LITMIR.BIZ

       4 THE 1930S

      ‘Monsieur Poirot here,’ said Japp. ‘Quite a good advertisement for a hair tonic, he’d be. Face fungus sprouting finer than ever. Coming out into the limelight, too, in his old age. Mixed up in all the celebrated cases of the day. Train mysteries, air mysteries, high society deaths – oh, he’s here, there and everywhere.’

      —THE ABC MURDERS

      For many the 1930s were disturbing years. Even among Poirot’s clients it was understood that most people were not as well off as before. Complained Elinor Carlisle in Sad Cypress: ‘Everything costs so much – clothes and one’s face – and just silly things like movies and cocktails – and even gramophone records!’ Some people actually became poor. ‘Darling,’ confided the Hon. Joanna South-wood in Death on the Nile,

      ‘if any misfortunes happen to my friends I always drop them at once! It sounds heartless, but it saves such a lot of trouble later! They always want to borrow money off you, or else they start a dressmaking business and you have to get the most terrible clothes from them. Or they paint lampshades, or do Batik scarves.’

      In Poirot’s world the uncertain political times – the ‘question’ of India, the ‘troubles’ in China, agitation against the Establishment, ‘Bolshies, Reds, all that sort of thing’ – were spoken of over cocktails and at tea. Towards the end of the decade a Europe under the shadow of war brought talk of armaments, the race for Supremacy in the Air, Hitler and Mussolini, the Spanish Civil War, ‘days of crisis’.

      In Chelsea flats Poirot was apt to encounter chairs made of webbing and chromium, and in country drawing-rooms even elderly hostesses made concessions to ‘modernity’ by allowing guests to smoke. Egypt in winter was expensive, Majorca was cheap, and ‘Paris doesn’t cut any ice nowadays. It’s London and New York that count,’ cried Jane Wilkinson in Lord Edgware Dies. Bottles of mouthwash could turn out to hold liquor instead, and gold-topped perfume bottles might hide cocaine. People now flew regularly across the Channel, and in one of Poirot’s cases air travel made possible the appearance of a surprise witness from New Zealand.

      In the younger generation people of fads and crazes might aspire to be ‘all S.A. and IT’, and in the older – like the Misses Tripp in Dumb Witness – to be ‘vegetarians, theosophists, British Israelites, Christian Scientists, spiritualists and enthusiastic amateur photographers’. Dinner parties might conclude with dancing to phonograph records, or with poker or bridge – in Cards on the Table Mrs Lorrimer declared: ‘I simply will not go out to dinner now if there’s no bridge afterwards!’ – or with earnest conversations, as deplored in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe:

      ‘Jane has changed a lot lately. Where does she get all these ideas?’

      ‘Take no notice of what Jane says,’ said Mrs Olivera.

      ‘Jane’s a very silly girl. You know what girls are – they go to these queer parties in studios where the young men have funny ties and they come home and talk a lot of nonsense.’

      Fashion in clothes was a subject dear to Poirot’s heart, and in the 1930s he often found reason to regard his immediate world with satisfaction. ‘She really is a lovely girl,’ said Hastings of Thora Grey in The ABC Murders. ‘And wears very lovely clothes,’ mused Poirot. ‘That crêpe moracain and the silky fox collar – dernier cri!’. In Murder on the Orient Express he gazed with delight upon the Countess Andrenyi dressed in ‘a tight-fitting little black coat and skirt, white satin blouse, small chic black toque perched at the fashionable outrageous angle’. To match, there were plenty of sleek-headed men in well tailored clothes, though most of Poirot’s English circle tended to look askance at men (including Poirot) who paid too much attention to their appearance. ‘He was too well dressed – he wore his hair too long – and he smelt of scent,’ said Major Despard disparagingly of a murder victim in Cards on the Table.

      The 1930s found Hercule Poirot at the height of his powers. For him it was to prove a decade of triumphs, la crème de la crème.

In Black Coffee,¹ a play first staged in 1930, Poirot rescued for England a formula for the disintegration of atoms. This coup, and the solution to the after-dinner death of a brilliant scientist, Sir Claud Amory, was but the work of a few hours with the assistance of Hastings – presumably back on another business trip – and an enthusiastic Inspector Japp.

On his own once more, Poirot travelled to Lytcham Close, ‘one of the most famous old houses in England’, at the summons of the eccentric Hubert Lytcham Roche, a man of ungovernable temper and a fanatic for punctuality. As not infrequently occurred in Poirot’s cases, his announced arrival was slightly preceded by his client’s untimely death. For the first and last time, in ‘The Second Gong’,² Hubert Lytcham Roche was late for dinner.

Fourteen full-length books are devoted to Poirot’s exploits in the 1930s, and the first two of these – Peril at End House, published in 1932, and Lord Edgware Dies,³ published in 1933 – find Arthur Hastings at his side. As a sort of appetizer to these major cases, Hastings first enjoyed collaborating in a shorter one, ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’,⁴ a macabre society murder which Poirot pronounced ‘an artistic masterpiece!’ On the perpetrator he bestowed the greatest of compliments:

      ‘It goes to my heart to hang a man like that. I may be a genius myself, but I am capable of recognizing genius in other people. A perfect murder, mon ami. I, Hercule Poirot, say to you. A perfect murder.

      Epatant!’

      Welcome as he was to Poirot, Hastings-watchers may find his frequent returns to England rather disconcerting. Wasn’t all that sailing back and forth terribly expensive? Could the ranch afford it? Didn’t Cinderella mind? One imagines her standing on the verandah gazing across the pampas, the cicharra singing, as Arthur and his steamer trunk depart once again for England. From scattered references one rather imagines her waving cheerfully. ‘Tiens!’ as Poirot was apt to say about mysteries. ‘C’est curieux, n’est-ce pas?’

      Presumably Hastings sent Cinderella several postcards from the Majestic Hotel in St Loo, the ‘Queen of the Watering Places’ on the Cornish coast, where he and Poirot spent an unexpectedly eventful holiday in Peril at End House. Once again Poirot was in one of his retirement fits. Flattering appeals for help from the Home Secretary left him unmoved (‘I have retired! It is finished!’), but how could he resist intervening when only he could see that someone in St Loo was determined to murder a very independent young thing, Miss Nick Buckley?

      Peril at End House was a slippery case. Unchaperoned young women partying and weekending and wearing watches filled

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