Poirot and Me (15 page)

to Boulogne, but disappears in France. The

British government ask for Poirot’s help and

put a destroyer at his disposal to transport

him to France immediately.

That only contrives to reveal Poirot’s fear

of sea-sickness. As he tells Hastings in the

original story, ‘It is the villainous sea that

troubles me! The mal de mer – it is horrible

suffering!’ He is in no hurry to climb aboard

the warship, and insists that he will start his

search for the Prime Minister in England.

Hastings and the Leader of the House of

Commons cannot understand it, but the little

Belgian is unmoved.

Poirot then outlines one of the central

tenets of his attitude to solving a case, one

which he returns to time and again.

‘It is not so that the good detective should

act, eh?’ Dame Agatha had him say in her

original story. ‘I perceive your thought. He

must be full of energy. He must rush to and

fro. He should prostrate himself on the dusty

road and seek the marks of tyres through a

little glass. He must gather up the cigarette-

end, the fallen match? That is your idea, is it

not?’

Poirot fundamentally disagrees, and Dame

Agatha has him say so firmly.

‘But I – Hercule Poirot – tell you that it

is not so! The true clues are within –

here!’ He tapped his forehead. ‘All that

matters is the little grey cells within.

Secretly and silently they do their part,

until suddenly I call for a map, and I

lay my finger on a spot – so – and I

say: the Prime Minister is there! And it

is so.’

It is precisely the technique that Poirot

depends on time after time.

There

is

another

element

in The

Kidnapped Prime Minister that reveals

another of the similarities between Poirot

and me: the question of the English class

system.

Throughout her stories, Dame Agatha was

never afraid to criticise, and sometimes

make fun of, the British upper class and their

habits. As my character note number sixty-

two about him puts it: ‘HATES the English

class system.’ It is not just that Poirot calls

tea ‘the English poison’, it is also that he is

wary of accepting what might be called the

British habit of respecting people of their

own class, regardless of what the reality

about them might be, and I must say I agree

with him.

Although he is a Belgian, a refugee who

arrived during the First World War, he

emulates the British in his clothes and his

manners, considering himself like an English

doctor in Harley Street, and is content to

observe what he regards as their strange

customs. But he does not care, and neither

do I, for the British respect for class, and

what are so often called ‘good chaps’. Time

after time throughout his stories, Poirot rails

against the British tendency to accept

anything someone regarded as a ‘good chap’

says without a moment of hesitation.

I agree with him. It is another area in

which Poirot and I are as one. I don’t know

exactly why that is, but it is absolutely true.

Perhaps it has something to do with my

parents, or my own sense of being an

outsider, even though I was born in London,

but it is there anyway, one more thing that

links Poirot and me.

In fact, it is Poirot’s dislike of the

restrained attitude of the English upper class

that lies at the heart of the last, and most

important, film of my second series as Poirot

– a story that reveals, as my character note

number fifty-five says, ‘Doesn’t like the

English “reserve”. Thinks the English are

mad.’

Chapter 7

‘I FELT THAT I HAD

BECOME THE

CUSTODIAN OF DAME

AGATHA’S CREATION’

The Mysterious Affair at Styles became

our second two-hour television special

at the end of the second series, and was

scheduled to be broadcast to mark the

centenary of Dame Agatha’s birth. Indeed, it

premiered in England on 16 September

1990, exactly one day after the centenary of

her birth in 1890, and almost fifteen years

after her death in Oxfordshire in January

1976.

What made it so significant for me,

however, was that it was a television version

of the very first crime novel Dame Agatha

ever wrote, and the one that introduced the

character of Hercule Poirot. It was a prequel

to everything that I had done before in the

nineteen stories we had already filmed.

There was no doubt that London Weekend

were intent on making it as fine a film as

they possibly could. The script, once again

by Clive Exton, felt like the screenplay for a

feature film rather than a television special,

not least in using a huge number of extras

and vintage vehicles, which were needed to

give a feeling of London in the First World

War. The director was the talented fifty-

year-old South African Ross Devenish, whose

1980 film Marigolds in August had won a

prize at the Berlin Film Festival that year.

Most of all, however, it gave me an

opportunity to establish my Poirot from the

very beginning of his career. The television

audience may have seen the later Poirot, but

they had never seen him as a younger man,

shortly after he arrived in this country as a

refugee from the German invasion of his

native Belgium, forced to come to England to

escape the carnage in his homeland.

But this was not an especially cheerful

Poirot story. This was a serious crime and a

complex mystery, which was downbeat from

the very beginning. One of the early scenes

features a younger Lieutenant Hastings

recovering from his war wounds in a ‘rather

depressing’ convalescent home in England.

