Hercule Poirot, Matchmaker

 My previous entry that began a Structuralist critique of Agatha Christie's Poirot works focussed on the use of underplayed family relationships that turn out to be important in the story. Certainly that was continued in Ackroyd. There were multiple such relationships, including a "hidden marriage" and a hidden mother-son relationship that play such important roles this time.

But the theme that leapt out at me this time, and which struck me as being important in all three of the novels I've read so far is the degree to which Poirot as a detective, in becoming an agent of justice, explicitly seeks to allow two characters who are in love to find happiness by the solution of the murder, which they would otherwise be prevented from achieving. 

In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, he explicitly says as much, and indeed the estranged husband and wife find happiness with each other at the end of the story.  This is also very obvious in The Murder of the Links, in which he not only provides the means of happiness for two in-love suspects, both of whom are accused of the murder by the police at very times, but he also furnishes the means by which his "Watson" character, Arthur Hastings, finds his true love and get married (and leaves Poirot, as we find out in Ackroyd).

In Ackroyd, this theme is certainly continued. We have a couple who are allowed to discover that they love each other, and able to get married. We a secretly married couple who are able to "come out" as married to the world, all because the murder is solved and justice is served.

Thus in Christie, we see part of the arc of justice is itself the establishment of conjugal love between husband and wife, whether in an existing marriage or a new one, by freeing them of the situation of injustice in which they have found themselves, with Poirot acting as the Cupid-like agent of this.

It should be mentioned that this was a theme is not one that is dominant in Conan Doyle, but it is certainly present in The Moonstone. But as everyone knows, The Moonstone, published in 1868, contains, in some form, everything present in every detective novel that has come after it.