Norton’s small pistol

Norton’s small pistol is the weapon used by Hercule Poirot to kill Stephen Norton and stage the death as suicide. First presented as apparently Norton’s own, it helps make a locked-room murder look conclusive; in Poirot’s later account, it becomes the material trace of the disguise and deception behind that appearance. Its conspicuous placement on Norton’s dressing table and the unnaturally symmetrical bullet wound turn the pistol from planted evidence into the key to the truth.

Identity and Apparent Ownership

When Norton’s door is forced open, he is found lying on his bed in his dressing gown, with the key in his pocket and a small pistol in his hand. A bullet hole sits precisely at the centre of his forehead. The pistol is described as a mere toy, yet capable of killing: its smallness does not make it harmless, but makes its lethal function easy to underestimate.

At the inquest, the weapon appears to settle the question of access and ownership. It is taken to be Norton’s own pistol, and the housemaid confirms that she had seen it on his dressing table twice during his stay at Styles. Those observations are true, but their apparent meaning is false. Poirot had deliberately placed the weapon there while Norton was elsewhere, making the pistol seem familiar and available to its supposed owner before it was used to kill him.

The Staged Suicide

The pistol is one component in a carefully arranged picture of suicide. The door is locked, the key is in the dead man’s pocket, the windows are closely shuttered, and the weapon is in Norton’s hand. At the inquest, the surgeon identifies the one visible irregularity: it is unusual for a person shooting himself to place a bullet exactly in the centre of his forehead. Yet this doubt is overwhelmed by the surrounding signs, which make the death appear plain and leave no alternative solution in view.

The apparent evidence is strengthened by explanations offered for why Norton might have killed himself. He had complained of headaches, and some of his investments had been doing badly. The account acknowledges that these are hardly compelling reasons, but they are enough to help the suicide verdict pass. The pistol’s apparent ownership and the staged room thus reinforce one another: a weapon previously seen among Norton’s possessions seems to corroborate a death arranged to look self-inflicted.

Poirot’s Account of the Weapon

In the manuscript explaining the crime, Poirot reveals that the pistol was his, not Norton’s. He had acquired it abroad and kept it carefully locked away, except for two occasions when he placed it ostentatiously on Norton’s dressing table. Norton himself was away on both mornings. The housemaid’s testimony was therefore accurate, but Poirot had arranged the very sightings that made the weapon appear to belong to the dead man.

Poirot explains how he used the pistol as part of the murder and its concealment. Wearing Norton’s dressing gown, he came along the passage and knocked on Arthur Hastings’s door. Hastings saw what appeared to be Norton leaving the bathroom and limping into his room; he heard the key turn in the lock from inside. Poirot then replaced the dressing gown on Norton, laid him on the bed, and shot him with the small pistol. He put the key in Norton’s pocket, locked the door from outside with a duplicate key he had possessed for some time, and wheeled his chair back to his own room. The pistol was not an incidental object in a suicide scene: it was the instrument around which Poirot built the scene’s false account of who had entered, who had locked the door, and who had fired the shot.

The Forehead Wound and the Revelation

The weapon’s decisive clue lies in the wound it leaves. Poirot admits that he should have shot Norton through the temple, but could not bring himself to produce an effect that seemed lopsided and haphazard. He instead fired into the exact centre of the forehead. That deliberate symmetry is also the detail that makes the staged suicide suspect: the surgeon notices it at the inquest, Hastings recognizes its significance only after reading Poirot’s manuscript, and the carefully centred mark brings the concealed killer into view.

The pistol therefore carries two opposed meanings. In the inquest’s account, it is an apparently personal possession supporting an apparently self-inflicted death. In Poirot’s account, it is his carefully hidden weapon and the device that makes the murder possible. Yet the same exactness with which he tries to impose order on the killing betrays him. Hastings recalls that the mark resembled the brand of Cain, transforming the wound from a technical irregularity into a sign of guilt. The small pistol helps Poirot win the immediate contest of appearances, but its shot leaves behind the physical clue by which Hastings finally understands the truth.