Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous, has died in England. His age was unknown.
Mr. Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904. His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, his creator, was one of the most illustrious in fiction.
At the end of his life, he was arthritic and had a bad heart. He was in a wheelchair often, and was carried from his bedroom to the public lounge at Styles Court, a nursing home in Essex, wearing a wig and false mustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity. In his active days, he was always impeccably dressed.
Mr. Poirot, who was just 5 feet 4 inches tall, went to England from Belgium during World War I as a refugee. He settled in a little town not far from Styles, then an elaborate country estate, where he took on his first private case.
The news of his death, given by Dame Agatha, was not unexpected. Word that he was near death reached here last May.
Continue reading the main storyHis death was confirmed by Dodd, Mead, Dame Agatha's publishers, who will put out “Curtain,” the novel that chronicles his last days, on Oct. 15.
The Poirot of the final volume is only a shadow of the well‐turned out, agile investigator who, with a charming but immense ego and fractured English, solved uncounted mysteries in the 37 full‐length novels and collections of short stories in which he appeared.
Dame Agatha reports in “Curtain” that he managed, in one final gesture, to perform one more act of cerebration that saved an innocent bystander from disaster. “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it to quote Shakespeare, whom Poirot frequently misquoted.
Dodd, Mead had not expected another installment in the heroic achievements of the famous detective.
No manuscript came in last year, and none was expected this year, either. However, there had been many rumors to the effect that Dame Agatha had locked up two manuscripts — one a Poirot and one a Marple—in a vault and that they were not to be published until her death. Jonathan Dodd, of Dodd, Mead, said that the Poirot was the one now being published.
Although the career of Poirot will no more engage his historian, a spokesman for the author said that Dame Agatha, who will be 85 Sept. 15, intends to continue writing. In her long writing career, one that parallels the literary existence of her detective, she has published 85 full‐length novels and colrections of short stories, which have sold 350 million copies in hard cover and paperback all over the globe. This figure does not include the pirated editions behind the Iron Curtain, of which no count can be made.
In addition, under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott she has written a halfdozen romances. What is perhaps more significant is that her first title, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” is still in print.
At least 17 of her stories have been made into plays, including the famous “The Mouse Trap,” which opened in London in 1952 and is still running, setting all kinds of records for longevity in the theater.
Twelve of her tales have become motion pictures, many of which have centered on Jane Marple, Dame Agatha's other famous detective.
In the person of the lateMargaret Rutherford, Miss Marple developed her own devoted following.
The most recent of Dame Agatha's movies, “Murder on the Orient Express” opened last year, with excellent boxoffice returns. And Christie properties have been used for television mystery dramas and for radio shows.
Her hold on her audience is remarkable in a way because the kind of fiction she writes is, well, not exactly contemporary. Her characters come from the quiet and exceedingly comfortable middle class: doctors, lawyers, top military men, members of the clergy. The houses in her fiction are spacious, teas are frequent and abundant, servants abound. True, the comforts have been cut back es the real England in which her mysteries are set has been altered over the years. But the polite, leisure‐class settings have been retained.
“I could never manage miners talking in pubs,” she once confided to an interviewer, “because I don't know what miners talk about in pubs.”
‘Undisputed Head Girl’
Not everyone has agreed to her high ranking. Robert Graves complained that “her English is schoolgirlish, her situations for the most part artificial, her detail faulty.”
On the other hand, Margery Allingham, herself a writer of whodunits, called her the “undisputed head girl,” and the late Anthony Boucher, who reviewed mysteries for this newspaper, remarked, “Few writers are producing the pure puzzle novel and no one on either side of the Atlantic does it better.”
Dame Agatha who has been described as a large woman looking both kind and capable, is the daughter of a well‐to‐do American father and English mother. She was tutored at home and attended, as she recalled, innumerable classes: dancing, singing, drawing. In World War 1, she worked in a Red Cross hospital, and this experience gave her a good working knowledge of poisons, ingredients that. turn up rather frequently in her books.
In 1926, she suffered an attack of amnesia, left home and was discovered some days later in a hotel under another name. The furor stirred up by the newspapers over her disappearance has made her shy of newspapers and reporters ever since. She has kept herself inconspicuous in public, even insisting for a while that no picture of herself appear on the dust jackets of her books. She has declined to be interviewed about the death of Poirot. In 1928, she was divorced from her first husband, Archibald Christie, and in 1930 she was married to Max Mallowan, an archeologist.
It has been said that she has brought Victorian qualities to her work—a charge she does not deny. She dislikes sordid tales and confesses that she could not write them. But another side of that Victorianism is that in all her years as a writer she has had one publisher in America, Dodd Mead. Such steadfastness is surely of
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