Anne Hart - Agatha Christie’s Poirot - The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot

Its capital, Brussels – the city where Poirot was probably born, and certainly flourished for many years – possesses what is probably the most beautiful and sociable square in Europe, the Grand Place . Here, high atop the magnificent Hôtel de Ville, a gilded figure of St Michael watches over the city. It is perfectly possible that, once upon a time, St Michael watched a procession of Poirots taking a new baby to church to be christened.

When was Hercule Poirot born? In what he himself would have called ‘supreme exercises of imagination’, a number of serious attempts have been made to pinpoint one improbable year or another. Usually these calculations depend on a remark of Poirot’s in Three Act Tragedy that he was ‘due’ to retire from the Belgian Police Force at the time of the outbreak of the First World War. Making an undocumented guess at a retirement age of sixty to sixty-five years, the conclusion has then been reached that he was born between 1849 and 1854. 1

Tempting as it is to reconstruct a chronological Poirot in this matter of age – particularly as he was still flourishing in the early 1970s – I suspect that Agatha Christie, and Poirot himself, would have been amused by all this arithmetic. In context, Poirot seems to be a man in his late fifties or early sixties when he arrives in England and somewhere in his mid-eighties in Curtain , his last case. That close to sixty years of elegant ageing elapsed between, with never a diminution of his grey cells, was a tour de force for his adroit creator and one of Poirot’s great charms. ‘Men have as many years as they feel,’ says an Italian proverb. In this matter of years, and of his age at any particular time, Poirot was always extremely – and wisely – reticent.

In The Labours of Hercules Dr Burton, a Fellow of All Souls College, ruminated on Hercule Poirot’s first name. ‘Hardly a Christian name,’ he pointed out. ‘Definitely pagan. But why? That’s what I want to know. Father’s fancy? Mother’s whim?’ Whether moved by fancy or whim, the Poirots showed no timidity. In an inspired moment they delved into Greek mythology and named their son after Hercules the Strong, the mightiest of the ancient heroes. Poirot himself loved his name; it was to prove a glorious compensation for his diminutive size. ‘It is the name of one of the great ones of this world,’ he boasted in The Mystery of the Blue Train . 2

All his life Poirot preferred privacy and was particularly unforthcoming about his earlier (and long) life in Belgium. References to his past are rare, but in Three Act Tragedy we are permitted an insight into his childhood: ‘See you, as a boy I was poor. There were many of us. We had to get on in the world.’ One glimpses the Poirots again, hard-working and close-knit, in his lifelong devotion to The Family. ‘I am very strong on the family life, as you know,’ he declared to Hastings on one occasion, and ‘Family strength is a marvellous thing,’ he said on another.

Papa Poirot is scarcely mentioned. All evidence suggests that the mother was the strong one in this family. ‘Madam, we, in our country, have a great tenderness, a great respect for the mother. The mère de famille , she is everything!’ was how he introduced himself to a matron in ‘The King of Clubs’; and ‘I comprehend the mother’s heart. No one comprehends it better than I, Hercule Poirot,’ he told the Dowager Duchess of Merton in Lord Edgware Dies . Throughout his life he was to stand in awe of mothers. ‘Mothers, Madame, are particularly ruthless when their children are in danger,’ he said to a somewhat enigmatic one in Death on the Nile . Perhaps Madame Poirot had cause to be formidable? One imagines her determined and orderly, keeping strict accounts, supervising lessons, fighting against considerable odds to bring her children up to be good little bourgeois , and insisting, in their small quarters, that everyone have good manners and be very neat. Is it Madame Poirot we are seeing, shepherding her large flock to church, in Poirot’s recollection of how women looked in his youth: ‘… a coiffure high and rigid – so – and the hat attached with many hatpins – là – là – là et là .’

But life was not all obedience and hard work. Madame Poirot’s children had some good times as well. ‘ Les Feux d’Artifices , the Party, the Games with balls,’ recalled Poirot in Peril at End House . Little Hercule must have been especially enthralled with ‘the conjurer, the man who deceives the eye, however carefully it watches’. And they all must have had a splendid time at the Ommegang , the great holiday in July when the Grand Place is thronged with merrymakers. Like most Europeans, however, Poirot regarded childhood as not a particularly desirable state, but as something to be got over with as quickly as possible. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead , listening to Superintendent Spence dwell in nostalgic detail on the pleasure of childhood:

Poirot waited politely. This was one of the moments when, even after half a lifetime in the country, he found the English incomprehensible. He himself had played at Cache Cache in his childhood, but he felt no desire to talk about it or even think about it.

What of his brothers and sisters? ‘There were many of us,’ he told Mr Satterthwaite, but there is a mention of only one of them in all the Poirot literature, and it is a mention that is quickly erased. In the original version of ‘The Chocolate Box’, a short story that recalls his earlier days in Belgium, Poirot says:

‘I was informed that a young lady was demanding me. Thinking that it was, perhaps, my little sister Yvonne, I prayed my landlady to make her mount.’ 3

Later versions of this story omit this reference to Yvonne, but it does provide an affectionate glimpse of Poirot as an older brother, a glimpse reflected in an avuncular way a generation later in Cards on the Table when Poirot says to a young woman:

‘It is, you understand, that Christmas is coming on. I have to buy presents for many nieces and grand-nieces.’

One has to be a bit wary about this mention of nieces and grand-nieces, however, as Poirot, who practically never mentioned his real family, was apt to invent imaginary relatives to suit his purposes. The most outrageous example of this is the appearance among the dramatis personae of The Big Four of a twin brother, Achille. When first told of this hitherto unsuspected twin, Hastings was understandably surprised. ‘What does he do?’ he demanded, ‘putting aside a half-formed wonder as to the character and disposition of the late Madame Poirot, and her classical taste in Christian names.’ Replied Poirot, smoothly:

‘He does nothing. He is, as I tell, of a singularly indolent disposition. But his abilities are hardly less than my own – which is saying a great deal.’

‘Is he like you to look at?’

‘Not unlike. But not nearly so handsome. And wears no moustaches.’ 4

In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Poirot invented a nephew to extract information from that indomitable purveyor of village news, Miss Caroline Sheppard. ‘I never knew that Poirot had an imbecile nephew?’ said her brother, Dr Sheppard.

‘Didn’t you? Oh, he told me all about it. Poor lad. It’s a great grief to all the family. They’ve kept him at home so far, but it’s getting to such a pitch that they’re afraid he’ll have to go into some kind of institution.’

‘I suppose you know pretty well everything there is to know about Poirot’s family by this time,’ I said, exasperated.

‘Pretty well,’ said Caroline complacently. ‘It’s a great relief to people to be able to tell all their troubles to some one.’