Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot. Anne Hart
next investigation, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,20 published in 1940, takes place in the first half of the catastrophic year of 1939. Hints of dangers in Europe – Communists and Fascists, arms dealers and assassins, spies and counter-spies – surface like piranha throughout this complex affair. As for England, there is much talk of preserving a solvent economy and conservative values at all costs, the Prime Minister is shot at, and the Imperial Shirts ‘march with banners and have a ridiculous salute’.
Disturbing as all this was, at the outset of the case Poirot was preoccupied with anxieties of his own:
There are certain humilating moments in the lives of the greatest of men. It has been said that no man is a hero to his valet. To that may be added that few men are heroes to themselves at the moment of visiting their dentist.
Hercule Poirot was morbidly conscious of this fact.
He was a man who was accustomed to have a good opinion of himself. He was Hercule Poirot, superior in most ways to other men. But in this moment he was unable to feel superior in any way whatever. His morale was down to zero. He was just that ordinary, that craven figure, a man afraid of the dentist’s chair.
‘It is a beautiful thought,’ said a deliriously happy Poirot half an hour later to a taxi driver, ‘that I have been to the dentist and I need not go again for six months.’ But even as he was digesting a celebratory lunch, George handed him the telephone: ‘It’s Chief Inspector Japp, sir.’ Astonishingly, within an hour of Poirot’s departure, Mr Morley, his chatty and inoffensive dentist, had committed suicide.
Or was it murder? Or espionage? Or a monstrous double bluff of which poor Mr Morley was but an accidental victim? Steadily gathering victims, and paced by a familiar nursery rhyme, the case advanced like a juggernaut. Who was he really up against, Poirot began to wonder. Was he trying to avenge his dentist? Or was he, in fact, trying to save England? When Japp was called off the case by the highest authority, Poirot soldiered on alone:
George entered the room with his usual noiseless tread. He set down on a little table a steaming pot of chocolate and some sugar biscuits.
‘Will there be anything else, sir?’
‘I am in great perplexity of mind, George.’
‘Indeed, sir? I am sorry to hear it.’
Hercule Poirot poured himself out some chocolate and stirred it thoughtfully.
When the case was all over, Poirot found himself exhausted. ‘Is it possible,’ he said to himself with astonishment, ‘that I am growing old?’
The murder in Poirot’s last case of the 1930s occurred on 27 July 1939, and his investigation of it is superbly recounted in Sad Cypress, published in 1940. It is a story of letters and wills, love and greed.
The centrepiece of Sad Cypress is the trial for murder of a young woman, Elinor Carlisle. Caught in a love triangle, her rival poisoned, the evidence against her is overwhelming. When all appears lost, a friend and would-be lover calls in Poirot.
It was a most tactful and beguiling Poirot, looking ‘very Londonified’ and ‘wearing patent leather shoes’, who descended upon the village of Maidensford to interview a majestic housekeeper, a lovelorn garage mechanic, and a confused under-gardener. The re-examination of old evidence over many cups of tea became, at times, a game of cat and mouse. To win the confidence of the housekeeper, for example (‘for Mrs Bishop, a lady of conservative habits and views, strongly disapproved of foreigners’), Poirot had to play a trump card:
He recounted with naive pride a recent visit of his to Sandringham. He spoke with admiration of the graciousness and delightful simplicity and kindness of Royalty.
Mrs Bishop, who followed daily in the court circular the exact movements of Royalty, was overborne. After all, if They had sent for Mr Poirot … Well, naturally, that made All the Difference. Foreigner or no foreigner, who was she, Emma Bishop, to hold back where Royalty had led the way?
NOTES
1 Black Coffee stands on its own as the only Poirot play not based on a previously published work.
2 An expanded version of this story, with a changed ending, was published in 1937 under the title ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’.
3 Also published under the title Thirteen at Dinner.
4 An expanded version of this story was published in 1960 under the title ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’.
5 Though published in 1936, the Foreword to Murder in Mesopotamia states: ‘The events chronicled in this narrative took place some four years ago.’
6 Also published under the title Murder in the Calais Coach.
7 Also published under the title Murder in Three Acts.
8 In the 1920s, and always to his great astonishment, Mr Satterthwaite had been the associate of another of Agatha Christie’s detectives, the mysterious Harley Quin.
9 Also published under the title Death in the Air.
10 Before coming to work for Poirot, Miss Lemon served as secretary to yet another of Agatha Christie’s detectives, Parker Pyne.
11 Also published under the title Poirot Loses a Client.
12 Though a much longer case, Miss Arundell’s posthumous summoning of Poirot is reminiscent of Miss Barrowby’s in ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’.
13 Two others published during this period, ‘The Incredible Theft’ and ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, are expanded versions of ‘The Submarine Plans’ and ‘The Second Gong’.
14 Also published, sometimes in slightly differing versions, under the titles ‘Crime in Cabin 66’, ‘The Mystery of the Crime in Cabin 66’, and ‘Poirot and the Crime in Cabin 66’.
15 During this voyage a fellow passenger asked Poirot if he had ever been to Egypt. ‘Never, Mademoiselle,’ he replied, completely forgetting ‘The Adventure of The Egyptian Tomb’ of the 1920s, a remarkable lapse of Poirot’s famous memory that I can only ascribe to seasickness.
16 Although Cards on the Table was published in 1936, a sobering remark by one of its characters – ‘Even if somebody did push their great-aunt down the stairs in 1912, it won’t be much use to us in 1937’ – places events of this case in the following year.
17 Like Poirot