Arthur Hastings

Arthur Hastings serves as the book’s first-person narrator and a returning companion to Hercule Poirot, but his importance lies as much in how he tells the story as in his presence within it. In The ABC Murders, he breaks from his customary eyewitness account to include third-person chapters, explicitly vouches for their events, and insists that the personal consequences of crime belong within the narrative. His return to England in 1935 brings him back into Poirot’s orbit just as the anonymous warnings become a murder investigation.

Identity and Return to England

Hastings identifies himself as Captain Arthur Hastings, O.B.E., and presents the narrative as a personal account. In June 1935 he comes home from his ranch in South America for a stay of about six months. The ranch has been affected by the world depression, and he has business in England that he believes requires his personal attention; his wife remains behind to manage the property. The account therefore begins with Hastings returning from a life and partnership elsewhere, rather than already being stationed beside Poirot.

One of his first acts after arriving is to visit his old friend. He finds Poirot installed in a new service flat in London, whose geometrical appearance and proportions Poirot has deliberately chosen for their symmetry. This reunion restores the familiar investigative partnership, but it also establishes a contrast between Poirot’s carefully ordered domestic surroundings and the crimes about to disrupt the pattern of the narrative.

Narrator and Method

Hastings acknowledges that the book departs from his usual practice of relating only incidents and scenes at which he was personally present. Some chapters are written in the third person, allowing the account to follow events beyond the narrator’s direct viewpoint. He nevertheless assures readers that he can vouch for what those chapters report. The shift is presented as a deliberate expansion of his usual testimony, not a renunciation of responsibility for the story’s truth.

He also distinguishes reported events from his account of other people’s inner lives. Hastings concedes that describing their thoughts and feelings involves a degree of poetic licence, while claiming reasonable accuracy and noting that Poirot has vetted those passages. The framing makes the narration both personal and openly constructed: Hastings tells readers where his account exceeds direct witnessing, and identifies the standard by which he asks them to trust it.

His first-person presence remains visible in the investigation’s chronology. When June 21 arrives, he admits that Poirot’s forebodings about the anonymous letter have slipped from his mind. The warning returns to immediate significance with the visit of Chief Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard. Japp greets Hastings as a familiar figure from earlier cases, welcomes his return from South America, and jokes about his thinning hair. Hastings records the small embarrassment, his belief that careful combing makes the thinning unnoticeable, and his decision to accept Japp’s teasing in good humour. The exchange situates him not only as Poirot’s colleague but as someone with a history among the investigators and a temperament that can accommodate Japp’s tactlessness.

Partnership with Poirot

Hastings’s relationship with Poirot is one of old friendship as well as investigative collaboration. After returning to England, Hastings seeks him out without delay; when the next major alarm arrives, it is Poirot who wakes him. On the morning of July 25, at about half past seven, Poirot stands beside Hastings’s bed and gently shakes his shoulder. Hastings remembers that one look at Poirot’s face is enough to bring him fully out of sleep, and he immediately asks what has happened. The compressed scene turns their familiarity into an instrument of narrative pace: Poirot’s expression communicates urgency before Hastings has received any explanation.

The bond also frames Hastings’s access to the investigation. He does not claim to be a detached chronicler; he is close enough to be awakened at the moment the case demands attention, and sufficiently familiar with Poirot to read his face as a signal. The friendship gives the narrative a personal point of entry into the crimes while preserving Poirot as the figure whose forebodings and investigative authority direct their response.

Human Consequences and Narrative Role

In his foreword, Hastings explains why he gives substantial attention to the secondary relationships that arise from the crimes. He argues that the human and personal elements cannot be ignored, and invokes Poirot’s earlier lesson that romance can be a by-product of crime. This emphasis defines the range of his account: the murders matter not only as a puzzle to solve but also through the attachments and personal consequences that gather around them.

Hastings’s narrative method and stated priorities reinforce each other. The third-person chapters let the account move beyond what he witnesses, while his attention to relationships carries it beyond the mechanics of detection. His return to Poirot, Japp’s recognition of him, and Poirot’s urgent awakening of him supply the personal thread through which the reader encounters the investigation. As narrator, he presents the story as both witnessed inquiry and a wider record of how crime alters human relations.