Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Anne Hart

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 at Sea’, ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, and ‘Murder in the Mews’ occurred.¹³. In all three 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 СКАЧАТЬ