Agatha Christie’s Poirot

One remarkable element of the novel lies in its coldness – and even viciousness – towards many of the key characters. Our murder victim, the American heiress Ruth Kettering, is disfigured by a blow to the face following her strangulation with a length of cord, a brutal way to kill a young woman (and further evidence that however one might describe Christie ‘cosy’ is not an apt adjective). Inevitably there are plot reasons for the attack that makes Kettering’s face unrecognisable, but it provides a lingering image for the reader to digest over the course of the novel. This harshness is accentuated by the lack of a narrator who would usually filter such brutality through their own squeamishness or respect for the victim, as Hastings remains in the Argentine. Instead, we get a third-person narrative and our first appearance of Poirot’s valet George, ‘an intensely English, rather wooden-faced individual’. George (or, as Poirot is wont to pronounce, ‘Georges’) doesn’t intrude on the mysteries in which he is present, as he usually functions as a solid sounding-board for Poirot’s ruminations. On this occasion Poirot doesn’t play a part in the novel for quite some time, and keeping the detective off-stage for so long means that the mystery takes longer to develop than usual. However, Poirot seems sure that he will be able to solve this case whatever his involvement, as this is the novel in which he quietly but confidently introduces himself as ‘probably the greatest detective in the world’.

In a typical bout of hyperbole, The Mystery of the Blue Train was publicised as ‘Poirot’s greatest case’ by Collins upon its British publication in March 1928, with some adverts even featuring a bizarre introduction to the story by Poirot himself (but surely not penned by Agatha Christie), in which he wrote:

Mesdames et Messieurs,

Oui, c’est moi, Poirot, back from ze long retiral. I have done something zis time so clevaire with my leetle “grey cells”. You will be thrilled and surpris. Mais oui, you will gasp with ze mouth as I spread my net. I am … what you say? … swell head, yes? Ah well, but I am not such a top ‘ole detective? … je crois que oui!

Hercule Poirot, P.O.I.

(Prince of Investigators)

Nice, Le 25 Mars, 1928

If divorced from its origins and read simply as a new Poirot murder investigation then there is much to admire in the ingenuity of the murderer’s plan and way it is initially presented to the authorities in The Mystery of the Blue Train. Certainly The Times Literary Supplement received the novel as warmly as ever, although the reviewer seemed to be more in awe of Poirot’s detective skills than Christie’s construction, which is a perspective that is difficult to untangle. However, it’s true that without Belgium’s greatest detective on board the police would surely have struggled to make sense of the case, which only adds to his increasingly legendary reputation. In the course of the investigation Poirot allies himself with Katherine Grey, a thirty-three-year-old woman who has worked as an elderly lady’s companion and is now resident in St Mary Mead – we can only speculate on how The Mystery of the Blue Train would be remembered if one of Katherine’s neighbours, Miss Jane Marple, had caught Le Train Bleu in her place …

Alibi

(Play by Michael Morton, 1928)

Agatha Christie was highly proprietorial over her works when it came to adaptations. This was particularly true when it came to film and television, but it was also the case regarding the stage. With this in mind, why was it that Christie allowed another person, the dramatist Michael Morton, to write Poirot’s first appearance away from the world of magazines and books in the play Alibi? Julius Green, in his history of Christie’s writing for the stage, suggests that this may have been the result of pressure from her agents who would have felt that Christie should concentrate on writing novels (which were known to be profitable), and certainly it seems to have been a financially judicious move.[59]

Agatha Christie made no secret of her general unhappiness with changes made by Morton in order to present her mystery The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for the stage. ‘I much disliked his first suggestion, which was to take about twenty years off Poirot’s age, call him Beau Poirot and have lots of girls in love with him,’ she wrote in her autobiography. In an unpublished section she elaborated on the personal impact of this, writing that Morton ‘upset me, although I fought as valiantly as I could at that time. I was too nervous and submissive to be a good fighter at that period’.[60] Nevertheless, Christie accepted that her creation was only growing in stature:

I was by this time so stuck with Poirot that I realised I was going to have him with me for life. I strongly objected to having his personality completely changed. In the end, with Gerald Du Maurier, who was producing, backing me up, we settled on removing that excellent character Caroline, the doctor’s sister, and replacing her with a young and attractive girl … I resented the removal of Caroline a good deal: I liked the part she played in village life: and I liked the idea of village life reflected through the life of the doctor and his masterful sister.[61]

Caroline’s replacement was the younger Caryl, and there’s something of a romantic frisson in her relationship with Poirot at the play’s denouement. After they say their final goodbyes (‘Perhaps one day …’ says Poirot as she leaves), stage directions inform us that ‘Poirot turns back to table, takes rose out of specimen glass which is on table, kisses it, and puts it in his button-hole’. One other crucial amendment not mentioned by Christie is the fact that the Poirot of this play is described as ‘the great French detective’, rather than Belgian – an identity change that would have horrified him.

