Lucy and Jenny's bedroom is completed and the teddy bears are (sniff) no more.  It's now a sophisticated sage green and cream (the actual colours, according to the tin are Flagon (uh?) and Parchment.  Anyone who wants to know the exact shade can have look at my fingernails;  I'm like a walking colour chart!  And, quite honestly, why they were that bothered about the paintwork beats me;  a week from now and you won't be able to see the wall for pictures of Johnny Depp, Harry Potter and the more ornamental components of the Sale Sharks Rugby Union football team.

Here's the second part of the Arthur Hastings article.  (And, by the way, I can't be the only one to find Hugh Frazier rather nice;  a bit like Kevin McCloud but with less architecture.)

Captain Arthur Hastings, OBE

Life after the Styles case improved for the aimless young Captain; after the recruiting job he became private secretary to an M.P. and he went from having "no near relations or friends," (perhaps he was using the word "near" in a geographical sense) to having "many friends and acquaintances" by the time they looked in to the Foscatini murder.  His association with Poirot gave him the adventures he craved and Poirot, in return, gained an old friend and a biographer.  That Poirot was a close friend can be in no doubt; on seeing Hastings outside Styles Post Office he cries "Mon ami Hastings!" and, true son of Gaul as he was, clasps him in his arms and kisses him.  Hastings, with more cosmopolitan panache than one would readily give him credit for, doesn't turn a hair.

Poirot grew to have a rich enjoyment of his friend's foibles.  He let him indulge himself in detection, with predictably disastrous, if hilarious, results as in the affair of Miss Mary Marvell, and was happy to let him carry a gun, although he never seems to have used it. "You must join me in my all-night vigil... armed with that excellent revolver of yours."  "Rather!" I cried with enthusiasm," is the conversation when they were hunting Naval Plans stolen from the Americans, and Poirot frequently teased him about his preference for girls with auburn hair. He doesn't tease Hastings for his occasional foray in to speculation.  Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who kept Dr Watson's cheque book locked up in his desk so he couldn't blow his money on horse-racing, Poirot is more than happy when Hastings is put on to a good thing in the City by a friend and, having "money to burn" takes Poirot off for a weekend at the Grand Metropolitan.

The fact that Poirot, a perfectionist, allowed Hastings to publish the first accounts of his adventures in England argues that he respected Hasting's talents as a writer.  And really, he is excellent.  Modest and unassuming, he is content to let his brilliant friend shine and present his own efforts and ruffled feathers as comic relief.  It is likely that Hastings, as an author, occasionally felt dissatisfied with having to present everything in the first person; by the time he comes to write up the ABC murders, he gives large slices of the narrative in the third person, a technique he was to return to in writing up the investigation surrounding the murder of Emily Arundell.  The reason for this dissatisfaction is clear;  "It's not all jam," wrote P.G. Wodehouse, of his Jeeves stories, "writing a story in the first person.  The reader can know nothing except what Bertie tells him and Bertie can only know a limited amount himself."  However, for immediacy and directness, the "I" form is unbeatable.  It also has the advantage of pinning down the point of view, which in apprentice authors tends to float like a butterfly, and Hastings was wise to stick to it for his first books.  And, after all, how many writers have the chance to share in the escapades of one of the greatest (Poirot would have said the greatest) detectives of the century?

Hastings was, perhaps, mildly irritated by Poirot's insistence that all the girls he fell for had auburn hair.  For once, Poirot got it wrong.  Cynthia Murdoch, to whom he chivalrously proposes (to her great amusement) certainly had auburn hair, but Dulcie Duveen, who he eventually marries, has dark curls.  Thora Grey, who attracts his wandering eye (and that alone - he was a Good Man) in the ABC affair was a Scandinavian blonde. Hastings in the grip of the divine fire is rather interesting.  Kneeling on the floor of the sitting room of a Coventry hotel, holding the girl in his arms, he manages to mix molten passion with an accusation of murder.  Fortunately Cinderella, who loves her Arthur deeply, refrains from ticking him off for being so bone-headed and kisses him "with a sweetness and fire beyond belief."  Which settles the matter. When Poirot intervenes (one of his more tactless moments) Hastings bounds across the room and hold his old friend "in a grip of iron" so that the future Mrs Hastings can escape. All ends well.  Poirot knows that Cinderella, as Hastings calls his wife to be, is innocent and, what's more, can prove it.  It is partly due to Cinderella's acrobatic skills that all ends as happily as it does. Hastings was not the only detective to mix up love and murder, but the usual procedure was to be convinced of the beloved's innocence and clear her name (as Philip Trent and Lord Peter Wimsey do in "Trent's Last Case" and "Strong Poison") then propose.  Hastings is, as far as I know, the only one to be convinced of his girl's guilt whilst offering marriage. The Renauld business ends with talk of the Hastings going out to join Cinderella's sister and her newly-acquired husband, Jack Renauld "on a ranch across the seas" and this is what happened.

