The fact that Poirot never changes makes him tiresome to some readers. Christie herself hinted she eventually found him tedious by giving her fictional alter ego, Mrs Ariadne Oliver, similar feelings toward her own protagonist. And Poirot on the page is a flat, even cartoonish character, especially compared to the fully realized characters we write and read about today. But as Suchet inhabits this character, he brings the finicky, precise, keen-witted little Belgian to life. An émigré and an outsider in English society, sometimes lionized and sometimes dismissed, he is sensitive to slights but manages to keep his temper, his sense of humor, and a sense of irony. And in the end, he solves the case without fear or favor.
We know the sweet damsel in distress whom Poirot unmasks at the end as the contemptuous murderess...the disregarded maidservant...the pair who detest each other most convincingly yet turn out to be lovers in cahoots...the victim who comes back to life. We've seen them before, these most unlikely villains, as we have the cluster of murders to conceal the motive for a single death. We may even have used them ourselves.
What we mustn't forget is that these classic devices—the least likely suspect, the unreliable narrator—are familiar to us because Agatha Christie thought of them first and sprang them on a vast audience who were as truly baffled as the witnesses and suspects Poirot gathers together for the revelatory dénouement of each episode.
In Suchet's interpretation, Poirot is not merely observant. He has a touch of OCD, constantly straightening table settings laid awry or ornaments on a mantelpiece. I particularly loved the moment when he realized the missing will, or was it a compromising letter, had been torn up into "spills," twisted strips of paper meant for lighting the fire, in a jar on the mantel. They caught his eye because the other objects on the mantel were out of order—and he had straightened them the day before.
Delightful
ReplyDeleteThanks. :)
DeleteIn "Mrs. McGinty's Dead", Poirot is able to solve the case when he finds the incriminating photo in a drawer he'd straightened out earlier - and it hadn't been there then, so it had been planted there to frame his hostess.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, Poirot can get irritating; but I still enjoy them. (One of my favorites is "Cards on the Table") And at the time, the plot twists were breathtakingly new and even more importantly, you had to work at solving it. I remember reading the supposed classic "Trent's Last Case" (E. C. Bentley, 1913), and I thought I knew who did it before the end of the first chapter - but, because I'd been raised on Christie, I knew it couldn't be that easy. But it was.
I wasn’t impressed by Trent’s Last Case either, Eve. And I can still get mad at another classic, Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop, thinking about the blatant contempt for the young woman character. We consider Christie’s characters flat by today’s standards, but there are many reasons she’s the one whose work is still read, well, widely is an understatement.
ReplyDeleteHas anyone read Raymond Chandler's evisceration of Milnes' The Mystery of the Red House (I think that's the title, but I'm too lazy to go check)? It's in the essay "The Simple Art of Murder," and it applies to a depressingly large percentage of the "Golden Age" mysteries, in which the convoluted mystery counted for more than characterization, dialogue, or much of anything else. I have to admit, I've never been a huge Christie fan, but she DID create marvelous baffling puzzles.
ReplyDeleteThe Golden Age is also when Dorothy L Sayers breathed life into the relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane and thus turned the classic puzzle genre into the puzzle embedded in a character-driven novel. I’ve written about this elsewhere, or maybe even on SleuthSayers in the past.
DeleteI read that Agatha thought she'd made Poirot too old from the time of her first story about him. Then she did the same thing again with Miss Marple.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth, “too old” is an even more subjective term today now than it was then. And the life of a mystery series is even more precarious. I say brava to Ms Christie for giving us protagonists who (like many of us, readers and writers), are rich in life experience and not so good at balancing on the wings of planes or, as I told a little girl at the beach today, getting up when we fall down in the surf as we used to be.
ReplyDeleteYep. I fell down in my kitchen & broke my hip in 2019. I didn't know it for 2-1/2 weeks, when it started feeling worse instead of better. I had it replaced & this was both before & after other serious health problems. I'll be 70 next month! I grew up reading Agatha Christie. I hope you had a lovely day at the beach!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Elizabeth, I did. My mother was still swimming in the ocean in her 90s, so I have standards to uphold! The challenge is to do it without breaking anything, if possible.
DeleteThere for a brief moment in time, we experienced a perfect coalescence of Golden Age characters, David Suchet as Poirot, Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, and Jeremy Brett as Holmes. It's not been the same since.
ReplyDeleteAs a kid, the puzzles seduced me. I read the stories not for the characters, but to solve the mystery. I barely recall Trent's Last Case, but I seem to remember reading it as a parody cum criticism of those detectives with perfect perception.
I unabashedly love Christie.
Leigh, is that a present or past tense “read”? Ah, the English language! I confess I have always read the stories for the characters, although most “literary fiction,” ie fiction lacking a mystery, bores me.
ReplyDeleteGood catch, Liz– 'read' past tense. I much more appreciate characters now.
DeleteI agree… 'literary' fiction often is a bore. I feel like– Finish the damn story!
I started reading Christie because her young women were often the only ones of independent mind--hopping off to Baghdad or some other exotic locale. Her puzzles were fun but the stories about the returned colonels from India, the ladies of genteel poverty, and more were fun to follow around. Her characterization may have seemed shallow but in most of the individuals there was a snippet of a real life that literary writers would have expanded into 300 dragging pages. There was always something more below the mystery.
ReplyDeleteLeigh, I totally agree that David Suchet as Poirot, Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, and Jeremy Brett as Holmes were all perfectly cast and pitch perfect. (Remember that Christie wanted Joan Hickson to play Miss Marple.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, I still read Christie - they're good, well done, and I think anyone who writes mysteries needs to read her to observe the construction, if nothing else.
THAT I did not know!
DeleteLiz, I haven't seen any of these in years! I remember the wonderful Art Deco opening spooked one of my nieces back then! I'll have to watch and see how they did "The Labors of Hercules," I always liked that idea!
ReplyDeleteJeff, I was so fascinated by the animated merging of the plane, train, automobile art deco motif I wore out a VCR replaying and studying it. (Okay, some of that wear might have come from um, er, other sources… you know, nature documentaries.)
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