Agatha Christie's Poirot - Blog Posts

Captain Hastings and Miss Lemon kicking around their shared brain cell like a football

I was thinking about this at work the other day and like. what if the reason Hastings is so in-the-moment to the exclusion of all other moments stems from his service during the War?

Don't think about the past. Go too far and you're confronted with the horrors of the trenches. Shells screaming overhead, no way of knowing where they'll land. The sound of explosions ringing so loud in your ears that you don't know if you'll ever hear anything else again. Great, metal beasts crushing everything in their path. Boys torn apart before they had the chance to come of age.

Go back even further and you have to face the man you once were. The man you can never be again. The man you could have been but can never become after living through what you did.

And as for the future, it simply doesn't exist on the battlefield. It's become a vague, nebulous, abstract concept that may or may not come to pass, so why give it too much thought? The here and now is all that matters. It's the only thing you're guaranteed.

Captain Arthur Hastings is so ADHD coded.

Every episode he has a new hyperfixation, that he has abandoned by the next one. His car is pretty much his only constant interest but even then he plans to participate in a 24 HOUR race without having any experience with racing. We see how easily a new hyperfixation is triggered with Hastings in one episode (don't know exactly which one) when he and Poirot visit some attorney who deals with the stock market and not shortly after Hastings is absolutely obsessed with it. It screams ADHD to me.

In 'The Wasps Nest', when Hastings is currently obsessed with photography, Poiroit even says something along the lines of "his newest tick, I'll give him two weeks" (rough translation from the German synchronisation since the English original is not available anywhere in Germany as far as I know ...). So we have canon proof that Hastings getting new obsessions/hobbies and abandoning them shortly after is indeed happening and not just the writers not showing us how he pursues his interest anymore.

I'd also attribute his naivety/slowness (some people say he's stupid but I won't) to ADHD. I myself and most people I know with ADHD keep getting told that we are naive or gullible. Taking people at face value and generally not assuming ill intent is common in people with ADHD and something we also see in Hastings.

His slowness / him not being really smart is a characteristic that is certainly being amplified by the fact that we constantly see him in comparison to Poirot (I doubt that he would be seen as that stupid if the show was just him and Japp). I'd also say that him not being able to follow Poirot's deduction and reasoning doesn't mean that he is necessarily dumb, just that he is not as intelligent as Poirot and he does have his smart moments. (Also I think he was meant to represent the audience, and we often also have no clue what'S going on) But his less bright moments can also be attributed to ADHD. ADHD causes brain frog , as well as concentration and memory issues ( If I don't write important appointments down on my arm I will forget them no matter how important, but I can tell you everything I've learned about vulcanos when I was 8). He gets distracted easily, fails to pay attention to the 'important aspects' of cases and would rather tell everyone about his newest hyperfixation or work on his car, but he's trying his best. In his areas of expertise (cars, or whatever he is currently obsessed with) he is smart and knows his way around, he's just at loss when it comes to everything else.

I forgot halfway through where I was going with this soooo....

Captain Arthur Hastings OBE has ADHD!

I just started season 3 of Poirot and, excuse me? Where are Hastings' little hyperfixations? Where is the adorable little side plot of Hastings being obsessed with a new obscure little topic every episode? I hope they just dropped it for the first few episodes and will pick it up again. Give the man his ADHD back!!

David Suchet Poirot my beloved!

Poly art assignment from my digital art class, yes I did individually make all those triangle, yes that is how we were supposed to do it, yes it did take forever!

I feel like I could have been a little more intentional with the detail but I’m still happy with how it came out :)

currently reading Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie! here are my current thoughts in a nutshell:

it’s kind of giving conservative grandma??

like, yeah, this was written in the 30s; pretty self explanatory.

i really like christie’s storytelling, i do. it’s just this book feels like her shading on the younger generation for,, idk, not being traditional or something?? which really does feel like something every younger generation faces (times really don’t change)

for the last 12 chapters i read, im just being constantly reminded about how emily arundell’s niece married a Greek doctor and how dreadful it is. like my bad, sorry this dude isn’t ENGLISH ENOUGH FOR YOU?? yall are just jealous they got good food okay

and let’s not forget there’s a slur in the book💀

literal jumpscare when i opened the table of contents.

but then again, just looking at my older copy of And Then There Were None makes me wonder why i’m surprised

UPDATE: Just finished the book! i’m surprised i got through it that quickly. anyways, here are my thoughts!

i thought the plot was interesting. i thought it was pretty cool how upfront everyone was abt how they wanted emily’s money since it shows that none of them can be completely trusted.

like everyone was after the same thing, for different reasons, but only ONE of them actually committed to it.

and let’s not forget the constant reminder of good old “english-breeding.” it’s not said a lot, but it’s something i notice popping up in the book from time to time.

like goodness gracious woman, please stop. describing others as “well bred” makes them sound like a horse freshly groomed

anyways, i think this is the first time i got introduced to hastings? i didn’t even know he was a reoccurring character and a friend of poirot since i’ve only read Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None.

so you can imagine my confusion when i skimmed through random pages and noticed it was from someone else’s perspective.

but their dynamic is pretty cool! i kind of see it as like poirot doing his usual detective stuff and it going like:

poirot, lying to get some answers:

hastings: you are crazy, y’know that?

poirot: not crazy enough to kill, though!

well that’s how i see it anyways. i do think it’s cool that seeing through the lens of hastings does make things more fun. like this silly guy is as clueless as me

and he kind of vocalizes the audience? kind of? that’s how i saw it during the times he tried convincing poirot that the ball incident was genuine

but yeah it was okay. i might read the first book of the series because i just found out poirot is a refugee or smth?? like i need to know what’s up with that

so yeah, that’s my thoughts!

please can we all have a moment of appreciation for the most cute wonderful creature that is Monsieur Bob!!!! And Snubby, the dog who played him in the Dumb Witness episode of Poirot.