Poirot / Poirot - Tropes N to Z

This page is for tropes that have appeared in Poirot.

For the rest:

• A to D
• E to M

---

• The Name Is Bond, James Bond: Poirot introduces himself in this manner in The Adventure of the Clapham Cook. In fact, some episodes have some characters introduce themselves in this way.
• Nightmare Face: In one dream sequence in Sad Cypress, Poirot tells Mary Carlisle to be careful, but when she gives him a look, her face suddenly melts into that of a skeleton! Also counts as Nightmare Fuel.
• No Animals Were Harmed: A disclaimer in the end credits of Appointment with Death says, "No animals were harmed in the making of this film."
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: The Chocolate Box is set entirely in Belgium. All the Belgian characters are played by English actors using their own natural dialects. This is especially distracting since these characters frequently share screen time with Suchet's Poirot, who of course retains his own authentic Belgian accent.
• Nothing Left to Do but Die: At the end of Cards on the Table Poirot postulates that their host, Mr. Shaitana arranged the opportunity for his own murder, because he had grown tired of life and wished to create a mystery no one could solve, a strong possibility given his macabre personality.
• Not Now, Kiddo:
  • In The Clocks, Hardcastle keeps brushing off Nora after she spots the thread at the inquest. This does not end well for Nora.
• Nude Coloured Clothes: In Four and Twenty Blackbirds, a model of Henry Gascoigne's is seated in a chair wearing her skin-coloured clothes and making a pose while other artists paint her portraits.
• Obfuscating Disability:
  • Double Sin short episode. The real thief is an older woman who uses a wheelchair, but that's a dodge. At the very end she gets up and runs away before being caught.
  • The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge has Poirot sick after being at a hunting lodge's grounds during the winter. He plays up his sickness to the point of appearing completely feeble.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Poirot frequently plays the dotty old man to disarm suspects, making them more vulnerable to his questioning. He also uses his accent to this purpose, as he explains in Three-Act Tragedy (the novel, not the adaptation):
  "It is true that I can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But, my friend, to speak the broken English is an enormous asset. It leads people to despise you. They say - a foreigner - he can't even speak English properly. It is not my policy to terrify people - instead, I invite their gentle ridicule. Also I boast! An Englishman he says often, 'A fellow who thinks as much of himself as that cannot be worth much.' That is the English point of view. It is not at all true. And so, you see, I put people off their guard."
  • He tries this in Problem At Sea with less success, feigning forgetfulness over whether Colonel Clapperton left with two young ladies while talking to Ellie, who is quite attracted to him herself. She isn't fooled.
  ''"They're not children, monsieur Poirot. Nor am I.""
• Oh, Crap!: The murderer in Problem At Sea gets a massive case of this when Poirot outs his trick of using ventriloquism to deceive witnesses into thinking his wife was still alive. His face freezes in shock, as a series of wham shots are intercut to show him and the audience flashing back.
• Ominous Pipe Organ/Belgian Chanting/One-Woman Wail: This combination is heard in The Chocolate Box in Marianne Deroulard's death scene at the beginning. When it is played again as Madame Deroulard explains the story to Poirot, it is revealed that her son Paul killed Marianne for power.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Played for Laughs in The Lost Mine. Lord Pearson arrives at Poirot's place to ask for assistance in the murder of his associate Mr. Wu Ling, while Poirot assumes Lord Pearson (who happens to manage the bank Poirot patronizes) is visiting to apologize for the errors in his bank account. It takes a while before Poirot is disabused of the notion.

• Pet the Dog: Once Poirot works out that the Asshole Victim in The King of Clubs died by accident (after being punched and then falling and hitting his head), he decides not to solve the case and quietly lets it drop to save the attacker's reputation, who was being blackmailed.
• Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo: In The Theft of the Royal Ruby, Poirot receives a cup of drugged coffee (so he would be asleep when the thief looked around in his room for the ruby). He quietly switches it with Colonel Lacey's cup of coffee.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The villain of Sad Cypress, upon realizing they have been tricked into confessing their crimes, shouts "You filthy foreigner!" at Poirot.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: Most of the episodes have this going on to various degrees. The most common reasons are usually:
  • To expand a rather short original story into a full-length television episode or give it more action / visually interesting sequences. A common way of doing this was to include a chase-sequence towards the end where a killer who had, in the original story, elected to give themselves up quietly instead decided to make a break for it. For example, "The Mystery of the Spanish Chest" ends with the murderer engaging in a sword fight with another character after the victim's wife is wrongfully arrested by the police under Poirot's direction to flush him out.
  • To increase Poirot's role in events. In some of the original stories, particularly those written later on in Agatha Christie's career when any affection she might have had for the character completely dissolved away, Poirot's contribution to the narrative can in some cases seem like little more than a glorified cameo. For example, The Clocks turns Poirot into a more active investigator where in the original novel he stayed at home and solved the mystery from there.
  • Related to the above, earlier seasons adapted many stories in order to find roles for Captain Hastings, Miss Lemon and Inspector Japp, who didn't always appear in the original stories. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for instance, turns Japp into Poirot's assistant where he doesn't appear in the original novel.
  • To fit all of the stories into the pre-World War Two 1930s milieu that the series adopted rather than settling them in a period spanning from the end of World War One to the 1970s. For example, Third Girl is set in and heavily reflects the culture of The '60s, but is transported back thirty years in the adaptation.
• Precious Puppy: We have Bob the dog in Dumb Witness, who becomes an assistant of Poirot and points out the tricks with the mirror and other events that occurred.
• Precrime Arrest: Poirot has a motive of this in Wasps' Nest, albeit without time travel, in which he must stop a murder crime or a tragedy from happening in the future.
• Product Placement:
  • Poirot and Hastings play Monopoly from the beginning of The Lost Mine, and it becomes a Running Gag throughout the entire episode.
• Promoted to Love Interest:
  • The Mystery of the Blue Train:
    • Inverted with Derek Kettering. While he is in a love triangle between Lenox and Katherine in the book, he has no romance with either in the series (apart from Lenox's single comment on how handsome he is). Mirelle is also his mistress in the novel, though he rejects her; here, she only propositions him once, gets refused, and it doesn't go any further.
    • However, played straight with Rufus Van Aldin who has no romantic relationships in the novel but becomes Mirelle's lover in the series.
• Promotion to Opening Titles: Captain Hastings and Inspector Japp only appear in a few of the original Poirot stories, but feature in the majority of the pre-season IX episodes anyway.
• Public Domain Soundtrack:
  • In The Mystery of the Spanish Chest, we get Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto (which Poirot and Hastings attend in the theatre) and Träumerei (Dreaming) from Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood).
  • In Five Little Pigs, we get the song "Alice Blue Gown" from the 1919 Broadway musical Irene and Erik Satie's Gnossienne no. 1.
  • Combined with One-Woman Wail: In Appointment with Death, the sad music that plays in the scene when Dame Celia Westholme approaches the helpless Lady Boynton to perform the Coup de Grâce on her is "Dido's Lament (When I Am Laid in Earth)" from the 1689 opera Dido and Aeneas by English composer Henry Purcell. (Some parts of it are also repeated in one scene before the murder, and in another scene when the record skips because of the dust in it.)
• Railroad Tracks of Doom:
  • Toward the end of The Mystery of the Blue Train, after a Hostage Situation with Katherine Grey fails, Major Knighton gets off the train and allows himself to get run over by another one on the tracks.

• Related in the Adaptation: Poirot's personal involvement with the cases is frequently increased by giving him personal connections to the victims or suspects, which were not there in the original novels. For example, in Cat Among the Pigeons, he is an old friend of Miss Bullstrode. In Sad Cypress, he is well acquainted to Dr Lord. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, he is an old friend of Roger Ackroyd and has invested in his business, and so on.
