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Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories 2/25/2015 7:05:02 AM
This post originally appeared on www.thunderalleybcp.com
Hercule Poirot is justifiably Agatha Christie’s most famous creation.
Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories is a comprehensive chronicle of the detective’s life in short fiction. While the numerous Poirot novels are among Christie’s best and popular works, the character excelled in the short format, offering a distillation of what makes him great in concise bites.
Published from the 1920s through the 1940s, the tales in The Complete Short Stories present a full portrait of the Belgian police inspector enjoying a retirement career as a celebrity crime stopper in London. Poirot’s character emerges quite distinctly. His precision, fastidious attention to his appearance, obsession with neatness and order and fetishistic care of his prominent moustaches are constants. He’s always the smartest person in the room, able to wring meaning from nuanced observation of a scene’s minutiae. Though he’s sometimes shown to disdain pedestrian acts such as looking for cigarette ash or loose threads, often Poirot’s notice of such trivialities proved to be key to a case’s resolution.
Over the course of these stories, Poirot encounters any number of thieves, murderers, swindlers, cons, conspirators, saboteurs and thugs. The British gentry fall victim to any number of murderous devices, including several exotic poisonings and more than one attempt to pass a murder off as a locked room suicide. Poirot foils any number of clever theft schemes. Some cases aren’t even mysteries, per se, but more general crime fiction, allowing Poirot to use his considerable mental gifts to thwart more subtle criminal schemes.
Poirot is all about method. He extols the virtue of an “orderly mind” and uses “the little grey cells” to make logical deductions of a scene’s details. Christie doesn’t shy away from the inevitable Sherlock Holmes comparisons, either. Indeed, more than one story addresses the comparison to Arthur Conan Doyle’s very similar creation head-on. It was somewhat gutsy, but then, no one ever accused Christie of lacking ambition.
While Poirot’s novel-length adventures provide complex, multi-layered plots with large casts, his short fiction appearances are admirably economical. Christie packed a lot of detail into a very few pages and a character like Poirot, with a well-known and colorful persona, can have major impact in a story without significant exposition regarding his character. With a few well-placed sentences, Christie imparted all a reader needed to know about Poirot to grasp his essence and could then move on to lean, well-crafted problems that Poirot could dispatch without needing novel-length exploration.
Included in the collection is a series called “The Labours of Hercules.” These are a series of twelve shorts, where Poirot selected a case thematically inspired by one of the famous adventures of his mythological namesake. They alone provide a strong cross-section of the diversity of Poirot’s adventures, boasting everything from a straight murder mystery to a political scandal. And as always, Christie embroidered these stories with well-placed twists that weren’t obvious but made perfect sense.
Other notable adventures include the disappearance of valuable bonds from a trans-Atlantic ship; a banker who seemed to disappear while on a short walk; a sailor who discovers a body in a train compartment; the theft of a movie star’s famous jewels; and a plot to kidnap the British prime minister. Other adventures included a country Christmas visit in search of a foreign royal’s stolen necklace; several mysterious deaths seemingly connected to the curse of an opened Egyptian tomb; a hidden will designed to test the ingenuity of the beneficiary; and a murder at a costume party.
In addition to the colorful rogues and hapless victims populating these stories, Poirot was accompanied by a number of recurring characters. The stories from the ‘20s tended to be narrated by Captain John Hastings, Poirot’s ex-military friend and confederate. Hastings was a “true blue” Brit, easily swayed by patriotism, awe of the nobility and a pretty face. While not a dullard, Poirot often treated him as though he were a slow child or favored pet. Hastings so frequently expressed jealousy or malicious glee at the possibility of Poirot being wrong, it was a wonder the friendship endured. A constant throughout the adventures was Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard. Japp was shown as smart and tenacious, and always happy and willing to accept Poirot’s assistance. After Hastings’s exit from the stories, Poirot was sometimes seen with George, his faithful, capable valet, and Miss Lemon, his prim, efficient secretary.
The Complete Short Stories isn’t a brief affair. It clocks in at close to 900 pages in trade paperback, so it’s not necessarily the best starting point for casual fans or newcomers. For Poirot die-hards, however, it’s an essential volume containing all of the character’s shorts and novellas.
