Puzzles in Agatha Christie, Part Three
Posted 21 November 2008 in Books by Catriona
And yet more puzzles from Agatha Christie novels:
4. Whose son is Colin Lamb? (The Clocks, 1963)
Colin Lamb is the one-off investigator in The Clocks, a murder mystery tied up with espionage. He’s acquainted with Poirot through his father, whom Poirot knows and, perhaps, worked with in earlier years. This is all made clear when he arrives in London to lay the details of a curious murder case in front of Poirot.
But “Lamb” is not his real name; he works for an unspecified MI branch (presumably MI5 or MI6), and Lamb is his current pseudonym. His real name is never mentioned.
So who is his father? Is he someone we’ve already met in an earlier book?
Colin’s father is a police officer: Poirot makes sly comments about Colin following his father’s profession, but Colin points out that he’s following it in a rather tangential fashion. But which police officer?
He may, of course, be someone we’ve never met. But if he’s a character from earlier books, who could it be? The logical choices would be Chief Inspector Japp, Superintendant Spence, or Superintendant Battle, but none of them seem plausible options.
Japp’s personal life we know nothing about, as far as I can recall from my reading. But he’s primarily a character in the earlier books, and seems, perhaps, too senior a man to have a thirty-something son in the mid-1960s. For the same reason, I’m excluding another possible: Colonel Race. I don’t recall Race’s age being specified but he is not, I believe, a young man when he makes Poirot’s acquaintance.
(It’s also less likely that Colin would describe his career as tangentially like his father’s if his father were Race, since Race was involved in espionage work.)
But, then, what we know of the other men doesn’t make them more likely characters, either. Superintendant Battle we know has a daughter, whom we meet briefly and tangentially in Towards Zero (1944), while Superintendant Spence’s home life, as revealed in Hallowe’en Party (1969), centres on a house shared with an elderly sister: there’s no mention of a wife or children. That wouldn’t stop either man from having a son, but it does mean that neither man is explicitly described as having a son.
I can’t isolate who Colin Lamb’s father is and, given the ambiguous treatment of the character in The Clocks, I’m not sure we’re supposed to.
But it annoys me, nonetheless, in a mild fashion.
5. Does Poirot have any family?
Now this is a tricky one, because Poirot clearly lies all the time about his family: in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, he talks of a cousin with developmental delays to induce confidences from a witness, and he does likewise with a relative suffering from jaundice in Dumb Witness (which I addressed in my last set of puzzles).
Similarly, the mysterious Achilles Poirot, the putative brother in The Big Four (1927), is—according to the standard reading, which I think is correct—Poirot himself in disguise. But is it possible that Poirot himself is entirely without family?
Poirot is Catholic: he mentions this on more than one occasion, most notably in Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), when he recognises that the so-called Father Lavigny is like no priest with whom he, as good Catholic, is familiar. And for a Catholic man born in the nineteenth century to have no extended family whatsoever seems unlikely to me. In fact, in Three-Act Tragedy (1935), he mentions to Mr Satterthwaite that “as a boy, I was poor. There were many of us. We had to get on in the world” (47).
Against that, however, we have to consider the fact that Poirot is also Belgian, and Belgium suffered terribly in both World Wars. It is possible, if not likely, that his entire family may have been killed in one or the other of those conflicts.
But the incident that always strikes me as suggestive is the one in Cards on the Table (1936), where he sets a trap for a young girl he suspects of being an opportunistic thief by leaving her alone with small, luxurious items that he claims are Christmas presents for his nieces and nephews.
Among them are an enormous quantity of gossamer-thin silk stockings, the type of luxurious present that a doting uncle would plausibly buy for nieces, especially if those nieces were in straitened circumstances: the vast expense of the stockings has already given the shop assistant an entirely false impression of Poirot’s morals.
The quantity is ostensibly part of the trap: he believes, quite rightly, that the girl will be more tempted to take a few items from a large pile than from a small one, where their loss is more likely to be noticed.
What, then, is the purpose of these stockings? Are they purely to trap the thief? In which case, what does he do with them afterwards? Return them to the shop? Store expensive stockings against a rainy day?
Or does Poirot actually have nieces? Is he the doting uncle who feels that, with not only Christmas close but also, simultaneously, a man murdered almost under his nose, that this is an opportunity to undertake a small experiment and finish some of his Christmas shopping?
That does not seem an impossible solution to me. Poirot, with his occasional habit of calling himself “Papa Poirot” and his perpetual interest in the happiness of younger people—in Death on the Nile, for example, this interest induces him to allow a murderer to choose their own death—seems to me eminently suited to be the doting uncle who showers a bevy of pretty nieces with small luxuries each Christmas.
(Quote from Three-Act Tragedy from the 1972 Fontana edition.)
Share your thoughts [11]
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Tim wrote at Nov 24, 01:01 pm
Alternatively, his ‘perpetual interest in the happiness of younger people’ could be interpreted in precisely the opposite way, indicating a man who has no children of his own and seeks other outlets for his paternal feelings. Nor is it impossible that he bought the stockings purely for the experiment — I think he mentions in some of the inter-war novels that he has more money than he knows what to do with.
