Agatha Christie’s Poirot - Anne Hart

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in the Clouds,9 published in 1935. Poirot, once he had recovered from his airsickness, had a splendid time solving it.

      Back from Argentina in June of 1935 came Arthur Hastings to find Poirot established in Whitehaven Mansions, ‘an outstanding building of modern flats’. Taking stock, the two men immediately began talking about each other’s hair. Inspector Japp, dropping by, had something to add. ‘Just a little bit thin on top, eh?’ he remarked tactlessly to Hastings, and Poirot made things even worse:

      ‘You know, Hastings, there is a little device – my hairdresser is a man of great ingenuity – one attaches it to the scalp and brushes one’s own hair over it – it is not a wig, you comprehend – but – ’

      ‘Poirot,’ I roared. ‘Once and for all I will have nothing to do with the beastly inventions of your confounded hairdresser’

      and added, testily, that Japp – for whom Hastings had never had much affection – was ‘getting as grey as a badger’ and looking much older.

      Poirot, of course, was secure with his hairdresser and a black bottle of REVIVIT.

      But more important matters were soon at hand – the extraordinarily senseless serial murders recounted in The ABC Murders, published in 1936. Poirot had been hoping for just such a case to enliven Hastings’s visit:

      ‘As soon as I heard you were coming over I said to myself: Something will arise. As in former days we will hunt together, we two. But if so it must be no common affair. It must be something’ – he waved his hands excitedly – ‘something recherché – delicate – fine …’ He gave the last untranslatable word its full flavour.

      ‘Upon my word, Poirot,’ I said. ‘Any one would think you were ordering a dinner at the Ritz.’

      The puzzle of the ABC killings, in which the date and whereabouts of each murder was ghoulishly announced to Poirot before it was committed, made for an exciting summer. For Poirot it was an interesting departure from his usual type of case, the crime intime: ‘Here, for the first time in our association, it is cold-blooded, impersonal murder. Murder from the outside.’ For Hastings it was, no doubt, a welcome change from worrying about the ranch. What a splendid return! What a ‘cream of crime’! Who cared, after all, if one was going a trifle bald?

      The ABC murderer was caught in November, just one month short of Hastings’s return to Argentina, and in June of the following year we find him back again enjoying ‘the roar of London’ from Poirot’s sitting-room window and making notes for the narration of a new case:

      But though Miss Arundell’s death surprised no one, something else did. The provisions of her will gave rise to varying emotions, astonishment, pleasurable excitement, deep condemnation, fury, despair, anger and general gossip. For weeks and even months Market Basing was to talk of nothing else!

      In Market Basing, Hastings was very drawn to the late Miss Arundell’s household. Of her drawing-room he wrote:

      A faint fragrance of pot-pourri hung about it. The chintzes were worn, their pattern faded garlands of roses. On the walls were prints and water-colour drawings. There was a good deal of china – fragile shepherds and shepherdesses. There were cushions worked in crewel stitch. There were faded photographs in handsome silver frames. There were many inlaid workboxes and tea caddies. Most fascinating of all to me were two exquisitely cut tissue-paper ladies under glass stands. One with a spinning-wheel, one with a cat on her knee.

      He was also very taken with her amiable wire-haired terrier, Bob. In the end the orphaned dog was given to Poirot but Hastings quickly claimed him as a spoil of war. ‘My word, Poirot, it’s good to have a dog again,’ he said, and off he went, back to Argentina. This time, for whatever reasons and however homesick, Hastings did not return to England for many years.

      ‘Are you enjoying this trip, M. Poirot?’

      ‘Frankly, no. It was an imbecility to allow myself to be persuaded to come. I detest la mer. Never does it remain tranquil – no, not for a little minute.’

      Surely, though, in ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, one could expect a little peace in the kind October sun? But even here, uneasily surveying the emotions surging just below the surface at his quiet hotel, ‘M. Poirot perceived the inevitable shaping of events to come’ – the duty to solve, while on holiday, a crime passionnel.

      And could any meal with Inspector Japp – like one on a Guy Fawkes night for example – not lead to a murder investigation?

      Turning off the main road, the two men passed into the comparative quiet of a mews. They had been dining together and were now taking a short cut to Hercule Poirot’s flat.

      As they walked along the sound of squibs was still heard periodically. An occasional shower of golden rain illuminated the sky.

      ‘Good night for a murder,’ remarked Japp with professional interest. ‘Nobody would hear a shot, for instance, on a night like this.’

      How true! Nor was Japp alone in such thoughts, as subsequent events in ‘Murder in the Mews’ proved.

      Poirot had murmured in The ABC Murders:

      ‘Supposing that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four; while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and, intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime

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