Hercule Poirot
Hercule Poirot is a fictional Belgian detective created by the English writer Agatha Christie. Poirot is Christie's most famous and longest-running character, appearing in 33 novels, two plays and 51 short stories published between 1920 and 1975.
Poirot is noted for his distinctive appearance, including his waxed moustache and fastidious dress, as well as for his reliance on logic, psychology, and what he terms his "little grey cells" to solve cases.
The character's biography is developed gradually across Christie's works. He is introduced as a former Belgian police officer living in England as a refugee following the First World War. Poirot is portrayed as dignified, meticulous, and occasionally vain, traits that sometimes serve as comic devices but also reflect his precise and methodical approach to detection. His final appearance is in Curtain: Poirot's Last Case.
Poirot has become one of the most recognisable figures in detective fiction and has been widely adapted in other media. He has been portrayed by numerous actors in film, television, stage, and radio, including David Suchet, John Moffat, Peter Ustinov, and Kenneth Branagh. The character has also appeared in continuation novels authorised by the Christie estate, written by Sophie Hannah from 2014 onwards.
Overview
Influences
Poirot's name was derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: Marie Belloc Lowndes's Hercules Popeau and Frank Howel Evans's Monsieur Poiret, a retired French police officer living in London. Evans's Jules Poiret "was small and rather heavyset, hardly more than five feet, but moved with his head held high. The most remarkable features of his head were the stiff military moustache. His apparel was neat to perfection, a little quaint and frankly dandified." He was accompanied by Captain Harry Haven, who had returned to London from a Colombian business venture ended by a civil war.A more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of Arthur Conan Doyle. In An Autobiography Christie states, "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp". Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detective stories on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and his anonymous narrator, and basing his character Sherlock Holmes on Joseph Bell, who in his use of "ratiocination" prefigured Poirot's reliance on his "little grey cells". Poirot also bears a striking resemblance to A. E. W. Mason's fictional detective Inspector Hanaud of the French Sûreté, who first appeared in the 1910 novel At the Villa Rose and predates the first Poirot novel by 10 years.
Christie's Poirot was clearly the result of her early development of the detective in her first book, written in 1916 and published in 1920. The large number of refugees in the country who had fled the German invasion of Belgium in August to November 1914 served as a plausible explanation of why such a skilled detective would be available to solve mysteries at an English country house. At the time of Christie's writing, it was considered patriotic to express sympathy towards the Belgians, since the invasion of their country had constituted Britain's casus belli for entering World War I, and British wartime propaganda emphasised the "Rape of Belgium".
Popularity
Poirot first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920, and exited in Curtain, published in 1975. Following the latter, Poirot was the only fictional character to receive an obituary on the front page of The New York Times.By 1930 Christie found Poirot "insufferable"; by 1960 she felt that Poirot was a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep". Despite this, Poirot remained an exceedingly popular character with the general public. Christie later stated that she refused to kill him off, claiming it was her duty to produce what the public liked.
Appearance and proclivities
's first description of Poirot:Christie's initial description of Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express was that of "a small man muffled up to the ears of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache."
In the later books, his limp is not mentioned, suggesting it may have been a temporary wartime injury. Poirot has green eyes that are repeatedly described as shining "like a cat's" when he is struck by a clever idea, and dark hair, which he dyes later in life. In Curtain, he admits to Hastings that he has taken to wearing a wig and a false moustache. However, in many of his screen incarnations, he is bald or balding.
Frequent mention is made of his patent leather shoes, damage to which is frequently a source of misery for him, but comical for the reader. Poirot's appearance, regarded as fastidious during his early career, later falls hopelessly out of fashion.
He suffers from sea sickness, and, in Death in the Clouds, he states that his air sickness prevents him from being more alert at the time of the murder. Later in his life, we are told: Always a man who had taken his stomach seriously, he was reaping his reward in old age. Eating was not only a physical pleasure, it was also an intellectual research.
Poirot is extremely punctual and carries a pocket watch almost to the end of his career. He is also particular about his personal finances, preferring to keep a bank balance of 444 pounds, 4 shillings, and 4 pence. The actor David Suchet, who portrayed Poirot on television, said "there's no question he's obsessive-compulsive". The filmmaker Kenneth Branagh said that he "enjoyed finding the sort of obsessive-compulsive" in Poirot.
As mentioned in Curtain and The Clocks, he is fond of classical music, particularly that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Methods
In The Mysterious Affair at Styles Poirot operates as a fairly conventional, clue-based and logical detective; reflected in his vocabulary by two common phrases: his use of "the little grey cells" and "order and method". Hastings is irritated by the fact that Poirot sometimes conceals important details of his plans, as in The Big Four. In this novel, Hastings is kept in the dark throughout the climax. This aspect of Poirot is less evident in the later novels, partly because there is rarely a narrator to mislead.In Murder on the Links, still largely dependent on clues himself, Poirot's approach is contrasted with a "bloodhound" detective who focuses on the traditional trail of clues established in detective fiction. From this point on, Poirot establishes his psychological bona fides. Rather than painstakingly examining crime scenes, he enquires into the nature of the victim or the psychology of the murderer. He predicates his actions in the later novels on his underlying assumption that particular crimes are committed by particular types of people.
Poirot focuses on getting people to talk. In the early novels he casts himself in the role of "Papa Poirot", a benign confessor, especially to young women. In later works Christie made a point of having Poirot supply false or misleading information about himself or his background to assist him in obtaining information. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Poirot speaks of a non-existent mentally disabled nephew to uncover information about homes for the mentally unfit. In Dumb Witness, Poirot invents an elderly invalid mother as a pretence to investigate local nurses. In The Big Four, Poirot pretends to have an identical twin brother named Achille.
Poirot is also willing to appear more foreign and vain in an effort to make people underestimate him. He admits that he "can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But... 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.... Also I boast! An Englishman he says often, "A fellow who thinks as much of himself as that cannot be worth much."... And so, you see, I put people off their guard."
He also has a tendency to refer to himself in the third person.
In later novels Christie often uses the word mountebank when characters describe Poirot, showing that he has successfully passed himself off as a charlatan or fraud.
Poirot's investigating techniques assist him solving cases; "For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away..." At the end Poirot usually reveals his description of the sequence of events and his deductions to a room of suspects, often leading to the culprit's apprehension.
Life
Origins
Christie was purposely vague about Poirot's origins, as he is thought to be an elderly man even in the early novels. In An Autobiography, she admitted that she already imagined him to be an old man in 1920. At the time, however, she did not know that she would write works featuring him for decades to come.A brief passage in The Big Four provides original information about Poirot's birth or at least childhood in or near the town of Spa, Belgium: "But we did not go into Spa itself. We left the main road and wound into the leafy fastnesses of the hills, till we reached a little hamlet and an isolated white villa high on the hillside." Christie strongly implies that this "quiet retreat in the Ardennes" near Spa is the location of the Poirot family home.
An alternative tradition holds that Poirot was born in the village of Ellezelles. A few memorials dedicated to Hercule Poirot can be seen in the centre of this village. There appears to be no reference to this in Christie's writings, but the town of Ellezelles cherishes a copy of Poirot's birth certificate in a local memorial 'attesting' Poirot's birth, naming his father and mother as Jules-Louis Poirot and Godelieve Poirot.
Christie wrote that Poirot is a Catholic by birth, but not much is described about his later religious convictions, except sporadic references to his "going to church" and occasional invocations of "le bon Dieu". Christie provides little information regarding Poirot's childhood, only mentioning in Three Act Tragedy that he comes from a large family with little wealth, and has at least one younger sister. Apart from French and English, Poirot is also fluent in German.