Poirot and Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

“GODS”,’ was
    my ninth commandment, and the next: ‘A
    man of faith and morals. Regards himself as
    “un bon Catholique”. Reads his Bible every
    night before he goes to sleep.’ The more I
    read about Poirot, the greater the respect I
    found for his creator. I had not realised that
    the woman born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller
    on 15 September 1890, in my own father’s
    favourite seaside resort of Torquay in Devon,
    was the best-selling novelist of all time.
    Nor did I know that her books had sold
    some two billion copies around the world,
    that she was the most translated individual
    author ever – appearing in 103 languages –
    and that hers are ranked the third most
    widely published books in history, after the
    works of Shakespeare and the Bible.
    Perhaps if I’d known all those things when
    I started out on the project, I might have
    been even more terrified at the prospect of
    playing Poirot and satisfying her millions of
    fans.
    After all, they had a lot of experience of
    him: all those novels and short stories over
    fifty-five years. Indeed, even though Dame
    Agatha had professed to become ‘tired’ of
    him in the late 1940s, she nevertheless
    continued to write about him until 1972,
    when
    Collins
    published Elephants Can
    Remember. They went on to publish Curtain:
    Poirot’s Final Case , which she had written
    many years earlier, just a few months before
    her death at the age of eighty-five in January
    1976.
    So, utterly determined to get Poirot as
    right as Dame Agatha would have wanted
    him, I sat in my room in the Hell Bay Hotel
    on Bryher, steadily compiling my ever-
    expanding list of his characteristics.
    Number eleven read: ‘A great thinker who
    says he has “undoubtedly the finest brain in
    Europe”,’ while number thirteen added:
    ‘Conceited professionally – but not as a
    person.’ Fourteen said: ‘Loves his work and
    genuinely believes he is the best in the world
    and expects everyone to know him,’
    although
    fifteen
    conceded:
    ‘Dislikes
    publicity.’
    Every day Poirot’s complexities and
    contradictions,
    his
    vanities
    and
    idiosyncrasies, became ever clearer in my
    mind, but as they did so, I began to worry
    about his voice.
    In fact, in the ten weeks I spent on Bryher,
    it was Poirot’s voice that worried me the
    most. I would walk round that beautiful,
    unspoilt little island, with its population of
    under a hundred and where there isn’t a
    single tarmac road, thinking about how he
    would truly sound. Perhaps the quietness of
    the island helped me do so.
    ‘Everybody thinks he’s French,’ I said to
    myself as I walked across the great stones
    that littered the beach at Rushy Bay, or
    stomped over the tussocky grass of Heathy
    Hill, with its famous dwarf pansies.
    ‘The only reason people think Poirot is
    French is because of his accent,’ I muttered.
    ‘But he’s Belgian, and I know that French-
    speaking Belgians don’t sound French, not a
    bit of it.’
    I started experimenting by talking to
    myself in a whole range of voices, some of
    them coming from my head – all nasal and
    clipped – others coming from my chest,
    lower and a little slower, even a little gruff.
    Nothing sounded quite like the man I had
    been reading about in bed every night. They
    all sounded a little false, and that was the
    very last thing that I wanted.
    I also was well aware of Brian Eastman’s
    advice to me before I left for Bryher: ‘Don’t
    forget, he may have an accent, but the
    audience must be able to understand exactly
    what he’s saying.’ There was my problem in
    a nutshell.
    It certainly wasn’t the only one. I wanted
    to discover everything I could about the
    great detective, and as I read, I realised that
    there were some clues at hand. In the midst
    of
    compiling
    my
    list
    of
    Poirot’s
    characteristics, I came across a letter the
    great man had apparently written himself in
    April 1936, to his American publisher. It
    appeared in an American omnibus of