Murder is a great matchmaker

“Murder is a great matchmaker” is Hercule Poirot’s wry description of how a shared tragedy can set a second, romantic drama in motion. The expression joins the murder plot to the relationships that emerge around it, and crystallizes Arthur Hastings’s claim that the human consequences of crime deserve attention alongside the mystery’s solution.

The Expression in Conversation

Poirot develops the idea while reflecting with Hastings on the people brought together by tragedy. He distinguishes their shared crisis from a second drama that begins alongside it, “tout à fait à part.” His formulation is not that grief disappears, but that other human attachments can take shape amid it.

Hastings reacts with scandalized disbelief, insisting that those involved must have been thinking only of the tragedy. Poirot counters by turning the observation toward Hastings himself. The exchange gives the expression a teasing edge: it is an argument about how romance can coexist with crisis, as well as a gentle challenge to Hastings’s view of human attention.

From an Earlier Case to a General Observation

Poirot supports his point by recalling his first case in England. There, he says, he brought two people who loved one another together by having one of them arrested for murder; arrest, in his telling, was the intervention that made their union possible. He presents this not as a general method to imitate, but as an example of an intimate relationship emerging through a criminal case.

The remembered case turns the phrase from a clever line into a recurring principle in Poirot’s experience. His emphasis falls on the unexpected intersection between investigation and personal life: a case organized around death may also alter the living people’s relationships.

The Novel’s Human Aftermath

Hastings’s closing reflection gives the idea its broader place in the narrative. He explains that he has described secondary personal relationships at length because the human and personal elements cannot be ignored. He also credits Poirot with teaching him, dramatically, that romance can be a by-product of crime.

That perspective complements Hastings’s assessment of the investigation itself: he regards Poirot’s approach to the ABC mystery as an act of real genius, precisely because the problem was unlike those he had faced before. The expression holds these strands together without making them equivalent. The murders demand a solution; the relationships that develop around the resulting tragedy show another consequence of the case, one that remains part of the story after the puzzle has drawn attention.