This is the first proper post of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story in my Introduction post, but basically I realized in 2014 that I am inordinately attached to David Suchet’s portrayal of Hercule Poirot in the long-running ITV series, and I’m incapable of watching Curtain. I’ve decided to rewatch and reread the entire series this year so that, by Christmas, I’ll be ready to watch the final episode and say goodbye.

So, this post is about the first episode of the first series. I won’t labour the point too much, but these aren’t academic reviews. I’m not a Christie expert or particularly knowledgeable about the production of the ITV series. This is just a personal response to a TV show that I’ve loved since I was ten.




The first ever episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was broadcast on the 8th January 1989 – it’s very weird to think that this is the exact date that I learnt who Hercule Poirot was. I knew who Miss Marple was from the BBC adaptations of the 1980s, and I’d already been permanently traumatized by Sleeping Murder (still can’t look over a set of banisters without getting the creeps) and A Pocketful of Rye (the clothes peg! oh God, the clothes peg!) As a side note, I was about to find out who Albert Campion was, as the BBC’s underrated Campion, starring Peter Davison and Brian Glover, would air a few weeks later. (Oh wow, I’ve only just thought, was this a competition between ITV and BBC? Two shows about dapper Golden Age detectives with ridiculously catchy theme tunes and natty Lagonda cars making their appearances on rival channels within weeks of each other? Hmmm…) In fact, I remember watching the first episode of Campion a lot more clearly than watching the first episode of Poirot, because my little brother loved Campion too. I don’t know if this is an embarrassing or endearing story, but me and my little bro were quite enamoured with Campion and used to insist on wearing white shirts and bowties when it was on (and repeatedly singing the theme song). I have no idea where we got the bowties from (I was ten, he was nine), but we clearly felt the show deserved a sense of occasion. All I remember from my first viewing of ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’ was being quite fascinated by the concept of ‘white slavers’ (as I had no idea what on earth this might mean – if only I’d seen into the future and Appointment with Death, hee hee). But I digress…

‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’ was based on Agatha Christie’s short story of the same name, which was first published in 1923. The story was part of the ‘original’ series of Poirot stories (though it wasn’t the first to appear), published in The Sketch magazine and written at the request of Sketch editor Bruce Ingram. Hercule Poirot had made his debut three years earlier in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and Ingram approached Christie about the possibility of publishing further Poirot adventures. These stories are often quite short, and Christie would go on to rework several of them into longer stories (more on that in my next post!), and they are narrated by Poirot’s associate Captain Hastings (undoubtedly inspired by Watson’s narration of Sherlock Holmes’s cases).

In Christie’s ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’, we meet a bored Poirot. The intrigues of the newspaper headlines – as read aloud by Hastings – do nothing to excite him, and he decides to focus his meticulous attention on attending to his wardrobe and his moustache. These plans are interrupted by the arrival of a Mrs Todd, who wishes to engage Poirot to find an absconding servant (the ‘Clapham Cook’ of the title). Poirot decides to take the case – on a whim, more than anything – but soon discovers that there is more going on at 88 Prince Albert Road than first suspected. It turns out to be, as he announces in the final sentence, ‘one of [his] more interesting cases’.



The episode was written by the late Clive Exton and directed by Edward Bennett, and it is a reasonably faithful adaptation. Much of the dialogue is retained from the short story, including (and I am very fond of this), Poirot’s conversation with Annie the maid (played by Katy Murphy) about white slavers and stewed peaches. But, for me, the most interesting moment comes not when something is said, but when something is not said. In the short story, when Poirot initially rejects Mrs Todd’s case as being beneath him, she remonstrates with him that, for someone in her position, a missing cook is ‘as much to you as her pearls are to some fine lady’. Poirot pauses at this, and Hastings notes:

‘For a moment or two it appeared to be a toss up between Poirot’s dignity and his sense of humour.’

The adaptation retains this exchange, almost word-for-word. When Mrs Todd (Brigit Forsyth) finishes, Poirot is standing facing her and Hastings (Hugh Fraser). For me, this moment illustrates David Suchet’s approach to playing Poirot beautifully, as he simply captures the words of Christie’s text in his facial expression. We can see, like Hastings, the ‘toss up’ between his dignity and his sense of humour flicker across his face, before he laughs, apologizes and agrees to take the case. It’s a lovely moment.

While the story and much of the dialogue in ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’ stays close to its source material, the adaptation makes some important changes that introduce the overall ‘shape’ that the early series will take. The characters of Miss Lemon (Pauline Moran) and Inspector Japp (Philip Jackson) are added, as they will be to further episodes. (While not present as such, Japp is mentioned in the original short story, as Poirot insists that ‘our friend Inspector Japp’ must never get to hear of their search for a missing domestic.) I will say up front that I have no problem with Japp, Miss Lemon and Hastings being added to stories – I love the dynamic between the characters, and the central group makes for a more coherent TV series. I should note, Moran’s Miss Lemon is quite different to the character that appears in Christie’s books – but I’ll cover that in a future post.

Other changes work in a similar way. Scenes that are (briefly) narrated in the short story – such as the discovery of Davis’s body – are (understandably) dramatized on screen. A scene in which Poirot and Hastings question a railway porter (played by Danny Webb, in the first of his two appearances in the series) about Eliza’s trunk is added, and this includes an additional clue about Simpson’s possible escape plan. In order to avoid the ‘static’ feel of the short story, Poirot and Hastings travel to meet Eliza Dunn (Freda Dowie) in Cumbria rather than the other way round. This allows for a comical insight into Poirot’s feelings about the English countryside, which will recur in other early episodes, and the first of many gorgeous, gorgeous steam trains. Finally, Poirot, Hastings and Japp race to the docks together to apprehend Simpson (in the short story he is caught ‘by the aid of wireless’ while on board a ship to America); this is the first of the classic Poirot ‘chase scenes’, which will become a staple (and faintly silly) feature of the early episodes. All of these changes are completely understandable, though, as they reveal an attempt to translate a short story into a TV drama – and to create a recognizable template for future episodes.



A more significant change, however, is to be found in the clueing of the story – and I have mixed feelings about this. In my opinion, one of Agatha Christie’s greatest strengths as a crime writer lay in her ability to obscure clues and present red herrings, so that she gave readers everything they needed to solve the puzzle without them realizing it. Consider the chatty, fussy opening to The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side or the blatant explanation of Ratchett’s death on the first page of Murder on the Orient Express– Christie was the queen of telling you everything when she appeared to be telling you nothing. And ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’ has shades of this (though less developed than in her later novels) – one of the ‘throwaway’ headlines that Hastings reads to Poirot turns out (of course) to be the key to the mystery.

The adaptation dilutes this somewhat, by drawing the viewer’s attention to key plot elements right away. Instead of opening with a bored Poirot in his apartment, the first tense little scene shows us Simpson (Dermot Crowley) tying up Eliza Dunn’s box (to dramatic music). When reading the headlines to Poirot, Hastings names the bank from which the clerk has absconded (with £90,000 rather than the £50,000 of the short story – that’s inflation for you). When Poirot and Hastings arrive at Prince Albert Road, we see Simpson acting shifty and are quickly told that he works at the Belgravia and Overseas Bank. In a detail added to the original story, Poirot asks Simpson if he ever takes part in ‘musical theatre or amateur dramatics’, before shortly afterwards explaining that he had spotted a dab of Gum Arabic in the suspect’s sideburn. Once you’ve read the short story, these changes are disappointing, as you feel your attention is being drawn to the bank theft and to Simpson too quickly. Poirot describes Simpson as ‘inconspicuous’ in his summing-up in Christie’s story, but he is in no way so in the adaptation. However, I’m pretty sure I didn’t work out the mystery when I first watched the episode, and I know my husband (who watched it for the first time yesterday) was baffled until Poirot’s explanation. So maybe the rejigging of the clues isn’t a giveaway, but rather a necessity of creating appropriate tension and suspense. This is a question I think I’ll be coming back to a lot as I rewatch the series.

Overall, ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’ is a brilliant opening to the series. It introduces us to the main characters, it cements the setting and aesthetic, and it’s a ‘classic’ Poirot puzzle. Highlights for me are Katy Murphy and Brigit Forsyth (who are just perfect as Annie and Mrs Todd), and the subtlety of Suchet’s performance. Minor negative point: the change to the interview with Eliza Dunn results in the omission of one of my favourite lines in the short story (‘Do not forget how to cook.’).

Next up… ‘Murder in the Mews’

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’.


I should probably carry on now with less anecdote and more focus, otherwise I’ll never get to Curtain by Christmas.

Episode 2 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot is ‘Murder in the Mews’, and was first broadcast on 15th January 1989. Again, it was dramatized by Clive Exton and directed by Edward Bennett. It was based on the short story of the same name (first published in 1936 under the title ‘Mystery of the Dressing Case’), which was itself a reworking of ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ (published in 1923).

‘The Market Basing Mystery’ begins with Poirot, Hastings and Japp taking breakfast one summer’s morning at a pub in Market Basing, before being interrupted by a Constable Pollard who urgently needs assistance with a suspicious death. Walter Protheroe has been found shot dead in a locked room, the key to which is missing. Although Protheroe was found with a gun in his hand, various indications at the scene suggest that he did not commit suicide (such as the gun being in his right hand, but the bullet wound being to his left temple). Poirot eventually deduces that, rather than being a murder made to look like a suicide, this is in fact a suicide made to look like a murder. Protheroe’s housekeeper, on discovering her beloved employer has taken his own life, alters the scene to disguise the truth. As she is the only person to know that Protheroe is left-handed, she moves the gun to his right hand to make it look like he was shot by someone else. In the original story, narrated by Hastings, Poirot confronts Miss Clegg, who confesses that Protheroe was being blackmailed and that she wanted to implicate the blackmailers in his death.

The 1936 reworking of the story replicates the means, method and motive, but replaces Walter Protheroe with a young widow named Mrs Allen, and the housekeeper Miss Clegg with the flatmate Miss Plenderleith. Hastings’ narration is removed – indeed, Hastings is removed from the story completely – and the setting is altered to London, with the story opening on Bonfire Night. The revised story is substantially longer, with additional clues thrown in (including an attaché case and a blotting pad), a further suspect added (Mrs Allen’s fiancé), and various interrogations and searches carried out by Poirot and Japp. The later story is a more satisfying read – the early version feels rather rushed – but I love the opening of ‘Market Basing’, in which we discover that, when not on duty, Inspector Japp is an ‘ardent botanist’ who knows the Latin names (‘somewhat strangely pronounced’) of flowers.



The TV adaptation was based on the later version of the story, but altered it to include Hastings. While the setting is still Bonfire Night, the episode’s opening is, in some ways, closer to that of ‘Market Basing’, as we get all three men (rather than just Poirot and Japp) out enjoying themselves on a night off. Nevertheless, the story is otherwise reasonably faithful to the 1936 text – with a comment about fireworks being a good disguise for gunshot (made by Hastings in the adaptation, Japp in the story) proving to be grimly prescient on the discovery of Mrs Allen’s body the following morning.

As with ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’, there are some minor changes to the source material. Miss Lemon is again added to the story, and George (Poirot’s ‘immaculate man-servant’) is removed – this character doesn’t make an appearance until much later in the series, despite his presence in a number of the short stories. Weirdly though, Mrs Allen’s fiancé Laverton West is played by David Yelland, who would eventually return to the series in Taken at the Flood as George. So I guess George is sort of in ‘Murder in the Mews’ after all!



Other changes made are similar to those found in the first episode. Some of the subtler elements of the original story are underlined more clearly – specifically the question of whether the victim was right- or left-handed. Instead of being hinted at, as in the story, this question is repeated several times and is more directly presented as a source of confusion/interest for Poirot. A red herring from the story is also removed: the character of Mrs Pierce (Gabrielle Blunt), the woman who keeps house for the flatmates, is reduced, and the question of her being ‘an old liar’ is omitted. Finally, as in other episodes, events that are briefly narrated in the text are dramatized in the adaptation. Notably, this includes a trip to the golf course for Poirot and Hastings (allowing for further development of the dynamic between them and more of the twinkly humour Suchet brings to the role in these early outings).

Again, this early episode sets up things that will become recurring features of the show. Hastings’ love of cars – and his prized Lagonda – is introduced. And we get our first taste of the dramatic sets (other than Poirot’s apartment, of course) that characterize the show’s aesthetic. 14 Bardsley Gardens Mews (pictured above) is a far cry from 88 Prince Albert Road, Clapham, and the swimming pool used as the location of Laverton West’s second interrogation is very beautiful. The interview with Major Eustace is also moved from his ‘mere pied à terre’ to a nightclub. Presumably this is the ‘Far East Club’ that Eustace mentions in Christie’s story, as the viewer’s languorous introduction to this establishment reveals hostesses dressed in ‘Oriental’ costumes and a striking (though utterly un-PC) performance of ‘Hindustan’ (a song written in 1918 by Oliver Wallace and Harold Weeks) by Moya Ruskin. I don’t know if Ruskin was actually singing or just miming, but she is really stunning here – though the hand gestures that accompany the song are thoroughly inappropriate. The ‘Far East Club’ is our first taste of the colonial aesthetic that surfaces throughout the series. It is undoubtedly glamourized – look at the band! look at that gorgeous singer! – but it is also very subtly criticized, as the man who inhabits the ‘Far East Club’ is a decidedly a wrong ’un.



‘Murder in the Mews’ is another cracking adaptation. Once again, although there are some changes made, Exton’s dialogue manages to keep some of my favourite lines from Christie’s text. These are: Eustace’s comment that he had heard Mr Allen was ‘by way of being a bad hat’, and Japp’s assessment of Laverton West (with Philip Jackson’s marvellous delivery) as ‘bit of a stuffed fish […] And a boiled owl!’ You just don’t hear ‘boiled owl’ enough these days.

Next episode: ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘Murder in the Mews’.


I think this review will be shorter and a little less effusive than the two that have come before, as the third episode in the first series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot is one of the less memorable (apart from two bits, that is). And I can't remember if I’d ever read the original short story before today.



‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’ was first broadcast on 22nd January 1989, and was based on the short story (aka ‘The Kidnapping of Johnny Waverly’) published in The Sketch in 1923. The original story is narrated by Hastings; Poirot has been engaged by Mr and Mrs Waverly, whose young son has been kidnapped. The couple received a series of letters threatening to abduct Johnnie if a ransom of £50,000 was not paid by a specific deadline. They didn’t pay the money, and their young son was taken – despite all their attempts to prevent this. Poirot questions the couple, and then travels to Waverly Court, where an examination of the property and interviews with the staff allow him to unravel the kidnapping plot.

I’m not sure this is the most exciting of the Poirot stories – the detective dismisses kidnapping as ‘easy’, and even Hastings admits that he is ‘frankly bored’ during one of the interviews. Nevertheless, there are some nice clues and a neat ‘hidden in plain sight’ perpetrator. As it is one of the early stories, there is still something of the Watson about Hastings’ narration – he is faithfully recording the deeds of his illustrious associate – but his confession that he is ‘bored’ prepares us for some of the excellent Hastings snark that is to be found in the later novels (e.g. Peril at End House).

The adaptation was dramatized by Clive Exton and directed by Renny Rye. The plot and characters are retained from the source material, but there are some changes that don’t quite work as well as in other Exton adaptations. Firstly, the alteration of the third co-conspirator and the resulting requirement that Tredwell’s niece (played by Carol Frazer) could pass for a young version of Tredwell (Patrick Jordan) doesn’t work as well as the revelation in the original story. Also, inexplicably, the adaptation has Mr Waverly (Geoffrey Bateman) meet with Poirot alone – it would make a lot more sense if (as in the original story) Mrs Waverly was responsible for engaging the detective. Why on earth would Mr Waverly want a famous detective poking his nose in? Finally, as in other episodes, some of the clues have been stripped down and removed entirely. The dust-free priest hole of the short story is replaced with a secret tunnel, and the clue of the dog paw prints is absent. I think this is a bit of a shame, as these were nice little clues (they even make Poirot chuckle).



As with the rest of the series, the regular ‘family’ of characters are inserted into the adaptation, despite not being present in the short story. And I’m absolutely fine with this!

Miss Lemon is added to the story, though she is only present in the early scenes before Poirot goes to Waverly Court. These brief scenes do have two points of note, though. We see the first of several silent exchanges between Moran's Miss Lemon and Fraser's Hastings – it’s just a little bit of eye contact between the two after Poirot has left the room, but it speaks volumes. And we get our first taste of Miss Lemon’s incredible filing system (which, I believe, is mentioned in Christie’s work, but appears more frequently in the early adaptations). I adore Miss Lemon’s filing system – it’s long been my ambition to have an office (or a mind) that is so efficiently organized.

Inspector Japp is also added ito the episode; here, he replaces Inspector McNeil as the Scotland Yard detective who doesn’t have time to take the threatening letters seriously at first, and then fails to prevent the kidnapping when he finally goes to Waverly Court. This isn’t a big change, to be honest, and I don’t have a problem with Japp being used instead of the various detectives who appear in Christie’s fiction. And, let’s be honest, the central group of characters at the heart of the early series are why we fell in love with it in the first place. Much better to have Japp here than the arbitrary ‘McNeil’ that we’ll probably never see again.

But it’s the added Poirot-and-Hastings scenes that are really memorable in this episode. The two travel to Waverly Court in Hastings’ Lagonda, giving us our first taste of the ‘car porn’ that will recur throughout the early series. After spending the night at Waverly Court, Poirot is dismayed to find that the frugal Mrs Waverly serves a less than substantial breakfast (she appears to not even put fish in the kedgeree). Hastings takes him to a pub for a full English (something that Christie’s Poirot disdains in ‘The Market Basing Mystery’, and that the ITV character will later wrinkle his nose at) – and this includes a couple of pints of ale. Fed and watered, the two travel back in Hastings’ car, giving a rousing rendition of ‘One Man Went to Mow’. It’s not in the source material, and it’s not quite in character, but I do love that bit.

And bonus points for another gorgeous steam train (this time pulling into a station), as Poirot declines Hastings’ offer of driving him back to London.



And so ends the third review in my Poirot Project. On to ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’…

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’.


Episode 4 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 29th January 1989. It was dramatized by Russell Murray (with Clive Exton as script consultant) and directed by Renny Rye. The episode was based on the short story of the same name (aka ‘Poirot and the Regular Customer’), which was first published in Collier’s Magazine in November 1940.

I don’t clearly remember watching this episode when it was first broadcast, though I’ve seen it a few times since. I do remember reading the short story for the first time though, and it remains one of my favourites. The adaptation is interesting, as it removes some of my favourite features of the short story (boo!) but adds some extra details that I really love (yay!).

Christie’s short story begins with Hercule Poirot having dinner with his friend Henry Bonnington at the Gallant Endeavour. While the two are enjoying their meal, the waitress tells them a curious story. She points out an old man who has been dining regularly at the restaurant for nearly ten years, and says that, like all ‘gentlemen’, he always orders the same thing. However, the week before, the old man had not only varied the day on which he came to the restaurant (he went on a Monday, as well as his usual Tuesday and Thursday), but he also ordered something quite different from the menu – thick tomato soup (despite never having ordered a thick soup before), steak and kidney pudding (despite hating suet pudding), and blackberry tart (despite hating blackberries). Poirot finds this occurrence fascinating, and his little grey cells begin to tingle.

This is what I love about ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’. It begins with this simple little curiosity and the reader, like Poirot, is invited to start thinking about explanations. Why would a man who has been so fixed in his eating habits for nearly a decade suddenly deviate so dramatically from habit? When I first read the story, I remember pausing at the section break after Poirot and Bonnington’s meal, running through possible scenarios that might explain the weird occurrence. And I’m quite proud of myself for actually working it out, too. Although this opening section of the story doesn’t give any information as to whodunit – in fact, at this point in the story, no one has actually ‘dun’ anything – I did work out the puzzle of the old man’s dining habits…

… but the fun of ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’ lies in its ‘double puzzle’ structure. Three weeks after their meal together, Poirot runs into Bonnington and learns that the old man hasn’t been to the Gallant Endeavour for over a week. Poirot is now completely hooked, and begins to investigate. He estimates the old man’s age and searches for reports of deaths that might match. With luck, the first death he finds (that of Henry Gascoigne) turns out to be the right one, and away he goes. But even if you (like Poirot) solved the first puzzle – that the ‘Henry Gascoigne’ who ordered the blackberry tart was an imposter – this only serves to make the second puzzle – who killed Henry Gascoigne, and why? – more confusing. The man was a poor artist, with only a nephew and an estranged twin brother, and there seems no reason for his death. Stranger still, Poirot discovers that the twin brother himself has died earlier the same day. All that remains is for Poirot (and the reader) to put the various pieces together and work out what has happened. There’s some nice clueing, and a little red herring, in the story to lead you on your way.



