Loyal companion and friend, Capitan Arthur Hastings helps Hercule Poirot in many of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. In today’s episode, Brook and Sarah discuss the crucial role Hastings plays for the reader and the detective.
Discussed and mentioned
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) Agatha Christie
Poirot Investigates (1924) Agatha Christie
Black Coffee (1930) Agatha Christie play
Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989-2013) ITV
Curtain (1975) Agatha Christie
Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
Death on the Nile (1937)
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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, how are you doing today? |
| Sarah | I’m doing really well. How about you? |
| Brook | I’m great. So today we’re going to talk about another one of Agatha Christie’s recurring characters. |
| Sarah | I’m super excited to talk to you today about captain Arthur Hastings. |
| Brook | I am excited too, so let’s get into it. So, although he’s the best friend of master detective Hercule Poirot, Captain Arthur J.M. Hastings, OBE is much more than just a sidekick. He’s our everyman guide through the brilliant, methodical, and sometimes complicated investigations. |
| Brook | In Hastings, Agatha Christie created the classic gentleman. He’s a bit of a throwback, even in Christie’s time. He’s often described as gallant, dapper, and well-spoken. Captain Hastings is dependable and trustworthy, almost to a fault. |
| Brook | Christie doesn’t share much about Hastings’ background in the stories, but we do learn he’s a former soldier with the experience of World War I behind him, making him both brave and loyal. He has a straightforward nature and is sometimes naive, making him the perfect foil to highlight Poirot’s extraordinary power of deduction. |
| Brook | The partnership between Hastings and Poirot began in Christie’s debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1921. Hastings finds himself drawn into Poirot’s orbit as they work together to entangle a perplexing case at a family’s country house. |
| Brook | This meeting marked the beginning of a friendship that would fuel many of the early Poirot adventures and provide a familiar grounded perspective for readers. Much like Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes, Hastings narrates stories in the first person, is often slow to see the significance of clues, and stands in as a surrogate for the reader. |
| Brook | With him as the narrator, we get many of the iconic descriptions of this Belgian detective from Hastings’ perspective. He’s the one that said that his head was exactly the shape of an egg and he always perched it a little to one side. He describes Poirot’s mustache as very stiff and military. And he says, “I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.” |
| Brook | Hastings appears in eight of the Poirot novels, and he’s also the narrator of all the short stories in Poirot Investigates. And this is a collection that was released in 1924. He’s also present in Christie’s 1930 play Black Coffee. |
| Brook | Numerous actors have portrayed the gentleman’s sidekick in radio and TV adaptations, most notably Hugh Fraser in the long-running ITV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot. |
| Brook | Another personal fact that we do learn about Captain Hastings is his attraction to women with auburn hair. In fact, Poirot teases his friend about this. But it’s actually a dark-haired woman who Hastings later falls for, and he settles down with her in Argentina, where he becomes a cattle rancher. And this marks the end of his regular appearances with Poirot, leaving the role of sidekick to other well-loved characters, such as Edward Catchpool, Felicity Lemon, Inspector Japp, and Ariadne Oliver. |
| Brook | But it is Hastings, who appears by Poirot’s side in the final novel, Curtain. Christie penned this book in the 1940s when she was afraid she might not survive World War II, but survived she did and Curtain was then eventually published in 1975. It’s the last of her books to be released during her own lifetime. |
| Brook | The story brings the two old friends together once again at Styles Court where they solved their first mystery together and I just think it’s such a lovely bookend to their partnership and it says a lot about Agatha Christie’s love for the character of Captain Hastings that he was the character to accompany Poirot in solving his last case. |
| Sarah | Thanks for that summary, Brook. He is probably, i you know I think I say this about each of the characters that we’ve discussed that Agatha Christie created, but he is one of my favorites, I think. |
| Brook | I agree. Sherlock and Watson, I think that’s a really good ah comparison because they kind of go together like peanut butter and jelly. |
| Sarah | I listened to Poirot Investigates this week in preparation for our conversation, and it was such a delight because David Suchet, who played Poirot in the ITV series, narrates most of the stories, and the remaining ones are narrated by Hugh Fraser, who played Hastings, as you said, in the series. and um Yeah, I just maybe it’s because of all the like wild things that are going on in the world. It was just really nice to spend time with both of those characters this week. |
| Brook | Yes, I agree. I’ve listened to some of those as well. And I love when David Suchet narrates because, you know, he is Poirot in my head. And so when you get his voice telling the story, I just I just adore it. |
| Sarah | One of the things that I really like about the character of Hastings is the fact that I guess like um Watson and Holmes, the pair live together Poirot and and and Hastings. And I just I think that that’s really fun. |
| Brook | I agree. That is, yeah, that’s another point, another um similarity that the pairs have. And I did read that, obviously, this is right out the gate of Agatha Christie’s career. And she did intentionally pattern that, you know, we had Arthur Conan Doyle with this very successful partnership. And so she did that intentionally, to so that she could have this character who was the everyman and, um you know, maybe, maybe average intellect isn’t fair, but definitely more of like, what the reader is going to be thinking. And then we have the, you know, highly intelligent, genius detective. So she did pattern that after, after that other earlier pair. |
| Sarah | And I mean, that makes sense because you’ve got readers who are fans of Sherlock Holmes and fans fans of mystery, and they’re familiar with that setup, right? |
| Sarah | And so you add your flavor to it and kind of make it your own. um It makes total sense for why Agatha Christie would have would have done that. |
| Brook | Yeah, I can remember some of the earlier Agatha Christie stories that I read as a younger reader, and always very thankful that we had Hastings because he was thinking what I was thinking. |
