Arthur Hastings - Literary Function

Literary Function

Hastings is today strongly associated with Poirot, partly because many of the early TV episodes "Agatha Christie's Poirot" were adaptations of the short stories, in most of which he appeared, or were stories into which he had been introduced in the course of adaptation (e.g. Murder in the Mews). In Christie's original writings, however, Hastings is far less prominent. He is not a character in either of the two best-known Poirot novels - Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express - and of the fifteen Poirot novels published between 1920 and 1937, he appears in fewer than half. Moreover, when Christie expanded The Submarine Plans (1923) as The Incredible Theft (1937), she removed Hastings.

Hastings appears to have been introduced by Christie in accordance with the model of Sherlock Holmes's associate, Doctor Watson, to whom he bears a marked resemblance. Both narrate in the first person, both are slow to see the significance of clues, and both therefore stand as a form of surrogate for the reader. There are even similarities of role: Hastings is Poirot's only close friend, and the two share a flat briefly when Poirot sets up his detective agency. They both share similar military backgrounds also. The presence of Chief Inspector Japp, a close "literary descendant" of Holmes's Inspector Lestrade, fleshed out Christie's adoption of the Holmes paradigm.

Christie's experiments with first-person narration, especially in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, saw her attempt to expand the formal resources of the detective novel. In And Then There Were None (1939), her most successful novel, and one in which none of her detectives appear, her third-person narrative moves fluidly between the perspectives of all of her characters. This need to see different events from alternative perspectives (especially from the perspectives of her suspects) meant that she increasingly favoured third-person narration throughout her career.

In Sad Cypress, for example, the character of a woman on trial is made to think like a murderess when the narrative is written from her perspective: a significant red herring that is only possible because of the method of narration.

Furthermore, Poirot's method changes in the novels. In the earlier phase of his career, Hastings is valued for his imaginative approach to cases, inevitably giving rise to fanciful hypotheses that Poirot can gently mock. This characterisation of Hastings is made by Poirot himself in "The Mystery of the Spanish Chest" (1932): "How my dear friend, Hastings, would have enjoyed this! What romantic flights of imagination he would have had. What ineptitudes he would have uttered! Ah ce cher Hastings, at this moment, today, I miss him...".

Later in her career, Christie's apparatus is less fanciful, and the opportunity for wild speculation much diminished. When the need for a sidekick arises in the later novels and stories it is either:

• A suspect
• Miss Lemon (who, in direct contrast with Hastings, is completely unimaginative)
• Mr. Satterthwaite (a great observer of human nature who avoids passing judgments)
• Ariadne Oliver (a crime novelist who opened to Christie the opportunity for self-satire)

Although Hastings remains the most popular of Poirot's sidekicks, his appearance in only eight of the thirty-three Poirot novels indicates that he no longer served Christie's literary purpose.