Satire: the use of humor, irony, or exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
Ancient Greece offers us a bulging and bounteous buffet of philosophical schools; Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Scepticism, and, taking the thought of that big buffet most seriously, Epicureanism. Plato’s The Republic or Aristotle’s On Politics are typically held up as foundational philosophical texts introducing us to the ‘philosophy of urbanization’. In reality, no school has had more influence on contemporary urban debates than the English Detective School of Urban Philosophy. This blog (part of the CCI Big Thinkers series) introduces us to the profundities of this school and its three leading protagonists. Those three are Monsieur Hercule Poirot (the urban positivist), Miss Jane Marple (the urban sceptic), and Mr Sherlock Holmes, one associated with all that is foggy and urban, but a philosopher who in practice sought to reconcile the Poirovian and Marpalian extremes.
The English Detective School of Urban Philosophy does have its US counterparts; Jesscia Fletcher (Murder She Wrote) and Lieutenant Colombo (Colombo), have made, at most, minor contributions to the school. In the main, US urban detective philosophy has departed from the cozy-philosophizing of the English school and emphasized instead cops, guns, car chases, and fights. More loud and sweaty American simplicity than the careful and thoughtful English nuance on this side of the Atlantic.
We begin a series of three blogs here with the thoughts of Monsieur Hercule Poirot, the Belgian private detective long resident in London. Monsieur Poirot is best known to us through his biographer Agatha Christie, his philosophical contemplation has recently been portrayed on the Big Screen, with Kenneth Branagh as the eponymous lead, in Murder of the Orient Express (2017), Death on the Nile (2022), and A Haunting in Venice (2023). Most scholars proclaim the earlier UK television series, Poirot (1989-2013) starring David Suchet, as the definitive edition of his collected philosophical works¹.
In The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) Monsieur Hercule Poirot is described:
“He was hardly more than five feet four inches but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. Even if everything on his face was covered, the tips of moustache and the pink-tipped nose would be visible. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police.”
Short, egg-headed, gloriously moustached, and impeccably dressed: this is how we know Monsieur Poirot. For one so visually familiar, our biographical understanding of Monsieur Poirot is much sketchier; he was likely born in Brussels, Belgium in the 1870s and raised a Catholic, but definitely honed his earliest philosophical expertise in the Belgian police. Poirot fled to England as a refugee in 1916, during the First World War.
Why is Poirovian philosophy important?
Orthodox urban scholarship focuses on how the talented, innovative, and productive accumulate in cities to their mutual benefit. One study of Chinese cities shows how university researchers in second-tier cities enjoyed a productivity boost after being connected to first-tier cities, and their more renowned universities, by high-speed trains. Another study of New York, found that among 1,000 advertising agencies in southern Manhattan, productivity benefits existed for firms located with 750 meters of each other. While orthodox economists obsess with the urban talented, innovative, and productive, Poirovian research shines scholarly attention, on that hitherto neglected urban category: the idle, lucky, and lazy rich. It is Monsieur Poirot we must thank for empirical proof of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s aphorism, “the rich are different from you and me.”
Monsieur Poirot “was fond of eating with the English upper classes and solving their crimes.” The protagonists in his philosophical oeuvre are aristocrats, royals, high-society minglers, gold-diggers, heiresses, owners of fabulous jewelry, Prime Ministers, Generals, and glamorous actresses. Poirovianism is a practical philosophy. To better understand the life of the idle and talentless urban rich Poirot does have to interact occasionally with the lower orders. Servants have a proclivity to gossip and observe things which can be of great assistance to a detective. In The Hollow (1946) we learn, “There’s always hope where there’s a kitchenmaid……Kitchenmaids talk, Kitchenmaids babble.” There is no practical escape from the idle rich, how else could a philosopher pay his bills? As Poirot made this clear in the Labours of Hercules (1947) “my fees are high” and “I do not bargain. I am an expert. For the services of an expert you have to pay” (p197).
Orthodox economics can help explain why Chinese researchers gather in cities and why research and advertising gurus mingle in Manhattan, so they can learn from each other’s expertise. But it is to Monsieur Poirot we must turn to learn why the idle rich gather together and to what glorious economic impact this has.
Poirovianism argues that the rich agglomerate in cities so they can better consume nice things and admire each other in doing so (there are echoes here of Bernard de Mandaville’s thesis of ‘conspicuous consumption’ from his 1714 pamphlet The Fable of the Bees). These profound philosophical insights have been relatively neglected by the bland mundanity of economists and their obsession with production, innovative, and productivity. While basic manufactured goods are national goods, many other forms of consumption require consumers to be comfortably seated in a particular location. Nice dinners in nice restaurants need the idle rich to take expansive time for their enjoyment; no scope here for a busy economist obsessed with efficiency and productivity and the horrors of a quick sandwich lunch at their depressing desks. Poirovian texts are replete with practical examples.
In After the Funeral (1953), Poirot and company dine off a Sole Veronique, followed by Escalope de Veau Milanaise, and finish with Poire Flambe with ice cream. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952) “His [Poirot’s] eyes held a reflective sleepy pleasure. The Escargots de la Vieille Grand’Mere had been delicious.” And, “in between meals he spent quite a lot of time searching out and marking down possible sources of new and delicious food.”
Recent statistical evidence does support these Poirovian philosophical contentions. Cities with more restaurants (New York) and live performance theatres (Paris) grew more rapidly in the twenty years after 1980. There is even good evidence that this Poirovian contention is becoming more apt over time. The correlation between an amenity index and urban size increased in the 1990s relative to the 1980s, indicating that urban amenities become a more important determinant of city growth over time. The love Monsieur Poirot has for the London world of dinners, exhibitions, and theatre and its well-known gastronomic centres – including, the Savoy, the Carlton, the Gallant Endeavour, and the Cheshire Cheese – is a practical engagement for that which spurs a city to rapid growth.
