I've just now finished watching nearly every episode of Agatha Christie's famous private investigator, Poirot.
M. always said he loved the whodunit and I could never understand why.
I hated the series as a child - the theme tune and style of the titles, the locations, the moustache.
So, even when we sat down together to watch the newly produced, cool looking version, I still found it hard to understand his love of the fat Belgian detective.
In particular, I noticed that I was frustrated by my impulse to blame first one character then another, and back again and so on, endlessly and always incorrectly. I did not attribute this as a natural part of the experience of this type of story. I just found it an annoying compulsion on the part of my character. Perhaps because I already had enough annoying compulsions and figured I could not handle dealing with another, I have steered well clear of them and failed to understand them - perhaps until now.
Now, I find myself in love with Poirot and his friends, their characters and their friendships and their proper way of conducting themselves, the interesting aspects of their strengths, their limitations and their charity to each other. Their humanity.
I have begun to appreciate the form of the whodunit and of what it says about human nature and, it seems to me that it is kind of a lesson in Christian non-judgement:
For does it not show us our willingness to prematurely judge others? And to judge falsely? And does not Poirot demonstrate to us how to conduct ones self honourably, always carefully and always with a great respect and understanding of order: that everyone is innocent and guilty? Or, is it that only Poirot has the keen sense which comes from true virtue that enables him to find the guilty?
Perhaps M. would say I've taken it too far.
