Hercule Poirot

Hercule Poirot is the Belgian detective whose friendship has shaped Arthur Hastings’s life and whose return to Styles sets the final case in motion. There, amid old memories and a body weakened by age and illness, Poirot confronts a murderer who cannot readily be brought to justice because his method is to make others commit crimes. Poirot ultimately stops him by committing murder himself, leaving Hastings to discover both the truth and the cost of that choice in a manuscript written near the end of Poirot’s life.

Identity and Return to Styles

Poirot and Hastings first met again at Styles, where Hastings had gone to stay with an old friend. Hastings remembered being astonished by Poirot’s limping figure and prominent moustache; in retrospect, that encounter began a friendship whose influence, he says, moulded his life. They had hunted down another murderer together, and Hastings had met his future wife in the course of that earlier association. When Hastings returns to Styles decades later, he is once again going there to meet Poirot.

The reunion is framed by a sharp physical contrast with the earlier days. Hastings has not seen Poirot for nearly a year, and the last meeting left him shocked and saddened: Poirot is now very old and almost crippled with arthritis. He had gone to Egypt hoping to improve his health, but returned in worse condition. His cheerful letter nevertheless invites Hastings back to Styles, a place Poirot calls the first home he had in England. The old house has become a guest house, and Poirot describes his return as a chance to relive the past.

The New Case and the Pattern Behind It

Poirot does not return to Styles merely for nostalgia. When Hastings asks why he has come, Poirot points out that he had not answered earlier, then states that he is there to hunt down a murderer. He predicts that a murder will soon be committed there. The declaration gives the setting a double significance: Styles is both the place where Poirot and Hastings first joined forces and the scene of a new investigation.

Poirot approaches the case through a pattern spanning earlier deaths. His notes describe Leonard Etherington, who died from arsenical poisoning after a death initially attributed to food poisoning. Etherington’s unhappy wife was arrested, tried, and acquitted because the evidence did not establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt. General opinion nevertheless treated her as guilty, and the social consequences of that suspicion were severe: she was cold-shouldered by friends and died two years later after taking an overdose of sleeping draught. Poirot’s account of the case thus distinguishes a formal verdict from public certainty, and a proven crime from the social damage caused by an unproved accusation.

In outlining the wider pattern, Poirot identifies an otherwise unnamed figure as X. X had been on intimate terms with Etherington, had lived in the same village as Riggs, knew Mrs Bradley, had been photographed walking with Freda Clay, and was near the house when Matthew Litchfield died. Although one case placed X far away when the crime occurred, Poirot argues that the repeated connections are too numerous to dismiss as coincidence. His suspicion is not that X personally carries out each killing; rather, the repeated proximity points toward a less direct and more elusive means of causing crime.

Witness, Evidence, and the Suicide Verdict

Poirot’s own testimony becomes pivotal after Barbara Franklin’s death. At the inquest, he describes a conversation from the day before her death: she had been depressed, worried about her health, and had spoken of periods when life did not seem worth living. He also states that on the morning of June 10 he saw her coming out of the laboratory with a small bottle in her hand. She looked startled when she saw him.

The coroner presents the evidence as a choice between accident, suicide, and administration by another person. The medical evidence establishes poisoning by physostigmine sulphate. The inquest also hears of Barbara’s poor health and nervous condition, her belief that she was obstructing her husband’s career, and the absence of evidence showing exactly when or how she took the poison. The missing bottle is an unresolved irregularity, but the coroner treats it as possibly consistent with the suggestion that she had put it away. The jury finds that Barbara took her own life while temporarily of unsound mind.

That verdict does not settle the case for everyone. A local woman recalls the earlier murder at the Court and repeats the old certainty that Mrs Inglethorp’s husband was responsible, then speculates that a husband may again be implicated. Hastings corrects her that the coroner’s verdict was suicide, but she questions whether the official conclusion must be right. Her exchange shows how old suspicion at Styles persists alongside a new, formally settled death—and how easily public stories assign guilt before evidence can resolve it.

Poirot’s Moral Reversal

Hastings believes Poirot will prevail. Looking back, he records that he never imagined X could defeat Poirot, despite Poirot’s frailty and ill health; his confidence rests on a lifetime of seeing his friend succeed. Poirot himself introduces doubt when he speaks of the possibility that something may happen to him. In the manuscript he leaves behind, the meaning of that warning becomes clear: Poirot has come to understand that X’s crimes cannot be stopped by ordinary legal means, and that he must kill X to prevent further attempts.

Poirot explains X’s method as psychological pressure rather than hypnotism or a direct instruction to kill. X finds the precise words, phrases, and intonations that weaken another person’s ordinary resistance, building pressure around a vulnerable impulse until the person’s better qualities are enlisted in an act that also serves a destructive purpose. Poirot tells Hastings that this happened to him as well. When Poirot had spoken of a crime to be committed at Styles, he had not always meant the same crime: one was to be committed by Poirot himself.

The decision contradicts the principle Poirot had lived by. He says that he does not approve of murder and values human life, yet concludes that X is beyond the reach of the law and cannot be defeated by any other means he can devise. He describes himself as reluctant, delaying action even though he believes it necessary. The attempt on Mrs Luttrell becomes the decisive pressure to act at once.

Poirot arranges for Hastings to bring X to his room that night. He gives X no opportunity to deliver a prepared story, instead telling him directly what he knows. X does not deny the accusation; he sits back, smirks, and asks what Poirot intends to do. Poirot answers that he proposes to execute him. This confrontation turns the detective’s final victory into an ethically compromised act: the man who has devoted his career to preventing murder uses murder as the only means he believes will stop X.

Manuscript, Death, and Narrative Legacy

The account reaches Hastings through Poirot’s manuscript, not through an explanation given while the two men are together. The manuscript ends after Poirot’s reflections on their good days. Hastings’s final note records his disbelief and recognition: he says he should have understood when he saw the bullet hole placed symmetrically in the centre of X’s forehead. The detail retrospectively confirms the meaning of the apparent suicide and exposes the final case as a deliberately arranged death.

The inquest into X’s death had returned a verdict of suicide. The scene appeared to support it: the door was locked from the inside, the key was in the dead man’s pocket, the windows were shut, and a pistol lay in his hand. The pistol had been seen on his dressing table during his stay at Styles. A surgeon questioned the exact central position of the wound, but the evidence was otherwise made to look conclusive. Hastings calls the death another beautifully staged crime, with no alternative solution apparent to those investigating it.

The gap between the public account and the manuscript’s disclosure completes Poirot’s final case. In public, X’s death is accepted as suicide; in private, Poirot’s explanation identifies it as the act that ends X’s threat. Yet the victory is inseparable from the method. Poirot’s long record of bringing murderers to justice concludes with his own deliberate killing, and Hastings inherits not a conventional solution but a confession that forces him to reconsider the boundary between protecting the innocent and committing the crime one means to prevent.