Those dry pen-pushing urban economists think of housing in purely functional terms: affordability, accessibility, and connectivity to sewers. It is to Poirovian philosophy and the urban rich for whom housing has, not pipes and drains, but romance and poetry. The working masses depart their housing in the early morning and return late at night to access employment or public services. It is the idle rich who most need housing. Who but the idle rich surface from bed in late afternoon and need the subsequent proximity of comfortable sofas upon which to lounge and linger? Who but the idle rich need a separate dining room to entertain likeminded idlers to leisurely lunches?
Poirovian philosophy tackles such urban profoundities with commendable clarity. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952), Monsieur Poirot notes of his apartment: “He was proud of his home. A splendid symmetrical building. The lift took him up to the third floor where he had a large luxury flat with impeccable chromium fittings, square armchairs, and severely rectangular ornaments. There could truly be said not to be a curve in the place.”
Clothes maketh the man! It isn’t a Poirovian quotation, but it could easily have been. Cities are also the only practical places in which to dress well. In the Labours of Hercules (1947), we are introduced to Poirot’s “easy chairs” that are “comfortably padded”. Where else could one wear and revel in the “resplendent dressing-gown and embroidered slippers” that Poirot spends much of his time luxuriating in After the Funeral (1953). The ease of travel by taxi, the safe and swept footpaths, and the carpeted hallways of city life, allow one to enjoy fine clothing without mud-oriented concern. By comparison, in Sad Cypress (1933) Poirot alighted from a London train into the countryside and “looked very Londonified and was wearing pointed patent leather shoes.” The sartorial dangers were apparent in The Labours of Hercules (1947), “Hercule Poirot, wearing his usual smart patent leather shoes, had been forced to walk that mile and a half to reach the riverside villages of Hartly Dene.” It is only in the theatres, the restaurants, and at private dinner parties that one can both be properly admired and admire.
The narrow confines of economists and their associated obsession with production and productivity lead them to an erroneous conclusion. Economists have long blamed the economic woes of Africa on the failure of countries in the region to industrialize. African urbanization has happened quickly, but with little industrialization. In Angola for example, the urbanization rate was 15% before oil was discovered in the 1960s but soared to 60% by 2010. Angola now has an urban population of over 11 million people. Though oil accounts for over 50% of GDP the sector only employs about 10,000 workers. Angola has lots of oil wealth to pay for consumption, but not many productive workers. The Poirovians among us should hail this economic wonder. No so the dismal economist. Those economists drag out dreary argument that cities in such resource-exporting countries are ‘consumption cities’. Such cities, they lament, have a larger fraction of their workers in non-tradeable services such as commerce and transport or personal and government services. Surplus income generated from natural resource exports – they shake their mathematically befuddled heads – leads to more demand for urban goods and services (relative to food). This added demand is met largely through imports (except for urban services, which are produced locally), so doesn’t contribute to domestic industrialization.
The focus on production and industrialization by policy advocates in the World Bank, UN-Habitat, or the Charter Cities Institute is all wrong. The Poirovian strand of the English Detective School of Urban Philosophy should make us realize that consumption is the most important goal of public policy. To better stimulate consumption, a growing and thriving class of idle rich should be encouraged to inherit, to dissociate themselves from practical or innovative endeavor, and most importantly to learn from Monsieur Poirot. The idle rich should be lingering in big (manufactured) beds until the afternoon, enjoying soft (manufactured) furnishings, and to be partaking of an early, long, and leisurely dinner (processed agricultural products). In Labours of Hercules (1947), after awaking late from slumber, Poirots’ “valet had come in with his morning chocolate.” Without the late night at the theatre and the comfortable bedding, from where would come the opportunity and necessity for Poirot to slowly sip a morning chocolate? Without that beneficial idling there would be no job for a valet!
Wealth inherited is less likely to induce the creativity and innovation that distracts from maximizing leisurely consumption. Good public policy should endeavor to tax income and effort, not consumption and inheritance. A good city is one founded on idleness. A good city is a consumption city. Oh! What thanks will the idle rich then have from the brewer, the butcher, the tailor, and the retailer! The more idle and rich they be the more they shall consume; the more sumptuous, the more gourmet, and the more sparkling is their idleness, the happier shall be urbanization.
In anticipation…
Monsieur Hercule Poirot does not like the countryside. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952) Poirot notes, “It’s not really a guest house, just a rather decrepit country house…..Hercule Poirot closed his eyes in agony”. In The Hollow (1946) Poirot observes “The surrounding landscape he did not care for through it was, he knew, supposed to be a beauty spot. It was, however, too wildly asymmetrical to appeal to him. He did not care much for trees at any time – they had that untidy habit of shedding their leaves.” Should we hurriedly and uncritically acclaim the urban enthusiasm of Monsieur Hercule Poirot? Not so fast! The rich resources of the English Detective School of Urban Philosophy offer another perspective, of profound and quaint juxtaposition. Miss Jane Marple offers us a deep urban skepticism and extols the philosophical merits of the English village.
To be continued…
¹ Please do note, I have provided references from the Poirovian cannon, in the form of quotes or other facts, but not hyperlinks. Agatha Christie has only been outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare, so her works are available in many, many different editions globally. For the scholarly purists among you, I used a collected works published in the UK by Heron Books in 1977. I provide original UK publication dates for each book noted here.