The TV adaptation makes quite a few alterations to the source story, some good, some not so good. Let’s begin with the not so good…

As with several of the early episodes, key details and clues are made much more obvious in the adaptation than in the short story. I’ve forgiven this in some previous episodes, but I find it a bit more frustrating here. Perhaps this is just because I’m fonder of the short story, I’m not sure.

The episode begins with a short disconnected scene (the same technique is used in ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’), showing the death of Anthony Gascoigne, and mentioning his brother Henry and nephew George Lorrimer. We also quickly learn that George (played by Richard Howard) works in the theatre, and is devoted to both his uncles.

Poirot enters the story, as in the source text, at dinner with Bonnington (Denys Hawthorne). Bonnington is now Poirot’s dentist – allowing for further development of a recurrent joke about Poirot’s fear of the dentist – and the restaurant is now called the Bishop’s Chop House. Molly the waitress (Cheryl Hall) tells the men about the regular customer, but in this version there’s no mystery about his identity. She then interrupts the men’s meal to tell them that Henry Gascoigne has, for a second time, ordered thick soup, suet pudding and blackberry crumble. This conflates the events of the short story into one meal, and removes the need for a later chance meeting of Bonnington and Poirot. To be honest, I can understand why this meeting would have to be changed for the TV adaptation – it’s quite hard to imagine Suchet’s version of Poirot travelling on the tube – but I feel that this collapsing of events into one strange dinner weakens the mystery somewhat. The clues, which were handled quite neatly in the short story, are being presented a bit too heavy-handedly.

In addition to this, the plot has undergone some changes. The TV version of Henry Gascoigne is now a successful artist, who prevented sales of his highly-prized paintings during his lifetime. Two new suspects are introduced as a result of this change: Henry’s model Dulcie Lang (played by Holly De Jong) and his agent Peter Makinson (Clifford Rose), who both own paintings that have become highly valuable with Gascoigne’s death. Furthermore, a specific cause for the Gascoigne brothers’ feud is introduced: Anthony’s wife, Charlotte, was previously Henry’s model and muse. As Hastings comments, it now seems like ‘everyone stands to benefit from the old man’s death’. These changes turn out to be something of a red herring, however, as the final motive (and murderer) is revealed to be the same as that of the short story.



The episode’s slightly altered plot leads to a different denouement. This is the case with a number of the shorter episodes, as the short stories don’t all feature a confrontation with (or apprehension of) the perpetrator. As a result, these endings are often inserted into the TV episodes. As well as this, the change in George Lorrimer’s profession (from doctor in the story to theatre manager/performer in the adaptation) – and the inclusion of Japp and a team from Scotland Yard (see below) – leads to a very theatrical denouement indeed (which looks ahead, in a way, to The Big Four). It’s a bit over-the-top but, as I’ve mentioned before, the early TV episodes are known for their dramatic endings – and at least it’s not a chase scene this time.

While the puzzle is a little less subtle in the TV adaptation, there are some changes that I do like. As in other episodes, these relate to the inclusion of the ‘family’. Hastings, Miss Lemon and Japp are included in the story, despite not being in the original short story, and George is removed, despite being mentioned briefly (we’ll have to wait a while longer to meet George). And just like in other early episodes, these ‘family’ scenes are a complete joy.

Highlights of the episode include the revelation that Miss Lemon adores Raffles, the gentleman thief, and tunes in religiously to a radio adaptation of E.W. Hornung’s stories (much to Poirot’s affectionate amusement); the first hint in the series of Hastings’ predilection for redheaded women, and Poirot’s love of Surrealist art; Poirot’s cooking of a traditional Belgian rabbit dish for Hastings, which the latter says ‘tastes more... well... rabbity than any rabbit I’ve ever tasted’. By far my favourite addition, though, is a little scene with Japp, in which the policeman shows Poirot around Scotland Yard’s brand new forensics lab. As specialists pore over microscopes and samples, Japp explains that this is the future of policing and that, very soon, men like himself and Poirot will be obsolete. Poirot counters this by asking for a favour and, when Japp agrees, the little Belgian detective happily notes that no amount of forensic science could ever replace their ‘camaraderie’. It’s a lovely moment.



All in all, this is a good solid episode, though it isn’t a favourite of mine. There’s lots of good character moments – and it’s worth watching just for the cricket joke that runs throughout the episode (with a brilliant punchline right at the end) – but the storyline doesn’t quite live up to the excellent source story.

Time to move on to the next episode… ‘The Third Floor Flat’.

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’.


The fifth episode of the first series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 5th February 1989. It was directed by Edward Bennett and written by Michael Baker. The episode was based on the short story of the same name, which was first published in Hutchinson’s Story Magazine in 1929.



Christie’s short story opens with a group of fashionable young things returning to Friars Mansions from a night out, only to discover their hostess, Patricia Garnett, has lost her latchkey. The two men of the party decide to use the service lift to get into Pat’s kitchen (she lives in a flat on the fourth floor of the apartment block), but they miscount the floors and stumble into a third floor flat instead. And something in that third floor flat isn’t right…

Poirot enters the story in a rather odd way, which serves to raise more questions than it answers. When Pat’s friends, Donovan and Jimmy, return to the third floor flat and discover the body of its resident (Mrs Ernestine Grant), they realize they have to call the police; as they discuss this, a man appears behind them:

‘They stood staring at the little man with a very fierce moustache and an egg-shaped head. He wore a resplendent dressing-gown and embroidered slippers. He bowed gallantly to Patricia.’

This is, of course, our Belgian detective – but his next statement is, to say the least, a little baffling:

‘I am, as perhaps you know, the tenant of the flat above. I like to be up high – in the air – the view over London. I take the flat in the name of Mr O’Connor. But I am not an Irishman. I have another name.’

Why has Poirot been living in this apartment block under the name of Mr O’Connor? Why has he been pretending to be an Irishman? We never find out – but the image is rather charming. Having revealed his true identity, he proceeds to investigate the scene of the crime, partake of an omelette cooked by Pat, put together the clues he discovers, and reveal the murderer of Mrs Grant.

It’s a neat story, with a nice little piece of misdirection at its heart. And the TV episode is a fairly close adaptation, which retains much more subtlety to its clueing than some of the previous episodes.



The TV version moves the location to Whitehaven Mansions (Poirot’s home), thus removing the bizarre Friars Mansions/O’Connor subplot, and adds the usual ‘family’ of Japp, Hastings and Miss Lemon. In this version of the story, Poirot is suffering from a cold (something he merely pretends to in the short story), and Hastings takes him out to the theatre to cheer him up. The play that they go to see, The Deadly Shroud, is a murder mystery, and the two men make a £10 wager that Poirot can solve the mystery by the end of the first act. This is quite a charming touch – a bit more of the Poirot-and-Hastings bonding that is such a key feature of the early series – made even better by the fact that Poirot loses the bet (he believes the butler did it). When the men return from the theatre, they find Pat (Suzanne Burden) and Mildred (Amanda Elwes) locked out of their flat; Donovan (Nicholas Pritchard) and Jimmy (Robert Hines) soon arrive to announce their gruesome discovery.

As a little anecdotal note, I do remember watching and enjoying this episode when it was first broadcast (I was ten at the time). In particular, I remember being quite taken by the service lift the men use to get into the apartment – and, of course, I wasn’t the only person to fall in love with the Whitehaven Mansion sets used in the series – but also by the song Pat and Mildred sing on the stairs as they wait for Donovan and Jimmy. When I was older, I found out that this is quite a well-known song: ‘Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries’ by Ray Henderson and Lew Brown. The song was first performed by Ethel Merman in 1931, so its use here is a nice way of presenting Pat and Mildred as bright young modern things.

Unlike in the previous episode, the details of the mystery are unchanged in the adaptation. Some scenes that are described very briefly in the story are shown visually (and a little differently) in the episode. For instance, Pat mentions that she thinks Mrs Grant has requested a meeting with her because she wants to complain about the noise of Pat’s piano; in the TV episode, we see Pat and Mildred dancing to music from a gramophone, which appears to lead Mrs Grant (played by a rather underused Josie Lawrence) to post a note through her door. However, these little changes do nothing to alter the overall arc or the subtlety of the clues.

Much of the characterization also remains the same in the adaptation. One lovely detail is to be found when Pat cooks Poirot an omelette. In both the story and the episode, this leads Poirot to wistfully comment that, once, he fell in love with an English girl who was very like Pat – except that she couldn’t cook, so he knew it wasn’t meant to be. This is the first of several references to Poirot’s thwarted love life that add a slightly sad air to his character: unlike for Sherlock Holmes, it seems there was more than just ‘one woman’ for Hercule. (Alternatively, perhaps, he is making up the beautiful English girl who couldn’t cook in order to charm and flatter Pat. In which case, and this is a distinct possibility, Poirot is an incorrigible flirt!)

When I wrote about ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’, I mentioned the ‘car porn’ that is used in these early episodes – and this episode has plenty of shots of Hastings’s gleaming Lagonda. Unfortunately, the Lagonda gets caught up in the episode’s obligatory chase scene, leading to heartbreak for Hastings. While the climactic chases are usually faintly silly in these early episodes, I always find this one to be a bit different. Hastings’s response to the destruction of his beloved car is genuinely moving, and Poirot’s sympathetic response is very sweet.

There are a couple of other points to note about this episode. It is the first of four (well, technically five) episodes to feature George Little as minor recurring character Dicker, the concierge of Whitehaven Mansions. We also have a couple of good Miss Lemon and Inspector Japp moments that expand on their relationship with Poirot. For the former, this comes when Poirot is laid low with a cold, and she is tasked with ensuring (or takes it upon herself to ensure) that the Belgian sleuth is well-dosed with Friar’s Balsam. For the latter, it’s in a little scene where Poirot attempts to persuade the policeman to let him search the murder victim’s flat – Poirot does this entirely via facial expressions, and Japp’s resigned acceptance of this manipulation is endearing.



Ultimately, this is a very good episode. For me, it strikes the perfect balance of recreating the original story and sticking to the format of the early TV series. And, like quite a few episodes, it has a classic Japp line delivered perfectly by Philip Jackson. When he arrives to investigate the murder at Whitehaven Mansions, our long-suffering policeman shoots his friend a mischievous look: ‘You’ll be having murders in your back bedroom next, Poirot.’

Next episode: ‘Triangle at Rhodes’

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The Third Floor Flat’.


Two phrases always spring to mind when I think of this episode: ‘unnecessary snake’ and ‘awesome drink’. To explain the first, I have a very visceral, physical phobia of snakes – even thinking about them makes me feel a bit nauseous and weak at the knees – and am slightly annoyed by the fact that TV shows and films aren’t required to warn you about snake appearances. I put this phobia down to the fact that, when I was eight, we moved to an area near a nature reserve that had adders, and so suddenly I was confronted by (what seemed like) terrifying signs everywhere warning me about the forest of snakes that lay on the other side of our garden fence. I haven’t been able to look at snakes since. Fortunately, I’ve seen this episode enough times now to know exactly when to look away from the screen, and simply listen to Poirot deliver a portentous comment on human nature, inspired by the discovery of a viper. And more on the awesome drink shortly…

‘Triangle at Rhodes’ was first broadcast on 12th February 1989; it was directed by Renny Rye and written by Stephen Wakelam. As with ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’, Clive Exton acted as script consultant – there’s a great blog post about Exton’s contribution to the Poirot series here, by the way. The episode was based on the short story of the same name, which was first published in This Week in February 1936. It also appeared in The Strand, published as ‘Poirot and the Triangle at Rhodes’ in May 1936. In the story, Poirot has taken a holiday to the ‘white sand’ and ‘sparkling blue water’ of Rhodes. And just to note, in the story and adaptation, Rhodes is still part of the Isole Italiane dell’Egeo (so, an Italian island rather than a Greek one): there’s a little joke about this in the episode, when Douglas Gold (played by Peter Settelen) proclaims that he hadn’t known where Rhodes was before they arrived, noting that it ‘turns out it’s Itai’. Back to the short story though, befriended by the bubbly Pamela Lyall and Sarah Blake, Poirot engages in a gentle bit of people-watching, observing the ostentatious Valentine Chantry and the mousy Marjorie Gold (and the women’s respective husbands). He quickly recognizes the pattern that he sees in his fellow holiday-makers’ interactions, sketching the shape of a triangle into the sand.

Despite giving a stern warning to Marjorie Gold – ‘Leave this place at once – before it is too late’ – Poirot is unable to prevent the inevitable tragedy from occurring. Valentine Chantry is murdered, just as (it transpires) Poirot had feared. In a quirky deviation from the usual formula, Poirot has already noted all the significant clues prior to the murder taking place, so the ‘reveal’ comes quite quickly after Valentine’s demise. He is asked by a shocked Pamela why he did nothing to stop events transpiring, and makes a typically Hercule pronouncement:

‘And say what? What is there to say – before the event? That someone has murder in their heart? I tell you, mon enfant, if one human being is determined to kill another human being –’

In a lot of ways, ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ has much in common with Evil Under the Sun (first published in 1941), and some people have seen the later novel as an expansion of the short story. There are certainly a couple of recycled features (as well as a plot point that had previously been used in Lord Edgware Dies), but personally I prefer to think of the two as discrete texts. Perhaps this is because I really like both of them, and because the characters in both are rather distinctive.



On to the adaptation (because it’s starting to look unlikely that I’m going to get to Curtain by Christmas unless I get a wriggle on)… the episode begins with an overcast shot of Whitehaven Mansions. A postman arrives with mail for 56B (the address used for Poirot’s flat in the TV series – I’ll return to the question of Poirot’s address in a later post), concierge Dicker (portrayed by George Little, in his second appearance in the role) tells him not to bother: ‘they’re all on holiday’. Thus, we’re set up for the first episode that doesn’t feature Japp, Hastings or Miss Lemon, and also the first episode to take place overseas. While Hastings has ‘gone off shooting things’ and Miss Lemon is visiting her sister in Folkestone, we follow Poirot to the ‘white sand’ and ‘sparkling blue water’ of the Mediterranean.

As with the previous episode, the central mystery follows the short story quite closely. The means, motive and perpetrator of the murder are almost identical to those in the source text – though the nature of the poison used is different, which leads to some additional post-murder investigation that is not found in the short story. A number of other changes have been made; some of these are rather superficial, but some are more substantial.

The characters of Pamela and Sarah are conflated into one, Pamela Lyall (played by Frances Low). The TV version of Pamela latches on to Poirot when he rescues her from the over-attentive Major Barnes (Timothy Kightley). Poirot appears here as a sort of avuncular figure, a role he’ll reprise again in other stories, and it’s in-keeping with the show’s repeated suggestion that Poirot is very comfortable in the company of women. In the short story, Poirot seems somewhat less avuncular and even more comfortable in the women’s company. The story gives no indication of how or why Pamela and Sarah have befriended the detective, but simply opens with a ‘dandified’ Poirot (in ‘white flannels and a large panama hat’) happily sitting on the beach with a young woman who is ‘wearing the barest minimum of clothing on her sun-browned person’. He’s a bit of player, is Poirot.

In fact, one thing I did notice on rereading the short story is that the TV episode is far coyer about the opening/early sunbathing scene. In Christie’s text, Pamela is scantily dressed and Valentine has ‘slip[ped] the straps of the white bathing-dress from her shoulders’ in order to tan more completely. In the adaptation, Pamela (presented as a borderline spinster, rather than a flirtatious young girl) is more modestly dressed and Valentine’s straps stay resolutely in place. Given that a number of the later episodes introduce sex scenes that aren’t present in Christie’s books, this coyness in an early episode is quite charming.

As I say, other alterations are a bit more substantial. Christie’s General Barnes, ‘a veteran’ who serves as little more than an additional guest with whom Poirot passes a little time, becomes Major Barnes, a suspiciously overfamiliar man who claims to be in Rhodes for the fishing. I’m not a huge fan of the Major Barnes subplot in ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ – it feels too much like padding and doesn’t really add anything apart from a red herring and a silly maritime chase scene. There is also a deviation involving Poirot’s abortive attempt to leave the island. As his holiday has come to an end, Poirot tries to board a boat at the harbour; however, he is detained by customs officials and accused of being a spy.



While the Major Barnes subplot is a bit pointless, the customs incident does serve some purpose other than padding, and it needs a little explaining. Chronology in Agatha Christie’s Poirot stories is a tricky thing, and it doesn’t always run smoothly. The stories and novels have shifting settings, with contemporary mores and references often making it hard to pinpoint the timeline of Poirot’s life (and making the detective, who had already had a full and successful police career in Belgium by the outbreak of World War I, very very old by the time of his death). Moreover, mores and styles shift with time, and this is reflected through the course of the books, making the decades that divide ‘The Third Floor Flat’ from Third Girl (for instance) very apparent. The makers of the TV show, therefore, had a difficult decision to make about chronology and setting. Do they adapt the stories in the order they were written? Or in a reflection of the stages of Poirot’s career? And should the timeline follow a logical aging of Poirot starting at his arrival in England during WWI? Or set each book at the time of writing, making Poirot’s implausible longevity more obvious?

The programme makers decided to take a different approach, which results in a rather trippy experience of time in the series. With the exception of The Mysterious Affair at Styles (set during WWI), ‘The Chocolate Box’ (set, partially, in flashback to Poirot’s career in Belgium) and Curtain (to be set in the 1940s), the producers set out with the intention of setting all episodes in 1936 (or thereabouts). This doesn’t hold strictly true, and some of the later feature-length episodes deviate a little from this, but the majority of episodes are indeed set at some point between about 1935 and 1939. Some fans have found this to be rather frustrating, and at least one person has gone to some lengths to divine a more detailed chronology for the cases featured in the series. I’m happier to simply accept that – like Heartbeat– this is a show pretty much permanently set in one particular year, with a coherent aesthetic inspired by this setting.

This perma-36 setting has a significant result. The world of Agatha Christie’s Poirot is always on the brink of World War II, but never quite there. Fascism is always on the rise; international relations are always unstable; political beliefs and allegiances are always under suspicion. There will be other episodes that deal more directly with the threat of Nazism, invasion and trauma, but ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ gives us our first taste of this recurrent theme. Rhodes is peppered with Italian blackshirts; Major Barnes gives a stark warning about the world being ‘on the brink of war’; and Poirot’s apprehension at customs has sinister overtones. All this serves to heighten Poirot’s role as an embodiment of (perhaps futile) order in a world about to descend into chaos.



There’s probably a lot more I could say about ‘Triangle at Rhodes’. It’s always been an episode that’s fascinated me, but I don’t want to risk turning this review into a full-blown essay. So I’ll end with a comment on that ‘awesome drink’.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was only ten when this first series aired, so my memories of watching individual episodes for the first time are a little patchy. What seems to have happened is that certain details stuck in my mind, even if the plot and solution faded away. Like the ‘white slavers’ in ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’ and the bowl of cherries song in ‘The Third Floor Flat’, the means used to deliver the poison in ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ lodged itself firmly in my young mind.

In both the TV episode and the original short story, Valentine Chantry is killed by a poisoned pink gin. As a child, I was intrigued by this drink, which Valentine (played by Annie Lambert) repeatedly demands throughout the episode, and it seemed to fit with the glamourous 1930s Mediterranean setting. Then, when I was an older teenager, the drink took on an added layer of allure, as I realized that I’d never heard a reference to pink gin in anything other than Poirot. It wasn’t a drink that you could get in the pub; it wasn’t something that my friends or family drank. Pink gin started to take on something of a mythical quality for me, and I was sure that I would one day discover the secret. (This was in the 1990s, by the way, so I couldn’t just Google it.) Finally, when I was about twenty, I worked in a pub that had an old cocktail book gathering dust under the bar, and I finally discovered the elusive ingredients of a pink gin: it’s just Plymouth gin with a dash of Angostura bitters. While this discovery might sound a bit anti-climactic, I was delighted. I immediately embarked on a night of celebration with my new-found tipple.

