Characters
The Big Four's characters are typical ethnic and national stereotypes of 1920s British fiction, with the Chinese characters typecast as Fu Manchu-esque bandits. Other key villains include a French femme fatale and a vulgar American multimillionaire. These characters implement conspiracies and undetectable poisonings operated from a super-secret underground hideout.
The book also features Achille Poirot, Hercule's twin brother (later revealed to be Hercule Poirot himself in 'disguise'), and an eventual double agent, the beautiful Countess Vera Rossakoff, who is portrayed as a stereotypical aventurière and down-at-the-heels Russian ex-aristocrat of the pre-October Revolution period.
Read more about this topic: The Big Four (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
“My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that’s basically a conservative view of life.”
—Jane Smiley (b. 1949)