  • In Appointment with Death, Dr. Theodore Gerard and Dame Celia Westholme become the actual parents of Jinny Boynton.

• Running Gag:
  • Captain Hastings's tendency towards making ill-advised investments tended to pop up quite a bit, as did his lack of any kind of understanding of or ability with women (and his equal lack of self-awareness about it).
  • Poirot typically greets his friends with a hug and a kiss. Japp is not keen on such intimacy, and would awkwardly draw back from Poirot when he attempts to do so, until the latter finally settles for a handshake.
• Samus Is a Girl: Marrascaud was always referred to using male pronouns, and the people who had claimed to see him swore that he was a man. "He" turns out to be the very female Alice Cunningham. Of course, the only people who had seen "him" was Alice herself and her accomplice, so their testimonies were obviously false.
• Serial Killings, Specific Target: The ABC Murders and Three Act Tragedy both feature a murderer deliberately targeting other people to conceal their true motivations for the one murder that actually mattered to them.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • Thanks to the Setting Update. In the TV series, Hastings meets his eventual wife in 1936 instead of the early 1920s. Nevertheless, his daughter is a woman in her early twenties as of Curtain, set in 1949.
  • Cards on the Table includes a reference from the book to a dagger in Poirot's collection, one used as a murder weapon on the Orient Express. Murder on the Orient Express was filmed several years after Cards, however.
• Setting Update:
  • Inverted with some stories to avoid the books' use of Comic-Book Time—all Poirot's cases are set in the period from World War I to World War II (except Curtain, which is explicitly dated to 1949). This can result in some strangeness, however, such as Third Girl, which was written in The '60s and uses so many contemporary themes that the book comes off as an Unintentional Period Piece, being re-set in The Great Depression.
  • The setting of The Clocks is changed from the Cold War era to a pre-World War II in the adaptation. This is to keep the story in line with the previous episodes, which were invariably set in the 1930s.
  • The setting of The Kidnapped Prime Minister is changed from the end of World War I to 1935, and the peace conference aimed at ending the war is replaced with a League of Nations conference that has been convened to decide on Germany's rearmament. This is likewise reflected in the change of the villains and their motivations: whereas in the short story Germany is the greater-scope villain via German spy Frau Bertha Ebenthal, who is in league with Captain Daniels, in the TV episode Commander Daniels and his ex-wife Imogen are Irish nationalists implied to be working for the IRA (though the organization itself is never named) when they hatch their plot to kidnap the Prime Minister.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran:
  • Largely averted with Hastings. He rose to the rank of Captain at the Front, earned an OBE, and was eventually invalided home through injury. However, with the exception of a nightmare that wakes him up in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, there doesn't seem to be much evidence of PTSD throughout the series.
  Hastings: (Discussing Japp's sleep-talking) I can't take much more of it, Poirot. [And] I've been through three days of a Jerry barrage.
• Shout-Out:
  • At the very beginning of The Adventure of the Cheap Flat, Poirot, Hastings, and Japp attend the screening of G Men (1935), and yet Poirot is not pleased with all the violence that disturbs him.
  • In Double Sin, as Poirot is boarding a bus, he notices a lady boarding the same bus as well, prompting him to say, in a nod to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, "More curiouser and more curiouser."
  • In The Affair at the Victory Ball, Poirot becomes the radio actor for the BBC in order to deduce the killer's true identity, and the callers complain about his accent, his Poirot Speak and his fractured English. Ironic, since it's a Shout-Out to when actor John Moffatt was cast as him in most dramas aired at BBC4 Radio.
    • Another Shout-Out: at the end of the same episode, Poirot tells Hastings that the former shall lend to Chief Inspector Japp his own personal copy of "The English as She Should be Spoken". The book's title is actually English as She Is Spoke by Pedro Carolino, which Poirot means to refer to.
