If there’s one way you can recognise an amazing character it’s when they literally come alive through the writing
Their little mannerisms, odd quirks, the way they have their tea or how their nose crunches up because dirt tarnished their shoes.
The characteristics of a character are far more important than their appearances. A good character almost becomes a friend, who’s reactions to certain things can be predicted easily.
A good character doesn’t even mean the character has to be morally good or bad. He just has to be so well written that you can imagine an actual person existing like that.
Hercule Poirot: the world-renowned, moustachioed Belgian private detective, unsurpassed in his intelligence and understanding of the criminal mind, is one such great character brought to life in over 33 novels and 50 short stories by Agatha Christie. There’s just something incredibly captivating about Hercule Poirot that you get hooked to him from the first moment he enters maybe it’s the way he walks in or maybe it’s the fact that he would be busy fussing over the dry blood that dirtied his shoes when he entered the crime scene or about how he couldn’t apply pomade on his moustache before coming to help Inspector Japp.
Most often than not people misjudge Poirot because of his appearance. He is an egg headed little man who looks so foreign and speaks broken english in a very thick accent. The characters also don’t seem to believe that Hercule could solve the case and he uses this to his advantage. “When you saw him you just wanted to laugh! He was like something on the stage or in the pictures. To begin with, he wasn’t above five-foot five, I should think—an odd, plump little man, quite old, with an enormous moustache, and a head like an egg. He looked like a hairdresser in a comic play!
And this was the man who was going to find out who killed Mrs. Leidner!” --- Amy Leatherman, in Murder in Mesopotamia.
He has a rather unique way of sleuthing, unlike other detectives scrabbling around on the floor searching for clues, Poirot uses psychology and his extensive knowledge of human nature to weed out the criminals. He does of course take physical evidence into account, but more often than not his combination of order, method and his little grey cells does the trick. He doesn’t, it throws many suspects right off their guard. The way he explains how the murder takes place, the motive and how poirot cracked the case, leaves you in awe of how the little man’s brain works. Since Poirot always had a flair his cases end with this extremely typical, dramatic denouement, satisfying his own ego and confirming to all that he is truly "the greatest mind in Europe."
Comments