Probably best to gloss over the details of that night, but suffice to say, come the next morning, I did not look as glamourous as Valentine Chantry.

To bring this review to a close, then, ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ has its problems as an adaptation, but it’s always been an episode that’s close to my heart. For me, it was one of the more memorable episodes of the first series, and it introduces Poirot as the international traveller with an eye for the wickedness in human nature. It’s also the first episode of the series to rely on a really really important ‘rule’ of Agatha Christie’s fiction… but I’m not sure I want to say what that is, as once you know the rule an awful lot of detective fiction is spoilt (so let’s just call it the Peril at End House rule).

Time to move on, though. Next up, it’s ‘Problem at Sea’.

Bleak landscapes, empty hearts, insignificant lives, dystopian futures, extinction, limbo, uncertainty, death. A beautiful void or a horrific state of being. The simple complexity of nothingness.

Submissions wanted for a new anthology of short stories based on the theme of nothing.

What we want: Edgy, dark and weird fiction. Any interpretation of the theme is welcome – and we have no preconceptions about what ‘nothing’ might mean. Any genre considered: dark fantasy, urban fantasy, Gothic, horror, sci fi, steampunk, cyberpunk, biopunk, dystopian, slipstream. We’re looking for original and fresh voices that challenge and unsettle. (And, please remember, we do not publish misogyny, misandry, homophobia, transphobia or racism.)

Editor:Hannah Kate

Publisher:Hic Dragones

Word Count: 3000-7000

Submission Guidelines: Electronic submissions as .doc, .docx or .rtf attachments only. 12pt font, 1.5 or double spaced. Please ensure name, story title and email address are included on the attachment. Email submissions to Hic Dragones. Submissions are welcome from anywhere, but must be in English.

Submission Deadline: Monday 5th September 2016

Payment: Contributor copy (1 copy of paperback plus eBook in ePub and/or mobi format); permanent 25% discount on paperback (resale permitted); 1 free eBook from our catalogue.

For more information:email or visit the Hic Dragones website

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘Triangle at Rhodes’.


The seventh episode of the first series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 19th February 1989. It was based on the short story of the same name, which was first published in This Week in January 1936. The story was first published in the UK in The Strand in February 1936, under the title ‘Poirot and the Crime in Cabin 66’.

Thanks to Liam Adler for providing this image.

The short story is set during a cruise around Egypt, and begins with Miss Ellie Henderson in conversation with General Forbes. As Miss Henderson gently probes the general for information about a fellow guest – Colonel Clapperton – we become aware that another traveller is present: Hercule Poirot. So, once again, we find Poirot enjoying a bit of female company on his holidays – this theme is going to come up several more times, by the way.

Ellie’s interest in Colonel Clapperton has been inspired by his seemingly mismatched marriage. The colonel is a pleasant, quietly spoken man; his wife is a domineering woman, disliked by all the other occupants of the boat. General Forbes is the only person who voices any criticism of the poor browbeaten husband – but this is presented as old-fashioned snobbishness. The general is disdainful of the fact that Clapperton was once a music hall performer; he believes the man is socially beneath his wife (the former Lady Carrington). Nevertheless, the general’s blustery haughtiness is the only voice of dissent – Colonel Clapperton is liked (even loved) by everyone else.

When the boat arrives at Alexandria, two cheeky young women (Kitty Mooney and Pamela Cregan) attempt to lure Colonel Clapperton off the boat for a day of fun. In front of a small audience, the henpecked Clapperton asks his wife’s permission and is angrily dismissed through a locked door. However, he quickly gets over his embarrassment and joins his female friends for the trip.

Clapperton returns from the trip and discovers… shock! horror!… his obnoxious wife has been murdered! The only clue is a string of beads found on the floor of Mrs Clapperton’s cabin, implicating a local vendor. Poirot, of course, isn’t fooled.

I love this short story. In fact, I love it so much that I sort of ‘borrowed’ the solution for a murder mystery game I wrote for Hic Dragones. This means that I know from experience how hard a trick it is to pull off. One whiff of ventriloquism and the whole things falls to pieces. I handled this by slipping in a reference to a ‘vent act’ when no one was paying attention; Christie did it by never actually saying what Clapperton did on stage, allowing the other characters (and the readers) to jump to the wrong conclusion. The ‘wrong conclusion’ here is that Clapperton was a conjuror – an error that Clapperton perpetuates by performing card tricks. Even Poirot is briefly fooled, noting that the ‘conjuror had shown himself through the mask of the pukka sahib’. (I’m going to come back to the idea of the conjuror in another blog post.)

Another reason why I like ‘Problem at Sea’ is the character of Ellie Henderson. According to the Wikipedia page for the series (hmmm…), the TV programme often made changes to ‘present female characters in a more sympathetic or heroic light, at odds with Christie’s characteristic gender neutrality’. Though this might be true for some major characters in the later feature-length episodes, it obscures some of the fascinating minor characters in the short stories, who are often written with subtle depth and sympathy. Ellie Henderson is one such character – a beautifully tragic woman, whose initial good humour belies an aching loneliness. The most poignant example of this is when Clapperton leaves the boat with Kitty and Pam. Miss Henderson watches the three disembark, and is asked by Poirot whether she will also be going ashore. The detective notes that Miss Henderson is wearing a sun hat and smart clothes, but she quietly insists that she was planning to stay on board. Poirot, naturally, is too much of a gentleman to question this.



The TV adaptation was written by Clive Exton and directed by Renny Rye. As with most of Exton’s other scripts, it stays close to its source material, and so given how much I love the short story the episode is one of my favourites (one of my many favourites). If I had to say what stuck with me the most after I first watched it (and remember, I was only ten at the time), it would undoubtedly be the bonkers denouement – and more on that shortly.

As with most of the episodes in the first series, the biggest change comes with the insertion of characters who weren’t in the original story. Hastings is now accompanying Poirot on his cruise, and is strangely wrapped up in organizing a clay pigeon tournament. While this little subplot is rather silly, it does nothing to distract from or alter the main mystery. It’s a classic ‘give Hastings something to do’ plot, of which there are several in the early series. The TV adaptation also adds a few other passengers to the cruise: the Morgan sisters and their young niece (played by Dorothea Phillips, Sheri Shepstone and Louisa Janes), and the Tollivers (played by Geoffrey Beevers and Caroline John).

Additionally, there are a few changes to characterization, though, again, this doesn’t deviate too dramatically from the source story. Colonel Clapperton (John Normington) is a little less reserved than his literary counterpart. In Christie’s story, Clapperton is a ‘distinguished grey-haired’ gentleman who is difficult to reconcile with ‘with a red-nosed comedian singing mirth-provoking songs’. In the TV episode, it is much easier to imagine Clapperton on the stage, even before his mask ostensibly slips during the card trick.

Mrs Clapperton (played by Sheila Allen) is also slightly different. In the short story, Christie describes the woman thus:

‘Mrs Clapperton, her carefully waved platinum head protected with a net, her massaged and dieted form dressed in a smart sports suit, came through the door from the bar with the purposeful air of a woman who has always been able to pay top price for anything she needed.’

This is followed up with a wonderfully cutting statement:

‘From the distance she had looked a possible twenty-eight. Now, in spite of her exquisitely made-up face, her delicately plucked eyebrows, she looked not her actual forty-nine years, but a possible fifty-five.’

Despite this, I must admit to feeling a bit of sympathy for Christie’s Adeline Clapperton. Colonel Clapperton is a bit of an arse, to be honest. He spends half the cruise openly flirting with two girls young enough to be his daughters, and the rest batting his eyelids at Miss Henderson. He refuses to play bridge with his wife, meaning that, unless there’s a single person present, she’ll be unable to play. I’ve always felt that Clapperton seems to be deliberately trying to humiliate his wife (before bumping her off). So I’m just going to say it: Mrs Clapperton has funded her husband’s entire lifestyle since he came out of the army and – do you know what? – she’s absolutely right to point out that the car she paid for isn’t actually his car.

Perhaps because of this, the TV episode exaggerates Mrs Clapperton’s ‘odious’ nature, making it easier for viewers to sympathize with her husband (though not me, I’m afraid). Adeline’s appearance is no longer deceptive – she is clearly a woman in her late forties/early fifties – but her vanity is retained (even heightened). We first see her gazing into a mirror, plucking her eyebrows (in a nod to the description in Christie’s story). As she plucks and preens, she sings ‘Stay as Sweet as You Are’ (by Harry Revel and Mack Gordon), which is not only an awfully vain song to sing to oneself, but also an incongruously modern song (it was first performed in 1934) for an older woman to croon. (Now, I’m not going to go on about this too much, but I can’t help but feel that Adeline’s desperate attempts at ‘youth’ here could maybe, just maybe, have something to do with the fact that her husband makes no secret of his infatuation with two eighteen-year-olds. ‘Stay as Sweet as You Are’ is a song usually sung by a man to a woman – Adeline singing it to herself is rather sad.)

Interestingly, although Exton’s Mrs Clapperton is more dramatically ‘odious’, this is tempered by a slight expansion of General Forbes’s character (played by Roger Hume). As in the short story, it is the general who questions Clapperton’s military record and reveals his music hall past. However, in the adaptation, Forbes is more clearly fond of Mrs Clapperton (who he calls ‘Adeline’), and there are definite hints of unrequited affection here.

But, as in the short story, any glimpses of Adeline’s softer side are overshadowed by the presentation of Miss Henderson – Colonel Clapperton’s other victim. Played by Ann Firbank, the TV Miss Henderson captures the dignified sadness of Christie’s character perfectly. In a slight change to the story, Miss Henderson (in her sun hat and smart clothes) does go ashore at Alexandria; however, when she runs into Poirot, she says that she thought she would be part of Colonel Clapperton’s party (i.e. the arse has stood her up). Poirot, with careful tact, prevaricates on the subject, before admitting that Clapperton came ashore with ‘the two little girls’. Miss Henderson sighs and says, ‘They’re not children, Monsieur Poirot.’ And then adds, ‘Nor am I.’

Oh! Miss Henderson – I love you.



Of course, during all this, Hastings hasn’t had much to do. The clay pigeon storyline has been flogged to death – and it’s never really clear (either to the viewers or, indeed, to Poirot) why Hastings is taking it so seriously. Time for a change of pace… Cut to: Hastings posing for a photo on a wooden camel.



As I said above, when I first watched this episode it was the denouement that really stuck in my mind. And it is an absolute cracker. Unlike many of the other early episodes, there’s no chase scene, but there is a truly grand gather-the-suspects reveal, which allows David Suchet to revel in Poirot’s taste for the dramatic. The thing is though… for once, the TV denouement is actually less crazy than that of the short story.

In the adaptation, the passengers are enjoying a bit of post-prandial, post-homicidal entertainment. Mr Russell (the old man known only by the disrespectful nickname ‘the Grandfather of All the Tea Planters’ in the short story, here played by James Ottaway) is reciting a bit of Kipling, when he is interrupted by the ship’s captain (Ben Aris). Poirot is to have centre-stage, and he arrives dramatically carrying a suitcase under a cloth. He whips the cloth away, revealing a suitcase. After working his audience for a short time, he opens the suitcase and produces a doll. This doll, he says (with pure showmanship), can speak – but only if no one is looking. He places her back inside the suitcase, and an eerie voice begins to recite the words Mrs Clapperton ostensibly spoke through her bedroom door on the morning of the murder. The ventriloquism is revealed, and all eyes are on Colonel Clapperton.



Now, much as this might seem like an embellishment written for the TV episode (along the lines of the theatrical capture of George Lorrimer in ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’), it’s actually taken from Christie’s short story. However, Christie’s version is – believe it or not – even stranger. In the source text, the passengers find handwritten notes by their dinner plates, instructing them to go to the lounge at 8.30. There, the captain stands on the orchestra stage and announces Poirot as though he were the evening’s star turn. The little Belgian detective arrives with a bulky object covered with a sheet – he removes the sheet to reveal ‘an almost life-sized wooden doll, dressed in a velvet suit and lace collar’. Poirot then performs what appears to be a ventriloquist act (though the doll’s voice is actually provided by a stewardess concealed behind the stage) and implicates Clapperton.

Erm… where did Poirot get this almost life-sized wooden doll? In the TV adaptation, his prop is clearly explained: we see Poirot approaching the Misses Morgan’s niece, who we have previously seen playing with dolls, and requesting ‘a favour’. But at no point in Christie’s story do we see anyone playing with a large wooden mannequin – meaning Poirot fortuitously discovered that there was an almost life-sized doll just kicking around on the boat waiting to be put into action. Or he went out and bought a ventriloquist’s dummy (from one of the many ventriloquism emporia at Alexandria harbour, no doubt) for the sole purpose of giving a murderer a heart attack.

That’s right, did I forget to mention? Poirot’s little show gives Colonel Clapperton a fatal heart attack. And Poirot did this intentionally. As he explains to Miss Henderson, he’d found a prescription for digitalin in the Clappertons’ cabin, and he deduced it belonged to the colonel. Unlike in the TV version, where Poirot’s performance is intended to provoke a confession, in the short story the detective is trying to literally scare the man to death. Come on, Poirot, I know he was an arse, but isn’t that a bit too far?*

And as if this wasn’t enough weirdness, let’s not forget that Poirot puts on a special voice to do his little show. I don’t mean the dummy’s voice (that’s done by the hidden stewardess), but rather Poirot’s own voice changes when he talks to the doll: ‘it was no longer foreign – it had instead a confident English, a slightly Cockney inflection’. WTF? Why does he do that?? (As with the bizarre disguised-as-an-Irishman subplot in ‘The Third Floor Flat’, I can sort of see why Exton chose to drop this bit from his adaptation. It just raises too many questions.)

But there’s one final little flourish in Poirot’s Cockney ventriloquism routine that is absolutely golden. When he presents his ‘witness’ to the crime, he gives the doll a name. The dummy, apparently, is named ‘Arthur’. As in, Arthur Hastings (who doesn’t actually appear in the short story). I’ve mentioned my love of Hastings’s snark in reviews of previous episodes, but it’s just lovely to see Poirot take a light-hearted swipe at his companion here. It’s this sort of thing that really differentiates Poirot and Hastings from Holmes and Watson.

Okay, I’ve gone on too long about this episode now – and there are lots more to go before I get to Curtain. It’s just that this really is a fantastic adaptation of a great short story, and I love talking about it. Two final little gems before I finish…

Although we’ve had a glimpse of Poirot’s moustache-care kit, this is the first episode in which we get to see a really classy Poirot travel accessory. In this case, it’s his walking stick telescope. Nice.



And, while the dialogue is pitch-perfect throughout, the story has one standout exchange between Poirot and Mrs Clapperton (retained verbatim from the short story):

‘“‘You’re so alive, Adeline,’ they say to me. But really, Monsieur Poirot, what would one be if one wasn’t alive?”
“Dead,” said Poirot.’

Can’t argue with that. Next up: ‘The Incredible Theft’


*Actually, Poirot’s causing Colonel Clapperton’s heart attack isn’t quite as sinister as it might sound. Most of the Poirot stories were written before the abolition of the death penalty in the UK, and Christie’s detective frequently offers murderers a way to ‘avoid the rope’ – if he feels some sympathy towards them, that is. Moreover, Poirot is sometimes reluctant to let British killers face foreign courts (as we’ll see in Death on the Nile), which may have been the case had Clapperton lived. Nevertheless, ‘avoiding the rope’ is more commonly achieved by a discreet dose of poison or the concealing of a gun – this is the only story in which it’s effected through a ventriloquism-induced heart attack.

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘Problem at Sea’.


The eighth episode of the first series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 26th February 1989. It was based on the short story of the same name, which was first published in 1937. That story was, in turn, a revision and expansion of ‘The Submarine Plans’, which was first published in The Sketch in November 1923. ‘The Submarine Plans’ isn’t included in The Complete Short Stories, but it’s in Poirot’s Early Cases (Collins, 1974) and, since I don’t own a copy of that collection – and I hadn’t previously read the 1923 story – I’d like to say a big thanks to Sorcha Ní Fhlaínn for lending me a copy so I could compare the texts. It’s always nice when your friends understand your obsessive completism.

Like all of the ‘original’ run of Poirot stories that appeared in The Sketch, ‘The Submarine Plans’ is narrated by Hastings. It begins rather abruptly – ‘A note had arrived by special messenger’ – with Poirot being summoned to Sharples, the country house of Ralph Curtis, Lord Alloway. Alloway is the head of the ‘newly formed Ministry of Defence’, and is responsible for the ‘new Z type submarine’, the plans for which appear to have been stolen from Sharples. Poirot has been called in as police involvement would risk a scandal, and because Alloway remembers ‘only too well what you did for us during the war, when the Prime Minister was kidnapped in that astounding fashion’.

A collection of guests at Sharples make up the cast of suspects. Admiral Sir Harry Weardale, his wife and son (Leonard) are among them, as is Mrs Conrad (‘a lady well known in London society’). Alloway’s secretary, Mr Fitzroy, appears to have been the last person to see the plans, and Mrs Conrad’s French maid caused a disturbance shortly before the theft which, she claimed, was the result of her seeing a ghost on the stairs. Poirot cuts through all this nonsense to reveal a bait-and-switch plot designed to trap (or, as it turns out, trick) Mrs Conrad, who has dubious connections to foreign powers. Despite having set up the whole affair, Lord Alloway is revealed to be a patriotic hero, who goes on to become Prime Minister.

I’m afraid to say, ‘The Submarine Plans’ is not a particularly memorable short story. For me, the only notable feature is the excellent bit of snark at the end of Hastings’s narration. After Poirot sums up his findings with his characteristic arrogance – he announces to his companion that he ‘spoke to Alloway as one great man to another – and he understood perfectly’ – Hastings accuses his illustrious friend of simply guessing at the explanation. A short epilogue follows, in which it is revealed that the Z type submarine was a huge success and Lord Alloway acknowledged his gratitude to Poirot after becoming Prime Minister, and Hastings again asserts his scepticism about Poirot’s deductive powers: ‘But I still consider that Poirot was guessing. He will do it once too often one of these days.’

‘The Incredible Theft’ is a fairly straightforward expansion of the 1923 story, with little additional plot added (though, as in Christie’s ‘Murder in the Mews’, Hastings has now been removed). The character names are changed: Lord Alloway becomes Sir Charles McLaughlin, Lord Mayfield; Harry Weardale becomes Air Marshal Sir George Carrington, his wife is now named (Julia) and his son is called Reggie rather than Leonard; Mr Fitzroy becomes Mr Carlile. Mrs Conrad is now an American woman named Mrs Vanderlyn, and more emphasis is placed on the woman’s dubious connections, and an additional guest – Mrs Macatta MP, ‘a great authority on Housing and Infant Welfare’ – is included.

Perhaps as a result of the different context of the stories, Christie also makes further changes to the details of the plot. The original story was written five years after the end of WWI, and the military implications of the submarine and Alloway’s career are barely mentioned. ‘The Incredible Theft’ was published two years before the outbreak of WWII (and just months before the Sudetan Crisis), and so the implications of the stolen plans seem more serious. In ‘The Incredible Theft’, Mayfield has been created ‘first Minister of Armaments, a new ministry which had only just come into being’, and the plans are for a bomber, rather than a submarine. As such, Carrington is Air Marshal Sir George Carrington, head of the Air Force (his counterpart, Weardale, was an admiral in the Navy).

Hints of impending conflict pepper the later story, though these are kept rather vague. In discussing the bomber, Carrington notes that Britain has fallen behind other nations in engineering a new plane:

‘Lots of gunpowder everywhere all over Europe. And we weren’t ready, damn it!’

Mayfield counters this by saying:

‘A lot of the European stuff is out of date already – and they’re perilously near bankruptcy.’

Note that Christie sticks to the generic ‘European’, and offers no specifics about which countries might be ‘near bankruptcy’. This vagueness continues in the comments about Mrs Vanderlyn’s suspicious connections. The men talk of her association with foreign nations, but give no actual details: ‘We will just say to a European power – and perhaps to more than one European power.’ Even the past scandal in Lord Mayfield’s career isn’t specified:

‘You were suspected of friendship with a European Power at that time bitterly unpopular with the electorate of this country.’

