From Styles to Syria
Happy birthday, Poirot the refugee

Agatha Christie created her detective based on the “colony of Belgian refugees” she met during the first world war

Books, arts and culture

A HUNDRED years ago—July 17th 1916—Agatha Christie’s most beloved character, Hercule Poirot, made his debut. In “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”, Christie’s first novel, readers were introduced to the “quaint dandyfied little man” in the fictional village of Styles St Mary in Essex. As Poirot enters the local post office, he bumps into an old acquaintance, Captain Arthur Hastings, the man destined to be his loyal shadow over the next half-century, helping him crack the most perplexing murders of the day. With his pleasant Old Etonian manner and conveniently dim brain, Hastings was the perfect foil to the “wonderfully clever” foreigner in patent leather shoes.

But this Poirot was a far cry from the sleek David Suchet avatar we know so well—the wealthy private investigator installed in a London apartment and courted by Scotland Yard and the grandees of the English peerage. This Poirot was an old Belgian policeman with a bad limp, sharing a cottage with six other Belgian exiles of the first world war. His egotism and sartorial style are undented (“a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound”), but he is painfully aware that he is—that most-loaded word—a refugee.

Marking the centenary of Poirot’s invention in the midst of one of the worst refugee crises in history is especially poignant due to Christie’s deep personal connection with Syria and Iraq. As the wife of Sir Max Mallowan, an eminent archaeologist, she spent over a decade at various digs in these two countries before and after the second world war. Mallowan and Christie loved their years in the Fertile Crescent, and would be heartbroken and horrified at the scale of human suffering unfolding there today. “How much I have loved that part of the world,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I love it still and always shall.” For Christie’s husband, Islamic State’s (IS) vandalising of the Mosul museum and razing of the ancient Assyrian military capital of Nimrud would be unbearable. Nimrud made Mallowan. The excavation of its temples, palaces, and stunning collection of 3,000-year-old ivory artefacts (which Christie lovingly cleaned with her face cream) was the apogee of his career.

It was on the great mound of Nimrud that Christie began writing her autobiography. Her tranquil descriptions of the “creamy beauty” of Palmyra and the “pinkish buff” grandeur of Raqqa (the de facto IS capital) offer an aching contrast to current slaughterhouse conditions. Reading about the mystical high she experienced on visiting the peacock angel mountain shrine of the “singularly gentle” Yazidis is both moving and painful—for the Yazidis have been annihilated by IS, deemed worshippers of Satan.

But her memoir also evokes the imperial regime of the day. When Christie boards the Orient Express at Calais with her linen frocks, sun hat, bully beef and smattering of Arabic she is very much the “Empire Builder’s Wife” heading for “Mem-Sahib Land”. This is the world of Sykes-Picot, whose legacy IS has sworn to smash the way it has smashed thousands of cuneiform tablets inscribed with the earliest human handwriting. The tone of Christie’s memoir is a blend of colonial and maternal. Arabs are fondly described as simple and childlike, or sly and corrupt; the Kurdish men with their fierce red faces and blue eyes remind her, comically enough, of Lord Kitchener.

But she is no red-faced Colonel Blimp, contemptuous of local customs. In “Murder in Mesopotamia”, Poirot opens his denouement with the holy invocation: “Bismillahi ar rahman ar rahim.” (“In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.”) By having her Belgian Catholic detective intone “slowly and solemnly” from the Koran, Christie was evoking a touch of local flavour. But the scene has a certain dignity and sweetness, and speaks of her respect for the rituals of the region. Another novel, “They Came to Baghdad”, is significant mainly for its creepy contemporary resonance. The villains, a band of English terrorists waging “total war—total destruction” in order to birth a New World, are cut from the same slippery black cloth as IS. Christie, who had no patience for paradisiacal cant, would have concluded that the wellspring of IS’s bloodlust is not the creation of a worldwide caliphate but something far more banal. As Poirot says quietly in “Mesopotamia”, “Murder is a habit.”

Back in England Poirot, too, had become a habit. His “little grey cells” and erroneous locutions (“I stebbed my toe”) had proved so catching that Christie complained in 1938, “Why-why-why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature?” Indeed, why did she? The answer lies in a combination of whimsy, cussedness and circumstance.

Though “Styles” was only published in 1920 (after numerous rejections), Christie wrote it during the war when she was a volunteer nurse in Torquay, tending to wounded soldiers. While learning to make suppositories and dispense powders (it was at the dispensary that she acquired her mastery of different poisons), she toyed with the idea of writing a detective novel. Casting around for a suitable sleuth, she noticed the “colony of Belgian refugees” at the local parish, and watched as the attitude towards them changed from “loving kindness and sympathy” to grumblings about them not being “sufficiently grateful”. That the “poor things were bewildered and in a strange country was not sufficiently appreciated,” she wrote. Christie was no bleeding-heart activist. But like her other invention, Jane Marple, she had a firm moral compass. Her Sherlock, she decided, would be a refugee policeman with a grand name. The first case Poirot solves is the murder-by-strychnine of his benefactor, the grand dame of Styles in whose spare cottage he and six other Belgians are staying. By exposing his patron’s killer, the refugee symbolically repays a debt of gratitude. If Christie were writing today, her Poirot could well be Syrian.

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