YMMV / Hercule Poirot

• Awesome Ego: Poirot constantly praises his own intelligence. Christie eventually came to find it annoying, but the fans didn't. He really is very smart, and he also says that his boasting serves to throw people off, because the English believe that "a fellow who thinks as much of himself as that cannot be worth much."
• Awesome Music: Invoked in "Yellow Iris", where the attempted murderer arranges for the performance of a superb singer (with the lights down) so they could go unnoticed while committing the crime.
• Complete Monster:
  • Murder on the Orient Express: Lanfranco Cassetti is a murderer well-known to Hercule Poirot for his international notoriety. A blackmailer who kidnaps people, murdering them when the authorities close in but still collecting the ransoms, Cassetti was the murderer of a little girl named Daisy, having continued to exploit her family days or even weeks after he had already killed the girl. Uncaring of how this killed four innocent people, from Daisy's mother dying from grief in premature labor with her new baby, to her father's suicide and an innocent maid killing herself when she was falsely accused of complicity, Cassetti cares only for escaping justice and was so evil that even the heroic Poirot feels obliged to cover for his killers.
  • The ABC Murders: Franklin Clarke, aka "ABC", wishes to inherit his brother's wealth, but is aware that he would be the obvious suspect. ABC hits upon the fact that his brother has an alliterative name and lives in a town that begins with the same letter. With that in mind, ABC proceeds to kill Alice Ascher in Andover, Betty Barnard in Bexhill, and Sir Carmichael Clarke in Churston, creating the illusion that a Serial Killer is on the loose, in an effort to hide his murder-for-profit. ABC also picks out a patsy in epileptic Alexander Bonaparte Cust, and preys on his insecurities, convincing Cust that he has been committing the murders during his blackouts. Committing one last murder in Doncaster, ABC slips the knife into Cust's pocket, and then calls the police, intending that Cust either hang, or end up in a mental ward, while he walks away with the money.
  • The Labours of Hercules' "The Flock of Geryon": Dr. Andersen is the murderous leader of the Flock of the Shepard. As the leader of the Flock, Andersen manipulates rich old women into willing their estates to the cult, and afterward, he infects them with various deadly diseases, leaving them to die painfully miles away while he collects their inheritance without suspicion. Having killed at least 4 women prior to the events of the story, Andersen attempts to infect Hercule Poirot's friend Amy Carnaby with tuberculosis, hoping she would die and he would inherit her money.
  • Curtain: Mr. X—Stephen Norton—is a different sort of monster from most murder mystery villains. Deliberately modeling himself on Iago, Mr. X is a social predator who toys with people's fears, nudging them towards committing murder, while technically never breaking the law himself. Over the course of the novel, Mr. X convinces three different people, including Hercule Poirot's Watson, Captain Hastings, to commit murder, with Poirot only barely averting each at the last moment. When confronted by Poirot, Mr. X gloats that he will continue on this way forever, and that there is nothing the law can do to touch him, prompting Poirot to commit his only ever vigilante execution.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Poirot is fastidiously neat, to the point that he compulsively straightens things on other people's mantle pieces, or requests people fix the lay of their clothing. He also has some very odd ideas on logical arrangements of things and wishes chickens laid square eggs of identical size for neatness's sake, for all these reasons he's often considered OCD or OCPD by the audience though nothing was ever stated in the stories themselves.
• Funny Moments:
  • In a reference to Sherlock Holmes' adventure The Yellow Face, a story has Poirot request Hastings to do something similar to what Holmes asks Watson at the end of the story. Hastings ends up pulling out the warning minutes later.
  • This exchange from The ABC Murders, all the funnier because it comes out of nowhere:
    Poirot: And wears very lovely clothes. That crêpemarocain and the silver fox collar— dernier cri.
    Hastings: You’re a man milliner, Poirot. I never notice what people have on.
    Poirot: You should join a nudist colony.
  • In The Labours of Hercules, Poirot encounters an old friend who tells him to meet her "in Hell". When he asks his secretary what she'd do if someone told her to meet them in Hell, she replies, "I'd ring up for a table." Poirot's train of thought very clearly derails at that point. (Said old friend has opened a club called "Hell".)
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The short story "The Kidnapped Prime Minister", set in 1919 and written in 1925, is about Poirot having to find the titular kidnapped Prime Minister before the Versailles negotiations start, because if he is not present then the treaty might be 'too lenient'. Of course in hindsight it's generally thought now that the harshness of the Versailles treaty played a major role in the rise of Adolf Hitler. Also possibly a case of Artistic License – History; the real driver for a punitive treaty was France, whose northern countryside had been ravaged by four years of trench warfare, and who had earlier been embarrassed by their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
  • Elephants Can Remember ends positively with Mrs. Oliver reflecting on the eponymous phrase and concluding that "mercifully human beings can forget". In 2009, a comparative study carried on the books suggest that the drop in quality of Christie's last few works (including Elephants Can Remember) could have been caused by Alzheimer's disease.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: To a point. Metacritic has given the games based on the series mediocre reviews: Murder on the Orient Express was given a score of 60 out of 100 (though having David Suchet of the Poirot TV series voice the titular character is a bonus despite not being the player character); Evil Under the Sun was given scores of 66 for the PC version and 46 for the Wii version. User scores, however, sit just on either side of the border of being outright favorable. The ABC Murders is a straighter example, being given a score of 53 without a significantly different reception from users.
• Recycled Script: Some of Poirot's adventures are so good, other characters copy them. Done by Poirot himself in "The Plymouth Express" and "Mystery of the Blue Train".
• Values Dissonance:
  • "The Augean Stables" sees Poirot go to great lengths to bury and discredit accusations of embezzlement by a former Prime Minister... which happen to be true. This obstruction of justice, which involves destroying a man's career, is considered right and proper in order to defend the late Prime Minister's reputation, prevent his party from suffering a great loss of face, and prevent a politician from another party from becoming the new Prime Minister (as he is considered to be most unsuitable for the position). Nowadays Poirot would be the villain in the story.
  • "The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly" has a man taking an unknown child for a joyride despite the kid's protests treated as perfectly harmless. He turns out to be involved in the kidnapping anyway, but if anything such conduct would be considered far worse in modern times.
  A car, answering to the description, with a man and a small boy, had passed through various villages, apparently making for London. At one place they had stopped, and it was noticed that the child was crying and obviously afraid of his companion. When Inspector Mc Neil announced that the car had been stopped and the man and boy detained, I was almost ill with relief. You know the sequel. The boy was not Johnnie, and the man was an ardent motorist, fond of children, who had picked up a small child playing in the streets of Edenswell, a village about fifteen miles from us, and was kindly giving him a ride.
• Viewers in Mourning: Poirot received an obituary in the New York Times when he died.

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