Please Explain My Hercule Poirot Fixation

Why can't I quit our short Belgian king?

I’ve only seen a couple of David Suchet-as-Poirot episodes thus far.

Recently, I saw fit to use BlueSky for its highest intended purpose: crafting brief erotic fan fiction about Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s beloved – by her fans, if not by her – creation. If you’re not yet horned up for this sensual use of the newsletter format, I assure you that tumescence is about to ensue.

HERCULE POIROT: Mon ami, whom do you believe to be the murderer?

CAPTAIN HASTINGS: Goodness me, surely you don’t want to know MY opinion?

POIROT: Au contraire!

HASTINGS: Well…that lady did it.

POIROT: Wrong, you big hot stupid baby bitch English piece of shit.

HASTINGS: Let me die for you.

Now, if you’re turned on but lack context for the Babygirl-esque sub/dom working relationship described above, do not fret! I shall give you more details.

Poirot is a Belgian police detective who arrives in England as a refugee sometime after the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. He has an egg-shaped head, a voluminous mustache, and a very high opinion of his own intellectual prowess – with very good reason.

John Malkovich as Poirot in “The ABC Murders” written by Sarah Phelps. It’s fucking brilliant, and my first onscreen Poirot experience a few years back.

Like Sherlock Holmes, he’s got a sidekick who isn’t as much of a genius as he is. Instead of Dr. Watson, he’s got Captain Hastings, an injured veteran of WWI who has a pronounced affinity for redheads.

Poirot displays an obsessive need to straighten objects and keep himself and his surroundings as tidy as possible. His manners are courtly until he starts yelling at criminals who piss him the fuck off by lying. He is almost certainly on the asexual spectrum, but regardless of his specific identification, he is obviously a queer icon of waffles and WISDOM (to my knowledge, he does not eat any Belgian waffles during his adventures.)

Agatha Christie was inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and Conan Doyle was himself inspired, at least in part, by Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin. This makes Poirot a character with at least a couple of fabulous literary antecedents. (His name is quite similar to character names chosen by certain other authors, and I don’t think Christie ever made a secret of her influences.)

He appears in 33 of Christie’s novels, 51 of her short stories, and two of her plays. She sat with the guy for more than half a century, and seemingly came to resent him nearly as much as audiences came to adore him.

I’ve never written a series with a character who recurs, but I can see how endless letters begging for the next Poirot adventure may have eventually annoyed Agatha Christie. She was so incredibly prolific, with such a busy mind, that I don’t imagine she wanted to give much extra space to recycling the same old formula (though of course she did, because it worked.)

Anyway, I spend a lot of time listening to Hercule Poirot stories, and a little bit of time watching them onscreen, and a ton of time thinking about Hercule Poirot, and (in truth) exactly zero time thinking he is sexy.

Holmes displays empathy sometimes in Conan Doyle’s stories, but Poirot displays more of it. At the same time, Poirot is a little more mysterious to me than Holmes, whose motivations seem entirely straightforward.

Poirot is quite good with people, not nearly so acerbic or combative as Holmes, yet despite his many “friends,” he still seems to spend much of his life alone. I can’t imagine Holmes being particularly lonesome, though he misses Watson here and there, but I wonder at Poirot’s ability to be so entirely self-possessed whether solo or in a crowd, and to seem to choose to be among other humans rather than to need to be among them.

There are a few audio and onscreen interpretations of Poirot that hint at or directly address a dark and troubled past, often highlighting the trauma of war and displacement. I suppose it’s a credit to Christie that I continue to seek out even more. I first got into the audiobooks while very sick with COVID in late 2022, and have listened to even more in the years since. Now I’ve moved on to scouring various streaming services for different versions of the same old stories.

I bring him up to my friends a lot. It’s getting kind of weird. At this point, I don’t know if I’m reading and watching and listening for pleasure or for research.

Perhaps Poirot himself might relate.