Crime intime

Crime intime is Hercule Poirot’s name for murder contained within the victim’s intimate, ordinary world. Its defining contrast is between a death enabled by familiar proximity and the cold-blooded, impersonal crime committed from outside that circle.

Definition and imagined example

Early in the novel, Poirot describes the ideal crime intime as simple, domestic, and unimpassioned. To illustrate, he imagines four people playing bridge while a fifth man sits apart in a chair by the fire. One of the players leaves the table while dummy and kills him; absorbed in the hand, the others do not notice. The mystery is not how an outsider entered, but which person among the four used the ordinary evening’s closeness as cover.

The example makes intimacy a condition of opportunity as well as a boundary around the investigation. The victim is present in a familiar social setting, the possible killer belongs to the small group, and the others’ attention remains fixed on routine play. Poirot’s hypothetical turns domestic normality into the mechanism that makes a crime possible.

Poirot and Hastings’s distinction

When Arthur Hastings remarks that their earlier cases were private murders, Poirot agrees that they had usually worked from the inside. Their attention had centered on the victim’s history: who benefited from the death, and what opportunities the people around the victim had to commit it. He identifies that pattern as the crime intime.

Poirot sets it against the case now confronting them: murder from outside, cold-blooded and impersonal. The distinction changes the investigative frame. Rather than treating the victim’s close relationships as the essential field of inquiry, the partners must reckon with a killer whose actions do not arise from the intimate circle they had previously examined.

Narrative significance

The phrase links Poirot’s early thought experiment to the later contrast between familiar, private crimes and the murders under investigation. Its bridge-game example concentrates the intimate form into a compact puzzle of access, attention, and concealed action; the subsequent conversation marks the new case as a departure from that pattern. Hastings’s response registers the change as unsettling, while Poirot’s distinction clarifies why their established way of approaching murder no longer quite fits.