Updated 18 March 2024
Please note that there will be spoilers in this section.
Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot is introduced in The Mysterious Affair At Styles, published in 1920, as a retired Belgian police detective, in England as a refugee during World War I. As a detective, Poirot is the antithesis of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes; Holmes is tall and athletic, Poirot is short and roundish, with an egg-shaped head. Holmes is active, throwing himself on the ground to examine footprints or cigar ashes; Poirot prefers to sit quietly in his chair and let the famous "little gray cells" of his brain unravel the mystery.
Like the Sherlock Holmes stories, Christie starts Poirot out with an equivalent of Dr. John Watson, narrator of the Holmes stories; in this case the sidekick is Captain Arthur Hastings. Hastings tends to be a romantic with an inflated view of his own detective abilities, a bit contemptuous of Poirot's inclination to sit back and think things through rather than actively chase after clues. Hastings' inability to keep anything that passes through his mind concealed justifies Poirot's keeping his "little ideas" to himself until he arranges the denouement; every clue is shown to Hastings and to the reader, but the deductions from those clues are only revealed at the end. Christie evidently decided after Styles and the short stories in Poirot Investigates that Poirot did not need a Watson, or perhaps she found Hastings to be as irritating as I did, and marries him off in The Mystery of the Blue Train and sends him off to herd cattle in Argentina.
And then comes her masterpiece, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In that book, there is again a narrator, Dr. James Sheppard, who works closely with Poirot on the case and who, along with the reader, is shown every clue that Poirot finds. The difference with this book is that Dr. Sheppard is not merely a new (and slightly better) version of Watson, but Dr. Sheppard is himself the murderer. This conclusion outraged readers when the book was published in 1926 on the grounds that it violated one of the canons of Golden Age detective fiction., that is, that the murderer must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow, and that the detective himself must not be the murderer. Christie, through Poirot's explanation, points out how carefully each item in the indictment of Dr. Sheppard has been laid out in his own narrative, including the significant time gaps and the fact that the doctor had taken his black medical bag along to dinner with Ackroyd and left it in the hall outside the study. I think part of the reason we feel somewhat cheated by this ending is that we readers have been adroitly led down the garden path by Agatha Christie, who has allowed us to slip comfortably back into the familiar Watson-as-trusted-friend-and-narrator convention, until we finally realize we have been bamboozled by this very convention. Of course, it all under scores Poirot's frequent saying, "Me, I suspect everyone." And so should we.
I groaned when I saw that The Big Four was the next book on the list; I contemplated either just skipping it or at least skimming it. It had two strikes against it: number one, it involved a gang of four international super criminals who are attempting to achieve world domination; number two, Christie brought back Captain Hastings as the narrator. I decided to stick it out and continue reading it, and was surprised to find that it was better than I remembered it to be. In fact, Christie adroitly uses Hastings tendency to blurt out anything that comes to his mind, and has Poirot use this characteristic to bring about the ultimate show down with the gang.
After bringing Hastings back to narrate several more books (Peril At End House; Lord Edgeware Dies), Christie finally sends him back to Argentina, and Poirot is once again on his own, although usually there is another character with whom he discusses the case. One of these is Mr. Satterthwaite, who is one of the guests present, along with Poirot, at Sir Charles Cartwright's cocktail party where an inoffensive elderly clergyman is poisoned in Murder In Three Acts. Mr. Satterthwaite, a devoted theater goer, observes life as if it's being played on the stage. Toward the end of the case, he makes an interesting observation and finally asks Poirot why he, who can speak flawless, idiomatic English if and when he choses to do so, persists in speaking broken English and often pretends to be unfamiliar with English words or idioms.
Poirot laughed. "Ah, I will explain. It is true that I can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But, my friend, to speak the broken English is an enormous asset. It leads people to despise you. They say, 'A foreigner; he can't even speak English properly.' it is not my policy to terrify people; instead, I invite their gentle ridicule. Also I boast! An Englishman he says often, 'A fellow who thinks as much of himself as that cannot be worth much.' That is the English point of view. It is not at all true. And so, you see, I put people off their guard. Besides," he added, "it has become a habit."
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