Nevertheless, the story ends with a less subtle nod towards contemporaneous events. Like Lord Alloway before him, Lord Mayfield is tipped to become the next Prime Minister. But, unlike the earlier character’s dignified discretion, Mayfield concludes his business with Poirot with more self-assertion:

‘You are much too clever, M. Poirot. I will only ask you to believe one thing. I have faith in myself. I believe that I am the man to guide England through the days of crisis that I see coming. If I did not honestly believe that I am needed by my country to steer the ship of state, I would not have done what I have done – made the best of both worlds – saved myself from disaster by a clever trick.’

Modern readers can see, of course, just how prescient Mayfield’s ‘days of crisis’ speech really was.



The TV adaptation was directed by Edward Bennett, and dramatized by David Reid and Clive Exton. Again, as with ‘Murder in the Mews’, Hastings is returned to the story, along with Chief Inspector Japp and Miss Lemon (neither of whom appeared in either version of the short story).

Miss Lemon has little to do in this episode, sadly – aside from bearing the brunt of some full-on Poirot sarcasm when she refuses to take an anonymous call: ‘Life first, Miss Lemon. Filing second.’ Hastings is also at a bit of a loose end. His presence in ‘The Submarine Plans’ was as the (admittedly somewhat cynical) narrator, and so there’s not much space for him in ‘The Incredible Theft’. This is literally true, as Hastings isn’t able to stay at Mayfield’s house with Poirot. He has to stay in an overcrowded pub in the village instead and, as the pub’s rooms are all booked, this results in his sharing a room (and a bed!) with Inspector Japp. This does lead to one of the funniest bits of the episode, as Hastings glumly explains to Poirot that Japp talks in his sleep. Apparently Hastings has been kept awake all night by shouts of ‘Now I’ve got you, young sonny me lad’, ‘Japp of the Yard strikes again!’, and (my favourite) ‘Stand back, lads, he’s got a blancmange!’

While Hastings and Miss Lemon get through the episode by just sort of being Hastings and Miss Lemon, the presence of Inspector Japp is a bit more of a problem. As I said, in both versions of the short story, Poirot is called in precisely to avoid any police involvement. In order to be able to include Japp, some aspects of the plot have had to be revised.

In this version of the story, then, Lord Mayfield becomes Tommy Mayfield (played by John Stride), an engineer who is struggling to rebuild his relationship with the British government after a scandal (‘that Japanese business’). As such, he isn’t being completely trusted with his plans for a new aircraft. Sir George Carrington (John Carson) is in attendance as a representative of the government, and he has called on Japp to be stationed nearby (without informing Mayfield of this) in case something happens to the secret documents. Carrington is staying at Mayfield’s home with his wife (played by Phyllida Law, in her first of two appearances in the series) and son Reggie (Guy Scantlebury), who appear as exaggerated versions of their literary counterparts (though, unlike in the short stories, poor Reggie doesn’t get his snog with a French maid in the TV episode).

Although the literary Lord Mayfield was unmarried, Tommy Mayfield has a wife who is becoming increasingly concerned about her husband’s involvement with Mrs Vanderlyn. It is Mrs Mayfield (Ciaran Madden) who contacts Poirot – before the theft of the plans – and requests that he visits them at their home. This additional plot element does result in a lovely little sequence shot on location at London Zoo (perhaps one of the most iconic locations used in the first series). Mrs Mayfield – posing, initially, as Miss Smith (Miss Lemon’s anonymous caller) – meets Poirot by the zoo’s famous Penguin Pool. Now a Grade I listed building (and no longer inhabited by penguins), this structure was designed by Berthold Lubetkin’s Tecton Architectural Group and opened in 1934. I’m a bit torn by its use here: on the one hand, there seems absolutely no reason for Mrs Mayfield to insist on an incognito meeting at London Zoo; on the other, the Penguin Pool is an absolutely perfect addition to the show’s early aesthetic.



Sleeptalking Japp and Penguin Pool aside, the TV episode turns out to unfortunately be as lacklustre as its source. Mrs Macatta MP and the French maid are dropped – which is a shame, as I liked the little ‘after all, what is a kiss?’ exchange between Poirot and the maid, which appears in both versions of the short story – in favour of more emphasis on the impending war in Europe. As I said in my review of ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, Agatha Christie’s Poirot sets almost all its episodes in the years just prior to WWII, and this episode draws attention to this context directly throughout. Characters engage in discussions about the military situation in Europe – specifically the role of the League of Nations and the possibility of using ‘radio echoes’ to track aircraft – and Mrs Mayfield states that her husband believes Britain is ‘on the brink of war’. In this version, there is no prevarication as to the enemy either. Mayfield jovially proclaims that Hitler and Mussolini need to be ‘taken down a peg or two’, and the newly designed aeroplane (named the ‘Mayfield Kestrel’) is compared favourably to the Messerschmitt.

Most striking of all is the alteration to Mrs Vanderlyn’s character. The TV Mrs Vanderlyn (played by Carmen Du Sautoy) is far removed from Mrs Conrad of ‘The Submarine Plans’ – though her role in the narrative remains the same.

In the 1937 short story, Mrs Vanderlyn is unobtrusively American: ‘Her voice held a soupçon of American accent, just enough to be pleasant without undue exaggeration.’ By contrast, the TV character is all about ‘undue exaggeration’. Her Americanness is stated repeatedly, and she comments on the Britishness of her surroundings several times. Moreover, her dubious associations are now explicitly ‘pro-German sympathies’. In case this hasn’t been made obvious enough, Mrs Vanderlyn hot-foots it to the German ambassador’s house as soon as she has the (phony) plans in her possession (chased – of course – by Poirot and Hastings in a stolen police car). And as a final cherry on the cake, she performs a Nazi salute on her arrival. A far cry from the nebulous threat of Mrs Conrad in the 1923 short story.



All in all, the TV episode is a solid, but not particularly exciting, adaptation of a solid, but not particularly exciting, short story. If I had to choose, I’d say that ‘The Submarine Plans’ is my favourite of the three versions, if only because of Hastings’s narration.

We watched this episode as part of a little set of Series 1 episodes: ‘Problem at Sea’, ‘The Incredible Theft’, ‘The King of Clubs’ and ‘The Dream’. Watching/reading these stories back-to-back highlights a couple of recurrent motifs that will pop up at various point of the series as a whole.

Firstly, a game of bridge is featured, and this game is used to illuminate character. As I mentioned in my review, bridge features prominently in ‘Problem at Sea’– and it will also be of importance in the next episode, ‘The King of Clubs’, and in later episodes as well. Bridge is a clear marker of class, and immediately evokes the world in which Poirot and Hastings circulate. It’s also an apt metaphor for the work of the golden age detective, I suppose.

An even more potent metaphor is that of the conjuror. Conjuring crops up in ‘Problem at Sea’, though the conjuring trick itself is a piece of misdirection. Although stage magic isn’t mentioned in the TV version of ‘The Incredible Theft’, there’s a nice little comment in the 1937 short story. When Lord Mayfield suggests calling in Hercule Poirot, Carrington is sceptical: ‘[he’ll] come down here and produce the plans like a conjuror taking rabbits out of his hat, I suppose?’ This isn’t the first time Poirot has been likened to a magician – and it won’t be the last.

As a fan of both golden age detective fiction and conjuring, I’m always happy when stories draw attention to the close relationship between the two. (I love Clayton Rawson’s Great Merlini stories for this, and some episodes of Jonathan Creek.) With his debonair dramatics and theatrical flair (as well as his taste for misdirection and production), Poirot is the classic conjuror-detective, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of this as the series goes on.

But it’s time to move on now… the next episode is ‘The King of Clubs’

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The Incredible Theft’.


The penultimate episode of Series 1 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 12th March 1989. It was based on the short story of the same name, first published as ‘The Adventure of the King of Clubs’ in The Sketch (March 1923).

Like all of the original Sketch stories, the story is narrated by Hastings, and it begins with the good captain attempting to interest his illustrious companion with an odd story in a daily newspaper. An ‘impresario’ by the name of Henry Reedburn has been murdered, and his death was announced in a strangely dramatic fashion. The previous night, as a ‘neat suburban’ family (the Oglanders) played bridge in their drawing-room, a woman in burst through their French windows and shouted, ‘Murder!’ The woman’s evening dress was stained with blood, and she fainted after her sinister proclamation.

At this point in the story, Poirot decides to put Hastings out of his misery and admits that he knows all about the Oglanders’ surprise visitor. The woman is Valerie Saintclair, ‘the famous dancer who has lately taken London by storm’, and Poirot has been contacted by Prince Paul of Maurania about the case – the prince, it seems, has recently become engaged to Valerie, and is keen to banish any trace of suspicion of the woman’s involvement in Reedburn’s murder. The prince explains that, while he knows that his family won’t officially sanction his marriage to a dancer (despite the fact that she is allegedly the daughter of ‘a Russian grand duchess’), he is free to enter into a morganatic marriage – provided the woman isn’t accused of murder, that is.

Poirot and Hastings take on the case and travel to Mon Désir, Reedburn’s ‘exceptionally fine villa’, and then to Daisymead, the ‘unpretentious little house’ of the murdered man’s neighbours, questioning the various characters as they go. Valerie Saintclair admits to being at Reedburn’s house at the time of the murder, but she insists that the impresario was attacked by ‘a dreadful-looking man, a sort of tramp’. Terrified, she escaped through the window and ran to the first house she saw. As the case proceeds, the detective discovers that Valerie has previously consulted a psychic, who warned her to beware ‘the King of Clubs’ – the assumption was that this referred to Reedburn, though the phrase takes on a different meaning as Poirot’s investigation progresses.

I like Christie’s short story. It’s not my favourite of the 1923 Sketch series, but it’s an enjoyable puzzle nonetheless. It’s got some nice subtle clues, especially when Poirot draws attention to seemingly irrelevant details (particularly an old photograph) that turn out to be vital. And the mildly incongruous aspects of the crime scene (and that of Valerie’s dramatic entrance) lead neatly to a satisfactory conclusion.



And now… the adaptation. The TV episode was directed by Renny Rye, and dramatized by Michael Baker (with Clive Exton as script consultant). Sadly, it’s not a high spot of the series. It’s not the loosest adaptation of the series (it’s positively faithful compared to some of the others), but some of the narrative changes that have been made here dilute the original mystery until the central puzzle is all but lost. In fact, despite having seen the episode a couple of times, it was only when I read the short story that I understood what the puzzle actually was.

In the adaptation, Valerie Saintclair is no longer a dancer, but is a famous film actress (played by Niamh Cusack, the first of the Cusack sisters to appear in the show). She is shooting a film at Parade Studios, which is owned by the arrogant and aggressive Henry Reedburn (David Swift). The episode opens with Valerie attempting to shoot a scene, as Reedburn boorishly hectors and demeans the cast and crew. Poirot and Hastings are witnesses to this scene, as they have been invited along by Hastings’s old friend, Bunny Saunders (played by Jonathan Coy), the film’s director. Also present is Prince Paul of Maurania (Jack Klaff), Valerie’s fiancé. As in the short story, Poirot is acquainted with the prince – His Highness thanks the detective for ‘all you have done for my family’.



After this opening, we are taken to Mon Désir, Reedburn’s grand residence – where the studio head is being confronted by two of his disgruntled stars. Although I don’t know a huge amount about the locations used in the series, I do know that the exteriors of Reedburn’s house were filmed at High and Over in Amersham, a Grade II* listed building designed in 1929 by Amyas Connell. Occasionally, particularly in the early series, locations are used that almost seem unreal. There’s something about ‘Mon Désir’ that seems too modernist, too stylized, too Poirot to be real – so it’s good to pause occasionally and look at the buildings. As Hastings says at the beginning of Christie’s short story: ‘Truth […] is stranger than fiction!’



Back to the episode, I have some serious reservations about the changes made to Valerie Saintclair’s character. Cusack performs her as a reserved and genteel actress, beloved by the dashing Prince Paul and popular with both viewers and colleagues. Gone is any trace of the ‘scandalous’ nature of Valerie’s profession in the short story, and there is no hint that the Mauranian royal family will be anything other than welcoming of their new daughter-in-law (there are definite echoes of Grace Kelly’s marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco in the relationship). The only potential obstacle is that Valerie may be implicated in Reedburn’s death, which Paul is keen to avoid.

While there’s nothing wrong with these changes per se, making Valerie more respectable has the effect of lessening the social divide between her and the Oglanders. In the episode, Valerie’s appearance in the ‘neat suburban’ sitting room of the Oglanders lacks all the wild incongruity of Christie’s short story. This is what confused me the first couple of times I watched it – there’s just no sense that she shouldn’t be there. There’s no sense of discomfort between Valerie and Mrs Oglander (played by Avril Elgar), or any animosity between Valerie and Geraldine (Abigail Cruttenden). The Oglanders’ son Ronnie (played by Sean Pertwee, in his first of two appearances in the series – he’ll be back in Dead Man’s Folly, though who knows when I’ll finally get to that episode!) is nothing but solicitous towards Valerie, and there’s a sense of the family protecting the famous actress from the moment Poirot arrives at The Willows (the new name for Daisymead). I must confess that, until I read the short story, I always assumed Valerie was a friend of the family, possibly a relation. And so I could never understand why Poirot questioned why the actress has arrived at The Willows in the first place. It just seemed obvious that she’d gone to their house deliberately.

In Christie’s short story, the reveal that Valerie is the Oglanders’ daughter, and that the family is protecting their own (despite being estranged), is explained by Poirot with characteristic elegance:

‘The interesting thing is that Valerie is ashamed of her family, and her family is ashamed of her. Nevertheless, in a moment of peril, she turned to her brother for help, and when things went wrong, they all hung together in a remarkable way. Family strength is a marvellous thing.’

This is lost in the adaptation, as there’s no sense of estrangement in the Oglander family. Their secrecy turns out to be down to the fact that Oglander isn’t their real name – they are, in fact, the Hawtreys, and they’re living incognito (Valerie included) because the silent and disabled pater familias once committed a serious act of fraud. The problem is that this sense of a shared secret pervades all their interactions, which, again, removes any sense of Valerie’s outsider status.



The change in Valerie’s profession necessitates a change in Reedburn’s. The nightclub impresario now becomes a film studio executive: thus he is no longer the ‘king of clubs’. As such, Valerie’s reported trip to the clairvoyant is removed – the connection between the playing card and the man would be much harder to explain in this version of the story. While the mention of the psychic in Christie’s story seems fluffy and inconsequential, it serves the purpose of hinting at something premeditated or preordained about Reedburn’s death – and this is an important piece of misdirection, as the reader is being discouraged from seeing the impresario’s death as the spur-of-the-moment act of violence it is ultimately revealed to be.

The adaptation has no such misdirection, and so Reedburn’s death always appears as an accident committed in the heat of an argument. In order to create some sense of mystery, additional suspects in the form of Bunny Saunders and the recently sacked Ralph Walton (Gawn Grainger) are thrown into the mix. Valerie’s mysterious tramp from the short story is transformed into a gypsy and, as in the source, Poirot disdains the task of hunting for this phantom. As an aside, one of my favourite lines in the short story comes when Hastings suggests they look for the vagrant, and his friend formidably proclaims: ‘Hercule Poirot does not hunt down tramps’.

But someone has to hunt down tramps or vagrants, and the TV version knows just the man: Inspector Japp is on the case. ‘Dear oh dear… here we go again,’ the policeman says as he arrives at Daisymead and prepares to undertake a pointless search of the local gypsy camp. The little Belgian detective is more than happy to let his friend head off on a wild goose chase, and the episode ends with Japp still convinced he will find the shadowy Romany. (As is the case with Hastings, some Japp storylines feel a bit like they’ve just been added for the sake of it.)

There is one significant element of the original story that has been retained in the adaptation. The Oglanders have been playing bridge, but Poirot discovers that a single playing (the eponymous ‘King of Clubs’) is missing from the card table. Bridge has become something of a recurring motif in the second half of this series, featuring significantly in the previoustwo episodes. Here, however, the game isn’t simply used as a metaphor or for character development, but it’s an important clue to the mystery (this idea will be used again in Cards on the Table).



The missing playing card is still a good clue in the TV episode – in fact, it’s one of the only good clues – but the identity of the missing card has been divested of any (phony) significance. Yes – the missing card is still the king of clubs, but the clue would have worked with any card from the pack. (Naturally, this makes the title of the episode seem a little odd until you’ve read the short story.)

To conclude, then, this isn’t a favourite episode. Like ‘The Incredible Theft’ it lacks both the punch and the charm of other episodes in the series. Even the interactions between the ‘gang’ seem watered down – Miss Lemon is absent, and Japp is at a loose end – though I do enjoy Hastings’s attempt to explain modern art to Poirot when they arrive at Mon Désir.

One final comment… it’s always interesting to compare Suchet’s performance and appearance in these early episodes to that of the later series. Sometimes, the superficial details can be quite telling. For instance, when Prince Paul calls Poirot to tell him about Reedburn’s murder, we see our detective disturbed in his slumber. As in other early episodes, he’s wearing pyjamas, but no hair or moustache net. It’s worth keeping this image in mind when we get to later episodes (e.g. Murder on the Orient Express) – it seems the little Belgian is to get more fastidious with age… he almost looks like a man of action here.



Okay, so ‘The King of Clubs’ isn’t a huge favourite of mine, though the short story is enjoyable. On to the final episode of Series 1 – ‘The Dream’– which is a very different kettle of fish.

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The King of Clubs’.


We’ve reached the end of the first series! I’m woefully behind schedule, so am seriously doubting that I’ll get to Curtain by Christmas – but it’s been so much fun revisiting Series 1 that I don’t mind that this project is probably going to take a lot longer than I envisaged. And I get to end this series with a great episode.

The tenth episode of the first series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 19th March 1989, and was based on the short story of the same name (first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1937, then in The Strand in February of the following year).

The story begins with Poirot arriving at Northway House, the residence of Benedict Farley. Farley is an eccentric millionaire, who lives in a house that is a ‘relic of an earlier age – an age of space and leisure, when green fields had surrounded its well-bred arrogance’. The description of Northway House continues:

‘Now it was an anachronism, submerged and forgotten in the hectic sea of modern London, and not one man in fifty could have told you where it stood.’

This evocative description of the house prepares us for its reclusive inhabitant. Mr Farley is known for his odd habits and erratic behaviour, and his summons to Poirot is characteristically strange. When the detective is shown into Farley’s room (in fact, into his secretary’s room), he discovers that he has been called in to consult on a recurring nightmare – not the detective’s usual fare. Farley has been repeatedly dreaming about shooting himself – always at the same place and the same time. He has consulted three doctors, who have advised him (respectively) that the dream is caused by poor diet, childhood trauma and subconscious suicidal urges. Farley has dismissed all these explanations, and asks Poirot whether it is possible that a murder could be effected through such means. The detective is unable to do much more than rule out hypnotism, so Farley dismisses him.

Naturally, of course, Farley is soon found dead – apparently having committed suicide at the very place and time predicted in his dream. Poirot is called in by his old friend Dr Stillingfleet, as the police have discovered the letter Farley sent requesting a consultation with the detective. Stillingfleet explains that, without this letter, the death would have been recorded as a suicide, but Poirot’s involvement suggests the matter may be more complicated. Additionally, Mrs Farley is able to corroborate the story of the dream, and Farley’s secretary says that he wrote the letter to Poirot on his employer’s instruction.

Because Poirot (and Stillingfleet) are quick to rule out suicide, the reader does so too. This, then, is a murder, which took place in a locked room with no access via window, and which the victim apparently predicted in a series of recurring dreams. It’s a locked room mystery – and I do adore locked room mysteries. (Agatha Christie was no John Dickson Carr and used the ‘locked room’ conceit more sparingly in her stories – but I feel that her Poirot locked rooms do stand up against the acknowledged masters of the subgenre. ‘Problem at Sea’ has always been a favourite of mine, for instance.)

