Je suis un petit hamster Belge

"I am not a bloody little frog; I am a bloody little Belgian..."

After the huge response of "The Underappreciated Mouse", I think it is high time for me to reveal some work from the upcoming Rivals of the Great Mouse Detective, whose contents I have kept secret for the last three years (since 2004).

First off, what was the Rivals of Sherlock Holmes? It was an anthology, edited by Hugh Greene, of detective stories published during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. These detective were created under the shadow of Sherlock Holmes' popularity — some, like A.J. Raffles, Arsène Lupin, and Father Brown, were fair contemporaries; others simply disappeared into utter absurdity.

For the Rivals of the Great Mouse Detective, I chose the 1930s, the delicate years between post-WWI and pre-WWII, when the progression of the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction" was at its height. Authors like Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, John P. Marquand, Chester Gould, etc, created some of the most legendary sleuths of the 20th century, from the glamourous to the hard-boiled. They are not adversaries, not at all so; they are the Great Detective's disciples, who integrated the Master's teachings of science and deduction into their own generation and carried them onto the next century. Nevertheless, our dear aged Great Mouse Detective could not help but conveniently pop his head up into a few of their lives and adventures.

---

Introducing Monsieur Hercule Poirot:  From the French-speaking country of Belgium, born in Spa but raised in Brussels, Poirot was an officer of the Belgian Police, with a prominent and successful career, solving an impressive number of cases. However, his career came to a halt with the start of the Great War. Germany launched a blitzkrieg in August 1914, invading neutral nations of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg in order to reach France. The national armies battled furiously in defence, but the weight of numbers overpowered the proud country and Belgium surrendered into German reign after eighteen days. Three weeks later, Austria-Hungary invaded the German-occupied Belgium. Subsequently, Poirot became employed as an intermediate agent for the French Secret Service, and served as a word-of-mouth messenger and informant, ducking across the warring territories unto Allied Headquarters. Once posing as a chef of a French diplomat in November 1914, Hercule Poirot was commissioned to relay a cipher dispatch from Rodom, Poland to Amsterdam, Netherlands, but when German Field-Marshall Friedrich von Hindenburg called off the Łódź offensive forty miles from Warsaw, Poirot was caught under the crossfire and, as a result, took a bullet in the leg, causing a noticeable limp, which he would carry for rest of his life.

As a result of the War, his beloved homeland became inhabitable. Deciding to avoid being caught again in the middle of yet another political uprising of socialism and fascism, a battle-weary Hercule Poirot withdrew from his services and packed his matching luggage off to England. He settled in the beautiful countryside of Kent at Styles St. Mary, a small town still serving as a minor-league British military colony that remained after armistice signings. He later moved to Whitehaven Mansions, a block of beautiful art-deco buildings and apartments in Sandhurst Square, London, where he established himself as a freelance detective.

Poirot is an exotic figure whose unmistakable and extraordinary look begets a little more than an arched eyebrow and a mused chuckle, whereas he blessedly oblivious at the attention as he contentedly guzzles the endless glasses of sirop de cassis and crème de menthe. Short and stumpy, with a curious egg-shaped head perched a slightly onto one side, his brilliant eyes flashed a striking bronze, and his most trademark characteristic is his stiff, luxuriant but heavily waxed moustache. He carries himself with a gait of short, brisk steps and a slight limp, and waddles from one place to another with an analogous shuffle of a well-dressed penguin! He is of an obsessive-compulsive nature and a neatness nut that systematised everything by height, from his bookshelves to his kitchenware, and carefully selects same-size eggs for his breakfast. So fastidious in his manners that he organises items in another's home as if it was his own, even goes as far as rearranging knick-knacks on the mantelpiece at the scene of the crime. He often balks at detective methods that inferred crawling on hands and knees and sniffing for clues with a glass. He shuns physical evidence on the grounds that, taken by themselves, such clues could never lead to the solution of a crime. He prefers to rely on order and method, and the use of "my little grey cells" to solve the most baffling of crimes.

(Je suis un petit hamster Belge is French for "I'm a little Belgian hamster." Yes, he's a hamster, not a mouse. And he's Belgian, not French. He's very touchy about it. Special thanks to my friend ~The-French-Belphegor for correcting my French. Come see David Suchet's wonderful performance of Poirot HERE! Warning, contains spoilers.)

Models - David Suchet

Medium – 4B graphite.

Hercule Poirot © Agatha Christie (and Diane N. Tran).