Agatha christie, p.44
Agatha Christie, page 44
“Why—why—why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic tiresome little creature? … Eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustache and tilting his egg-shaped head. Anyway, what is an egg-shaped head?” (8).
This quote is remarkably reminiscent of comments made by Ariadne Oliver, Christie’s alter ego, about her own invention, the quirky Finnish Sven Hjerson, in Cards on the Table, published two years earlier. Mrs. Oliver concludes that, if she ever met Hjerson in real life, she would commit her greatest murder yet (COT 68).
See also: Cards on the Table (novel); “A Letter to My Publisher”
“Hercule Poirot in Hell.” See “The Capture of Cerberus” (1947)
“Hercule Poirot, Insurance Investigator.” See “The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor”
Hercule Poirot Klärt den Mord im Orient-Express Auf
Hercule Poirot made his German television debut in an episode of Die Galerie der Großen Detektive, broadcast on 24 August 1955. Peter A. Horn dramatized this 50-minute episode of the anthology series, which showcased one adventure for each “great detective” from literature (starting with Sherlock Holmes). Heini Göbel played Poirot, cigar in hand. This was the first screen adaptation of the novel, and it is not clear whether Christie or her team was aware of it.
See also: Murder on the Orient Express (novel); NBC Television Adaptations
Hercule Poirot’s Casebook. See Agatha Christie’s Poirot
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (novel; alternative titles: A Holiday for Murder; Murder at Christmas; Murder for Christmas)
The publishing phenomenon of a “Christie for Christmas” was in full swing when the second Hercule Poirot novel of 1938 was published. Certainly written with an eye to festive sales, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is a distinctly Christean spin on the seasonal mystery. It is, of course, set in a country house—like “Christmas Adventure,” it has Poirot taking part, against his better judgment, in “the old traditional festivities” of a British family Christmas (78), although this time he joins the party after the murder. By the end, he has vowed never to enjoy another crackling open fire, preferring modern central heating.
The mystery is, rarely but not uniquely for Christie, a locked room one. Although Mark Aldridge has critiqued it as “[a] regression of style for Agatha Christie,” because it features a country house (Poirot 139), it is, like Appointment with Death, published in the same year, an early exploration of the theme of family—a preoccupation of Christie in the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, the country house setting is shown to be grotesque, as will country house settings in Crooked House (1949) and They Do It with Mirrors (1952): Gorston Hall is “furnished in the more flamboyant of old fashioned styles” (HPC 36). There is a caustic line that sums up the arch-traditional setting and the psychological focus: “Grand old tradition. Christmas. Promotes solidarity of family feeling” (78).
The tyrannical Simeon Lee gathers his family together for a “sentimental family Christmas” at Gorston Hall (26). However, on Christmas Eve he makes it clear that he is changing his will. A crash of furniture and a piercing scream draws everyone’s attention to his locked study, and soon he is discovered in a pool of blood, his throat cut. Uncut diamonds from his illicit adventures in South America have also gone missing from his safe. As family tensions surface, Poirot is called in to assist Superintendent Sugden of the police, and it emerges that two of the guests are not the family members they claim to be but have less savory connections to Simeon Lee. It also becomes clear that he has illegitimate children.
One of these, it turns out, is Superintendent Sugden himself, who killed Lee in an act of revenge for his mother, whom Lee treated poorly. In an unusual variation on the idea that detective fiction is a game, Poirot reveals that the locked room crime was committed with various items obtained from a joke shop—such as a pig’s bladder to produce a scream and obscure the time of death. He also proves that Sugden is Lee’s son by holding a moustache from a joke shop over a Lee family portrait and noting the resemblance. This is very similar to the revelation of the murderer’s heritage in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, a text that had previously inspired The Sittaford Mystery.