The clues to the trick (for locked room mysteries always rely on a ‘trick’) are to be found in Poirot’s odd meeting with Benedict Farley – the bright lighting of the room, the man’s inability to distinguish between his letter and a letter to Poirot’s laundress, his refusal to let Poirot see the room which is to be the scene of the crime. Some details of the crime scene also help – a pair of ‘lazy-tongs’, the blank wall that faces Farley’s window, the traffic noise from the street below. The detective puts these seemingly random details into a comprehensible order, and the solution is a satisfying one. It’s worth noting, by the way, that there is yet another reference to stage magic in the story: in response to Poirot denying any deception on his part, Benedict Farley chuckles, ‘That’s what the conjuror says before he takes the goldfish out of the hat! Saying that is part of the trick, you know!’

[Update: I wrote the above last night, but then I had a bit of a realization after I slept on it. I seem to remember that I worked out the solution of ‘The Dream’ when I first watched it. And I was only ten at the time. This possibly means that the ‘trick’ isn’t particularly sophisticated, or that it’s easy to spot its workings. However, ‘The Dream’ will always have a special place in my heart for this reason, as it’s the locked mystery I cut my teeth on.]



The TV adaptation was written by Clive Exton and directed by Edward Bennett. As is usual with Exton’s adaptations, it’s fairly faithful to Christie’s short story. Like many of the other earlier episodes, the ‘family’ are added to the story – Miss Lemon, Hastings and Japp aren’t in Christie’s story – but their inclusion is a little less clunky than in some other episodes. Miss Lemon has a little sub-storyline about a broken typewriter, and Japp neatly replaces Inspector Barnett, the ‘tame police inspector’ of the short story. The inclusion of Hastings necessarily downgrades Dr Stillingfleet (played by Paul Lacoux) from his role as the ‘Watson’ character, but I guess that’s a sacrifice that has to be made.

The TV version of Farley is fairly close to his literary counterpart. However, the eccentric is now the owner of a successful pie factory, rather than being something vaguely connected to transport. Unlike in Christie’s story, we get more of a sense of Farley at work – a Pathé Gazette newsreel introduces us to Farley’s Pies, and we see the owner addressing his workforce on the factory’s fiftieth anniversary. This Benedict Farley is a more straightforwardly obnoxious man. Christie’s short story mentions the millionaire’s ‘strange meanesses’, but also his ‘incredible generosities’; it is only the ‘meanesses’ (his attempts to block unionization, his dismissal of his daughter’s boyfriend) that are on show in the adaptation. But we still get no real sense of the man outside a few glimpses and reports from others, which is very much in-keeping with the original story.



Like ‘The Incredible Theft’ and ‘The King of Clubs’, the episode features some fantastic location shots. In this case, it’s the use of the Hoover Building in Perivale, which doubles as Farley’s factory. Like the other iconic buildings used in these early episodes, the art deco Hoover Building is both dramatically stylized and contemporary to the show’s setting (it was built in 1933). Unlike the other buildings, though, it’s now a branch of Tesco.

Weirdly, given that I really like both the episode and the short story, I find that I have a lot less to say about ‘The Dream’ than some other instalments. It’s just a neat little puzzle that was faithfully adapted for the screen. There are some nice interactions between Poirot and Miss Lemon (particularly the detective’s enthusiasm after Miss Lemon’s strange time-keeping leads him to his solution, and his final (misguided) thank you gift). And I like Poirot’s lamenting that his little grey cells have been ‘weakened by the old age and the fast living’ (which Hastings questions, but is informed that Poirot did indeed live fast in his youth). The episode sees the welcome (well, welcome to me) return of Dicker (played by George Little), the concierge of Whitehaven Mansions, who is the show’s most minor recurring character.



Since it’s the final episode of the series, it’s only fitting that we have one last chase scene as well. As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, the (silly) chase scenes are a regular feature of the early series, taking place on foot, by car and by boat. In ‘The Dream’, we round off the series with a motorbike-and-sidecar heading in hot pursuit of the murderer – complete with a dramatic leap from the driving seat to apprehend the fugitive.



And that brings me to the end of the first series – making me ten episodes closer to finally watching Curtain. It seems sort of fitting to end this review with a quote from Christie’s ‘The Dream’, I think:

‘“I wonder if you’ll ever commit a crime, Poirot?” said Stillingfleet. “I bet you could get away with it all right. As a matter of fact, it would be too easy for you – I mean the thing would be off as definitely too unsporting.” “That,” said Poirot, “is a typical English idea.”’

Onwards, then, to Series 2…

POSTSCRIPT:

As I said, I adore locked room mysteries. To hear more about some of my favourite examples of the genre (including a couple of Agatha Christie’s mysteries), have a listen to the radio show I did on this subject last year:

From magical places steeped in mysticism to evil foreboding places of unspeakable terror, the forest is a place of secrets, a place of knowledge, a place of death, and a place of life. But it is also a vulnerable place easily lost to the chainsaw and the drill. Our fascination with what may lie within the woods is an enduring one. Bewilder us, scare us, entertain us. Take us on a journey… into the woods.

What we want: Edgy, dark and weird fiction. Any interpretation of the theme is welcome – and we have no preconceptions about what ‘into the woods’ might mean. Any genre considered: dark fantasy, (sub)urban fantasy, Gothic, horror, sci fi, steampunk, cyberpunk, biopunk, dystopian, slipstream. We’re looking for original and fresh voices that challenge and unsettle. (And, please remember, we do not publish misogyny, misandry, homophobia, transphobia or racism.)

Editor:Hannah Kate

Publisher:Hic Dragones

Word Count: 3000-7000

Submission Guidelines: Electronic submissions as .doc, .docx or .rtf attachments only. 12pt font, 1.5 or double spaced. Please ensure name, story title and email address are included on the attachment. Email submissions to Hic Dragones. Submissions are welcome from anywhere, but must be in English.

Submission Deadline: Monday 13th June 2016

Payment: Contributor copy: 1 copy of paperback, eBook in ePub and/or mobi format; permanent 25% discount on paperback (resale permitted); 1 free eBook from our catalogue.

More information:email or visit the Hic Dragones website.

I've been told this week that all my social media aliases are a bit difficult to keep track of. (Tell me about it.) So here's a little list of all my social media profiles and what they do.

Personal/Professional

For my academic, personal, political and personal-is-politcal posts, I have this blog, a Twitter account and an Academia.edu page. I don't have a personal Facebook profile, so if you think you've found me on there... it's just an illusion.

My husband Rob and I have an occasionally-updated travel blog called About Our Isles, and a (very quiet) Twitter account to go with it.

Creative

I write creatively as Hannah Kate, and I have a blog and Twitter devoted to my creative stuff.

Radio

My radio show, Hannah's Bookshelf, is on North Manchester FM on Saturdays. I blog about it here and tweet about it from my Hannah Kate Twitter. The show has a Facebook page, and a Mixcloud page.

Medieval Studies

I'm treasurer and webmaster for the Manchester Medieval Society, and run the society's blog and Twitter account.

Publishing

Rob and I run Hic Dragones, a dark fiction micropress. We have a website and an oft-neglected Tumblr. Hic Dragones is also on Facebook and Twitter.

We also publish a line of digitized Victorian penny dreadfuls, and these can be found on the Hic Dragones website. DigiDreadfuls has its own Facebook page and Twitter account.

Freelance

For all our freelance work (editing, indexing, web design and eBook conversion), we call ourselves Creative Cats and have a website, blog, Facebook and Twitter.

Avon

If you're in Manchester and would like to buy Avon cosmetics from me, you can find my online store here.

Community

I'm currently running the Twitter accounts for a couple of local community projects - the Friends of Crumpsall Park and the (new) Keep Crumpsall Clean campaign.

And that's it. If you find any other accounts that you think might be me, do let me know. Every so often one of my aliases goes feral and I have to track it down.

For the past few months, I’ve been doing some research into the history of the Chorlton-on-Medlock area of South Manchester for a couple of organizations. I’m sure I’ll be writing up more about this research at a later date, but this post is about a little bit of fun my mum and I had with some of the stuff I’ve found.

Last month, we decided to follow some of the recipes in Betsy Westhead’s household book (from 1833).



Betsy Westhead was born in 1805, the daughter of George Royle Chappell, fustian manufacturer. At the turn of the 19th century, Chappell owned land in Chorlton Row (later Chorlton-on-Medlock), on the newly created ‘Nelson Street’. The family lived in Nelson House (now the site of Grafton Street car park), and also owned a pair of semi-detached villas next door (now the Pankhurst Centre). Chappell had six daughters, and each of them married into neighbouring families – who, like them, were influential in local politics, the industrial explosion of Manchester, and the Methodist church.

In 1828, Betsy Chappell married Joshua Proctor Westhead, and the two of them lived in Chorlton-on-Medlock for a time. Joshua adopted the surname ‘Brown-Westhead’ and inherited Lea Castle in 1848. He was elected Liberal MP for Knaresborough in 1847, and was later MP for the City of York (1857-65, 1868-71). Betsy and Joshua has a daughter, Adelaide, who married John Constantine de Courcy, 22nd Lord Kingsale in 1855.

My own research has focused so far on George Royle Chappell and the property he owned in Chorlton-on-Medlock – but this has involved finding out more about Chappell’s ‘fine family of daughters’ (as they were described in one source). During the course of this research, I discovered that the University of Manchester has a small notebook belonging to Betsy Westhead (née Chappell) in its archives. Described as ‘Betsy Westhead’s Receipt Book’, this is a handwritten household book, started in 1833 and recording various household tips and recipes collected from other women of her acquaintance.

Betsy appears to have started this receipt book with the best of intentions, neatly writing out recipes and patterns and adding little comments (‘very nice cake’, ‘a cake made this way with dripping is beautiful for children’). But this only goes on for a few pages, sadly. Most of the notebook is blank. I don’t know if Betsy got bored or lost the notebook (it’s also possible that her daughter was born around this time, and so her attention was elsewhere). What remains is a brief little glimpse into a few months in the life of a woman from nineteenth-century Manchester.

Obviously, I couldn’t resist this… so my mum and I decided we’d try out some of the recipes. After ruling out the intriguingly name ‘Mrs Tootal’s Calves Foot Jelly’ (not the best recipe for a vegetarian), preserved cucumbers (not sure we’d have much need of these) and Rhubarb Wine (rhubarb… urgh), we settled on Almond Pudding and Corporation Cakes. And here’s how we got on…



This recipe looked pretty tasty, so we started here. First up, we mixed grated bread, suet and brown sugar together.




And… almost immediately, we realized that historical baking isn’t as straightforward as finding a recipe in an old book. I know nothing about what sort of bread, suet or sugar Betsy would have used, but since we just wanted to get a ‘flavour’ of these 1833 recipes, we decided to accept that there would be some anachronisms. So we used supermarket-bought soft brown sugar and grated up a stale white loaf. And we used shredded vegetable suet (because I’m vegetarian).

The next problem was the bitter almonds. I was tempted to try these, but I would’ve had to order them online (and they’re quite expensive). I also got a bit squeamish about all the warnings bitter almonds carry – they contain cyanide in raw form and as few as 10 nuts might be enough to kill an adult, and as a result they’re illegal in the US. As far as I can tell, cooking bitter almonds destroys the poison, but I chickened out (because I've read too much Agatha Christie) and decided to substitute sweet almonds instead.


We used ground almonds, mixed with a little rosewater. (Side note: I thought it’d be good if we pounded the almonds ourselves, but it turns out my mum hasn’t got a mortar and pestle. She used to have one – but apparently she got rid of it years ago, so we had to use pre-ground nuts instead.)

Betsy’s recipe didn’t give any instructions about the sweet almonds, so we decided to roughly chop them.


Next, we beat together 5 eggs and a glass of brandy. I don’t know whether we used the right size of glass (we used a small wine glass), but the mixture smelt right so that was good enough for us.



Then we mixed the wet and dry ingredients together, spooned the mixture into a pudding basin, and tied it up ready for boiling.




The pudding needed to be steamed for six hours (give or take), so into the pan it went.


After just over six hours, the pudding was cooked through (slightly springy to the touch) and ready to be turned out of the basin…


… strewed with white sugar…


… and served (we didn’t make the wine sauce, as Betsy didn’t provide a recipe for that.)


It was delicious. The texture was close, but not stodgy, and you could really taste the almonds and brandy. The only change I would make in future would be to reduce the amount of rosewater, as there was just a little too much rose in it. The rosewater is really only intended to take the edge off the bitterness of the almonds, so if you’re using sweet almonds you only need a drop or two. (I’m also wondering about substituting the brandy for amaretto, for the ultimate almond pudding.)



The next recipe was a bit of a mystery. I’d never heard of corporation cakes before, and an internet search revealed very little. All I found was another recipe, in The Young Ladies’ Guide in the Art of Cookery (1777) by Elizabeth Marshall, but no information about the history or popularity of this type of cake. (As you can see, Elizabeth’s recipe differs from Betsy’s, as it has no yeast and the ratio of flour to sugar is different.)


Curious about corporation cakes, I asked people on Twitter if they could shed any light on the matter. I got some nice responses (and some advice) from food historians, but no one had actually heard of the cake before. Fortunately, I know a baker! The mum of one of the kids I tutor works for Park Cakes in Oldham, and I had a vague memory of her being knowledgeable about the history of baking. Sure enough, Ann-Marie turned out to have heard of corporation cakes – in fact, she recognized the name as soon as I said it – and she advised me that they’re a bit like rock cakes. (Sadly, she didn’t know anything about the history of the name – so I’m yet to discover why they’re called ‘corporation’ cakes.)

At least I now knew what the end product should look like… but there was a new problem. One of the historians I spoke to on Twitter, David Fouser, warned me that I’d have to think carefully about the type of yeast being used. Modern baker’s yeast didn’t exist in 1833, so I’d have to work out what sort of yeast Betsy was using before I could calculate the measurements for a modern substitute. With a bit of reading around the subject, I came to the conclusion that Betsy’s household would probably have used a homemade yeast (along the lines of a modern sourdough starter) or leftovers bought from a local brewer. My mum and I quickly decided that making a homemade yeast was out of the question (not least because we were both doing this on our only day off!) and it was unlikely that we’d find a local brewer willing to sell us some leftovers. Instead, I found a website to convert measurements of brewer’s yeast into modern baker’s yeast (dried) – though I had no idea how big Betsy’s ‘spoonsful’ were – and, working on the basis that we were making something along the lines of a rock cake, decided on using two teaspoons of dried yeast for 1lb of flour.


To this, we added the currants, sugar (anachronistic caster sugar, I’m afraid) and nutmeg.


We melted the butter over the fire – well, okay, in a pan on the cooker – and stirred in the egg white (without the homemade yeast, of course, as we’d added our dried yeast directly to the flour). Then we put the butter and egg to the flour mixture.




The mix was a little dry, and we couldn’t work it into a dough. This might have been because the yeast should’ve added some extra liquid to the mixture, so we compensated for this as best we could with a little warm milk. Eventually, the mix bound together into a dough.


Of course, I don’t know if this dough was right, as Betsy only told us to ‘lightly make it into little cakes’. Perhaps it was meant to be a sloppier than this… but without any evidence of what corporation cakes are supposed to look like, we just went with what we had. We made the mixture into small buns, and then ‘threw’ some powdered sugar onto them.


Betsy just told us to bake them in a ‘slow oven’, so, again, we had to just go with what seemed right. We decided to bake them at Gas Mark 4 ‘until they look right’ (in my mum’s very scientific language).

Ta da…


I was a bit disappointed, after all the research I did, to discover that the yeast was near enough pointless. The cakes didn’t rise at all, and we’re fairly convinced that we could have achieved the same result without the yeast. Maybe we should’ve added more, or maybe we should’ve avoided the preactivated dried stuff – or, given the fact that Elizabeth Marshall’s recipe didn’t include it, maybe the yeast was always pointless. I don’t know enough about the history of baking to say for sure. But never mind… onto the taste test…


The conclusion we reached (and which was agreed by my dad and my husband) is that Betsy Westhead’s Corporation Cakes (or, at least, our version of them) are amazing. They’re like the sweetest, butteriest rock cake you’ll ever taste. I think you could probably die from eating more than two of them in one sitting though, which is a problem because they’re really morish. The taste of nutmeg came through nicely as well. All in all, I think Betsy’s recipe might be a bit more decadent than Elizabeth Marshall’s, but that’s no bad thing.

(If you can shed any light on the history of ‘corporation cakes’, please do leave a comment!)

So that was our little foray into baking 1833-style. What have I learnt? That Mrs Tootal made a mean calves foot jelly, the people of Chorlton-on-Medlock had a sweet tooth, and puddings in the nineteenth century were a bit more cyanidey than modern ones.

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The Dream’.


Now we reach Series 2 – and a couple of changes. Firstly, this has now become ‘our’ project, rather than just ‘my’ project. My husband Rob was a bit reluctant to watch along with me at the start, because he said he didn’t like the series. As it turns out, this was because of a lingering negative association from his teens: the early episodes were always broadcast on a Sunday night, and so became associated with the end of the weekend and the start of another week at school. Once I persuaded him that he wouldn’t have to go back to school after each episode, he decided to give it a go. After a couple of episodes of Series 1, he was hooked and is now even planning to read some of Christie’s novels in preparation for later episodes.

Which brings me to the next change: Series 2 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot included the first adaptation of a Poirot novel, as well as more of the short stories. The series began on 7th January 1990 with a double-episode adaptation of Peril at End House. (The four series of short story adaptations were all broadcast in January-March, each beginning shortly after Christmas – perhaps another reason why Rob associated the first series with going back to school. I’m a little younger, so had not long started secondary school when ‘Peril at End House’ aired – I hadn’t yet come to loathe going to school. But that would come.) Future adaptations of novels would be feature-length standalone episodes, but ‘Peril at End House’ is very much part of the second series – the story ran across two one-hour slots, each one bookended by the opening and closing credits. There were eight other episodes in the series, making this run of stories the same size as Series 1.

Now, I am aware that my posts for this pet project have been getting longer and longer. Given that I’m now going to be delving back into Christie’s novels as well as her short stories, this is probably not going to change. Peril at End House is one of my favourite Poirot novels (one of my many favourites), and I’ve read it numerous times – the last time was last August, when I was recovering from a serious infection (comfort reading), but I still reread it before watching the episode(s) again – so there’s a lot I want to say about this one!

The academic side of me needs to note which edition I’m referring to. I’m using The Complete Battles of Hastings, Vol. 1 (HarperCollins, 2003), which was a Christmas present from my little brother (along with The Complete Short Stories that I’ve been referring to in other posts).


Peril at End House was first published in 1932. It was Christie’s sixth Poirot novel, following The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), The Murder on the Links (1923), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), The Big Four (1927) and The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) as well as numerous short stories and the play Black Coffee (1930). I don’t know for sure why Peril at End House was chosen as the first novel to adapt, but I can make a guess. Given the style of the early series, it makes sense that the programme-makers decided to go with one of the early Poirot novels, as these are perhaps closer in overall ‘feel’ to the short stories. The Big Four is a bit anomalous and was widely held to be unadaptable (until 2013, but more on that much later); The Mystery of the Blue Train has a bit more of a ‘thriller’ feel (again, more on that in a bit). The Mysterious Affair at Styles would have to be told in flashback, so I can understand the decision to save it until the characters are more well-established. And I don’t think I need to say anything on why it took a while longer for anyone to work out how on earth to adapt The Murder of Roger Ackroyd! I’ll say a bit more about The Murder on the Links in a moment…

As I’ve said, Peril at End House feels closer to the short stories of the 1920s than many of the later novels, not least because it is narrated by the good Captain Hastings. The story begins with Hastings and his illustrious associate on holiday in St Loo, Cornwall (a fictional seaside town – which I’ll return to when I get to Evil Under the Sun). They’re on holiday, and Poirot is absolutely insistent that he has retired. They meet a young woman, Nick Buckley, and Poirot quickly becomes convinced that someone is trying to kill their new friend – and, naturally, he is compelled to investigate. When an attempt on Nick’s life appears to go wrong, and her cousin Maggie dies, Poirot (assisted by Hastings and Japp) steps up his game and solves the case.

