, where he and Poirot spent an unexpectedly eventful holiday in Peril at End House. Once again Poirot was in one of his retirement fits. Flattering appeals for help from the Home Secretary left him unmoved (‘I have retired! It is finished!’), but how could he resist intervening when only he could see that someone in St Loo was determined to murder a very independent young thing, Miss Nick Buckley?

      Peril at End House was a slippery case. Unchaperoned young women partying and weekending and wearing watches filled with cocaine dumbfounded poor Hastings, but Poirot – who tended to be at his most avuncular at the seaside – took everything in his stride:

      ‘My friend Hastings is shocked,’ remarked Poirot. ‘You must be more careful, Mademoiselle. He is out of date, you comprehend. He has just returned from those great clear open spaces, etc., and he has yet to learn the language of nowadays.’

      Poirot, with Hastings in tow, was soon back in London and accepting commissions from wealthy clients. In Lord Edgware Dies some of these clients’ requests were outside Poirot’s usual genre. He reluctantly acceded to Lady Edgware’s request that he ask her husband to give her a divorce (‘Of course if we were only in Chicago,’ she exclaimed, ‘I could get him bumped off quite easily’), but drew the line at accepting an overlapping commission from Lady Edgware’s next prospective mother-in-law, the Dowager Duchess of Merton, to stop Lady Edgware from marrying her son. The two men in question were a very rum lot in Hastings’s opinion. Lord Edgware was secretive, sneering, and had most peculiar tastes in art and literature, while the Duke of Merton, ‘A young man of monkish tendencies, a violent Anglo-Catholic … was supposed to care nothing for women.’

      Poirot was preparing to cut and run on all this when the sensation of Lord Edgware’s murder broke upon London. There he lay in his handsome library, stabbed in the back of the neck, a challenge for Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard. But could Poirot, whose mind should have been elsewhere – the strange disappearance of an ambassador’s boots, for example – leave well enough alone? ‘To say I have the head of a pig is not pretty,’ Poirot exclaimed indignantly to Japp as he clambered aboard the case. Within a day or two of Poirot’s inspired solving of the Edgware affair, Hastings was ‘suddenly recalled to the Argentine’ and Poirot resumed his distinguished life as a consultant on matters of the greatest importance. ‘I belong to the world,’ he declared loftily, and we find him next journeying in the Middle East after ‘disentangling some military scandal in Syria’. On his way to Baghdad a diversionary case, ‘a fantastic crime’, plucked him from his course.

The narrator of Murder in Mesopotamia⁵ is Amy Leatheran, ‘a woman of thirty-five of erect, confident bearing’, temporarily employed as a nurse to Louise Leidner, the beautiful but overweight wife of the leader of the University of Pittstown’s expedition to Iraq. In what Nurse Leatheran was to call ‘the Tell Yarimjah business’, her assignment placed her in the compound of an archaeological team, a tense group of people that Poirot was to label ‘Mrs Leidner’s entourage’.

      Mrs Leidner’s murder – predicted by herself – confounded the local authorities and brought Hercule Poirot jolting down the dusty track to Tell Yarimjah. Amy Leatheran described her first sight of him:

      I don’t know what I’d imagined – something rather like Sherlock Holmes – long and lean with a keen, clever face. Of course, I knew he was a foreigner, but I hadn’t expected him to be quite as foreign as he was, if you know what I mean.

      When you saw him you just wanted to laugh! He was like something on the stage or at the pictures. To begin with, he wasn’t above five foot five, I should think – an odd plump little man, quite old, with an enormous moustache, and a head like an egg. He looked like a hairdresser in a comic play!

      And this was the man who was going to find out who killed Mrs Leidner!

      Some years later Nurse Leatheran neatly settled her starched cuffs and wrote an excellent account of how Poirot solved the murder. As she neared her conclusion she observed laconically: ‘M. Poirot went back to Syria and about a week later he went home on the Orient Express and got himself mixed up in another murder.’

      At the outset of this next adventure we glimpse Poirot, ‘of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache’, in danger of freezing to death on a winter morning on the platform of a Syrian railway station. Just behind him lay The Syrian Army Case (‘“You have saved us, mon cher,” said the General emotionally … “You have saved the honour of the French Army”’) and the crime passionnel of the Mesopotamian Murder Case. Just ahead a telegram awaited him in Stamboul recalling him to England on important business. And just beyond that, all unforeseen as he stamped his galoshes on the railway platform, lay an immobilization in snowdrifts aboard the most fabled train in detective literature.

Murder on the Orient Express⁶, published in 1934, was a lovely romp for Poirot – no outside interferences, no police, no need to rush elsewhere, and all set amidst the most comfortable of surroundings with excellent food and absorbing witnesses at hand. In this agreeable milieu Poirot solved one of his most famous cases, the stabbing in the next compartment of a notorious criminal recently acquitted in the United States of the kidnapping and death of little Daisy Armstrong, the child of famous parents. How grateful was the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits to Poirot for rescuing it from a potential embarrassment! And how grateful was Poirot for his snowbound diversion: ‘I was reflecting … that many hours of boredom lay ahead whilst we are stuck here.’

Three Act Tragedy,⁷ published in 1934, was a very sociable case. With an eye to the audience its cast busied itself with all sorts of camaraderie and hospitality (even Poirot rose to the occasion and gave a sherry party), while the nicotine which in turn dispatched three victims was neatly administered in an excellent martini, a glass of port, and a box of chocolates.

Tiens! Though pretending yet again to be semi-retired, how could Poirot resist rushing home from the Riviera when he heard all this? In this case, however, Poirot was at times gently upstaged by another small elderly man, Mr Satterthwaite:⁸

      A dried-up little pipkin of a man, Mr Satterthwaite, a patron of art СКАЧАТЬ