The victim is as grotesquely evil and commanding over his family as Mrs. Boynton in Appointment with Death. The language used of him, particularly before he has appeared, is notable: he is “tyrannical,” “he dictates our lives to us,” and his children “are his slave[s]” (20). Politics form a backdrop to the novel—wars, pacifism, and colonialism are all discussed extensively by characters that have experienced them—and it should be remembered that Hercule Poirot’s Christmas was written in the context of the rise of fascist dictators across Europe. The family itself is monstrous and particularly troubling is the free and easy talk of incest. The festive traditions allow the reader to explore traditional family structures as “family dirty linen” is aired in daylight (106)—neither is positive or sustainable in the twentieth century.
The other key feature of this novel is blood. An oft-quoted but seldom analyzed dedication to the author’s brother-in-law James Watts runs in part:
You complained that my murders were getting too refined—anaemic, in fact. You yearned for a “good murder with lots of blood.” A murder where there is no doubt about its being murder!
So this is your special story—written for you [6].
There is a lot of blood in the story, but it is not a matter of gore or violence—it is a matter of plot. There is in fact too much blood at the crime scene, something one character notes by repeatedly quoting Macbeth: “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (74; emphasis in original)—a quote that lent the book two working titles. It transpires that the murderer sprinkled fresh ox’s blood over the corpse to obscure the time of death—so it would look like he had only just been killed. This is the world of Christie where forensic science, even in 1938, is significantly behind reality.
The presence of blood, however, does not actually address Watts’s criticism, which was also a famous criticism of Raymond Chandler. The narratives are essentially bloodless in that they do not dwell on violence, and that is something Christie insisted upon (see “Genteel Queen of Crime”). However, as Gill Plain has pointed out in Twentieth Century Crime Fiction, that does not mean that they are not about bloody violence and the extremes of passion. A novel ostensibly written in response to the charge that Christie’s work needs “lots of blood” deliberately reworks that charge’s premise.
The book was published in the United Kingdom in 1938 but, oddly, appeared on American bookshelves in February 1939 under the more generic title Murder for Christmas (the paperback would be rechristened again as Holiday for Murder). The first of many dramatizations was for BBC Radio 4, with Maurice Denham playing Poirot, in 1986. Next was an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot for ITV in 1994. There have been two French television adaptations: the four-part Petits Meurtres en Famille, directed by Edwin Baily in 2006, was so successful it spawned a campy series, Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie. In 2018, this series featured another adaptation of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. There has also been a card game based on the book, released promotionally in 1994 to promote the ITV adaptation, and a mystery jigsaw, Poirot’s Christmas, from Paul Lamond Games in 2000.
Characters: Best, Grace; Champion, Charlton, Mr.; Walter; Estravados, Juan and Jennifer; Estravados, Pilar; Farr, Ebenezer; Farr, Stephen; Grant, Stephen; Horbury, Sydney; Johnson, Colonel; Kench, Joan; Lee, Adelaide; Lee, Alfred and Lydia; Lee, David, and Hilda; Lee, George and Magdalene; Lee, Harry; Lee, Simeon; Lopez, Conchita; Poirot, Hercule; Reeves, Emily; Sugden, Superintendent; Tressilian
See also: Agatha Christie’s Poirot; Games; Hercule Poirot (BBC radio series); The Mousetrap; Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie; Petits Meurtres en Famille; Shakespeare, William
“Heritage.” See The Road of Dreams (poetry collection)
Herjoslovakia. See Herzoslovakia
Hersheimmer, Julius P.
One of the richest men in the world, he is an American multi-millionaire in The Secret Adversary. He appears as a potential love interest for Tuppence Beresford (then Cowley), and readers are invited to suspect him of being too good to be true. In the end, he is simply a brash American who marries his delicate cousin, Jane Finn. Tuppence rejects his proposal of marriage and chooses instead to marry Tommy, who is poor but with whom she is in love. The character also offers Christie’s first attempt to write “in American”; an over-zealous use of sometimes nonsensical superlatives that has been gently mocked by some U.S. readers.
Hertzlein, August
August Hertzlein is a fascist dictator, transparently modeled on Adolf Hitler, in the original (rejected) version of “The Capture of Cerberus.”
