Brook and Sarah continue discussing Agatha Christie’s recurring sleuths and characters. In this episode, they look into Inspector Japp.
Discussed and mentioned
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) Agatha Christie
Lord Edgeware Dies (1933) Agatha Christie
Death in the Clouds (1935) Agatha Christie
One Two Buckle My Shoe (1940) Agatha Christie
Death on the Nile (1937) Agatha Christie
Evil Under the Sun (1941) Agatha Christie
Taken at the Flood (1948) Agatha Christie
“The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim” (1923) Agatha Christie
“The Affair at the Victory Ball” (1923) Agatha Christie
Curtain (1975) Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989-2013) ITV series
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Transcript
This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.
| Sarah | Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah. |
| Brook | And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery. |
| Sarah | Hi, Brook. |
| Brook | Hi, Sarah. Today we’re going to take a closer look at one of Agatha Christie’s recurring Scotland Yard detectives, Inspector Japp. |
| Sarah | I’m really looking forward to this. |
| Brook | I am too. So, appearing in Agatha Christie’s very first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Japp holds the distinction of being among the earliest characters to work alongside Poirot. |
| Brook | He starts off as an inspector and is later promoted to chief inspector of Scotland Yard. Christie drew inspiration for Japp from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stories. |
| Brook | In fact, the resemblance is quite uncanny. Both of them are occasionally described as ferret-faced and play a similar role. The capable, if unimaginative, police officer who serves as a contrast to the brilliant private detective. |
| Brook | Japp appears in seven Poirot novels and several short stories. While he often plays a minor role, usually calling in Poirot for his unique insight, Japp steps into a more prominent position in a few books, Lord Edgeware Dies, Death in the Clouds, and One Two Buckle My Shoe. |
| Brook | In many ways, Japp functions like Colonel Hastings, though the dynamic is different. Hastings is Poirot’s loyal friend and frequent narrator, while Japp is simply a professional colleague, a man of the law who respects Poirot’s brilliance, even if he doesn’t always understand it. And the two sometimes clash because of this. Japp is taking things at face value and relying on practical evidence. |
| Brook | And of course, Poirot dives deep into nuance, motive, and psychology. Japp disappears from Christie’s novels after 1940, but he’s not entirely forgotten. Poirot mentions him in Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun. And another Christie detective, Superintendent Spence, refers to Japp in Taken at the Flood, which didn’t come out until 1948. |
| Brook | So, this was a little nod to readers who remember Japp’s earlier contributions. Dame Agatha doesn’t give us much access into Japp’s personal life. |
| Brook | No first name is ever given for Japp in the novels. In adaptations, he’s called James Japp, but this isn’t from Christie herself. So today we’re giving this often overlooked inspector his due. |
| Sarah | Well, thank you for that summary, Brook. Have you read Lord Edgware Dies, Death in the Clouds, or One Two Buckle My Shoe? |
| Brook | I have read One Two Buckle My Shoe, but it’s not something that I’ve read really recently. So I I don’t have a lot of memory of all the ins and outs of the story. |
| Sarah | Yeah, because i’m I’m curious about how you mentioned his portrayal is slightly different in those books than in in the other ones. And I’m curious about that because I i haven’t um read them. |
| Sarah | So I can’t I can’t do that comparison. |
| Brook | Yeah, I think that he just um played a more prominent part rather than being such a side character. And this week I read a couple of short stories that really portrayed him um prominently. And I think that it probably is similar. |
| Brook | I read “The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim” short story as well as “The Affair at the Victory Ball”. And in these two, really the conversations about solving the mystery happen one-on-one with Poirot and Japp. |
| Sarah | I like that they have this respectful relationship. |
| Brook | Mm-hmm. |
| Sarah | I think they respect each other. |
| Brook | I do too. Yeah. Poirot does do his thing where he will point out how someone else isn’t nearly as bright as he is and that they need to use their little gray cells and they could figure it out. |
| Brook | But I think overall he does respect Japp, and he sees him as very professional and um you know somebody who he enjoyed working with, it seems. |
| Sarah | And do we know how they met? I am trying to remember from The Mysterious Affair at Styles if he is introduced to Japp in that book or whether they already knew each other. |
