Captain Arthur Hastings OBE

I've been stuck up a stepladder painting Lucy and Jenny's bedroom this week as they've decided that they're Too Old for teddy-bear wallpaper.  Well, I suppose at 15 and 17 they are a bit.  And, my constant companion in these hours of toil has been my beloved collection of Agatha Christie tapes.

They set me  thinking - as you do - about the role of best friends in detective fiction.  The archtype is, of course, Watson, but Agatha Christie's Hastings is an aimiable example of the Best Friend too.  Here's the first part of an article I wrote about Hastings.  The second part's next week.  I might have finished the bedroom ceiling by then!

Captain Arthur Hastings, O.B.E.

"I've a feeling," said Tupppence, "that this particular adventure will be call 'the triumph of Hastings."

"Never," said Tommy.  "It isn't done.  Once the idiot friend, always the idiot friend."

"Partners in Crime" 1929

The affair at Styles takes place in the summer of 1917.  Arthur Hastings had been "invalided home from the front" or, as he says in the run-up to the Renauld murder, "after the Somme they invalided me out altogether."  Amiens, where there was a big base hospital, obviously stirred up some sombre memories for Hastings for it is on his train journey through it that he recalls for the only time that he was wounded on two separate occasions.  He, brave man, says little about his injuries.  Unlike Dr Watson, whose wound seemed to shift from his leg to his arm and back again, we don't even know where Hastings was hurt.  That it was severe, we can be in no doubt.  The battle (or rather campaign) of the Somme lasted from 1st July to 18th November 1916.  For him to have "spent some months in a depressing Convalescent Home," and to be given a month's sick leave and still be at a loose end the following summer argues a considerable injury.  We know, too, that he was never again passed as fit for Active Service.  Instead, as he says in his account of the kidnapping of David MacAdam, he was given a recruiting job.  For a trained soldier, especially one whose rank put him in what has been called the "flower of the British Army" - i.e. the junior officers, whose casualty figures far exceeded any other ranks - not to be returned to the Front means that he must have been seriously hurt.

He was born in 1887 (he was thirty when the Styles affair started) and we can infer that he came from Essex.  He had an unspecified number of sisters, seemingly no brothers, and a female cousin who nursed during the war. His parents are, of course, an a priori assumption, but from the fact that he never mentions them we can presume that they are dead.

The young Arthur was sent to Eton, where, together with attaining an Old School Tie, (which Poirot recognizes on the Nile steamer Karnack) he attained what might be called the best of the Old School Manner.  Always correct in his behaviour, he is punctilious in his knowledge of what One May and May Not do.  Poirot derives considerable, if affectionate amusement from this trait on many occasions, such as when, for purposes of detection, he has to search Nick Buckley's bedroom, and Hastings, blushing hotly, protests against looking at a lady's underclothes.  After leaving school he might have gone to University but never mentions any friends from that era.  Perhaps he went, instead, straight in to Lloyds, where his occupancy of an office stool brought him in to contact with Hercule Poirot.

One of Hasting's more unsung talents is his fluent command of French. When the maid, Célestine, is accused of pinching Mrs Opalsen's pearls at the Grand Metropolitan, he has no trouble in following her stream of "rapid and virulent French".  At the Cavendish's dinner table he confesses to a "secret hankering to be a detective," because he "came across a little man in Belgium once, a very famous detective, and he quite inflamed me." It was while he was standing by the Pyramids with Poirot, trying vainly to reconcile him to the "cursed sand" that he remembered a holiday in Knocke-sur-mer with its "dunes impeccables".  It doesn't seem too much to suppose that the young, linguistically gifted Hastings should have been sent to Belgium to investigate an insurance fraud.  As it involved the then head of the Belgium Police, it must have been a fairly major affair.  It's a great shame Hastings never saw fit to write the case up.  Poirot triumphed ("his flair had been extraordinary") and Hastings obviously fell in to the role of amiable helper that was to be his lot in his relationship with Poirot.