What do I love about Peril at End House? Firstly, it’s narrated by Hastings, and I have a real soft spot for his narration. Like the early short stories, Hastings’s narration is differentiated from Watson’s narration of the Sherlock Holmes stories by a (mostly) light-hearted to-and-fro between detective and sidekick. Hastings is far less reverential than Watson, and his critique of his friend’s methods and demeanour is always enjoyable. In the novels, however, there seems to be more space for Poirot to get his own back (though he does do this in the short stories, especially ‘Problem at Sea’). This is evident from the first page: Poirot reminisces about his last case (more on this shortly) and tells Hastings that his friend’s involvement would have been ‘invaluable’. Hastings reflects on this: ‘As a result of long habit, I distrust his compliments, but he appeared perfectly serious.’ Poirot then explains that George, his valet (who accompanied him on that last case) has ‘no imagination whatever’, and he would have been glad of Hastings for ‘a certain amount of light relief’. This line is particularly amusing in light of the first series of the TV show, where ‘light relief’ was exactly the role in which Hastings was cast.

Elsewhere, we have Poirot claiming that, for a married man, Hastings has ‘very little appreciation of feminine psychology’, and mocking his friend’s ‘out of date’ shock at the details of a divorce case. Hastings comments a couple of times on Poirot’s arrogance, and in return Poirot teases his friend about his staid ‘Victorian’ ways.

Unlike in the short stories, though, this snarkiness occasionally tips over into bickering. At one point, Poirot’s highhanded criticism of his friend threatens to become almost hurtful:

‘You are the type of man who invests in doubtful oil fields, and non-existent gold mines. From hundreds like you, the swindler makes his daily bread.’

To which Hastings makes an impassioned defence:

‘Do you suppose I’d have made a success of my ranch out in the Argentine if I were the kind of credulous fool you make out?’

As this little example shows, there’s a big difference in the men’s relationship here to that in the original run of short stories – Hastings is now a married man, living overseas, and this distance has slightly altered the dynamic of their friendship. Nevertheless, this is redeemed in the novel’s denouement, which subtly relies on the close working relationship the two men have built over the years. Poirot doesn’t inform Hastings of his plans, but assembles the suspects and announces to the room that his friend Hastings has ‘pronounced mediumistic powers’. ‘Why fix on me,’ Hastings thinks to himself, but then seamlessly (and convincingly) enters into the role. I really like this bit, as it shows how well Hastings knows and trusts the methods of his strange little companion.

The other thing I love about Peril at End House is the mystery itself. As with all the classic Christie novels, the clues are presented from the very start – you just don’t always know what you’re looking at. In the second chapter, Freddie Rice actually says the solution outright and unequivocally – but, like Poirot and Hastings, the reader glosses over this and goes back to trying to solve what they think is the puzzle. I do like it when Christie sticks the solution right under your nose, and Freddie’s statement is a brilliant example of just how audacious this can be.

I need to get on to the TV episode, so just a couple of other highlights briefly… although his role is not as significant as in the adaptation, the novel features a welcome appearance from Japp. Poirot involves his ‘good friend Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard’ after the murder has occurred. Poirot and Hastings travel to London and meet Japp for dinner at the ‘Cheshire Cheese’ (presumably Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street). There are some nice Japp moments here, including his awkward explanation of ‘nerve doctors’ (‘talk to you about your libido, whatever that is’) and his casual description of Poirot’s moustache as ‘face fungus’. I like the social scenes with Japp, Hastings and Poirot, though there are fewer of them in the source stories than in the TV show (‘The Market Basing Mystery’ is a good example).

There are also a few other nice bits of characterization that will crop up in the TV show – though not necessarily in the ‘Peril at End House’ episode(s). I’ve mentioned the earlier series’ ‘car porn’ in previous posts, but Peril at End House has a nice example too. On spotting Jim Lazarus’s car, Hastings notes:

‘It seemed longer and redder than any car could be. It had a long gleaming bonnet of polished metal. A super car!’

(This car will appear – as a Chevrolet Phantom – in the adaptation, with Hastings’s narration represented in Hugh Fraser’s lingering appreciative gaze.)

Later on, Hastings will comment on Poirot’s loathing of the full English breakfast, his habit of building card houses to soothe his nerves, and his insistence on square toast – details which all feed into the presentation of the character on screen (although… Suchet’s Poirot does eat a full English in ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’). Some details will also be incorporated quite neatly into the episode – rather than pointing out Poirot’s ‘objection to golf’, the episode simply shows him dismissing Hastings’s desire to play ‘a quick nine holes’ with ‘Stiffy Bentham’ (it’s not clear whether this dismissal is because they are in the middle of a case, or if it’s because of the game itself – after all, Suchet’s Poirot has already showed himself to be quite proficient at golf). Similarly, rather than have his friend point out Poirot’s insistence on eggs that are the same size, the TV episode takes a ‘show, don’t tell’ approach and adds a little breakfast scene (complete with gorgeous egg cups) to illustrate.


Before moving on, I should really mention the lowlights of the book. Like many of Agatha Christie’s books, Peril at End House includes a couple of comments that reveal the less pleasant side of contemporary mores. In this case, it’s insidious anti-Semitism and classism. The character of Jim Lazarus is first described by Nick Buckley thus: ‘He’s a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one.’ And there are several other comments of this sort throughout the book, including Poirot’s casual mention of ‘the long-nosed M. Lazarus’. Poirot’s working notes on the mystery also contain a less-than-flattering characterization of the working class, as he notes the housekeeper Ellen’s apparent enjoyment of the murder: ‘But that might be due to natural pleasurable excitement of her class over deaths.’ However, as is also the case in many of Christie’s novels, these derogatory suspicions turn out to be misguided: Lazarus is revealed to be one of the only ‘decent’ characters in the book, and Ellen’s ‘satisfaction’ turns out to be relief at the vindication of her own suspicions about Nick. While it’s possible to interpret this as Christie attacking contemporary racist and classist views, I’m afraid I believe that it’s quite the opposite. Having Lazarus and Ellen turn out to be ‘goodies’ is meant to be a twist – suggesting that the Jewish man and the servant in Peril at End House are actually going against type (I’ll come back to this idea in my review of ‘The Lost Mine’).

Right, that said, I need to move on the TV adaptation!


The episode was written by Clive Exton and directed by Renny Rye. As I’ve said, it was first broadcast on 7th January 1990, and it’s a two-part story (the first half ends after Nick’s ‘engagement’ to Michael Seton is revealed and Poirot explains that there is now a more significant motive for her murder). The episode is, like all of Exton’s adaptations, fairly faithful to Christie’s novel, though there are some interesting alterations made.

The first of these is a fairly obvious choice. Christie’s novel makes a number of passing references to other stories – including The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Mystery of the Blue Train, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and ‘The Chocolate Box’ (though Christie avoids giving any spoilers… an etiquette she notoriously dispenses with in Cards on the Table) – which hadn’t yet been adapted for the series. All these references are, naturally, dropped – though they could’ve kept the cryptic mention of ‘the famous case which Poirot solved by his habit of straightening ornaments on the mantelpiece’, in my opinion). More significantly though, Peril at End House follows on from the earlier novels in terms of the development of Poirot’s career and of Hastings’s personal life. So, Poirot has already retired to King’s Abbott to grow vegetable marrows (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) and travelled on the Blue Train with his valet George (The Mystery of the Blue Train), before he arrives in St Loo. More importantly, the events of The Murder on the Links have already taken place and Hastings is now married (though he appears to have forgotten his wife’s real name and refers to her as ‘Bella’ in Peril at End House… oops) and running a ranch in Argentina. While we will get to this in the ITV series, we’re not there yet, and so ‘Peril at End House’ is altered to situate it more neatly into the early series. There is no sense of reunion with Hastings or Japp – Poirot is still working (and living) alongside his associates.

The episode begins, then, with Poirot and Hastings simply taking a holiday in Cornwall (St Looe, now, rather than St Loo). They arrive – inexplicably – by plane, and settle into the Majestic Hotel. This Poirot is more crochetty than his literary counterpart, unhappy with both the flight and the accommodation. One of the more light-hearted lines from the book’s first chapter – when Hastings reads a newspaper report on Michael Seton, Poirot mischievously asks, ‘The Solomon islanders are still cannibals, are they not?’ – turns into a grumpy bark of ‘Cannibals!’ to signal his lack of interest. The detective’s interest in Nick’s hat – the first indication of any wrongdoing – is also a lot more abrupt than in the novel.


Nevertheless, Poirot’s interest in Nick is the same as in the novel. Polly Walker’s portrayal of Nick is very close to the character from the book, and she charmingly leads Poirot up the garden path. The plot also remains the same, though the red herring subplot featuring Freddie’s husband is dropped, and many of the clues are also retained (though, as elsewhere some of the subtlety – particularly regarding the wristwatches – is diminished). The solution to the mystery – and to the side mystery of the missing will – is the same as in the novel.

As a little side note, there are a couple of things that are played down in the episode. For instance, while the Crofts appear as over-the-top Australians, just as they are in the novel, Mr Croft (Jeremy Young) doesn’t describe Poirot as a ‘bonza detective’ – perhaps Exton thought modern viewers would think this word was an anachronism more suited to Neighbours than the 1930s setting of the show? As in ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, there’s also evidence of a certain coyness in the adaptation. In the novel, when Hastings objects to Poirot going through Nick’s underwear, the detective exclaims:

‘The camisole, the camiknicker, it is no longer a shameful secret. Every day, on the beach, all these garments will be discarded within a few feet of you. And why not?’

In the episode, Poirot calls Hastings ‘Victorian’ but doesn’t follow this up with more comment. I think this change is completely justified – it’s really weird to imagine Suchet’s Poirot talking about knickers.

Other changes… as with most of the early series, Miss Lemon has been added to the story. This is done quite neatly, as Miss Lemon takes on some of the background work that Japp carries out in the novel (investigating Dr MacAllister, for instance). The episode also rewrites Hastings’s casual comment on the number of nicknames for ‘Margaret’ into a comical conversation between Hastings and Miss Lemon, in which they not only drop the ‘Margaret’ clue, but also consider the nicknames ‘Herc’ and ‘Jimmy’ for Poirot and Japp. Finally, Miss Lemon switches roles with Hastings in the denouement – it is now Miss Lemon who must play the role of the medium (without warning), with Hastings jovially egging her on (just as the literary Poirot did to his counterpart). Reading the novel’s séance immediately before watching the TV version actually adds a really nice extra layer of humour to this scene.

As I’ve said, Japp does appear in the novel, but his role is expanded in the TV episode. He’s called in at the death of Maggie Buckley, and assists with the rest of the case. This means that we get to see Japp having a stick of rock at the seaside – which is an absolute pleasure – as well as the first of many ‘social’ scenes between the three men (joined here by Miss Lemon), which will recur throughout Series 2.


The episode does have a bigger deviation from the source material, which I’m a bit less enthusiastic about. I love the character of Freddie Rice in Christie’s novel, but I’m less enamoured with her TV counterpart.

In the novel, an uncharacteristically poetic Hastings describes Freddie as a ‘weary Madonna’: ‘She impressed me, I think, as the most tired person I had ever met.’ This doesn’t really fit with Alison Sterling’s portrayal of the character.


Sterling’s Freddie is quite vibrant – first seen dancing around Nick’s sitting-room, singing along to ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’. We do get to see a more run-down Freddie, after she believes Nick has died, but I still don’t think ‘weary Madonna’ quite captures it.


Christie’s Freddie is a misleading character, and Hastings’s initial assessment is revealed to be a hint of the sympathy the reader will eventually feel towards her. Freddie has been dragged into drug abuse by her no-good ex-husband. She’s desperate to be free of this negative influence, and has been growing apart from Nick (a girl who, it’s revealed, loves a good ‘dope party’) as a result. The ‘pukka sahib’ Commander Challenger is revealed to be Nick and Freddie’s dealer – thus, another negative influence in Freddie’s life – and the suspicious Jim Lazarus is actually a good guy, trying (and succeeding) to help his friend shake her addiction. At the end of the novel, Freddie admits to Poirot that she’s almost clean and ready to move on with her life.

Much of this is removed from the TV episode. Freddie’s husband is mentioned, but not in any detail, making it appear almost as though she is the guilty party, running around with Jim (Paul Geoffrey) after abandoning her husband. She isn’t attempting to kick her habit, but enjoys partying (and snorting coke) with her friends. The TV Freddie is revealed not to be a murderer, but she’s still an unrepentant drug user at the end. I much prefer the version in the novel, to be honest.

This review has turned into an essay, I’m afraid. Not surprising, really, as this is the first of the novel adaptations and it’s based on one of my favourite books. I should try and wrap things up… even though there are so many more things I could say (I haven’t even mentioned all the references to conjuring and stage performance in the book, or the fact that Hastings has a fever dream in which Poirot appears as ‘a kind of fantastic clown, making a periodic appearance in a circus’.)

Instead, here are two final thoughts on the TV episode(s)…

This story sees the first appearance of Carol MacReady in the series (she’ll be back in Cat Among the Pigeons), playing Mrs Croft. While the character is pretty much the same as in the novel, the bit where Japp recognizes her as the forger Milly Merton (‘Hello-ello-ello…’) has been dropped. Perhaps this is because overcomplicating the Crofts’ backstory would weigh down the episode’s denouement, but I’ve often wondered if it’s not because Japp will make a similar pronouncement in the next episode (‘The Veiled Lady’). Given that Japp’s recognition of Gertie is completely integral to the plot of that story, it makes sense that Exton decided to drop the similar (but less important) scene in ‘Peril at End House’.

And finally, a comment should be made on Elizabeth Downes’s portrayal of Maggie Buckley. The point of Maggie’s character is that the reader/viewer shouldn’t pay much attention to her – she has to be near enough invisible or the jig is up. In the novel, just before the fireworks, the characters have dinner and conversation turns to the fate of Michael Seton. As is necessary (and, at that point in the story, appropriate), everyone’s attention is focused on Nick, and Maggie’s only involvement is to politely ask Hastings if he’s ever done any flying. Now… rewatch that scene in the TV episode, ignoring all other characters and just watching Maggie’s face. It’s wonderfully done.

Time to bring this very long review to an end. Peril at End House remains one of my favourite Poirot novels, and the TV episode(s) is an excellent and (mostly) faithful adaptation. Exton’s small alterations allow the programme-makers to slot ‘Peril at End House’ neatly into the early series, drawing out its similarities to the early short stories but saving the big changes for later. For now, at least, the gang are still together.


Time to press on with the second series… the next episode is ‘The Veiled Lady’.

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of 'Peril at End House'.


The third episode of the second series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 14th January 1990. It was written by Clive Exton and directed by Edward Bennett. The episode was based on the short story ‘The Case of the Veiled Lady’, which was first published in The Sketch in 1923.

‘The Case of the Veiled Lady’ is one of the original Sketch short stories and so it’s narrated by Hastings. It begins with a bored Poirot bemoaning his lack of cases and claiming that, because he’s so famous, London’s criminal classes have curtailed their activities. He refers to a recent newspaper report of a jewel theft, which he claims is ‘not badly imagined’ (but ‘not in [his] line’). What happens next is a frequent occurrence in the early Poirot stories: Hastings reads some newspaper headlines out loud. This happens a lot. It happens in ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’, for instance, and in Christie’s version of ‘The King of Clubs’. In Peril at End House, Hastings describes this activity as his ‘perusal of the morning news’, and this seems like a nice name for the trope. Here, as in every other insistence, Hastings’s Perusal of the Morning News includes a seemingly trivial detail that will turn out to be important and, we find out, Poirot was listening to every word, despite appearing to ignore his friend.

The two men are interrupted in their chit-chat by a visitor – a ‘heavily veiled lady’ (a description which Poirot places in inverted commas, noting the way this woman ‘mounts the steps’, ‘rings the bell’ and ‘comes to consult us’). I’ve often wondered how deliberately this is meant to evoke the opening of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Speckled Band’* – in Doyle’s story, Helen Stoner is described as being ‘heavily veiled’, so I wonder if Poirot is specifically quoting the Sherlock Holmes story in his description.

The woman in the veil reveals herself to be Lady Millicent Castle Vaughan, the Duke of Southshire’s new fiancée. Millicent is being blackmailed by a ne’er-do-well named Lavington, and she needs Poirot’s help to retrieve a compromising letter. On hearing this story, Poirot (apparently) switches into full avuncular mode: ‘Have faith in Papa Poirot. I will find a way.’

Poirot is then visited by a man who calls himself Lavington, who ‘accidentally’ lets slip that he will shortly be leaving for Paris. Naturally, Poirot decides to burgle the man’s house while he’s out of the country, and is able to retrieve the Chinese puzzle box in which the letter is stowed. All is not what it seems, however, and his final confrontation with ‘Millicent’ reveals that Poirot isn’t the mug she took him for.


The episode is a pretty faithful adaptation of the short story. ‘Millicent’ is played by Frances Barber (her first of two appearances in the series), and she’s pretty convincing as both Millicent and Gertie. When she’s finally caught by Japp, the TV Gertie utters a similar ‘Nabbed!’ line to that of the short story, and does indeed look at Poirot ‘with almost affectionate awe’ when she realizes the game is up.

As in other episodes, Miss Lemon is added to the story – though sadly Pauline Moran doesn’t have a lot to do here aside from looking like she’s going to lamp ‘Lavington’ (Terence Harvey) when he calls to see her employer. Japp does appear in the short story, but his role is expanded in the TV adaptation – and he gets a wonderful final line (more on that shortly).

The beginning of the story is moved to a picturesque lake, where Poirot, Hastings and Japp are just chilling out, watching kids sail toy boats. Poirot, again, bemoans the lack of good cases, and Japp tells him about the jewellery theft. Hastings does his Perusal of the Morning News later in the episode, in between the meetings with ‘Millicent’ and ‘Lavington’. Millicent’s entrance into Poirot’s flat is removed, with the woman requesting a meeting at her hotel instead, though the content of their conversation remains the same. (The Athena Hotel in this episode is being played beautifully by Senate House, University of London.)


However, while much of the plot and dialogue is retained from the short story, there are two very memorable changes made. Firstly, the TV episode expands the brief description of Poirot’s burglary into a comic set-piece. In the story, Poirot and Hastings set out ‘just on midnight’ to enter Lavington’s house. Hastings has dressed in ‘a dark suit, and a soft dark hat’, which Poirot finds amusing: ‘You have dressed the part, I see’. They are able to open the window sash with ease, and Poirot confesses that earlier that day he went to the house, convinced the housekeeper that he was there to fit ‘burglar-proof fastenings’, and sawed through the catch. This little exchange has some comic elements – not least that Poirot gained entrance by using an ‘official’ card from Japp, but never explains how he came by this card (I like to imagine that he swiped a pile of them at some point, just in case).

The TV episode takes this little vignette and runs with it with a quite adorable little sequence (at least, I think it’s adorable – maybe not everyone will agree). After ‘Lavington’ leaves the flat, Hastings realizes that Poirot has a sneaky plan. Cut to: Poirot disguised as a Swiss locksmith, tootling through Wimbledon on a bike as a jaunty version of Gunning’s theme tune plays.


Poirot is such a method actor, he’s even dewaxed his moustache for the part. (When my husband Rob saw that for the first time, he said, ‘Oh no! Look at his moustache! That must be killing him.’) He presents himself to the suspicious housekeeper Mrs Godber (Carole Hayman), who doesn’t understand his talk of mountains and cantons: ‘You’re never Chinese!’

Poirot and Hastings return that night – both dressed for the part this time – and search Lavington’s house. They discover the Chinese box (which disappoints Hastings, as you ‘can buy them for tuppence in Limehouse’ – a little nod to the setting of the next episode), but before they can take another step… the police show up. The TV Mrs Godber is cannier than her literary counterpart; she knew Poirot was lying and so set a trap for him. Hastings panics and – wildly – throws himself out the window. Poor Poirot is taken down the nick.

I like Poirot’s disguise, but I like Japp’s arrival at Wimbledon police station even more. Alerted by Hastings, he’s come to get his friend out of trouble – but not before he’s had a bit of fun at Poirot’s expense. Looking through the window on Poirot’s cell, Japp tells the desk sergeant (Tony Stephens) that he’s been after this ‘vicious looking character’ for a while: ‘Nobody knows his real name. But everyone calls him Mad Dog.’ Poirot angrily exclaims, ‘This is not funny, Japp.’ But Japp, and the viewer, has to disagree.

The second major change in the story comes at the end. In ‘The Case of the Veiled Lady’, Poirot confronts ‘Millicent’ in his own flat. After revealing the stowed jewels in the puzzle box’s second compartment, Poirot says that Japp will be able to confirm that they are the jewels stolen in the Bond Street robbery. And as if by magic, ‘Japp himself stepped out from Poirot’s bedroom’. The policeman reveals the woman’s true identity, and Poirot reveals that he’d suspected her all along, because ‘the shoes were wrong’.