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Catriona wrote at Nov 24, 01:53 pm
Yes, he does mention that he has become very rich, and seeks to spend that money and his increasing leisure time first in travel (and I believe the novels showing him in Egypt and the Far East were written fairly far apart but supposed to be set close together on a single trip) and then, much later, with searching out satisfactory restaurants.
And I certainly don’t think he has children of his own, though he’s occasionally susceptible to the attractions of certain types of women.
But the fact that he doesn’t have children of his own does not negate the idea of his having nieces and nephews—he doesn’t seem to have any in England, so he may not see them often, or at all.
He does mention siblings, without providing details, so nieces and nephews aren’t out of the question.
Looking at the passage again, a couple of things spring to mind: he buys nineteen pairs, despite the fact that there’s a reduction in cost if he buys two dozen (141). Fair enough: that’s probably part of the trap. He may well feel, and plausibly, that the girl will suspect he’s less likely to notice two pairs missing out of an odd number.
But, the stockings are included among a pile of other potential gifts: “stockings piled up in untidy heaps—some fur-lined gloves—calendars and boxes of bonbons” (151).
Some of this is set-dressing: the narrator specifically mentions it as “a table whose contents were strangely at variance, had she but known it, with the well-known order and neatness of Hercule Poirot” (151). But how much of it is set-dressing? It may well be, as I’ve said above, necessary to buy so many pairs of stockings, but is it necessary to buy all these other items, as well? Just to set a trap?
(Quotes from the 1978 Fontana edition.)
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Tim wrote at Nov 24, 02:18 pm
I can easily imagine Poirot taking a stage-manager’s pleasure just in finding the elements and constructing the scene. “And one more box of the little sweets. Too much, perhaps? No, c’est vrai. The trap, it is set.” Afterwards he might ask Miss Lemon or George to find some good children to give them to, or something. Or maybe offload them on to Ariadne Oliver, who definitely does have nieces, nephews and godchildren.
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Catriona wrote at Nov 24, 09:46 pm
Okay, your excellent Poirot voice has convinced me. (Also, I am easily cowed by people who understand French.)
No, but seriously, that’s plausible. The whole novel is stagey—this would be, in part, a reflection of that first elaborate staging of Shaitana’s dinner party (in the most recent adaptation, would you believe, they made his death both murder and suicide?) and would prefigure the greater melodrama of the parlour scene at the end.
It does raise the question of what happens to everything afterwards—but that’s definitely unanswerable (and not as interesting, to me, as the other question).
Okay, so here’s the next question: why doesn’t he have any family? If he doesn’t, why not? Catholic man, mid-nineteenth-century family (he’s an old man already in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, past retirement age), open acknowledgement that he has or had many siblings—why doesn’t he have pretty nieces and great-nieces to shower gifts on, as he claims to have here?
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Tim wrote at Nov 24, 11:08 pm
If we accept the length of his post-Styles career as written, I think we have to retcon his age at Styles. As for his family, perhaps, as you say, they died in the war. Do any of his mentions of siblings occur in a context where he’s not talking to a suspect?
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Catriona wrote at Nov 24, 11:55 pm
Yes: he mentions the siblings—in the quote I cited above from Three-Act Tragedy—to Mr Satterthwaite, who might, I suppose, be considered a suspect in the first death in that novel, but wasn’t present at the second death, so is unlikely to be a serious suspect. And the context isn’t really crime, either: he’s talking about how he went from a poor boy in a large family to a rich successful man able to indulge himself with travel.
The problem with Poirot’s age, I suspect, is that Christie herself rapidly realised she’d made a mistake making him so old to be begin with. So the books span more than fifty years and show the passage of time—I rather enjoy the ones where Poirot comes face to face with the swinging ’60s, though they’re not often satisfying mysteries. But Poirot can’t possibly age that much: at most, his personal chronology would support twenty years—maybe closer to thirty, though that would make the events of Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case even more improbable (though I know that was written some thirty years before it was published).
But then, at the same time, Hastings seems to age at a reasonable rate: I can’t remember how old his youngest daughter is in Curtain, but she’s not that young. So there are three or more warring chronologies in these books.
Still, this isn’t unique: Ruth Rendell made the same mistake by making Wexford too senior/old in From Doon With Death: both he and Mike Burden would be well past retirement age by now.
And perhaps trying to resolve the chronologies of fifty-odd years of Poirot novels is as pointless as looking for a coherent theory of magic in Baum’s novels.
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Nick Caldwell wrote at Nov 25, 12:35 am
It never really occurred to me to think about the ageing of a principal character in a long-running narrative. It seems to be more of a problem for detective fiction than for other genres (to do with the greater claims to realism, perhaps?).
Certainly, no one seems to bothered that Peter Parker has been in his early 20s for the last 40 years – although that may be a poor example, given all the retconning being done to Spiderman these days – and they usually just update the location of the American imperialist misadventure that creates Iron Man to some new conflict.
