Through the admiring eyes of Captain Arthur Hastings, in Chapter 2 Agatha Christie provides readers with a description of the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, introducing this iconic character to readers for the first time. As Hastings waxes poetic about his hero, Christie uses hyperbole to craft a lasting image for the reader of the man who will eventually come to star in over 30 of her novels:
Poirot was an extraordinary-looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police.
The passage above focuses on Poirot’s physical appearance—his stature and attire and facial hair—as well as his fundamental essence. The entirety of Poirot's quiet dignity and eccentricity are conveyed perfectly in a mere six sentences. Most of Christie’s prose throughout the novel is sparse and nondescript. In this quote, however, she uses exaggerated language to emphasize the extraordinary nature of her protagonist. Hastings’s assertion that “a speck of dust would have caused [Poirot] more pain than a bullet wound” is the most extreme of these claims, perfectly encapsulating the fastidious singularity that has endeared Poirot to readers ever since.