In the adaptation, the final meeting is switched to the second dramatic location of the episode – London’s Natural History Museum. Poirot meets ‘Millicent’, reveals the jewels, but they are joined by ‘Lavington’ (real name Joey Wetherley) who tries to take the jewels back and make his getaway. This leads to a classic Poirot chase scene around various museum galleries, before the two wrong ’uns are finally nabbed.

While it is lovely to see the Natural History Museum here – and I particularly like the museum cat who gives away Gertie and Joey’s hiding place – there is a stonking anachronism in this episode. Funnily enough, the programme probably got away with this for years, but events in 2015 mean that it’s a bit more obvious now. When Poirot and Hastings arrive at the museum, there, standing in the Grand Foyer in all his glory, is Dippy the Diplodocus.


But as anyone who paid attention to the 2015 ‘Save Dippy’ campaign will undoubtedly know, Dippy was only moved to the Grand Foyer in 1979. Prior to that, the foyer was home to African elephants and a series of display cases – check out the second photo in the slideshow on this page to see what the foyer should have looked like.

This is a bit of a shame, really, as the museum was only ‘window dressing’ after all. I suspect this was a simple mistake on the part of the programme-makers, as they’re quite careful with historical detail elsewhere in the series.

Diplodocus notwithstanding, this is a very enjoyable episode. It’s a close adaptation of the short story, with the nice punchline that criminals are so in awe of Poirot, they’re actually hiring him themselves. Frances Barber puts in a really fantastic performance, and the scenes with Japp, Hastings and Poirot are as charming as ever.

So I’ll end with a couple of ‘miscellaneous gems’…

Interestingly, there are two points at which this episode contradicts details found in Christie’s Peril at End House. In the 1932 novel, Poirot definitively tells Japp: ‘I do not disguise myself, Japp. Never have I disguised myself.’ (Of course, this in itself contradicts a detail from the 1929 short story ‘The Third Floor Flat’, in which Poirot appears to have disguised himself as an Irishman named O’Connor.) Also in Peril at End House, Poirot suggests that Hastings’s patriotic pride in the feats of Michael Seton ‘consoles for the defeats at Wimbledon’ (in 1932, there’d been no British winners of the Gentleman’s Singles for twenty-two years) – in the TV version of ‘The Veiled Lady’, Mrs Godber notes that there’s been more crime in Wimbledon since ‘they started the tennis up the road’, and that it’s ‘been beyond all since that Fred Perry won again this year’. I assume her comments about the tennis starting ‘up the road’ refers to when the All England Club venue moved to Church Road in 1922 (Mrs Godber definitely looks old enough to make this comparison), but her mention of Fred Perry sets the story in 1935 – Perry won Wimbledon in ’34, ’35 and ’36, and Mrs Godber seems to be referring to his second victory. It makes sense, then, that Exton dropped the ‘defeats at Wimbledon’ line from his version of ‘Peril at End House’, as this wouldn’t make sense given that the series is set at the peak of Perry’s success. What I like here is the subtle intertextuality that only makes sense if you’ve read Christie’s texts: not only does Exton remove the now-anachronistic Wimbledon line in ‘Peril at End House’, he cheekily explains why he took it out in the next episode. Quite clever, really.

The episode ends with Poirot, Hastings and Japp back at the boating lake – only this time Hastings has a giant model boat to play with. As Poirot and Japp condescendingly watch their friend compete with the children’s boats, they share a beautiful little exchange that gives an insight into Japp’s more romantic side (which Christie hinted at the ‘The Market Basing Mystery’):

‘Did you ever think to go to sea, Poirot?’
‘No, no, my friend. This is as close as I like to get.’ [Fibber!]
‘I used to dream about the sea.’

Awww… Japp!

Next up… ‘The Lost Mine’.


* Much as I love the Sherlock Holmes stories – and have an abiding love of the Granada adaptations starring Jeremy Brett (not as deep as my love for Suchet’s Poirot, of course) – ‘The Speckled Band’ always makes me angry. There are three reasons for this: (1) You can’t train a snake. (2) Julia Stoner lived surrounded by exotic animals – she would’ve recognized a snake when she saw it. (3) You can’t train a snake.

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The Veiled Lady’.


The fourth episode of the second series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 21st January 1990. It was directed by Edward Bennett and written by Michael Baker and David Renwick. The episode was based on the short story of the same name, which was first published in The Sketch in 1923.

The short story is possibly the weakest of the original Sketch stories – it feels a lot like Agatha Christie was just phoning this one in. In attempt to assert the moral/intellectual high ground, Poirot criticizes Hastings for making speculative investments, and derides his friend’s advice to speculate in the ‘Porcupine oil-fields’ (foreshadowing the ‘doubtful oil fields’ mentioned in Peril at End House). Poirot explains that the only shares he owns are in the Burma Mines Ltd., and they were the reward for his services in a case of theft and murder:

‘You would like to hear the story? Yes?’

The rest of the story is made up of Poirot narrating this past exploit to Hastings. And it’s not the most exciting past exploit.

Poirot was called upon by Mr Pearson, one of the directors of ‘an important company’, to solve the murder of a Chinese man named Wu Ling, who was killed shortly after arriving in England with papers relating to a valuable ‘lost’ mine in Burma. Pearson had intended to meet Wu Ling at Southampton, but found his visitor had already disembarked from his ship and travelled to London before he got there. The following day, Wu Ling’s body was found in the Thames, and the papers were nowhere to be found.

There’s a bit of back-and-forth as Poirot carries out his investigation, with a ‘broken-down European named Dyer’ and a ‘young bank clerk named Charles Lester’ falling under suspicion. Eventually, Poirot and Pearson travel to Limehouse, ‘right in the heart of Chinatown’, visit an opium den, and Poirot reveals Pearson was behind the murder all along. He whips the papers out of Pearson’s pocket, explains the truth of the mystery to the police, and is given shares by the company as a reward. The story ends with Poirot using this as a lesson to Hastings not to invest in companies, lest their directors turn out to be ‘so many Mr Pearsons’.

There aren’t many notable features to the short story, except an appearance by Inspector Miller (who crops up in a few other Christie texts). Miller is like the anti-Japp: Poirot thinks he’s ‘obstinate and imbecile’, and the policeman vehemently distrusts the little egg-shaped Belgian. When Poirot explains to Hastings that he had to work with Miller, he says the policeman is ‘a man altogether different from our friend Japp, conceited, ill-mannered and quite insufferable’. While this sets us up for a somewhat antagonistic associate in this story, it also reveals how much affection Poirot has for Japp, which is rather sweet.

The story also has Poirot going undercover in an opium den, which I feel might be another jokey nod to Sherlock Holmes and ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’. In Doyle’s story, Holmes has been gathering information in an opium den, disguised as an old man. In Christie’s story, Poirot also enters an opium den, but disdains Pearson’s suggestion that they adopt a disguise (which would involve Poirot shaving off his moustache):

‘I pointed out to him that that was an idea ridiculous and absurd. One destroys not a thing of beauty wantonly. Besides, shall not a Belgian gentleman with a moustache desire to see life and smoke opium just as readily as one without a moustache?’

Aside from this, though, there isn’t much going on in the short story, and it’s not very memorable.

And now… the adaptation. Hmmm… I think I’ll split this into The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

The Good

Like the short story, the episode begins with Poirot and Hastings just hanging out, talking about financial matters. However, in the TV version, the financial matters they are discussing are part of a mammoth game of Monopoly that is being played throughout the episode.


Obviously, this is enjoyable simply for the rapport between our two leading men. Hastings appears to be teaching Poirot how to play, and the Belgian detective disdains the game as one of mere chance – until he starts to win, that is. But there’s another reason why I like this detail – it’s another subtle little reference to the series’ setting. Monopoly was first licensed in the UK in 1935, so Hastings is actually introducing his friend to the ‘latest craze’.

The question of whether or not to speculate on the stock exchange is retained, but in the adaptation it is Miss Lemon, rather than Poirot, who is the recipient of Hastings’s advice. It seems Miss Lemon is quite a keen speculator, and is buying and selling shares with some success. It’s quite nice to see this side of Miss Lemon, and it’s good to know her quick brain is used for more than just maintaining Poirot’s files.


There’s also a nice Christie-esque clue added to the episode, which wasn’t present in the original story. As Poirot and Hastings are now on hand to investigate Wu Ling’s possessions (conducting a search that wasn’t included in the source), Poirot is able to discover an anomalous box of matches that makes for rather a nice puzzle.

Oh… and continuing my love affair with Poirot’s accessories, he shows off a natty smoking/playing Monopoly jacket in this episode.


Aside from these details – and the reappearance of Inspector Jameson (played by John Cording), who previously appeared in ‘Murder in the Mews’ (and is an even more minor recurring character than Dicker) – there isn’t much more ‘good’ to talk about. The writers had a rather dull story to contend with, and their reasonably faithful adaptation results in a rather dull episode, to be honest.

The Bad

Added to this, the only good bits of the original story are removed! Inspector Miller is absent, so Poirot doesn’t get chance to make his comparison with Japp. Poirot’s incognito trip to the opium den is also altered, replaced by a co-ordinated police raid on a premises in Limehouse. In my opinion, this is no more engaging than the source material – in fact, it feels a lot like padding.

The Ugly

Christie’s short story – like Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ – is set in a very particular version of Limehouse. It’s the Chinatown of Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories, and WWI Sinophobia. It’s a world of opium dens, gambling and murder.


Of course, Christie subverts the expectation of the ‘evil’ lurking in Limehouse. While Wu Ling was indeed murdered by Chinese men, these killers were merely acting at the behest of the true villain – the respectable (and English) Mr Pearson. As I said in my review of ‘Peril at End House’ though, this subversion of expectations isn’t necessarily being used to interrogate racist stereotypes, but rather to reinforce them: Pearson is the last person you’d suspect because he’s so English, the Chinese characters are much more obvious suspects because… well… they’re Chinese.

Now, this racist stereotyping of the inhabitants of Chinatown as murderous villains was actually criticized in the ‘rules’ of Golden Age detective fiction, and Christie’s bait-and-switch of revealing Pearson to be the true villain reflects an edict by one of her contemporaries (and colleagues). When Ronald Knox, one of the founding members (along with Christie) of the Detection Club, wrote his Detective Story Decalogue in 1929, his fifth rule stated: ‘No Chinaman must figure in the story.’ The reason for this interdiction has often been misinterpreted, but Knox made his thinking very clear. The ‘sinister Chinaman’ belonged in the realm of the thriller (like Sax Rohmer’s work, for instance), not the whodunit – using this figure is a lazy way to resolve a well-crafted puzzle. As Knox goes on to say:

‘Why this should be so I do not know, unless we can find a reason for it in our western habit of assuming that the Celestial [Chinese person] is over-equipped in the matter of brains, and under-equipped in the matter of morals. I only offer it as a fact of observation that, if you are turning over the pages of a book and come across some mention of “the slit-like eyes of Chin Loo”, you had best put it down at once; it is bad.’

While she does set her story in Chinatown, Christie sails just the right side of Knox’s prohibition: it is the Englishman who is ‘over-equipped in the matter of brains, and under-equipped in the matter of morals’, and there are no ‘Chin Loo’-type characters stalking the pages…

… but that’s not true of the adaptation.


In padding out the story with a number of forays into Limehouse, the episode necessarily introduces more individuated Chinese characters than were present in Christie’s short story – and these are all handled badly. In particular, the only named character aside from Wu Ling – Chow Feng (played by Hi Ching) – is very much of the ‘Chin Loo’ school of characterization. The owner of the Red Dragon club is sinister, effete and criminal – he might not have been behind the murder, but he’s certainly guilty of something.

But at least this character gets a name! The only other Chinese characters listed in the credits – and, remember, the ‘Wu Ling’ we see on screen isn’t really Wu Ling, so doesn’t get listed – are ‘Chinaman’, ‘Restaurant Manager’, ‘Oriental Gentleman’ and ‘Chinese Tart’. To make matters worse, one of these characters – ‘Restaurant Manager’ (played by Ozzie Yue) –is given a name (Mr Ho) in the episode, but this doesn’t seem important enough to add to the credits.

Ozzie Yue as Mr Ho, Hi Ching as Chow Feng, Susan Leong as ‘Chinese Tart’

It does break my heart to heap such criticism on a show I love, but sadly this episode (from 1990) actually heightens the problematic ‘Yellow Peril’ undercurrent of the short story (published in 1923), and it doesn’t seem appropriate to gloss over this – no matter how much I love the show.

To end, I will just add that the Limehouse sequences do allow for one (more positive) addition to the story. We get to see a hint of what Japp does when he’s not helping Poirot solves genteel whodunits. As in ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’, Japp introduces Poirot and Hastings to an aspect of modern policing. In the first series, it was a forensics lab; in this episode, it’s a state-of-the-art radio control room, complete with a dynamic map to be used in co-ordinating surveillance and raids.


Cool as this room is, we’re returned to ‘Yellow Peril’ territory quite quickly, as it’s revealed that Japp is using this resource to co-ordinate his investigations into the activities of ‘the Tongs’, a Chinese crime organization. Indeed, Japp is barely interested in the lost mine; he is completely focused on bringing down the crime syndicate, and his interrogation of Mr Ho and Reggie Dyer (played by James Saxon) are to this end, rather than to assist in Poirot’s case. The two investigations come together at the Red Dragon Club, as Japp believes it’s a hub of organized crime and Poirot believes it’s the scene of Wu Ling’s murder. (It’s both.)

Ultimately, despite his state-of-the-art control room, and an investigation that’s lasted seven years, Japp fails to nab a single Tong. All that time and effort has been for nothing, and Japp almost looks dejected as all he gets to do is arrest another of Poirot’s English murderers. He walks away with the slumped shoulders of a man who’s just realized that, while he might be an admirable associate to a Golden Age detective, he’ll never be the hero who roots out the corruption at the heart of Limehouse.

Forget it, Japp. It’s Chinatown.

And now for something completely different… the next episode is ‘The Cornish Mystery’.

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The Lost Mine’.


The fifth episode of the second series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 28th January 1990. It was written by Clive Exton and directed by Edward Bennett. The episode was based on the short story of the same name, which was first published in The Sketch in November 1923.

The short story is narrated by Hastings, and begins with a new client being shown into Poirot’s apartment. As happens in a few of these early stories, Hastings makes a passing reference to ‘our landlady’, indicating that, at this point in their story, he is living with Poirot. The silent landlady is never given a name, and does little more than show guests in, but she’s clearly a descendant of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Mrs Hudson. Rereading these short stories in quick succession, I’m becoming more and more sensitive to the references to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and I’m really enjoying the way Christie both pays homage to and lightly mocks her predecessor. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone is referred to as playing ‘Watson’ to Poirot, for instance. I suggested that two other stories in this series – ‘The Veiled Lady’ and ‘The Lost Mine’– made playful reference to specific Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ll return to this in a later review; for now, we simply have Poirot and Hastings living in comfortable bachelorhood, as their landlady ushers in a series of visitors, just as Holmes and Watson did before them.

In this case, the visitor is a Mrs Pengelley. I really like Hastings’s introduction of this character, so I think it deserves to be quoted in full:

‘Many unlikely people came to consult Poirot, but to my mind, the woman who stood nervously just inside the door, fingering her feather neck-piece, was the most unlikely of all. She was so extraordinarily commonplace – a thin, faded woman of about fifty, dressed in a braided coat and skirt, some gold jewellery at her neck, and with her grey hair surmounted by a singularly unbecoming hat. In a country town you pass a hundred Mrs Pengelleys in the street every day.’

It’s part of the charm of Hercule that, while Hastings finds this visitor ‘unlikely’, the little Belgian detective finds her fascinating.

Mrs Pengelley has become convinced that her husband is trying to poison her. She explains that he has recently taken on a ‘yellow-haired hussy’ to work as his receptionist (Mr Pengelley is a dentist), and that there’s a suspicious bottle of weed-killer that the gardener can’t explain. Poor Mrs Pengelley has been suffering from stomach pain and sickness, but her doctor has written it off as gastritis. Poirot is hooked – the case interests him ‘enormously’.

Poirot and Hastings travel to Polgarwith to investigate… but they’re too late! By the time they reach Cornwall, their client is already dead. Poirot is furious (with himself, with the murderer, with all those who ignored Mrs Pengelley’s cries for help) and is determined to reveal the truth. In this, the story has some similarities with Dumb Witness: Poirot refuses to relinquish responsibility for a client he has failed to protect, and steps into the roles of avenger as well as detective. In fact, when he eventually confronts the murderer he makes this role clear: ‘I represent – not the law, but Mrs Pengelley.’

Poirot’s investigation in ‘The Cornish Mystery’ is interesting. There is no physical examination of the crime scene; the only physical ‘clue’ (the bottle of weed-killer) is ignored. Instead, Poirot works out the nature of the crime through an observation of human behaviour. He knows that Mr Pengelley is innocent, for instance, because only an innocent man would behave in such a guilty manner. In the final denouement, Poirot has to resort to tricking the murderer into a signing a confession as, he admits, they have ‘no shadow of proof against him’. This method of resolving the mystery is a far cry from Holmes-like ratiocination foreshadows the methods of another of Christie’s famous creations: ‘The Cornish Mystery’ actually feels like it could have been a case for Miss Marple.


The TV adaptation begins, like the short story, in Poirot’s flat. We join our detective in a somewhat glum mood (a state that recurs throughout this series), bemoaning a lack of interesting cases and complaining about boredom. Behind him, Hastings performs a series of yoga exercises designed to keep his pancreas healthy. This leads to a characteristically bonkers exchange, in which Poirot criticizes his friend’s love of curry and Hastings extols the health-giving benefits of rice. They are interrupted in their chit-chat by Miss Lemon, who tells them that Mrs Pengelley would like to consult with Poirot, but she is too embarrassed to come into the flat.

The adaptation follows the short story fairly faithfully, with only a couple of additional plot elements added. Mrs Pengelley’s blustering doctor (played by Derek Benfield) still insists that the woman suffered from gastritis. Mr Pengelley (Jerome Willis) is still infatuated with his ‘yellow-haired hussy’ (Laura Girling) – though there is a brief comical exchange added in which Hastings has to explain the word ‘hussy’ to Poirot – and the maid (played by Tilly Vosburgh) still insists under oath that she saw her master hanging around the weed-killer. The question of Mrs Pengelley’s will is the most significant addition to the plot, with a will reading scene revealing possible motives for the murder. This doesn’t really alter the story, though, but rather underlines things that were implied in Christie’s text.

The final confrontation with the murderer is, in spirit, the same as in the short story; however, there are a couple of little alterations. Firstly, in the short story, Poirot talks to Radnor for a time and then produces a pre-written confession ‘with the suddenness of a conjuror’ (another reference to conjuring… and there will be more). In the adaptation, we have a scene in which Poirot casually chats to Radnor (played by John Bowler), all the while writing away at a desk. Radnor becomes increasingly ill-at-ease with this eccentric behaviour, until Poirot blows on the ink and presents the confession to be signed. I can’t decide whether this makes the confrontation more ominous or more humorous – I think it’s probably both.

The other change in the confrontation scene comes when Radnor is warned about the two men who are watching the room. In Christie’s story, it is Poirot who draws attention to the men, warning Radnor that they will apprehend him if given the right signal. When Radnor signs the confession, Poirot asks Hastings to move the blind, to signal that Radnor is to be allowed to pass. Afterwards, Poirot explains to an oblivious Hastings that ‘those two loafers that I noticed outside came in very useful’. The episode flips this last detail – while it’s still Poirot who presents the ‘twenty-four hour head start’ deal to Radnor, it’s Hastings who points out the two men surveilling the room. After Radnor leaves, Poirot asks about the men and Hastings replies, ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea. I just saw them standing there when we came in.’ I like this change, as it reminds me of the séance in Peril at End House. He might not always be the sharpest, but Hastings can be relied on to improvise if necessary.