| Brook | I believe that they refer to knowing each other in previous cases that they met ah in Belgium in in the early 1900s and investigated a forgery together. |
| Brook | So I think that the understanding in that very first novel is that they were familiar with each other already. There’s so much about that that I love that Christie does right off the bat because you know you and I love how we have this Christie-verse where ah we like to imagine that these characters are out there all coexisting in the world. |
| Brook | So I think that that is a nice touch to think that ah these characters were existing before she ever wrote about them. |
| Sarah | I agree. It’s like we’re inserted partway into their lives. |
| Brook | Mm-hmm, exactly. Yeah, it’s really it’s really clever. |
| Brook | And that, you know, that I mentioned how some of the other characters refer to Japp later in her canon, even though he hasn’t been in the stories maybe for years, but it’s still that same that same way of having that continuity and drawing people back to some of the earlier stories. |
| Sarah | Yeah. And, and clearly she was very deliberate in that, right? Like she wouldn’t, she did that with intention. Yeah. |
| Brook | Yeah, definitely. |
| Sarah | I think it’s interesting that he’s not the only character who kind of fades away though, from her stories. So even though she continues to refer to him, you said, he didn’t appear past 1940. |
| Sarah | And you know, our conversation that we had about Hastings was the same thing, right? He didn’t appear, appears in Curtain, but, you know, between Curtain and I don’t remember that the story that he appeared in yeah before that, but there was quite a long time, right? |
| Brook | Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. |
| Sarah | I think it’s interesting that she does that with a couple of characters. |
| Brook | Definitely. And with Hastings, we get an explanation. We are told that he gets married and he goes to be a cattle rancher, I believe, in Argentina. So we at least have an explanation for him. And I think that speaks to how um she thought of these characters maybe and or how important they were to the stories. Because with um Inspector Japp, he literally just disappears. |
| Brook | And uh that goes along with the fact that she doesn’t give him a first name and we’ve and we’ve discussed that with other side characters as well. There are people she just doesn’t even acknowledge in that way and you know she gets criticism for having maybe um kind of archetype characters but I think that there is a very as you say intentional thing. Like Japp was accomplishing what needed to be accomplished in the story. ah She didn’t need him to be a fully fleshed out character. He still like gave that sense of realism and the represented the procedure and the you know detective of the story and then created the ability to have the contrast between the way Poirot would think of a case and the and the policeman did. And I don’t necessarily think that that is ah bad thing. He did what needed to happen in the story. |
| Sarah | I do think though that you know you mentioned how Hastings does get this backstory explanation for why he ceases to appear. |
| Brook | Yeah, it is interesting. You wonder how she categorized different characters in in her mind, I guess. Like this one is worthy of a full backstory and first name and you learn about their private life and this one is not. |
| Brook | And I use the word archetypes and I thought it was really interesting. ah the short story, the “The Affair at the Victory Ball”, it’s based on the characters of the Italian comedies, uh, such as Harlequin. And i don’t know, there’s five or six different masked characters and each of the suspects, this is a, ah again, a ball. And each of the suspects is in costume as one of those character archetypes. And, um, Christie was really inspired by these masked characters in her creation of Mr. Quin as well, which we’ve discussed Harley Quin. |
| Sarah | Uh-huh. |
| Brook | So apparently that art form, which really deals with caricatures or archetype characters where, um you know, the Harley Quin character acts and does things in a certain way. And, you know, the different ones kind of fulfill a role. Seems to be something she was really intrigued with and really liked to play with. Because here we’re seeing it again in ah in a short story where Japp is is the lead ah sleuth. |
| Sarah | That is interesting. And interesting that she plays with that um that theme in that particular short story. |
| Brook | Mm-hmm. And it it was great in that the and she does this really well. Like if she is going to ah put something out there, so for instance, in this case, it’s costumed characters, then you can bet that the solution of the mystery is going to revolve around that. Like she doesn’t waste a theme. And this one is is definitely that way. |
| Sarah | So I know that Japp appears with Hastings in Styles. What about some of his other characters? Does he appear in anything with Ariadne Oliver? |