| Brook | And I needed those questions to be posed. like She does that very well [Sarah: Mm hmm.] to um have him bring up, he’ll bring up a theory, right? |
| Brook | And Poirot will sometimes not very tactfully shoot it down, but he will like explain why that couldn’t possibly be. and um ah They just I I feel like I’m holding Hastings hand going yes. Yes, that that’s where that’s where I was thinking this was going. So it it’s really you know, and I said he’s a surrogate for the reader He is and really really well done. |
| Sarah | Yeah, I agree. He he really helps draw you through the story. |
| Sarah | I didn’t get a chance to finish, but I did start listening to The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which I have read in the past and I thought it would be fun to revisit and um I didn’t get a chance to finish it. But, you know, I almost think that I prefer the Hastings short stories. |
| Brook | I like the Hastings short stories a lot as well. um So one of the criticisms that are out there, and maybe this ties in, is that he’s one of Christie’s more ah cardboard characters, kind of the, just, although we said he he does this very important role, that it is a stere kind of a stereotypical, |
| Brook | ah person that he’s not a full character himself and maybe that ah kind of plays into that because in a short story you don’t necessarily need really well-rounded full people. You can have some placeholders if you will. um I don’t know if that’s part of it or not. |
| Sarah | That might be it, what I was unable to articulate. |
| Brook | I think it’s interesting that two of the biggest Poirot novels, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, neither one of those include Hastings. um And I’m just interested in maybe what Agatha Christie’s reasoning was behind that. And then there were two short stories that he appeared in and Christie later turned them into novels and she removed the Hastings character. So just interesting choices. |
| Sarah | ahha Yeah, that is that is really interesting. |
| Brook | Part of the reason for not including Hastings might be because of the tendency that Agatha Christie seemed to let go with Poirot of this ah maybe acting a little superior, poking fun. um And she and he he does that with Hastings, but he doesn’t do that with some of the other sidekicks. And so once Hastings marries off and goes to live in Argentina. We don’t see so much of that happening in Poirot with his relationships. So that that might play into this as well. |
| Sarah | Well, and maybe she you know had developed enough confidence in her writing that she didn’t feel like she needed that character to play that role any longer. |
| Brook | Yeah, definitely had enough ah books under her belt that she might have decided how she wanted to continue to use him. And we know she’s talked about being tired of him. And maybe that was part of what she didn’t want to continue. And she got to, you know, have him have different fresh relationships with other recurring characters. |
| Sarah | Well, you mentioned um Inspector Japp and he appears in several of the stories that are in Poirot Investigates. um You know, he he’s the police officer who’s who’s on the scene when Poirot shows up to solve the case. um And so it’ll be interesting when we do Japp because we haven’t done him yet. um I’m sure that um Hastings name well will come up because I think they are in a lot of the same stories. |
| Brook | That’s right. |
| Sarah | Brook have you read Curtain? |
| Brook | I haven’t read it, but I’ve seen the television production of it. And it’s so good. So I really need to read the book. And actually, Sarah, as I was preparing this week, I thought we could do an entire episode of the mysterious affairs styles versus curtain because what Christie does in those two bookend books is just fantastic. And I’m also intrigued the fact that she wrote it in the forties [Sarah: Uh-huh.] and then wrote many other Poirot novels and stories and then released it later. So she was writing towards that. She already knew the ending. It’s it’s very fascinating to me. |
| Sarah | It is, and I love the idea of looking at those two books that bookended her career, um looking at them more closely. I haven’t read Curtain and I don’t think I’ve seen the a screen adaptation of it. I think I’m really reluctant to because I know that it’s the end of that, um the end of her career, I guess, and and the end of of that character and and um I don’t know if I have in my head, okay, I’m going to do that. I’m going to read that as the final Christie book that I read for the first time because I’ve reread several of her books. If we decide that we’re going to do that episode, then I can bump Curtain up on my list. |
| Brook | There you go. Yeah, it’s a very poetic ending. And again, I think it’s so interesting that she wrote it actually quite early and to be able to accomplish that. um And, you know, without giving too much away, Hastings outlasts Poirot. And so there’s a lot to be said for the character of Hastings, I think. |
| Sarah | Mm-hmm. |
| Brook | In our interview with Colleen Cambridge recently, she mentioned that Agatha Christie is at heart a romantic. And there’s always, um you know, a bit of love or relationship in stories. And I think that she made Captain Hastings quite a romantic as well. She creates for him a spouse who is a little bit of a counterpoint. |
| Brook | He’s this very dapper gentleman. And Dulcie Duveen is his ah eventual wife, and she’s a a singer, I believe, like a performer. ah So I love that juxtaposition that she creates, but he you know they’re very much in love. They end up with four children, two sons who never have names, but then two daughters, Judith and Grace. And I believe Judith, for sure, and perhaps both the daughters appear in later stories. |
| Sarah | Oh, interesting. Well, and, you know, I think there’s also even though Poirot makes fun of Hastings because he, you know, can’t see what what Poirot thinks is the the obvious solution. I think there’s a lot of love between them. I do like the relationship that they have. |
| Brook | Definitely. That’s right. He can poke fun at Hastings and act a little superior. But in the end, they’re very good friends. |
| Sarah | Well, Brook, thank you so much for sharing a little bit more about Captain Arthur Hastings. I love that Agatha Christie gave him an OBE as well. |
| Brook | For sure. |
| Sarah | um But thank you so much for this. It’s been really fun to ah talk about this great character. |
| Brook | It has been fun, Sarah. I love that we’re going through and learning more and more about each of these recurring characters and um we’re not finished. There’s more to come. So we hope that you’re enjoying this little mini series too, listeners. But for today, thank you for joining us on Clued In Mystery. I’m Brook. |
| Sarah | And I’m Sarah and we both love mystery. |
