an egg-shaped head. Helping and hindering will be the bluff and energetic Inspector James Japp of Scotland Yard and, faithfully recording it all for posterity, the devoted Arthur Hastings, ever bewildered, ever admiring. It was to prove a great run. ‘Ah!’ Hastings was to write many, many years later, ‘if this could have been that day in 1916 when I first travelled to Styles …’
The Styles mystery and the subsequent murder trial at the Old Bailey occupied everyone concerned for several months. Wrote Hastings:
September found us all in London. Mary took a house in Kensington, Poirot being included in the family party.
I myself had been given a job at the War Office, so was able to see them continually.
It was probably while staying with the Cavendishes that Poirot, no longer limping, began looking for a more permanent home. A later story, ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’, indicates that at about this time Poirot was asked to undertake a small matter for the War Office. Perhaps he took this as a sign? Why return to the rural obscurity of Styles St Mary? As he later told Mr Satterthwaite, the Styles Affair had given him fresh confidence:
‘I found that I was not yet finished. No, indeed, my powers were stronger than ever. Then began my second career – that of a private inquiry agent in England.’
Poirot’s new enterprise was no doubt launched by the ordering of appropriate business cards and a search for suitable quarters. And, for guidance through the thickets of English customs and manners, who could be better than Arthur Hastings, now invalided out of the army and assigned a London job at recruiting? Firmly bonded to Poirot by the Styles Affair, and still hoping to become a detective himself, Hastings stuck to Poirot like glue.
In time Poirot would become the most fashionable detective in London and would live in considerable style, but at the outset he took modest rooms, often shared by Hastings, and endured certain privations:
Poirot had just finished carefully straightening the cups and saucers which our landlady was in the habit of throwing, rather than placing, on the table. He had also breathed heavily on the metal teapot, and polished it with a silk handkerchief.
In these surroundings Poirot commenced his practice as a private detective, and Hastings began to look forward to each evening’s account of the cases on hand. Several bread-and-butter years passed pleasantly enough and then, at last, Poirot received a commission of major consequence. As Hastings described it, he had just settled down one evening to listen to developments in the current investigation, a charlady’s missing husband (‘A difficult affair, needing the tact’), when:
… the landlady thrust her head round the door and informed him there were two gentlemen below who wanted to see him.
‘They won’t give their names, Sir, but they say as it’s very important.’
‘Let them mount,’ said Poirot …
In a few minutes the two visitors were ushered in, and my heart gave a leap as in the foremost I recognized no less a personage than Lord Estair, Leader of the House of Commons; whilst his companion, Mr Bernard Dodge, was also a member of the War Cabinet, and, as I knew, a close personal friend of the Prime Minister.
Clients worthy of Poirot’s mettle at last! And what a case they brought to his sitting-room – the disappearance of the Prime Minister on the eve of the approaching Allied Conference at Versailles. Said a grave Lord Estair:
‘We sought you out on the express recommendation and wish of a very great man of your own country.’
‘Comment? My old friend the Préfet – ?’
Lord Estair shook his head.
‘One higher than the Préfet. One whose word was once law in Belgium – and shall be again! That England has sworn!’
Poirot’s hand flew swiftly to a dramatic salute.
‘Amen to that!’
In the melodramatic episode that followed, ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’, which, one wonders, was sweeter for Poirot – foiling a desperate set of German agents, or succeeding where the French police and Detective Inspector Japp had failed? Wrote Hastings of this affair, his eye already on posterity:
‘I feel it is only just that England should know the debt it owes to my quaint little friend, whose marvellous brain so ably averted a great catastrophe.’
Whether the charlady’s husband was ever found is not recorded.
Soon after this coup there occurred a case that Hastings grandly and prematurely called ‘the ultimate problem brought to Poirot to solve’. This harked back to 1916 when Hastings had renewed his acquaintance with Captain Vincent Lemesurier, a fellow officer from an old Northumberland family. Remembering her husband’s account of his introduction to Poirot two years before, Mrs Lemesurier, a troubled and determined mother, sought his assistance in exorcizing the family’s medieval curse. Were all first-born Lemesurier sons doomed to die before inheriting the estate? In the short story, ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’, Poirot, at work like ‘an intelligent terrier’, proved that they need not.
In the spring of 1919, as England celebrated the end of the Great War, young Viscount Cronshaw was stabbed to death at a grand victory ball. ‘Every twopenny-halfpenny hop calls itself that nowadays, but this was the real thing, held at the Colossus Hall, and all London at it,’ reported Japp, dropping by Poirot’s rooms to invite him to lend a hand in tracking the Viscount’s murderer – or, as Hastings observed, ‘seeking favours under the guise of conferring them!’ Poirot had ‘a good opinion of Japp’s abilities, though deploring his lamentable lack of method’ and, probably realizing how much Japp must have smarted over the case of the kidnapped prime minister, he consented to join in the hunt. In ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’ he cracked open a sensational cocaine case involving such Bright Young Things as Miss Coco Courtenay and the Honourable Eustace Beltane. ‘Une belle affaire!’ Poirot later pronounced it, celebrating at a ‘recherché little supper’.
With these four cases – the unmasking of a country house murderer, the rescue of a prime minister, the laying of a family ghost, and the solving of a Mayfair stabbing – Poirot’s credentials as a private detective of brilliance and discretion were assured. Furthermore, he had found a new home and a new purpose. For the next half century his energies would be almost entirely devoted to the remarkable crimes of the bloodthirsty English.
NOTES
1 Even though Hastings was rapidly falling in love with Cynthia Murdoch, he misspelled her name on the plan.
‘This street, it is not aristocratic, mon ami! In it there is no fashionable doctor, no fashionable dentist – still less is there a fashionable milliner! But there is a fashionable detective. Oui, my friend, it is true – I am become the mode, the dernier cri!’
—Hercule Poirot,
‘The Adventure of “The Western Star”’
The
