An “Ego-centric Little Creep”

Would-be novelists are commonly taught to be generous when portraying their characters, to employ the depth and background of those imaginative figures as a means of attracting reader interest. However, as P.D. James explains in today’s London Telegraph, renowned whodunit author Agatha Christie didn’t follow that advice with her “best loved detective,” Hercule Poirot. Writing in anticipation of Britain’s second annual Agatha Christie Week, September 11-16, James recalls:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles [which introduced Poirot in 1920], with its complicated plot, foreshadows the development of Christie’s art, but her hero, so far from developing, remains essentially the same. He appears in over 30 novels and 50 stories, but nothing more is heard of his limp, nor of his habit of perching his head to one side. We learn that his eyes appear green in moments of excitement, that he acquires a chauffeur, George, and an efficient secretary, Miss Lemon. He lives in Whitehaven Mansions, a starkly modern London flat which satisfies his love of symmetry and order.

His native language is French, but he speaks it rather like a stage Frenchman, while on occasions speaking perfect English. His work as a private investigator is obviously lucrative since in Murder on the Orient Express, published in 1934, he declines $20,000 to protect Mr Ratchett. But he appears to live simply and we are not told anything of his hobbies or intellectual interests, although he does appear to have some knowledge of gardening, including an enthusiasm for growing vegetable marrows.

We are never privy to his private thoughts and we see and know him only through the eyes of other characters. His family and early life remain a mystery except for one reference, in Murder in Three Acts, when he talks to Mr Satterthwaite on the beach at Monte Carlo and reveals that he had been a poor boy from a ‘famille nombreuse’ who had joined the Belgian police force in an attempt to make a name for himself.

His involvement with the affair at Styles is therefore the beginning of a second and successful career, which presented Agatha Christie with problems about his age. She afterwards regretted that she had not made him much younger at his first appearance.

But the fact that we feel we know Poirot intimately while actually knowing very little is an advantage. He is at the centre of the novel, yet we are never distracted from his purpose--the solving of the crime--nor does he compete for psychological interest with other characters.

Interestingly, although Poirot provided his creator with a perfect outsider through which she could explore jealousy, deceit, and murder in British society, Christie wasn’t as charmed by him as were some of the players in her books. “[W]hile Dorothy L. Sayers undoubtedly fell in love with her detective, Lord Peter,” James explains, “and remodelled him according to her idea of a suitable mate, Christie grew to dislike Poirot intensely--she once called him a ‘detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep’. She saw him as an incubus, albeit a profitable one.”

(Hat tip to Marshal Zeringue’s Campaign for the American Reader.)