| Brook | I didn’t find any connections with um Japp and Oliver, but Miss Lemon is also in “The Affair at the Victory Ball”, which is another character that we still need to talk about, Sarah. |
| Brook | And I think that would be really interesting. And I think that that is a great point that I would love to see if there are some other crossovers. so ah Superintendent Spence, as I mentioned, discusses Japp. It’s kind of like hearkening back. |
| Brook | I would be interested to know if there’s any crossover with Japp and Superintendent Battle. Superintendent Battle actually came to mind for me several times this week and in preparing because I found him so—I really liked him. I felt like he was like this heroic kind of admirable character. And I wanted more battle because he felt very like real to me. |
| Brook | And then Japp is not quite as memorable, is he? |
| Sarah | No, he isn’t. |
| Brook | No, you really feel like he’s just kind of, he’s there fulfilling his role as we talked about. um And then the very interesting thing that also comes up with these two is Superintendent Battle, as far as the film or TV adaptations, was written out of a lot of the stories that he actually appears in in Christie’s work. And I think we learned that Miss Marple took over some of his cases and for the TV shows. |
| Brook | um And the exact opposite happens with Jap. um In the scheme of things, he’s a pretty small player for Christie, but because he appeared with David Suchet in many of the Agatha Christie’s Poirot TV show, it kind of enhanced or and expanded that character. I think if you only had watched Poirot on TV, you might think Japp is very important to the Christieverse. And in fact, he’s he’s not so much. |
| Sarah | Yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting. And, and um obviously, it wasn’t um Agatha Christie’s decision to write battle out of the adaptations, right? Someone else has made that choice. |
| Sarah | um But interesting to give one character of prominence that and another character doesn’t and reversing their um kind of positions in in her catalogue. |
| Brook | Yeah, that’s a really important point to make that these were not Agatha Christie’s choices. Somewhere along the line, producers or writers, you know, took this upon themselves. But it it is interesting to see how it how it played out. |
| Brook | Philip Jackson is that well-known actor who portrayed Inspector Japp with ah David Suchet as Poirot. |
| Sarah | Just thinking a little bit more about that respect that we were talking about, you know, in a lot of modern mystery fiction where you have a sleuth that isn’t a member of the police force, the police character often expresses some frustration with having this other person, whether they’re a hairdresser or a bookshop owner or, you know, whatever their reason for for being involved in the crime is, um kind of appearing at all these crime scenes. |
| Sarah | And we I don’t think Poirot and Japp have that same dynamic, right? Because I think, as you said, Japp brings Poirot into the investigations, right? |
| Brook | Yeah, that’s a neat observation. It’s true. If there’s any um rub at all, it might be Poirot being unimpressed with you know his skills of deduction, but I don’t feel like Japp is trying to keep this private detective out. He’s, as you said, inviting him in like, I need your help. You’re going to look at this differently than me. So that is that is really neat. And I think that that is an interesting concept because it’s very different from a lot of the other mysteries where the where the trained professionals are trying to keep the amateurs out. |
| Sarah | Yeah, yeah. It’s an interesting shift that you know, we don’t see that in Christie’s fiction, but we do certainly see that is one of the tropes, right, that you expect in a cozy mystery, although Christie wasn’t writing cozies, but, um you know, mysteries featuring non-police sleuths. |
| Brook | Exactly. And I think that even, you know, we mentioned that you um Japp was patterned after Inspector Lestrade. Even in those, I think that Sherlock Holmes and Lestrade had a more um conflicting relationship. And so Christie chose not to do that. And that’s pretty interesting. |
| Sarah | Yeah, no that’s a good point about the relationship between Lestrade and and Sherlock Holmes, because I think it was fraught with more tension. |
| Brook | Definitely. |
| Sarah | Well, thanks, Brook. I think this has been really fun to learn a little bit more about this character that, you know, we don’t get to see a lot of in Christie’s books. |
| Brook | It has been fun. I love learning about some of these less talked about characters and um and it just adds more to all the stories. |
| Brook | So thank you, Sarah. And thank you listeners for joining us today on Clued in Mystery. But for today, I’m Brook. |
| Sarah | And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery. |
