Agatha Christie's Poirot by Anne Hart

Author:Anne Hart [Anne Hart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007397297
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1 Besides Hastings’s thirty-four accounts, three other Poirot cases were recounted by first-person narrators: Dr Sheppard of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Amy Leatheran of Murder in Mesopotamia, and Colin Lamb of The Clocks.

2 Celebrated sleuth though he was, Poirot apparently did not notice Hastings’s mistake in calling Cinderella by her sister Bella’s name. What was going on at the ranch?

10

THE DOMESTIC POIROT

The flat was a modern one. The furnishings of the room were modern, too. The armchairs were squarely built, the upright chairs were angular. A modern writing-table was set squarely in front of the window and at it sat a small, elderly man. His head was practically the only thing in the room that was not square.

—‘Dead Man’s Mirror’

Poirot was an interior person; he loved his comforts and intensely enjoyed ruling and ordering his own small kingdom. He was always happiest at home, his desk symmetrically arranged, his wardrobe in perfect order, and the world beating a path to his door. It never seems to have occurred to him to carry out his practice as a private detective from any place other than his sitting-room. There he received his clients, dispatched his agents, and held court. It was the centre of his web.

It will be remembered that Poirot’s earliest years in England were spent in ‘rooms’ shared with Hastings, a comfortable arrangement hallowed by several generations of Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen. As tenants under a system halfway between lodgings and a separate establishment, each had his own bedroom and shared between them a sitting-room, to which their landlady brought their meals and their visitors.

As will be recalled, Poirot’s first set of rooms – in which Hastings soon joined him on a more or less permanent basis – was of a modest ambience and administered by a landlady of decidedly brusque habits. Nevertheless the two friends enjoyed many happy times there. A cosy picture is provided by Hastings in ‘The Chocolate Box’:

Poirot and I sat facing the hearth, our legs stretched out to the cheerful blaze. Between us was a small table. On my side of it stood some carefully brewed hot toddy; on Poirot’s was a cup of thick, rich chocolate which I would not have drunk for a hundred pounds! Poirot sipped the thick brown mess in the pink china cup, and sighed with contentment.

On at least one occasion – ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’ – this first set of rooms was used to stage an elaborate reconstruction of a crime. Wrote Hastings:

The preparations greatly intrigued me. A white screen was erected at one side of the room, flanked by heavy curtains at either side. A man with some lighting apparatus arrived next, and finally a group of members of the theatrical profession, who disappeared into Poirot’s bedroom, which had been rigged up as a temporary dressing-room.1

Afterwards ‘a recherché little supper’, prepared, one suspects, by hands other than the landlady’s, was served to five bemused guests.

With their incomes rising, Poirot’s and Hastings’s next set of rooms was at 14 Farraway Street, an address ‘not aristocratic’ and somewhere in central London.

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