conversation
It is a profound belief of mine that if you can induce a person to talk to you for long enough, on any subject whatever! sooner or later they will give themselves away.
Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s “After the Funeral” (1953)
In one form or another this opinion is voiced nearly in every single one of ↑Agatha Christie‘s Poirot-novels. Obviously it is something Mrs Christie deemed important to communicate to her readership. Although I ↵already stated that anthropologists are not criminal investigators, compare Poirot’s wisdom to the points stressed by ↑Gerd Spittler in respect to the method of Thick Participation: “[Thick Participation] implies apprenticeship and practice, natural conversation and observation, lived experience and sensuous research.” (↵Spittler 2001: 1)
The above picture shows Hercule “Poirot, played by Albert Finney, […] in ↑Murder on the Orient Express (1974) in what many critics feel is the most accurate representation of the detective on film. Heavily made up and sporting brilliantined hair and little moustaches, Finney looked the part and captured the combination of fussiness and cunning that fans of the novels had come to envision.” (↑agathachristie.com)
