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Hercule Poirot The Complete Short Stories
He was born in Agatha Christie’s fertile brain—a refugee from the German
invasion of Belgium that brought Britain into World War I, the Great War of
1914–18. Those who could flee the German onslaught did, and as a ranking
policeman in the city of Brussels, Poirot might well have been taken up and put
in prison.
Not the sort of thing Poirot would relish. No scope for ze leetle gray cells
there. And faced with the need to occupy himself, if not to earn a living while his
country was in German hands, Poirot fell back on what he did best: solving
crimes.
Later he shared lodgings with an ex-officer of that war, Captain Hastings,
who became in a sense his Watson, the man who carried the revolver in
emergencies and who was the sounding board for theories. Hastings often had
theories of his own, but just as often they were red herrings.
Poirot’s first case was The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Christie made him a
ludicrous figure, with his short, portly figure and egg-shaped head, his little
mannerisms, and the immaculate clothes of a bygone era. But she gave him as
incisive a brain as Sherlock Holmes, a man whose mind could cut through the
tangle of lies and secrets—and unerringly point to the murderer.
David Suchet portrayed Poirot to perfection in the PBS series, and even
Christie’s grandson, Mathew Pritchard, wished that she had lived to see his
portrayal. Peter Ustinov had taken the role in Death on the Nile, even dancing a
very fine tango with one of the characters. Albert Finney had portrayed Poirot in
a darker interpretation in Murder on the Orient Express. But it’s Suchet who
captured not only the outward appearance of the man but the inner strength and
intuitive intelligence that has given Poirot so many years of life and led new
generations of readers to discover him on the printed page.
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