Herzoslovakia
The small Balkan kingdom of Herzoslovakia first appears in The Secret of Chimneys in 1925, where battles over its throne and its oil are central to the plot. As a holiday destination, it is the setting for the 1940 Poirot story “The Stymphalean Birds.” The kingdom is also referenced, with a different spelling, in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940). A “Herzoslovakian Minister” is mentioned briefly in the 1954 play Spider’s Web (9).
The only sustained study of Herzoslovakia is “The Balkan Theme in The Secret of Chimneys” (2016) by Graham St. John Stott and Aysar Yaseen. They conclude that Christie’s stereotyped presentation of the kingdom, with obvious parallels to Romania and other countries, is strategic: “Christie uses the all too familiar Balkan stereotypes of backwardness and brigandage, but not—as was usually the case at the time—as an Other to illustrate British virtue, but as a mirror to British vice” (1).
See also: The Labours of Hercules; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe; The Secret of Chimneys (novel)
Hickory Dickory Death (See Hickory Dickory Dock)
Hickory Dickory Dock (novel; alternative title: Hickory Dickory Death)
By the mid–1950s, Christie’s publishers were urging her to engage with youth culture and to add more diversity to her books. Hickory Dickory Dock represents her attempt to fulfill this edict; whether or not she succeeded is a matter of opinion, although the mystery element of the novel is almost universally regarded as strong. Once again, Christie evokes a nursery rhyme to structure the action, although the relevance here is loose. Indeed, the strongest link to “Hickory Dickory Dock” is the setting, Hickory Road.
Hercule Poirot is shocked, first by his efficient secretary Miss Lemon making two mistakes and then by the reason: she has a sister who is troubled. Poirot struggles to understand that his “completely machine-made,” “precision instrument” (6) of a secretary could have anything as human as a family or family problems. He learns that Lemon’s sister, Mrs. Hubbard, is a warden at a student hostel on Hickory Road, London, where “things are going on” (8). Here is the first clue that we are entering unfamiliar Christie territory: this is going to be a novel about young, diverse people. Miss Lemon says with concern that “some of [the students] are actually black, I believe” (7; emphasis in original), to which Poirot responds, “Naturally” (7). Thus, Christie addresses and dismisses the concerns of some of her readers who might prefer a whitewashed, insular world in her fiction.
Poirot goes to the hostel to investigate, and learns that small things have been going missing. There appears to be a kleptomaniac at work. He addresses the students, who are postgraduates so in their early twenties, ostensibly giving an unrelated lecture about crime and criminality. This prompts one, Celia Austin, to confess privately that she is behind most—but not all—of the thefts. The shy Celia has been trying to impress a psychology student, Colin McNabb, to whom she is attracted, and believed she would be more interesting to him with a neurosis or complex. Poirot is inclined to let matters rest—“a girl is entitled to attempt desperate measures to get her man” (45)—but before long Celia is dead.
Investigating the death, Poirot and the police learn about various rivalries and suspicious behavior among the hostel’s residents. They also observe strange behavior from its proprietor, the eccentric Mrs. Nicoletis, who is clearly an alcoholic and, it becomes obvious, is involved in smuggling either drugs or diamonds. Mrs. Nicoletis is murdered as well, and then another murder is committed. Poirot comes to connect the murders with a diamond smuggling operation, which also links to some of the original thefts—those not accounted for by Celia but hidden among her crimes.
He uncovers a large criminal operation involving some of the most competent students and a murder plot centered around the homicidal figure of Nigel Chapman, whose contrarian, left-of-center ideas have been indulged henceforth. He emerges as a fatally attractive figure, who corrupts intelligent women, and it is revealed that his identity is assumed: he is, in reality, the wayward son of a great chemist, and in his youth, he murdered his mother. By the end of the novel, Miss Lemon’s sister is contemplating a relaxing cruise, and Miss Lemon is back to her old machine-like efficiency.
This novel provides evidence of a creeping—but, at this stage, still affectionate—distrust of the young. Postgraduate students (so, clever young adults) appear more influential than they are worldly. Miss Marple’s aphorisms aside, that is the reverse of how young people had appeared even earlier in the 1950s, for example in They Do It with Mirrors. The presentation of Mr. Akibombo, as a childishly naive but very clever man who needs to be coached not only in English but also basic socializing, is outright offensive, and shows Christie’s limitations as a novelist rather than broadening her reach, as she and her publishers had intended.