  • The conclusion of Appointment With Death is very reminiscent of that in the 1978 film of Death on the Nile: The culprits are a pair of lovers; after being exposed by Poirot, they kiss passionately while one delivers a Mercy Kill to the other with a hidden weapon. At this point Poirot realises something is wrong and stands up, but the surviving culprit warns him back, brandishes the weapon, and commits suicide, so that the two of them can escape justice and be Together in Death, with the scene being played very tragically.
  • In The Mystery of the Blue Train, during one party scene at a French villa, the music that plays in the background is the 1936 song "Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)" by Louis Prima (the kind that was used in Chips Ahoy commercials).
• Sick Episode: The Third Floor Flat, The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge (for Poirot), How Does Your Garden Grow? and The Million Dollar Bond Robbery (for Hastings), Wasps' Nest (for Japp), Hallowe'en Party (for Ariadne Oliver).
  • Notably at the end of The Third Floor Flat, Poirot has recovered and claims that the great Poirot is never sick.
  Miss Lemon: "But yesterday you were-"
  Poirot: "Miss Lemon. Yesterday was yesterday!"
• Sleek High Rise Apartment: Poirot's home in "Whitehaven Mansions"^note Actually "Florin Court".
• Spanner in the Works: The maid Annie in The Theft of the Royal Ruby becomes one when she overhears the villains plotting in church. She assumes they're about to poison Poirot through the plum pudding, writing him a warning note in the process. While the pudding doesn't poison anyone, it does help Poirot uncover the ruby he was searching for in the first place. Another one from the same story is the accident that befell the Christmas pudding; the villains put the ruby in the New Year's pudding, but the New Year's pudding was served in its stead when the Christmas pudding was ruined, allowing Poirot to get the ruby.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Colonel Clapperton in Problem at Sea. In the original short story, Poirot arranges for the man to have a fatal heart attack, which is omitted.
  • The Haverings in The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge.
  • Dr. Robert Ames is arrested and does not commit suicide in The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb.
  • In Dumb Witness, Arabella "Bella" Tanios does not commit suicide this time, and her guilt is proven during a standard Summation Gathering instead.
• Speed Demon: As a car fanatic, Hastings has a decided love of fast driving; his Drives Like Crazy tendencies were often employed for the purpose of dramatic Car Chase finales in the early seasons. Typically, Poirot does not approve.
  Poirot: (in the Lagonda) Not too fast, mind.
  Hastings: Don't worry, I won't go over eighty.
  Poirot: Kilometres?
  Hastings: Miles.
  (Poirot braces himself.)

• Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred!: Toward the end of Five Little Pigs, after the denouement, Elsa Greer walks out after being found out that she was Amyas Crale's murderer, and dares his daughter Lucy to shoot her. Poirot walks in and tells Lucy to spare Elsa, warning her, "If you kill her, you kill yourself." Lucy finally heeds his advice and breaks down, sparing Elsa and leaving her defeated.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Violet Wilson and the principal of her woman's college, Phyllida Campion, have very similar features in The Case of the Missing Will. This foreshadows the revelation that Phyllida is Violet's mother, though Violet herself does not know this until the end of the episode.
• The Summation: Just about every episode concludes with one of these.
• Summation Gathering: In One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Poirot had Japp gather all the suspects (including the one who is already in custody) before he makes his grand reveal. In the books, he only tells his deductions to the killer, who readily accepts their fate after knowing that Poirot can't be bought.
• Sword Fight: The Mystery of the Spanish Chest starts with one between a young John Rich and a young Colonel Curtiss in a Deliberately Monochrome past, in which the young Curtiss gets a scar on his face. And toward the end of the episode, in a Big Damn Heroes moment, Rich goes for one more sword fight with Curtiss; after a few bouts, Rich wins once again.
• Talking in Your Sleep: Inspector Japp apparently does it according to Hastings, who was forced to share a bed with him in The Incredible Theft.
• Theme Tune Cameo: In The Adventure of the Western Star Poirot absentmindly pluck the distingly first four notes of the opening theme on a harp while waiting in a famous Belgian actress in her hotel room.
