James Japp in “Unfinished Business”

James Japp

The professional private detective, ladies and gentlemen, is not the glamorous figure of fiction. He is a man who, failing in more worthy walks of life and being of meddlesome and troublemaking disposition, finally comes to rest in a dingy office over the chip shop, where he plies for hire in the sordid world of petty crime and divorce. Except, I have to say, for one. I have been fortunate in my career, in that many, in fact most of my cases have been shared with the most extraordinary of private detectives and, if I may borrow a word from his own native tongue, that doyen of the Belgian police force, Monsieur Hercule Poirot. I think I may say without fear of contradiction that Hercule Poirot has one of the most original minds of the 20th century. Intelligent, brave, sensitive, devastatingly quick, Hercule Poirot stands head and shoulders above any other detective of my considerable experience.