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

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СКАЧАТЬ Withal, a man of considerable intelligence and a very shrewd observer of people and things.

      Poirot came to have a high regard for Mr Satterthwaite’s acute observation of the social scene, but in the end, the murderer in Three Act Tragedy unmasked, he insisted on having the last word. Said Mr Satterthwaite:

      ‘My goodness … I’ve only just realized it! That rascal, with his poisoned cocktail! Anyone might have drunk it! It might have been me!’

      ‘There is an even more terrible possibility that you have not considered,’ said Poirot.

      ‘Eh?’

      ‘It might have been me’.

      ‘If anyone had told me a week ago,’ said Inspector Japp, in September of 1934, ‘that I should be investigating a crime where a woman was killed with a poisoned dart with snake venom on it – well, I’d have laughed in his face!’ Poor Japp! He had come in all innocence to Croydon Aerodrome on the off-chance of catching a smuggler and had found himself confronted with the airliner ‘Prometheus’ just landed from Paris with the body of a French passenger murdered en route. Also on board, as a further annoyance, was an airsick Hercule Poirot who, although claiming to be the greatest detective in the world, had slept through the whole thing. ‘Luckily,’ said Japp, breathing heavily, ‘it’s one of those semiforeign cases.’

But who could the murderer be? wondered Japp, Poirot, and M. Fournier of the French Sûreté as they pondered the list of passengers. Could it be the chatty English mystery writer, whose most recent whodunit, The Clue of the Scarlet Petal, hinged on poisoned darts? Could it be Japp’s favourite suspects, two seedy-looking Frenchmen? (‘What you say is possible, certainly,’ murmured Poirot tactfully, ‘but as regards some of your points, you are in error, my friend. Those two men are not toughs or cutthroats, as you suggest. They are, on the contrary, two distinguished and learned archaeologists.’) Could it be – as initially decided by a xenophobic coroner’s jury – Hercule Poirot? (‘The coroner frowned. “Nonsense, I can’t accept this verdict.”’) And so on. There was no doubt that a very clever murder had been committed in mid air. ‘Our Irish stew’ was one more of the things Japp called Death in the Clouds,⁹ published in 1935. Poirot, once he had recovered from his airsickness, had a splendid time solving it.

A short story which first appeared in 1935 is ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, in which Miss Amelia Barrowby of Charman’s Green in Buckinghamshire wrote to request a consultation with Poirot, on ‘a very delicate family matter’, just before succumbing to strychnine poisoning. Besides the mystery of Miss Barrowby’s sad death, this story is memorable as landmark evidence of Poirot’s mounting press of business, for in it we are introduced for the first time to a very formidable person, Miss Lemon, who rejoices for the rest of this saga in the title of Confidential Secretary to Hercule Poirot.¹⁰ Like George the valet, Felicity Lemon fully met all her employer’s fanatical specifications for neatness and order (‘Her real passion in life was the perfection of a filing system beside which all other filing systems should sink into oblivion’) and, like George, while overlooked in the excitement of a number of cases, she served faithfully in the background for many more years.

      Back from Argentina in June of 1935 came Arthur Hastings to find Poirot established in Whitehaven Mansions, ‘an outstanding building of modern flats’. Taking stock, the two men immediately began talking about each other’s hair. Inspector Japp, dropping by, had something to add. ‘Just a little bit thin on top, eh?’ he remarked tactlessly to Hastings, and Poirot made things even worse:

      ‘You know, Hastings, there is a little device – my hairdresser is a man of great ingenuity – one attaches it to the scalp and brushes one’s own hair over it – it is not a wig, you comprehend – but – ’

      ‘Poirot,’ I roared. ‘Once and for all I will have nothing to do with the beastly inventions of your confounded hairdresser’

      and added, testily, that Japp – for whom Hastings had never had much affection – was ‘getting as grey as a badger’ and looking much older.

      Poirot, of course, was secure with his hairdresser and a black bottle of REVIVIT.

      But more important matters were soon at hand – the extraordinarily senseless serial murders recounted in The ABC Murders, published in 1936. Poirot had been hoping for just such a case to enliven Hastings’s visit:

      ‘As soon as I heard you were coming over I said to myself: Something will arise. As in former days we will hunt together, we two. But if so it must be no common affair. It must be something’ – he waved his hands excitedly – ‘something recherché – delicate – fine …’ He gave the last untranslatable word its full flavour.

      ‘Upon my word, Poirot,’ I said. ‘Any one would think you were ordering a dinner at the Ritz.’

      The puzzle of the ABC killings, in which the date and whereabouts of each murder was ghoulishly announced to Poirot before it was committed, made for an exciting summer. For Poirot it was an interesting departure from his usual type of case, the crime intime: ‘Here, for the first time in our association, it is cold-blooded, impersonal murder. Murder from the outside.’ For Hastings it was, no doubt, a welcome change from worrying about the ranch. What a splendid return! What a ‘cream of crime’! Who cared, after all, if one was going a trifle bald?

      The ABC murderer was caught in November, just one month short of Hastings’s return to Argentina, and in June of the following year we find him back again enjoying ‘the roar of London’ from Poirot’s sitting-room window and making notes for the narration of a new case:

      But though Miss Arundell’s death surprised no one, something else did. The provisions of her will gave rise to varying emotions, astonishment, pleasurable excitement, deep condemnation, fury, despair, anger and general gossip. For weeks and even months Market Basing was to talk of nothing else!

Thus began Dumb Witness,¹¹ published in 1937, in which Poirot, to Hastings’s horror, told many lies to find the killer of Miss Emily Arundell, an upright and shrewd Victorian, whose death would never have been investigated had she not, in a fatally delayed letter, asked Poirot to undertake unspecified investigations on her behalf.¹²

      In Market Basing, Hastings was very drawn to the late Miss Arundell’s household. Of her drawing-room he wrote:

      A faint fragrance of pot-pourri hung about it. The chintzes were worn, their pattern faded garlands of roses. On the walls were prints and water-colour drawings. There was a good deal of china – fragile shepherds and shepherdesses. There were cushions worked in crewel stitch. There were faded photographs in handsome silver frames. There were many inlaid workboxes and tea caddies. Most fascinating of all to me were two exquisitely cut tissue-paper ladies under glass stands. One with a spinning-wheel, one with a cat on her knee.

      He was also very taken with her amiable wire-haired terrier, Bob. In the end the orphaned dog was given to Poirot but Hastings quickly claimed him as a spoil of war. ‘My word, Poirot, it’s good to have a dog again,’ he said, and off he went, back to Argentina. This time, for whatever reasons and however homesick, Hastings did not return to England for many years.

It was probably in this same year that the three cases recorded in the short stories ‘Problem СКАЧАТЬ