• There Is Only One Bed: Hastings is forced to share a bed with Inspector Japp in the The Incredible Theft. He's less than pleased with this arrangement.
• They Have the Scent!: In The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge, Jack Stoddard uses one of the dogs to sniff what appears to be Mrs. Middleton's dress; the dog runs off, sniffing any trace it can find, until it tracks down to the real murderer: Zoe Havering herself.
• Third-Person Person: Poirot usually speaks of himself this way. Dr. Lutz lampshades it in The Labours of Hercules.
• Time-Delayed Death: Emily Arundel in Dumb Witness, who dies after ingesting a liver pill (where the medicine had been switched with phosphorus) earlier in the day. The liver pill had also been tampered with days earlier.
• Title Drop:
  • Shortly before the The Summation in Three Act Tragedy, viewers are treated to a film title card of 'A Tragedy in Three Acts'. The title is also dropped in the final conversation between Poirot and Muriel Wills.
• To Be Lawful or Good:
  • Subverted in The King Of Clubs, in which Poirot seemingly has little problem letting the killer go free, due to a combination of Asshole Victim and the fact that the killing was accidental and not premeditated.
  • Subverted again in The Chocolate Box. Poirot has no difficulty with allowing the murderer to die of illness instead of being convicted, on the grounds that the murder had been regrettable but justified.
• The Tooth Hurts: Leads to the first victim's murder by what appears to be a Depraved Dentist in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.
• The Tragic Rose: In One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, when Mr. Amberiotis dies of a fatal overdose of adrenalin and morphine delivered by a cleverly disguised Alistair Blunt, his hand knocks out a rose from his desk as it falls to the floor, with scenes of children playing hopscotch and singing the Ironic Nursery Tune.
• Train-Station Goodbye: Happens at the end of The Double Clue: After Poirot tells Countess Rossakoff that they must go their separate ways, he and his private detectives escort her to the train bound for the United States. Before they leave, he offers her a cigarette case with the initials "B.P." (thought to be for Beatrice Palmeston Runcorn, but actually, as the initials are Cyrillic for "V.R.", for Vera Rossakoff) as something to remember him by. She thanks him and kisses him on the forehead before the train departs, and both wave each other goodbye.
• Two Scenes, One Dialogue:
  • Exaggerated into "Multiple Scenes, One Dialogue" in Dead Man's Folly, in which Detective Inspector Bland interviews many people one by one, all with the same dialogue.
• Undying Loyalty: In Sad Cypress, the one person who possesses complete, unquestioning and utterly immoveable loyalty and faith towards Eleanor Carlisle is Dr Lord. He refuses to consider even for a moment that she might actually be the murderer even when she's been convicted on overwhelming evidence, and is so devoted to her welfare that he ends up taking actions which accidentally make him seem like the murderer.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Mr. Anstruther, the railroad man whose bike had been stolen by the perpetrator in The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge, is rather unimpressed by the fact that Poirot and company took effort to return his admittedly dirty, dinged-up bike at the end of the episode. This leads to a rather philosophical discussion between Poirot and Japp about the gratitude of people towards detectives.
• Unrelated in the Adaptation:
  • Sheila Webb and Miss Pebmarsh from The Clocks, were revealed to be mother-and-daughter in the novel, but are unrelated in the TV adaptation. Colin is also clearly established as the son of Colonel Race, whereas in the novel, his father is implied to be Superintendent Battle.
  • In the original version of 'One, Two, Buckle My Shoe'' Helen Montressor is Alistair Blunt's cousin, whereas in the TV, she's his secretary. Though in either case, it doesn't matter, since "Helen Montressor" is a fake identity used by Blunt's wife Gerda.
• Unwanted Gift Plot: A minor example in The ABC Murders. Poirot and Hastings joyfully reunite after the latter spends several months adventuring in South America. Poirot is unimpressed by 'Cedric,' a stuffed caiman Hastings shot on the Orinoco. However, when Hastings reveals that he brought Cedric back for Poirot, the detective puts on a brave face.