Hickory Dickory Dock was published in 1955 by Collins in the United Kingdom and by Dodd, Mead in the United States, following abridged serializations in John Bull and Collier’s. It has been dramatized for television twice: as part of Agatha Christie’s Poirot in 1995 and as part of Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie in 2015. Around 1963, a script and score were completed for a stage musical, Death Beat, which was to star Peter Sellers as Poirot. However, no production was ever mounted.
Characters: Akibombo, Mr.; Ali, Achmed; Austin, Celia; Bateson, Leonard (“Len”); Bultrout, Miss; Chandra Lal, Mr.; Chapman, Nigel; Cobb, Sergeant; Combe, Alice; Endicott, Mr.; Finch, Sally; George(s); Geronimo; Halle, Rene; Hobhouse, Valerie; Hubbard, Mrs.; Johnston, Elizabeth; Jones, Montagu; Lane, Patricia (“Pat”); Lemon, Felicity; Lucas, Mrs.; Nicoletis, Christina; Maria; McNabb, Colin; McRae, Detective Constable; Poirot, Hercule; Ram, Gopal; Reinjeer, Miss; Robinson, William; Sharpe, Inspector; Stanley, Nigel; Stanley, Sir Arthur; Tomlinson, Jean
See also: Agatha Christie’s Poirot; Death Beat; Nursery Rhymes; Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie
Hicks, Annie. See Annie
Hicks, Rosalind (1919–2004)
The only daughter of Christie, Rosalind was born on 5 August 1919. She enjoyed a close but often fraught relationship with her mother, and their disagreements are sometimes borne out in Christie’s accounts of quarrels between parents and daughters in, for instance, “The Capture of Cerberus” (1947), Curtain, and A Daughter’s a Daughter. Rosalind married Major Hubert Prichard in 1940, and they had one son, Mathew, in 1943, a year before Major Prichard died in action during World War II. In 1949, she married solicitor Anthony Hicks, with whom she lived until her death in 2004.
Extremely protective of her mother’s reputation and legacy, Rosalind was well-known for her strongly worded opinions both before and after her mother’s death. Sometimes, the two clashed professionally, most notably over the question of staging Fiddlers Five. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, she vetoed most media proposals for Christie’s work and often clashed with producers to whom permission had been granted over how they should proceed. She held a 36 percent stake in Agatha Christie Ltd. that controlled the rights to most of Christie’s work. Her mother personally gifted her the copyright to Curtain and the playscript A Daughter’s A Daughter, the latter of which she refused to release or license, partly because of its presentation of a troubled mother-daughter relationship.
See also: Agatha Christie Ltd.; Christie, Colonel Archibald; A Daughter’s a Daughter (novel); A Daughter’s a Daughter (play); Prichard, Mathew
Hickson, Joan (1906–98)
In many eyes the definitive screen Miss Marple, Joan Hickson played the role on television in the BBC’s Miss Marple series (1982–92). She also narrated several audiobooks. Hickson, a character actor, is often said to have been Christie’s own pick for the role, a story that stems from a letter Christie wrote her in the 1940s, suggesting she would float Hickson for the role if she ever wrote a Miss Marple play. When she took the role, Hickson had already appeared in cameo roles in three Christie films: Love from a Stranger (1937), Murder She Said (1962), and Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (1980). She had also had a stage role in Appointment with Death (1945) and a varied non–Christie career, including in the Carry On films. Hickson was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1987, upon which occasion Queen Elizabeth II is thought to have said it was especially for her portrayal of Miss Marple.
See also: Miss Marple (television series)
Hidden Horizon. See Murder on the Nile
Higgs, Mr.
In both versions of “The Capture of Cerberus,” Mr. Higgs is an “odoriferous” dog-keeper (CC 444). In the 1940 version, he is a dog-stealer, and in the 1947 version, he is a dog-handler.
Hill, Florence