Poirot missed his friend badly.  At one point he thought he had found another Hastings when, after nearly beaning his next-door neighbour with a vegetable marrow, he makes the acquaintance of Dr. James Sheppard. Poirot sums up his feelings about Hastings  to Sheppard very neatly:  "I had a friend who for many years never left my side.  Occasionally of an imbecility to make one afraid, nevertheless he was very dear to me.  Figure to yourself that I miss even his stupidity.  His naiveté, his honest outlook, the pleasure of delighting and surprising him by my superior gifts - all these I miss more than I can tell you."

Dr Sheppard, as we know, proved to be a wash-out in his role of substitute Best Friend.  "Je ne peux pas obtenir l'assistance dont j'ai besoin," we feel Poirot may have sighed as him returned him to store, or, as we would say in English, "You can't get the staff."

After reading that crack about his imbecility, Hastings may have  allowed himself a feeling of righteous pleasure as to how the Roger Ackroyd case turned out.

It was a year and a half later that he came back to England.  Perhaps in the episode that followed, he could have wished he'd stayed in the Argentine. His wife could certainly be forgiven for doing so.  Tracking down the Big Four (one of his fruitier adventures) took her husband nearly a year and for a large part of that he was being drugged, tricked, made to assume uncomfortable disguises (he wore cheek pads for three weeks without a murmur) and blown up by nasty Chinamen.  If that wasn't enough, Cinderella Hastings had to spend most of the year in hiding in a secret locale arranged by Poirot.  After this, it will raise no eyebrows for anyone to learn that it was five years before she would let him return to England.  Having said that, he seems to spend the time in mere pleasure-seeking at St. Looe in Cornwall.  This time his life remained unimperilled.  A burst of malaria was nothing compared to be thrown to his death in the river Thames by the servant of Li Chang Yen.  Reassured, perhaps, Mrs Hastings allows Arthur to come back the following year, which he spends junketing at the Savoy and going to theatres in London, with only the occasional corpse to mar the even tenor of his days.  From then until the ABC business is a matter of three years.  When he reaches England this time, Hastings is a sobered character.  He has been awarded the O.B.E. (what for?) but it is in no happy mood he looks in on Hercule Poirot.  Cinderella is, as usual, back home on the ranch and, oddly enough, it is the ranch that occupies his thoughts.  "It had been a difficult time for us out there... we had suffered from the world depression."  Fortunately, a series of juicy murders occurred to cheer him up, but there is also the figure of Thora Grey.

Now, Cinderella must have read his books.  Although the Renauld millions must have come in handy round the ranch, and Arthur's earnings may have seemed small in comparison, she must have been proud of both his literary fame and the money they brought.  Reading the account, she wouldn't have been human if she hadn't suffered a twinge of jealousy.  And this is a woman, remember, whom Hastings had thought quite capable of knifing an erring lover.  Women in those days, doughty creatures, could put up with a lot.  Phyllis Drummond, wife of Bulldog, suffered years of being kidnapped, threatened, and of having mysterious lascars, Chinaman and Nameless Things invade her privacy.  But - and it's a big but - Hugh (Bulldog) Drummond never looked at another girl.  Although Cinderella must have known she could trust her husband, the ABC case must have caused her some concern.  Hastings was back on his native shores the following year, and this time he had his nose to the grindstone right away, looking in to the murder of Emily Arundell. Am I the only one to think that his aversion to the elegant Theresa Arundell (despite being "like an exaggerated drawing in black and white" he also mentions her "exquisite figure") slightly overdone?  In any event, when Arthur returns home this time, complete with Bob, the wire-haired terrier, he stays at home.  There are no more adventures from his pen.  Cinderella Hastings, the most unsung heroine in modern fiction, had finally had enough.

Poirot's cases as written up by Captain Hastings consist of nine books which are:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)              The Big Four (1927)

Poirot's Early Cases (1923)                           Peril at End House (1932)

Murder on the Links (1923)                            Lord Edgware Dies (1933)

Poirot Investigates (1924)                          The ABC Murders (1936)

Dumb Witness (1937)

There is also, apparently, another book called "Curtain" in which Hastings kills off Poirot. As I hate books where the hero dies, I prefer to think of it as a complete fabrication.  And, as Poirot was alive and kicking long after this was written in the 1940's, who’s to say I’m not right? Maybe Hastings was getting his own back for all those cracks about how cloth-headed he was!