• Villain Stole My Bike: In The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge, a bearded man (who is actually a disguised Zoe Havering) steals Mr. Anstruther's bike and rides away from the train station. Havering then goes to a field and buries the bike along with the beard disguise so that she can enter Hunter's Lodge as Mrs. Middleton and kill her uncle Harrington Pace for the money. Poirot, Hastings and Japp return the bike to Mr. Anstruther at the end of the episode, but because it's covered in mud and damaged from the way Zoe treated it, he's less than enthusiastic about getting it back in its current state, causing Poirot to frustatedly ask whether Mr. Anstruther wants it or not: he reclutantly agreeds to take it back and says he's goint to ask someone to take a look at it, with the episode ending as Poirot grumbles about how unthankful people are nowadays to Hastings and Japp.
• Vorpal Pillow: In Dead Man's Folly, we learn that James Folliat smothered Hattie Stubbs in bed with a pillow so as not to let his true identity be known.
• The Watson: Captain Hastings.
• We Will Meet Again: In The King of Clubs, as Mr. Reedburn is escorting one of his assistants out for a catfight, the latter says, "You haven't heard the last of me, Mr. Reedburn."
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: One of the suspects in The Clocks, a blind geriatric named Miss Pebmarsh, lived through World War I and was rightly traumatized by the young lives lost in the war. She conspires with the Nazis under a misguided belief that committing treason is preferable to a second war with Germany. Note that in the book, the story happened after WWII, during the Cold War instead.
• We Used to Be Friends: Happens in Three Act Tragedy: Poirot and Sir Charles Cartwright used to be longtime friends, but after investigating one murder case after another, Poirot finds out that Sir Charles murdered three people so that he could marry Egg. By the end, Poirot is left reeling after realizing that Cartwright's first victim could have easily been Poirot himself.
• Whatever Mancy: In Wasps' Nest, Poirot is into tasseography, i.e., reading tea leaves, and sees a murder crime that may happen in the future, which Poirot must prevent at all costs.
• Where It All Began: In a meta sense, Dead Man's Folly, which was filmed at Greenway Estate, Christie's country home from 1938 until her death, and inspiration for settings in several of her novels.
• Whole Episode Flashback: The Chocolate Box can be this, with some parts of the episode taking place in the present.
• Woman Scorned: Gerda from The Hollow. She loved her husband and she believed that he loved her, too. However, he engaged in several affairs with other women behind her back, including her friend Henrietta. On their trip to the country, she witnessed her husband having sex with his ex-fiancée. She was so devastated by the sight that she shot him.
• World Tree: In The Hollow, Henrietta Savernake makes some doodles in random places, and all these doodles are of what looks like a stylized palm tree which she calls Yggdrasil, a giant ash tree that represents Viking cosmology, with the branches standing for different parallel worlds.
• Yes-Man: Hastings to Poirot, as Hastings ruefully acknowledges in Dumb Witness.
• You Just Told Me: Played straight in Sad Cypress:
  Poirot: Tell me, you have lived in New Zealand?
  Suspect: [astonished] However did you discover that? Mind you, it is known.
  Poirot: Is it? I have tried numerous ways to discover it without success.
  [The suspect looks pissed off and cornered.]
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Toward the end of The Adventure of the Cheap Flat, when a Mafia assassin attempts to kill Carla Romero and her husband for the murder of Luigi Valdarno, Poirot steps in their way and tells his colleagues that the assassin would not dare shoot him. The assassin pulls out Hastings's gun and warns him that if he takes one more step, then he is finished. Poirot acts all like "Try me!" and takes one step. The assassin prepares to shoot him and... the gun clicks a few times before he realizes that the gun has no bullets. Poirot then shows him the bullets that he had taken out of the gun earlier while he and Hastings were tracking down the assassin in the Robinsons' apartment.

---