In fact, when we first encounter him,

Hastings and his fellow patients are

watching a black and white newsreel about

the latest battles on the Western Front,

which is then followed by a brief item about

the Belgian refugees that are flooding into

England.

It is just one of the many echoes in The

Mysterious Affair at Styles of Dame Agatha’s

own life as a young woman, as she had seen

Belgian refugees billeted near her home

town as the war began to take its toll.

The story makes it worth recalling just a

little about her upbringing. Born in the

English seaside town of Torquay in

September 1890, Agatha Miller started to

write stories as a girl, during a bout of

influenza, when her mother suggested that

instead of telling stories – which she enjoyed

doing – she should write them down. She

did, and never lost the habit.

Then, when Agatha Miller was a teenager,

she and her elder sister Madge were

discussing a murder-mystery they were both

reading when Agatha announced that she’d

like to try her hand at writing a detective

story. Madge challenged her to do it, while

suspecting privately that she would never be

able to. It was a challenge that the teenager

never forgot.

By the time she was in her very early

twenties, however, the young Miss Miller had

one or two other things on her mind, not

least the fact that she was being pursued by

a number of young men with offers of

marriage.

Indeed,

she

even

became

engaged to one in 1912, at the age of

twenty-two, only to break it off when she fell

in love with the dashing Lieutenant Archibald

Christie, the son of a judge in the Indian Civil

Service and then serving with the Royal Field

Artillery.

Less than eighteen months later, Agatha

Miller married Archie, now Captain Christie,

who had joined the newly formed Royal

Flying Corps. The ceremony took place on

Christmas Eve 1914, and war with Germany

had begun just four months earlier. Captain

Christie went back to the Western Front just

two days later, while his new wife went to

work in Torbay Hospital in Torquay, nursing

some of the first casualties to come back

from Flanders.

After eighteen months, she transferred to

the hospital’s dispensary, where she would

acquire the extensive knowledge of poisons

that would eventually appear in her novels –

not least in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It

was during the quieter periods in the

dispensary, in 1916, that the new Mrs

Agatha Christie started writing what would

be her first detective story, about that affair

at Styles.

To do so, she drew on her new husband’s

experiences of the war, and on her own, as a

nurse on the home front, treating the

wounded, while also being well aware that

England had provided a new home for some

Belgian refugees – a colony had been

billeted near her home in the parish of Tor in

Torbay.

Why not make one of them her fictional

detective, the young Mrs Christie thought to

herself. Perhaps he could be a retired police

officer from the Belgian force, not too young.

So Hercule Poirot was born, and the new

Mrs Christie allowed the then still thirty-year-

old Hastings to encounter Poirot – whom he

had met before the war in Belgium, while

working in insurance – during a trip away

from his convalescent home. Hastings is

invited to stay at a country house belonging

to the family of his boyhood friend John

Cavendish, Styles Court, a mile or so outside

the fictional village of Styles St Mary in

Essex.

The house is owned by John Cavendish’s

stepmother, who, although she is over

seventy,

has

recently

re-married

the

distinctly shady Alfred Inglethorpe, twenty

years her junior. He is an ‘absolute bounder’,

according to John Cavendish, because he has

‘a great black beard and wears patent

leather shoes in all weathers’. So the

mystery begins.

Written and set during the ‘war to end

wars’, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was

eventually published in London in 1920, to

quite extraordinary success, launching its

author’s career as the ‘Queen of English

crime fiction’ in the twentieth century. More

important for me, it also launched Hercule

Poirot as a fictional detective who would

come to rival the great Sherlock Holmes in

the public’s affection around the world.

To my mind, the story and the screenplay

o f The Mysterious Affair at Styles are both

Dame Agatha and Clive Exton at their very

best. It was no accident that the book was a

huge best-seller, because it contains an

extraordinary number of ingenious puzzles

and a remarkable set of characters who live

on in the memory.

But, as I said, The Mysterious Affair at

Styles is not exactly a conventional Poirot.

There is rather less of a twinkle in his eye

t h a n in some of the other stories. The

background of the war makes it sombre in

tone, and Poirot’s attempt to settle into a

new land is no laughing matter. He and his

fellow Belgian refugees are struggling to

understand the ways of their adopted

homeland.

In television terms, it is even more

unusual, because Poirot does not appear

until eleven minutes of the film have passed.

The old movie adage of ‘putting the money

on the screen’ by making sure the leading

actor appears as close to the opening as

possible was completely ignored. Indeed, to

establish it as something quite different from

the rest of the series, The Mysterious Affair

at Styles does not even begin with the series

titles

and

Christopher

Gunning’s

unmistakable theme music. Instead, it opens

like a feature film, with wounded soldiers

near Parliament Square in London, nurses

ushering them to and fro, and a military

band marching past.