Poirot’s Beleaguered Heirs

By Fraser Massey
It’s a mystery that would tax even the highly tuned “little grey cells” of Hercule Poirot himself.

Agatha Christie’s diminutive Belgian detective, currently celebrating his centenary year, has undoubtedly been one of the all-time major success stories of British crime fiction—featuring in 33 novels, 59 short stories, and a number of much-loved big- and small-screen adaptations.

So why aren’t bookshops nowadays stacked with volumes featuring the exploits of Poirot’s literary heirs?

Logic dictates that such a winning formula would swiftly be adopted by not only admiring fellow authors eager to offer their own twists on the concept, but also by huckster publishers hoping to make a quick buck by cashing in on the public appetite for European-born mystery-solvers crossing the English Channel to show up their slow-witted UK counterparts.

But where are they? Until very recently the most ardent fan of British-set crime fiction would have been hard-pressed to identify any slew of sleuths from continental Europe who’d followed in Hercule’s wake.

John Harvey’s Charlie Resnick perhaps came closest in terms of popularity. For a quarter of a century, from 1989’s Lonely Hearts to 2014’s Darkness, Darkness, the Resnick series won acclaim from both critics and readers—scoring Harvey a Diamond Dagger in 2007 for “Sustained Excellence in Crime Writing” from the British Crime Writers’ Association. The BBC adapted those yarns for television in the 1990s, with Tom Wilkinson in his pre-Full Monty days playing the deli-sandwich-loving detective.

In a 2020 interview with the Scene of the Crime blog, Harvey explained his views on what lay behind the success of those books. “Resnick is simultaneously an insider and an outsider … able to regard it [Nottingham, the English city where he lived and worked] with a foreign eye,” he said.

That’s the same trick Christie employed with such panache with Poirot, using her protagonist’s outsider standpoint to draw attention to the foibles of the natives of his adopted homeland. You can only marvel at her storytelling skills that a device she’d concocted so long ago was still working so well all those years later.

But there was a subtle difference between Christie’s creation and Harvey’s unorthodox detective inspector: Hercule was Belgian born and bred. Resnick may have been of Polish stock, but he was as English as the mist that rolled off the River Trent and onto the Nottingham streets he policed. Resnick’s parents had fled Eastern Europe during the Second World War and were already settled in Britain by the time Charlie took his first breaths.

While they’ve not yet achieved Resnick levels of public recognition, closer approximations of the Poirot template are at last cropping up on publishers’ lists. And very welcome they are too.

One of them is the protagonist Natalka Kolysnyk, a Ukrainian mathematics genius hiding out on England’s south coast, wary of violent gangs back home. She appears in Elly Griffiths’ The Postscript Murders (Quercus [UK], Houghton Mifflin Harcourt [U.S.]), which has been shortlisted for the 2021 Gold Dagger for crime novel of the year, to be presented this coming Thursday by the CWA.

Like Agatha Christie’s little Belgian, Kolysnyk is blessed with an above-average intellect. She’s also an amateur crime-solver, working alongside—but not with—the police.

And Kolysnyk’s not the only new Euro-sleuth on the block.

Readers today can also enjoy Eva Dolan’s outspoken, rum-drinking Detective Sergeant Mel Ferreira, a Portuguese immigrant now working in Peterborough (a town in a marshy area of eastern England known as the Fens), and Vicki Bradley’s London-based, but Polish-born, Inspector Domenik Kowalski.

Both Dolan’s Ferreira and Bradley’s Kowalski are serving British police officers. One Half Truth (Raven [UK] and due to be published in the States by Bloomsbury on July 6) is the fifth in the Ferreira series. Your Life or Mine (Simon & Schuster [UK]) is the second police procedural to feature Kowalski.

Bradley and Dolan have given their respective sleuths English partners to work with, although in Dolan’s case she’s paired Ferreira with an inspector whose grandfather relocated his family to the United Kingdom from Serbia two generations ago.

In a piece she wrote for the British crime-fiction Web site Dead Good Books back in 2017, Dolan described her protagonist as “driven by a burning sense of injustice born out of her own personal experience of being an unwelcome immigrant in a small fenland community.” It’s an interesting insight that may provide a clue as to why there have been so few Poirot clones during the past century. There’s long been a disturbing element in the British national character—a degree of intolerant bigotry directed towards outsiders—that tends to regard settlers from other nations at best with misgivings, and at worst with open hostility.

UK writers risk alienating potential readers if they choose to make the central figures in their novels non-British nationals.

Unquestioned everyday racist attitudes are something Bradley cleverly plays with in Your Life or Mine. As Inspector Kowalski’s murder team hunt a serial killer who’s been preying on women police officers, he finds his colleagues are treating him as a suspect. It’s an audacious reader-baiting technique. The author is basically forcing those who buy her book to question their own levels of racial prejudice, if they too begin to doubt the only non-English detective on the team.

In an interview for this piece, Bradley expressed some sympathy for anyone who falls into her trap. “It’s human nature to treat people who are different from you with mistrust,” she remarked. “But I wanted to point out that growing xenophobia in Britain is something that people like Kowalski would have to deal with today.”

Although Griffiths is up against some very worthy fellow contenders in Thursday’s competition for the Gold Dagger, a win for The Postscript Murders would indeed be timely. Considering the present political climate in the UK, it would make a positive statement.

Britain’s currently in the grip of increased anti-European feeling. Prime Minister Boris Johnson achieved a landslide election victory at the end of last year, partly on the back of those prejudices. In the months since his government was returned to power, it has been operating a highly controversial policy of tightening border controls and easing legal restrictions on deporting foreign nationals.

The irony in any celebrations of Poirot’s centenary is that if the Belgian detective were real, rather than fictional, and if he wanted to move to Great Britain today, he would most likely be turned away. And if he somehow managed to slip across the border, he’d now be facing legal challenges questioning his right to remain in the UK.

Who knows? That could yet be the fate facing these characters developed by Griffiths, Dolan, and Bradley.

Taking into account the slow nature of the publishing industry, The Postscript Murders, One Half Truth, and Your Life or Mine would all have been written long before the Johnson administration got into its stride. But their arrival at this moment places them firmly inside the #UKculturewars movement and marks them as important works at a time when Britain needs positive role-model images of immigrant figures to counter prevailing negative attitudes. The authors of these three novels should be applauded for writing them.

Let’s give Bradley the final word. “In the current climate in the UK, with the economic situation worsening because of COVID, people are closing ranks and becoming a bit more tribal. As a writer, you need to reflect the prejudices in society, but you also need to challenge them.”