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

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СКАЧАТЬ of these, as so often happened to Poirot, his presence at or near scenes of murder was a direct result of futile attempts to take restful holidays or lead a calm social life.

In ‘Problem at Sea’¹⁴ his determination to escape was clearly a case of masochism:

      ‘Are you enjoying this trip, M. Poirot?’

      ‘Frankly, no. It was an imbecility to allow myself to be persuaded to come. I detest la mer. Never does it remain tranquil – no, not for a little minute.’

Before long, however, Poirot was enjoying himself very much as he graphically explained to a captive audience in the main lounge just how it was that disagreeable Mrs Clapperton came to be murdered in her locked cabin while the ship was docked in Alexandria.¹⁵

      Surely, though, in ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, one could expect a little peace in the kind October sun? But even here, uneasily surveying the emotions surging just below the surface at his quiet hotel, ‘M. Poirot perceived the inevitable shaping of events to come’ – the duty to solve, while on holiday, a crime passionnel.

      And could any meal with Inspector Japp – like one on a Guy Fawkes night for example – not lead to a murder investigation?

      Turning off the main road, the two men passed into the comparative quiet of a mews. They had been dining together and were now taking a short cut to Hercule Poirot’s flat.

      As they walked along the sound of squibs was still heard periodically. An occasional shower of golden rain illuminated the sky.

      ‘Good night for a murder,’ remarked Japp with professional interest. ‘Nobody would hear a shot, for instance, on a night like this.’

      How true! Nor was Japp alone in such thoughts, as subsequent events in ‘Murder in the Mews’ proved.

      Poirot had murmured in The ABC Murders:

      ‘Supposing that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four; while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and, intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?’

Just such a closed circle puzzle is set in Cards on the Table, published in 1936,¹⁶ in which a diabolical host, the fashionable Mr Shaitana, who ‘existed richly and beautifully in a super flat in Park Lane’, invited to dinner four people he was convinced were secret murderers, and four others well known for detection: the celebrated Hercule Poirot, the venerable Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, the popular detective fiction writer, Ariadne Oliver, and a distinguished veteran of the Secret Service, Colonel Race.¹⁷ After dinner Mr Shaitana arranged two tables of bridge. The four famous sleuths were sent to the smoking room:

      ‘Five diamonds. Game and rubber,’ said Colonel Race. ‘Good for you, partner,’ he said to Poirot. ‘I didn’t think you’d do it. Lucky they didn’t lead a spade.’

      ‘Wouldn’t have made much difference, I expect,’ said Superintendent Battle, a man of gentle magnanimity.

      He had called spades. His partner, Mrs Oliver, had had a spade, but ‘something had told her’ to lead a club – with disastrous results.

      Meanwhile in the drawing-room, alone with his four suspected murderers, something much more disastrous was happening to Mr Shaitana. While seated by the fire he was deftly slain with a jewelled stiletto. Which of the four did it?

      With only the bridge scores as a tangible clue, with three fine collaborators in Superintendent Battle, Mrs Oliver and Colonel Race, and with the removal, by Mr Shaitana’s untimely death, of ‘the only moustache in London, perhaps, that could compete with that of M. Hercule Poirot’, it is no wonder that Agatha Christie observed, in a foreword to Cards on the Table, that this was one of Poirot’s favourite cases.

      A year later, far from Mr Shaitana’s drawing-room, Poirot encountered Colonel Race again on a steamer on the Nile. Poirot was once more in pursuit of a holiday. (‘This winter I shall visit Egypt, I think … One will escape from the fogs, the greyness, the monotony of the constantly falling rain’), and Colonel Race, a man ‘usually to be found in one of the outposts of Empire where trouble is brewing’, was in pursuit of a political agitator; but these goals were forgotten in the excitement of three murders committed in quick succession as the Karnak churned toward the Second Cataract.

‘A journey on a swift-moving river, between dangerous rocks, and heading for who knows what currents of disaster …’ Thus did Hercule Poirot predict the course of events in one of his most famous cases, Death on the Nile,¹⁸ published in 1937. At first acquaintance the passengers on the Karnak seemed a pleasant enough lot – Poirot certainly enjoyed the company of Mrs Allerton, for example, ‘one of the most charming people I had ever met’ – but as he and Colonel Race pursued their murder investigations some very nasty secrets came to light. ‘So many conflicting hates and jealousies and envies and meannesses. It is like a cloud of flies, buzzing, buzzing …’

      Poirot’s next case, Appointment with Death, unfolded in Palestine and Jordan. As it follows on the heels of Death on the Nile, it is fair to assume that both cases occurred on the same eventful holiday, and that Poirot proceeded from the Karnak on the Nile to the Solomon Hotel in Jerusalem and thence to Amman. With him he brought a letter of introduction from Colonel Race to Colonel Carbury, an administrative ‘power’ in Transjordania. Raising his eyes from Race’s letter, Colonel Carbury, a devotee of detective fiction, smiled hopefully upon his guest:

      ‘Tell me, d’you ever find your own special job has a way of following you around?’

      ‘Pardon?’

      ‘Well – to put it plainly – do you come to places expecting a holiday from crime – and find instead bodies cropping up?’

      ‘It has happened, yes – more than once.’

      ‘H’m,’ said Colonel Carbury, and looked particularly abstracted.

      Then he roused himself with a jerk.

      ‘Got a body now I’m not very happy about,’ he said.

      The body was that of an American tourist, the autocratic Mrs Boynton – ‘a distorted old Buddha – a gross spider in the centre of a web!’ – whose life had been universally pronounced as ruinous to all around her, and whose sudden death, while surrounded by her family in a tourist encampment at Petra, now raised a most disagreeable question: had someone slain the dragon?

      In the course of his investigations Poirot enjoyed fulfilling Colonel Carbury’s every expectation of how a detective should behave:

      ‘You desire to know, do you not, Colonel Carbury, who killed Mrs Boynton? (That is, if she was killed and did not die a natural death.) Exactly how and when she was killed – and, in fact, the whole truth of the matter?’

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