If The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s greatest success was in its experimentation with the mystery form, then Alibi’s greatest weakness is the way it tries to force the story into a more conventional mould. Its translation to the stage inevitably means that the literary twist so central to the original novel must be lost, leaving only a rather mundane skeleton of a story behind. Although the range of Poirot stories available at the time was relatively small, perhaps The Mysterious Affair at Styles would have been a better choice for the theatre because, even if it’s a weaker novel, it has greater reliance on simple but important visuals. If well staged, Styles’s emphasis on these physical clues could be a satisfying part of the puzzle for the audience, alongside the spoken word and alibis, with the placement of a door bolt and the arrangement of ornaments allowing the most observant audience members to make some important deductions. In fact, one of her notebooks that covers stories written in the early 1950s shows a plan for the first two acts of a potential adaptation of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, involving Poirot. The plan is incomplete, and another page that may have included more text has been ripped out, but even though the idea doesn’t seem to have progressed any further it’s intriguing that Christie was even considering this. If time had allowed her to mellow regarding Poirot in the theatre, it certainly didn’t last, as she continued to remove the character from stage adaptations of novels that had featured him. In 1956, she justified her dislike of Poirot on stage by saying that ‘However impeccably acted, they would never quite be my Hercule Poirot’.[62]

When Alibi opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in May 1928 it was the slow plotting of the first few scenes that seems to have grated with several critics. ‘In the first act, drearily long and annoying, characters kept walking on and off the stage,’ wrote the critic for the Daily Express, who went on to clarify that ‘when the action really started, and the detective got to work, Alibi became a most interesting play.’[63] However, the most plaudits were reserved not for Morton or Christie, but Charles Laughton, a rising star of theatre whose performance as Poirot was the highlight of nearly all those who reviewed the play. Laughton was the first person to play Poirot in any dramatic form – before any films, radio plays or television productions – and it’s difficult to imagine now that here he was on stage, setting the template. Pictures show a non-ostentatious moustache nestling on the upper lip of the twenty-eight-year-old, dressed in black tie with a flourishing flower in his buttonhole, while he seems to be surprisingly serious in these posed shots. The Church Times stated that it was Laughton’s portrayal of Poirot ‘which more than anything else contributes to the success of Alibi’, and that the play ‘has been received with the greatest cordiality; but calmly considered, the story of a murderer and its carefully concealed denouement is an affair of words rather than action.’[64] The Daily Express described Laughton’s performance as ‘so subtle, and yet so dominating, that it gripped the house. At the end the shout “Laughton! Laughton!”, to which we are now becoming accustomed, was heard on every hand. The play was an adaptation by Michael Morton of Alibi, a book by Agatha Christie [sic], once famous as the missing woman novelist. She was missing again at the end last night when they shouted “Author!” for she hid in a box.’[65]

When Alibi toured Britain Laughton was replaced by Francis L. Sullivan in the role of Poirot. Photographs of Sullivan make him look slightly jauntier than Laughton – how much this is down to the photographer we can’t know, although Sullivan’s moustache curves upwards at the edges in a rather more impressive way than Laughton’s more demure effort. Sullivan received positive, if slightly more muted, reviews, with The Manchester Guardian saying that ‘Mr Sullivan as Poirot brought a capable finish to the part’.[66] This wasn’t the last time that Sullivan would play the role of Poirot, but Laughton would also reprise the part for a brief Broadway run in 1932, which ran for only twenty-four performances under the title The Fatal Alibi.[67] Although the play wasn’t popular there (unlike in London, where it ran for 250 performances) the overall success of the production demonstrated that, with the right care and attention, Poirot could live and breathe outside of the confines of the written word. In the event, the next time he was to appear on stage Christie would ensure that it was her own words that he was speaking.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.