Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Anne Hart

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       3 THE 1920S

      ‘This street, it is not aristocratic, mon ami! In it there is no fashionable doctor, no fashionable dentist – still less is there a fashionable milliner! But there is a fashionable detective. Oui, my friend, it is true – I am become the mode, the dernier cri!’

      —Hercule Poirot,

      ‘The Adventure of “The Western Star”’

      The Great War over, the 1920s were years of economic and social upheaval and an uncertain but flourishing time for the middle and upper classes of England. Poirot, devoting himself to their expensive and interesting crimes, flourished along with them. His moustache, his famous hallmark, reflected it all. Described in the earlier years as ‘stiff’ and ‘military’, it waxed luxurious as the decade progressed.

      At some time in the early 1920s Poirot and Hastings – who had acquired a position as ‘a sort of private secretary … to an M.P.’ – became the tenants of a nicer landlady, Mrs Pearson of 14 Farraway Street, and to their sitting-room came a seemingly endless stream of troubled clients. There were housewives, for example (‘Private – that’s what I want. I don’t want any talk or fuss, or things in the papers’). There was Royalty (‘He was a strange-looking youth, tall, eager, with a weak chin, the famous Mauranberg mouth, and the dark fiery eyes of the fanatic’). There were film stars (‘Lord Cronshaw was telling me last night how wonderfully you cleared up the mystery of his nephew’s death’). There were ladies in distress (‘From the costly simplicity of her attire, I deducted at once that she belonged to the upper strata of society’). There were men on the run (‘Poirot hurried to his side … “Brandy – quickly”’). To Hastings’s delight, there was hardly a dull moment.

      And if clients couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come to Poirot, he would go to them, usually accompanied by Hastings, seemingly unconstrained by his job – to the superb Park Lane house of an American magnate, for example (‘Poirot picked up a pin from the carpet, and frowned at it severely’); to a country house drawing-room at the moment of a midnight robbery (‘The women were in becoming négligées’); to old-fashioned gardens where ‘the smell of stocks and mignonette came sweetly wafted on the evening breeze’; to an opium den in Limehouse (‘Then there came to us the proprietor, a Chinaman with a face of evil smiles’); to luncheons of steak and kidney pudding at the Cheshire Cheese; to clandestine laboratories (‘I believe that she has, to a certain extent, succeeded in liberating atomic energy and harnessing it to her purpose’); to villas in the suburbs (‘The place was somewhat overloaded with gimcrack ornaments, and a good many family portraits of surpassing ugliness adorned the walls’).

Most of the accounts of Poirot’s adventures in the early 1920s are preserved in the writings of his devoted colleague and scribe, Arthur Hastings, whose usual mode was the short story. Taken collectively, these recall exhilarating days.¹

‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’² opens with Inspector Japp, by now something of a constant in Poirot’s life, dropping by for tea. For Poirot and Hastings it was still the days of the untidy landlady and the metal teapot, but these trials were soon forgotten with Japp’s news of the disappearance of a famous financier. After a lively discussion on rival methods, Poirot wagered Japp five pounds that, without leaving his chair and given the same information as Scotland Yard, he could retrieve Mr Davenheim within a week.

Five days later, with their inevitable winnings, Poirot and Hastings fled their landlady and took Japp out to dinner. But had he learned his lesson? The next case, the murder of a millionaire’s daughter in ‘The Plymouth Express’,³ was later used by Poirot in a tutorial session with Hastings:

      ‘Remember the Plymouth Express mystery. The great Japp departed to make a survey of the railway line. When he returned, I, without having moved from my apartments, was able to tell him exactly what he had found.’

      Poirot was probably apt to cite ‘The Adventure of the Cheap Flat’, which turned into a case of international proportions, as another salutary lesson: never neglect the trivial. How, for example, in overcrowded post-war London, had the young Robinsons managed to rent a handsome Knightsbridge flat for only eighty pounds a year? When put to Poirot by Hastings as a mock challenge, the little detective figuratively sniffed the air:

      ‘It is as well, mon ami, that we have no affairs of moment on hand. We can devote ourselves wholly to the present investigation.’

      ‘What investigation are you talking about?’

      ‘The remarkable cheapness of your friend. Mrs Robinson’s, new flat.’

Another exciting spy story in those ‘difficult days of reconstruction’ is told in ‘The Submarine Plans’.⁴ In this case Poirot was summoned by the Minister of Defence on a matter of national emergency, the disappearance of the new Z type submarine plans. ‘I remember only too well what you did for us during the war, when the Prime Minister was kidnapped,’ said the shaken Minister to Poirot. ‘Your masterly deductions – and may I add your discretion – saved the situation.’ In Hastings’s opinion, Poirot treated this matter of the Z type submarines far too lightly, but ‘One thing is quite certain,’ he recorded with satisfaction. ‘On the day when Lord Alloway became Prime Minister, a cheque and a signed photograph arrived.’