Holmes Or Poirot?
The internet is split: which of these legendary detectives is better — and which could solve a mystery faster?
A little Belgian man with a bald egg-shaped head, a passion for method and perfection, and a deep interest in what makes someone a murderer.
Tall, English, and the image of the ultimate detective, finding height from a marking on the wall and names from a special brand of cigarettes.
Case Study
The overall character – which is the one who stands out more, which is the one the public sees when thinking of the word “detective”?
POIROT | Known as the “funny little foreign man with an egg-shaped head”, he’s easily recognizable anywhere — and evokes a certain feeling of nostalgia when a seasoned reader recognizes him in a book. Poirot’s character is very much complete; there is nothing left to a reader’s imagination (except perhaps his love life, for which we’re given hints at a certain Vera Rossakoff). A downside to his character is that it’s painfully one sided; at the end of his detective career, it was even considered by some as stereotypical — there seemed to be no other side to him than his OCD and methodical mind! However, there were instances where his feelings bled through his seemingly perfectly-organized persona: when in a certain book (which will remain unnamed for the risk of spoilers, but will appear if you were to google the title “Murder In Retrospect” — the book isn’t called that anymore, so you’d probably only recognize it if you were a die-hard fan or if you’d read the book before), the murderer was a girl who had given all her heart to one man who never felt the same, and who consequently turned her into a cold unforgiving statue, incapable of loving another. “She is young, that one,” Poirot had said about the girl. “I pity her.” She had gone all in and the cards had broken her heart.
HOLMES | “No sh*t, Sherlock.” At least one in five people knows who Sherlock Holmes is. This detective was the pinnacle of sleuths, the quintessential detective — yet his portrayal and description ranges from a dashing brown-haired young man to an elderly but able gentleman; most of his stories are completely devoted to a case and not his personal affiliations to it, and sagas or revisits from a character in different novels are rare. However, Agatha Christie took inspiration for Poirot and Hastings from Holmes and Watson, and much of the two detectives — and their companions’ — psyches are alike. That being said, Holmes is “the original detective”, having been created more than 50 years before Poirot — but first isn’t always the best.
WINNER OF THIS TAB: POIROT
Who has more cases? Who solved them better — the difficulty of the case being weighed in? Who had the biggest ratio of solved to unsolved cases? Which one had the most interesting cases?
POIROT | 33 novels and over 50 short stories; cases varying from murders to robberies, and even abductions; he was the Hercules of detectives. Poirot is famously known for using his “little grey cells” to find a culprit, and rarely had to move to solve a case if he could envision it in his mind. He focused on the psychological aspect of a case: What makes a murderer? Based on this person’s emotional and mental makeup, how would they go about killing someone — would that match this specific crime? How would they react and where would they place the murder weapon, if it’s missing? It’s a way of thinking that makes a reader want to follow along — and slap themselves in the face when they realize that they should’ve seen the revelation coming. Speaking of, Poirot is also famous for his dramatic revelations as to who the killer is. It’s a show of suspense, entertaining both readers and suspects alike. Some of the best demonstrations (in our opinion) are: The Affair At Victory Ball, 5 Little Pigs, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Death On The Nile (though he didn’t put on a show for the last one, it was a bittersweet end that, in the interpretation by David Suchet, is beautifully displayed to the point that it made a certain anonymous person cry a bit).
HOLMES | Appearing in a collection of 4 books and 56 short stories, Holmes, although not having had as many cases as Poirot, still was at the apex of the English crime scene. The cases are varied in both plot and method, which differs from Poirot in the sense that there are a few plot repetitions in Christie’s stories, especially in short stories. The way a case is analyzed can be psychological at times, but is dominantly reliant on clues and deduction. Fun fact: Sherlock doesn’t deduce; he inducts — deducing is the wrong word for his logic. The more you know! Movie adaptations of Holmes are often better designed and executed than those of Poirot, namely due to the time they were created; Poirot was big in the movies a long time before Holmes, so technology was a lot more evolved in movies like “Sherlock” than in David Suchet’s Poirot series.
WINNER OF TAB | TIE
Stereotype, public size, popularity — of the two greatest and most well-known detectives, which is the more commonly known in the media, and which one trumps the other in the game of fame?
POIROT | Almost every copy you can find of one of Agatha Christie’s novels states, either on the spine, front, back cover, or inside flaps, that Christie is the “most widely published author of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare”. However, in the modern world — and by world we mean the United States, since we don’t have much accurate and relevant data on other countries — Poirot isn’t as often heard of as Holmes.
HOLMES | Calling someone “Sherlock” is a compliment — unless it’s sarcastic — but you’d be getting weird stares saying things like “Good job, Poirot” (except from those who know their literature). Sherlock Holmes, having been appreciated first in the United States before making it big in England, where he was originally created, left a deeper mark on the country than the little Belgian detective. According to Google Trends, on average, the name “Poirot” has been searched less than once for every 19 “Holmes” searches in the last 5 years. In this aspect, Sherlock is the undisputed winner — but it doesn’t undermine Poirot’s persona.
WINNER OF THIS TAB: HOLMES
It’s not just the characters that matter — the authors are responsible for the way they are portrayed. Interestingly, both Christie and Doyle (the creators of Poirot and Holmes) didn’t like their characters in the end, but for different reasons. Which one was a better writer in terms of description, plot, and style, and which one, when it comes down to it, created their character better ?
POIROT | Agatha Christie invented Poirot on a dare from her sister; he went on to live through an odyssey of cases, growing in fame, knowledge, and… stereotype. Unfortunately, by his final case (Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case), even Agatha Christie admitted to have fallen back on patterns and the stereotype of foreigners; she had originally designed the character to match the Belgian refugees living near her during the war (in which she was a nurse), and over time, had diminished his originality and that of his cases. However, he was beloved by all who read his books, and remains the only fictional character to ever have received an obituary in the New York Times, and rightly so. Poirot’s quirks, his habits, his method, and his “little grey cells”, are what make him Hercule Poirot, the Belgian little detective that has climbed into our hearts and made his neat little home there — hopefully to stay in forever.
HOLMES | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had no luck in finding an audience for his new detective character in England, so he placed him in a magazine in the United States, which hit a goldmine of success — and soon thereafter the rest of the world followed in the rush. Holmes went on adventures; he was a brave but calculating man, analyzing situations, clues, and people, to solve a crime when nobody else could. Unlike Poirot, he wouldn’t lie back in his seat and watch a scene unfold for the right time to strike; he followed the trail of crumbs and was the first out of the forest because he hadn’t just spotted a crumb — he’d found it, based on the location and pattern of previous ones, and the dim shoeprint hidden underneath the shadow of a nearby tree. Every shadow of a detective in a pop-culture poster; every cigar that’s smoked, every hat and trench coat sold at the costume store; that’s Sherlock Holmes, and without him, the entire foundation — including Christie’s Poirot (she took inspiration from Doyle) — of story-time detectives would crumble to the ground.
QUOTE COMPARISON | Which not only sounds better — which did you read in a definite voice?
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Holmes
“The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.” – Poirot
TAB WINNER: POIROT
WHY?
– More books written
– Persona better described
– Christie’s writing style was better than that of Doyle’s (fun fact: Doyle wanted to kill off Holmes because he was bored with him, but his fans rioted so much that he brought him back to life — but the quality of his stories visibly dropped, making the plot more predictable, the characters less well described, and ultimately diminishing his fame and undermining Holmes’s personality and skill as a detective).
"Mon ami, what will you? You fix upon me a look of doglike devotion and demand of me a pronouncement a la Sherlock Holmes!"