One of the few ongoing series that really addresses the ageing issue well would be Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga — one of the reasons she’s slowed her output of the series is that it’s hard to see Miles surviving any more adventures. On the other hand, generational sagas have a bit more invested in showing a believable progression of time.
Sorry, disconnected thoughts here.
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Catriona wrote at Nov 25, 01:07 am
Well, it’s not always a problem in detective fiction, either. Rex Stout just refused to age either Nero Wolfe or Archie Goodwin—time moves around them and they remain ageless. It works for Stout: partly because he’s a superb writer and partly because there’s a hint of the surreal in the novels anyway. So the characters pass through Prohibition to World War Two to the swinging ’60s and they don’t age and they don’t become ill and there’s no fear that they’ll die unless Archie catches a stray bullet or someone succeeds in blowing up the brownstone.
Works in Stout’s hands: wouldn’t work in many.
Some adopt other techniques: Sherlock Holmes, for example, moves through time, but has an ageless quality. He ages, but he has the type of face and physique from which it is difficult to determine his age.
Stories with recurring characters that have a shorter run are easier: Peter Wimsey ages, and his aging it relevant (more to his personal life than his professional life), but there are so few Wimsey novels compared to Poirot novels that it doesn’t matter.
No, I think the problem with Christie and with Rendell is that they emphasise the characters’ ages. Wexford is always having health crises, his daughters and Dora age—and the former’s children age, as well—and then the novels move into contemporary themes that age the narratives themselves: the secret slave trade in England in Simisola, pedophilia and domestic violence in Harm Done, the need for environmental sympathy in the planning of infrastructure in Road Rage.
And Christie is always emphasising that Poirot is an old man—the end result for the reader is a tendency to think, “But he must be at least 100 years old by now!”
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Tim wrote at Nov 25, 01:53 am
If Poirot was about 40 in 1917 (The Mysterious Affair at Styles), he would be about 95 in 1972 (Elephants Can Remember). Curtain is always problematic, because internal evidence suggests it takes place in 1945 or 1946, but the publication date (1975) gives the most commonly accepted date of his death.
We can shave a few years off if we ignore the 1893 date from Chocolate Box and assume that Poirot was relatively new to the Belgian police force in 1904 (when Japp first met him). His retirement from the police force before the outbreak of WWI could be seen as a transfer to military or secret service rather than a retirement on grounds of age. This could put him in his 30s in 1917, close to Hastings’ age.
It’s worth noting that, although Poirot has a limp when we first meet him in Styles, in that same book he also does a lot of nimble rushing around, running down stairs and darting about. In Murder on the Links he rapidly climbs a tree to jump through a window. He’s clearly fit and spry at this time.
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Catriona wrote at Nov 25, 02:21 am
See, even retconning his age makes it unlikely he would survive through the later books.
I agree Curtain is problematic, as is Sleeping Murder—I believe these were the two books Christie wrote during World War Two, signed over to her husband and daughter, and put in a bank as a sort of life insurance policy in case her London house was hit? In that case, internal evidence would point to the 1940s. The problem with Curtain is that we have to read it as occurring in the 1970s because of the ending. Otherwise, some twenty books don’t make any sense.
I always assumed Poirot’s limp was a war wound or an injury sustained in the exit from Belgium: unlike Watson’s highly mobile bullet wound, it doesn’t recur in any of the later books.
But there are two passages I’d like to point out.
The first is from The Mysterious Affair At Styles:
That “in his time” isn’t the type of phrase one would customarily apply to a young man, a man in his 30s or even his 40s.
Then there’s this passage, fifteen years later, from Three Act Tragedy (which I’ve just realised that I shouldn’t be hyphenating):
This is, as with the reference to his siblings, to Mr Satterthwaite: there’s no reason to believe that he’s lying about this, nothing that would make a mendacious version of his career relevant to an investigation. The investigation has not, in fact, started yet. So unless we accept that Poirot always, reflexively lies about his career and life, this is truth (as far as the truth stands in the world of the novels in 1935).
And this is the career of an older man. That “due to retire” implies age, while the “due to retire. There came the war” undercuts your ingenious argument above about it being a military or ministry transfer.
I think, ultimately, the case is that Christie made a mistake in making him retirement age in Styles, and spent the rest of his career ignoring, shifting, or outright lying about his age to deal with the fact that her detective was nearly one hundred years old.
(In fact, that would mean Curtain made sense: he is a very old man in that, some twenty or twenty-five years after Styles, according to the internal chronology.)
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Tim wrote at Nov 25, 03:47 am
> I think, ultimately, the case is that Christie made a mistake in making him retirement age in Styles, and spent the rest of his career ignoring, shifting, or outright lying about his age to deal with the fact that her detective was nearly one hundred years old.
Absolutely. Any attempt to create a consistent and plausible chronology from the novels must ignore at least some of the material presented in them.
Barring supernatural explanations, that is.