Miss Lemon and Japp are, of course, added to the story. In addition to replacing the unnamed ‘Mrs Hudson’ character from the short story, Miss Lemon gets a nice comical scene in which she reads the I Ching for Hastings (Poirot’s hexagram is, apparently, ‘modesty’). This continues the theme of Hastings’s fascination with the East that runs throughout the episode, but also shows off Miss Lemon’s interest in spiritual matters. This is a sharp departure from the character’s presentation in Christie’s fiction – where she is described as a ‘machine’, rather than a person – but it’s something that will be developed further in future episodes. (Can I just also say, there’s another big departure from Christie’s fiction here… look at this picture… Pauline Moran is gorgeous as Miss Lemon, which is not how Christie imagined the character at all.)


Like in other adaptations, Japp steps in to the role filled by an anonymous police inspector in the source text. This is done quite neatly – there’s no attempt to shoehorn him in to the early stages of Poirot’s investigation, but he makes an appearance when (months after her death) Mrs Pengelley’s body is exhumed and an official murder investigation is launched. Japp is called in to oversee this investigation (because, apparently, he has the biggest patch of any Scotland Yard detective ever).

Japp is convinced that Mr Pengelley is guilty, and produces some of the evidence that sees the hapless dentist put on trial for murder. The policeman treats Poirot’s objections with a sort of light-hearted condescension, treating his friend like a harmless eccentric until the very last moment. In return, Poirot keeps Japp in the dark about his suspicions, even to the point of trying to make a quick getaway before Japp discovers that Pengelley’s trial has been dramatically halted. For fans of the ‘gang’, the final moments of the episode – when Japp is told about Radnor’s confession – is a real treat.

Before this, though, we get another little Japp scene – and it’s always nice to see the policeman enjoying a little trip to the seaside. While he availed himself of a stick of rock last time he visited Cornwall, this time Japp takes a fancy to a Cornish pasty. I love watching Japp wandering around the market, lost in the simple joy of things you don’t see in Peckham.


Unlike in some of the other episodes in this series, there’s very little direct reference to the 1935 setting. Hastings reads a story in the newspaper about ‘Herr Hitler’s speech’, but there are no more details about this to allow us to pin it down to a specific date. However, there is a weird little detail that reminds us we’re stuck in an odd time warp: Mrs Pengelley dies in July (the date is clear on the coffin plate during the exhumation scene), and her husband’s trial takes place in the run-up to the August Bank Holiday. Given that the events of ‘The Veiled Lady’ took place in July (the reason given as to why Lavington could be sure no one would use the logs for a fire), time is moving rather slowly in Poirot’s world. Of course, it’s possible that Mrs Pengelley calls on Poirot immediately after the events of ‘The Veiled Lady’ – but if that was the case, why is Poirot so bored at the beginning of the episode? He seems more like a man who hasn’t had a good case in ages. I’ve got a feeling that this is going to be a long year.

Finally… Christie’s short story has a couple of moments where Poirot’s foreignness is played up, but neither of these are included in the adaptation. The first comes when the detective contemplates another night in an English inn:

‘A return to the inn, and a night of horror upon one of your English provincial beds, mon ami. It is a thing to make pity, the cheap English bed!’

This isn’t something I’ve seen Poirot complain about before, but he can be a bit inconsistent with his criticisms of England (cf. the extremity of his aversion to a full English breakfast and to the countryside). I like this though – Poirot has something of a love-hate relationship with his adopted home. When he’s feeling grumpy (or when Hastings is being too English), every little thing irritates him. At other times, he is much happier to indulge in the various provincial pleasures his adventures offer.

And if Poirot doesn’t always love England, then England doesn’t always love him back. A number of Christie’s stories draw attention to the suspicion Poirot’s Belgian ways provoke in (usually provincial) English people. In ‘The Cornish Mystery’, it’s the detective’s choice of beverage that raises eyebrows. When Radnor is summoned to the inn, Hastings is charged with the drink order:

‘I ordered two whiskies and sodas and a cup of chocolate. The last order caused consternation, and I much doubted whether it would ever put in an appearance.’

Clearly feeling that the good innkeepers of Cornwall deserved vindication, the programme-makers drop this scene from the adaptation. But watch carefully… when Poirot and Hastings are first shown in their lodgings, Poirot is clearly enjoying a nice cup of hot chocolate. Obviously, in the TV version of Polgarwith, his request caused much less consternation.


All in all, a lovely little short story transformed into an enjoyable TV episode. I still believe it could’ve been a Miss Marple story – but that’s the beauty of Poirot. He’s one part Holmes, but the other part Marple. It’s why we love him.

Next up: ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The Cornish Mystery’.


The sixth episode of the second series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 4th February 1990, and it was based on the short story of the same name. ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ was first published in The Sketch in March 1923.

As is usually the case with the early Poirot stories, ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ is narrated by Hastings, and takes place during the time that Hastings and Poirot are living together in London. There is a little bit of confusion surrounding these living arrangements, but I think this comes down to a discrepancy in Hastings’s descriptions. In the first of the Poirot short stories – ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’ – Hastings makes it clear that he is living with Poirot, but calls their accommodation ‘Poirot’s rooms’. In ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’, he describes their arrangement as ‘sharing rooms’. However, in ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’, Hastings again calls their home ‘Poirot’s rooms’. The Mrs Hudson-esque landlady is sometimes called ‘the landlady’ (e.g. in ‘The Million Dollar Bond Robbery’) and sometimes ‘our landlady’ (e.g. in ‘The Cornish Mystery’ and ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’).

This has led to some people questioning Hastings’s status – is he Poirot’s employee? (See the comments on this blog post, for instance). Hastings rarely mentions any alternative employment and, even if he did have a job, he spends so much time running round the country with Poirot, he’d surely have lost it by now. And yet, Hastings clearly isn’t independently wealthy, as he has worked in the past (for Lloyds) and occasionally worries about his overdraft (see ‘The Lost Mine’). So has Poirot put him on a retainer? Does this include board and lodgings? And does Hastings sometimes make himself a bit too comfortable and start thinking he’s a guest, rather than staff?

I don’t think so. Although we don’t get a clear sense of Hastings’s background in Christie’s texts, we can tell a lot from his friends, especially John Cavendish in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Assuming Hastings and Cavendish are from similar backgrounds – and adding the revelation that he attended Eton (Dumb Witness) and the fact that, though he was working in insurance before the war, Hastings was a captain by 1916 – we can make an informed guess as to Hastings’s family background. He’s comfortably upper middle class, well-bred and well-educated, but with no land or title to inherit.

So why does Hastings have to worry about his bank balance? Again, we could compare him to John Cavendish – and also to Charles Arundell in Dumb Witness (who is made into an old friend of Hastings in the TV adaptation of the novel) – concluding that, even if Hastings ever did have an income/inheritance from his family, he may well have spent it at some point in the past (perhaps on one of his ‘doubtful’ speculations), leaving him as one of Christie’s many upper middle class men with absolutely no head for personal finance. While this might suggest Hastings needs an income from Poirot to avoid being completely destitute, I think he’s probably scraping by on an army pension (after all, he was wounded at the Front in 1916, and this wound was bad enough to ensure he didn’t see any more active service) and his other occasional bits of employment. Hastings takes lodgings with Poirot because he can’t afford to take his own flat – and, no doubt, because both men are glad of the company – but he is definitely the ‘lodger’ in ‘Poirot’s rooms’, rather than an employee. My own personal theory is that, while Poirot and Hastings generally refer to the premises as ‘shared rooms’, Hastings isn’t always able to pay his friend any rent. This would explain why he often sees it as ‘Poirot’s’ (and also why Poirot is occasionally a bit exasperated about his friend’s spending habits, and, in Peril at End House, he assumes Hastings’s wife is the one who manages the ranch in Argentina). It’s a mark of the men’s friendship that they are comfortable enough with this arrangement to call the London accommodation ‘our rooms’, and the woman who shows guests in ‘our landlady’. No matter who is actually paying the rent in these early stories, Poirot and Hastings live together in amiable domesticity.

And that’s where we find them at the beginning of ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’:

‘Poirot and I were expecting our old friend Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard to tea. We were sitting round the tea-table awaiting his arrival. Poirot had just finished carefully straightening the cup and saucers which our landlady was in the habit of throwing, rather than placing, on the table.’ [That’s because she’s your landlady, dear, not your housekeeper.]

I love this opening – it reminds me of ‘The Market Basing Mystery’, as we get to see the three men hanging out as friends and not just because there’s a mystery afoot.

Of course, there is a mystery afoot. Japp’s just got back from talking to Inspector Miller (possibly the same Miller who appears in ‘The Lost Mine’ as well as some other stories) about a perplexing case: a wealthy financier named Davenheim has apparently disappeared into thin air. Japp is convinced that Miller will discover clues to Davenheim’s disappearance (‘he won’t overlook a footprint, or a cigar-ash, or a crumb’), but Poirot disdains this method of investigation. He insists that all that is needed to solve a case like this is ‘the little grey cells’. Japp finds this amusing, and bets Poirot a fiver that he can’t solve the case without leaving his room – Poirot, of course, accepts the challenge.

Poirot investigates this case simply by examining the details as narrated by Japp; part of their agreement is that the policeman will bring ‘any fresh developments’ that arise. At one point, Poirot specifically asks for information to be gathered (he wants to know if Mr Davenheim shared a bedroom with his wife), but otherwise he relies solely on the story that Japp tells. Japp’s updates on the case are a rather neat way of presenting the puzzle to the reader, as we’re encouraged to search for the significance Poirot has found in the ‘little details’ in order to come up with a plausible solution. Christie will use the technique of having Poirot listen to stories told by multiple unreliable narrators and work out the truth behind them in Five Little Pigs and Elephants Can Remember, but, for now, we just have the (reliable) Japp to fill us in.

Naturally, Poirot is able to solve the case of the disappearing financier (with a solution that isn’t completely unlike Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, a story that also has something in common with Christie’s ‘The Lost Mine’). Still treating the case as something of a game between himself and Japp, Poirot doesn’t immediately reveal the solution, but rather sends Japp a cryptic telegram: ‘Advise you to withdraw any money deposited with firm in question.’ When the news breaks the next day of the ‘sensational failure’ of Davenheim’s bank, ‘the door flew open and Japp rushed in’, determined to find out ‘how the blazes’ Poirot could have known.

The mystery is a nice cerebral little puzzle, designed to make the reader flex their little grey cells or to make them feel like Japp at the end, but what really makes the story is the interaction between the three friends – and the little details of Poirot’s character that are thrown into sharp relief by the lack of other characters (Poirot only talks to Japp and Hastings in the story). My personal highlights are: Japp being bemused by Poirot’s question about the shared bedroom (‘Poor old fellow! War’s been too much for him!’); Poirot lamenting the lack of uniformity in eggs (‘What symmetry can there be on the breakfast table?’), before ‘gently collect[ing] every fragment of shell from his plate, plac[ing] them in the egg-cup, and revers[ing] the empty egg-shell on top of them’; and Japp’s sending a fiver to Poirot via registered mail. Poirot’s response to his victory is really quite lovely:

‘Ah, sacré! But what shall I do with it? I have much remorse! Ce pauvre Japp! Ah, an idea! We will have a little dinner, we three! That consoles me. It was really too easy. I am ashamed. I, who would not rob a child – mille tonnerres!Mon ami, what have you, that you laugh so heartily?’

The TV adaptation of ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ was directed by Andrew Grieve and written by David Renwick. It begins in a similar fashion to the Series 1 episodes ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’ and ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’, in that we get a dramatic little vignette that introduces us to the central premise of the story. Here, we see Matthew Davenheim (Kenneth Colley) preparing for a meeting with Gerald Lowen (Tony Mathews). Davenheim leaves the house to meet Lowen from the station, walks into the fog… and never comes back.

We then cut to our three friends hanging out together. However, they’re not simply having tea as in the short story, they’ve gone out to a magic show. I’ve mentioned the relationship between stage magic and Golden Age detective fiction in a previous post, but here the connection is made absolutely explicit – Poirot watches, then explains, the conjuring tricks performed on stage, while his friends seem happy to be swept along by the illusion. When they return to Poirot’s flat for a nightcap, Japp tells Poirot he knows of a disappearing trick that the detective won’t be able to explain, and, as in the short story, the two men make a bet. (As a side note: Japp is apparently less of a gambler than Hastings, as he only bets a fiver. In the adaptation of ‘The Third Floor Flat’, Hastings is willing to bet twice that much that Poirot will work out the ending of a play. No wonder he can’t afford his own rooms!)

Although the central conceit of Poirot not being able to leave the flat is retained from the short story, there are some minor alterations. In the TV episode, Hastings is allowed to act as Poirot’s agent, leading to a couple of comical exchanges as Hastings and Japp cross over in their investigations. There’s no mention of Inspector Miller in the episode, and it’s Japp who leads the police enquiry and oversees the dragging of the lake. A boatman named Merritt (played by Richard Beale) becomes a key witness, and Billy Kellett (played by… well…) has a few more scenes and, on his first introduction, a drunken associate.


The character of Gerald Lowen is fleshed out in the TV episode. As well as being Davenheim’s business rival (embroiled in a feud that’s much more intense than in the short story), Lowen now has a side-line in racing cars – much to Hastings’s excitement. In a very enjoyable (though arguably superfluous) sequence, Hastings follows Lowen to Brooklands motor racing circuit. A slightly silly case of mistaken identity almost leads to Hastings being able to take Lowen’s Bugatti out for a spin, but sadly this dream doesn’t become a reality. There are plenty of shots of the Bugatti in action, however, as Pathé are on hand to shoot a newsreel about Lowen (as in ‘The Dream’, we are treated to a short Pathé Gazette to get us in the 1935 mood).

Now… all this larking about with boatmen and racing cars is fine for Japp and Hastings, but we mustn’t forget that poor old Poirot is stuck in his flat, with nothing to do but wait for his friends to return with information. And this is where the episode wanders off into its own territory.

Inspired by the magic show he attended, Poirot has got hold of a copy of The Boy’s Book of Conjuring and decides to spend the time teaching himself magic tricks. He makes handkerchiefs disappear, practices his prestidigitation, and (in his slickest move) tears up a newspaper and magically reassembles it in front of Miss Lemon’s delighted eyes. I love the way David Suchet performs this trick, as his hands move just like a magician’s, but I love his disappearing card trick more – deep in conversation with Miss Lemon, Poirot studies his book and plays around with a card, making it vanish and reappear, while apparently having no idea how he is actually doing it.


It’s certainly interesting that it’s in this episode that the detective becomes a (literal) conjuror. The episode was written by David Renwick, who would later go on to create Jonathan Creek– a show in which the detective is a magician.

Sadly, Poirot’s magic tricks aren’t quite enough to fill the long days, and Renwick adds an extra (notorious) flourish. For some reason – and I’ll admit, I’ve seen the episode numerous times and I’m still not totally sure of the reason – a parrot is delivered unexpectedly to Poirot’s flat. This does lead to a nice bit of Poirot-Hastings banter:

‘Do not fraternize with that creature. I am still training him.’
‘It’s only a parrot.’
‘I was talking to the parrot.’

But it also involves one of the more ridiculous bits of dialogue in the series, in which the parrot-delivery-man mispronounces Poirot, is corrected, and politely announces, ‘I’ve got a pwa-ro for Mr Poyrott.’

Parrots aside, this is a nice little episode based on a really enjoyable short story. The playful bet between Poirot and Japp is handled well, and I’m glad that Hastings got to go to Brooklands. The episode is also notable for involving one of the more successful disguises of the series.


A number of episodes will feature a character in disguise, but these are often fairly obvious (thick glasses are usual, as are heavily made up faces). ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ avoids these typical tricks, and instead relies on careful camera work. Rewatching the episode once you know the solution, it’s striking how little of ‘Mr Davenheim’ we actually see – his face is never really in shot for very long. We see a lot more of ‘Billy Kellett’, but he doesn’t really seem to be in disguise, so it’s harder to connect him with the missing man.

One final gem and one final question then…

The gem: Davenheim’s house is being played by Joldwynds, a modernist house in Surrey, designed by Oliver Hill. This house will reappear in Series 3, in ‘The Theft of the Royal Ruby’.

The question: Why wasn’t Davenheim’s wife suspicious when he went to Buenos Aires (in the short story)/Johannesburg (in the TV adaptation) and didn’t contact her for three months? (Obviously, by the end, we know he was really in prison as ‘Billy Kellett’, but at the time she thought he was just on an extended overseas business trip.) Either they had a rotten marriage and she was glad of the break, or Davenheim had an associate ‘on the outside’ who was able to send fake letters or telegrams to his wife. Poirot didn’t twig about the accomplice, did he? Too busy talking to his parrot…

Next up: ‘Double Sin’

This post is part of my 2016 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’.


The seventh episode of the second series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 11th February 1990. It was based on the short story of the same name (aka ‘By Road or Rail’), which was first published in the Sunday Dispatch in 1928.

In my last post, I talked a bit about Poirot and Hastings’s living arrangements in the early short stories. This domestic set-up changes after The Murder on the Links (1923), which signals the end of the cosy ‘shared rooms’ of the Sketch short stories; by The Big Four (1927) and Peril at End House (1932), Hastings is ensconced in his ranch in Argentina with his wife, only popping back occasionally to meet up with his old friend. In the scheme of Poirot and Hastings’s friendship, ‘Double Sin’ takes place during this time – Poirot is now living alone in ‘rooms’ (he’s not yet moved into his swanky serviced apartment), and Hastings is living elsewhere. The story begins with Hastings arriving at Poirot’s lodgings:

‘I had called in at my friend Poirot’s rooms to find him sadly overworked. So much had he become the rage that every rich woman who had mislaid a bracelet or lost a pet kitten rushed to secure the services of the great Hercule Poirot. My little friend was a strange mixture of Flemish thrift and artistic fervour. He accepted many cases in which he had little interest owing to the first instinct being predominant.’

There are a couple of things that interest me about this introduction. Firstly, this story is set during the height of Poirot’s fame as a private detective, despite the fact it was published after The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and his first failed ‘retirement’ from detective work. The rich women with missing bracelets returns to an idea from one of the earlier short stories, ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’ (the adaptation of which will appear later in this series), that Poirot became quite fashionable for a time. Secondly, although Hastings clearly no longer shares rooms with Poirot, there’s no mention of his wife or his ranch anywhere in the story. In fact, there’s a little moment where Poirot behaves as though Hastings is still single (and Hastings responds as though he is still single):

‘“You were observing the pretty young lady who booked No. 5, the next seat to ours. Ah! Yes, my friend, I saw you. […]”
“Really, Poirot,” I said, blushing.
“Auburn hair – always the auburn hair!”’

I’m not sure if this little exchange means that the story is set earlier than it was published – though this wouldn’t really make sense as Hastings lived with Poirot right up until his bachelordom ended. Instead, I like to think of it as an indication that the two men find it easy to slip back into their old ways, even after Hastings has got married and moved away. If you remove the first sentence, ‘Double Sin’ could very easily be one of the 1923 Sketch stories.

Hastings arrives at his ‘overworked’ friend’s rooms and is quickly told that Poirot has promised to undertake some work for ‘Joseph Aarons, the theatrical agent’. Aarons doesn’t actually appear in the short story, but he appeared in the novels The Murder on the Links, The Mystery of the Blue Train and The Big Four. So, if you’re reading Christie’s stories in the order in which they were published, this character’s name will be familiar. Of course, I’m rereading them in the order ITV chose to adapt them, so have to keep referring to texts I’ve not got to yet in order to remind myself of who appears where. Had I not already read Links, Blue Train and Big Four, the name of Joseph Aarons would mean nothing. In this case – as with other minor recurring characters in Christie’s texts – it doesn’t really matter whether the reader is familiar with Joseph Aarons or not. Hastings makes this clear in his narration, when Poirot asks him if he calls the theatrical agent: ‘I assented after a moment’s thought. Poirot’s friends are so many and so varied, and range from dustmen to dukes.’ As is often the case, Hastings is acting as a stand-in for the reader; we don’t need to worry about the details, all that matters is that Aarons is one of the detective’s many random friends. His role within the story is clear without any knowledge of his backstory: all you need to know is that it is a letter from Aarons that has compelled Poirot to temporarily leave his cases in London and travel to Charlock Bay in Devon.


As travelling to Charlock Bay by train is somewhat difficult, Hastings books the two men on a Speedy Cars ‘motor coach’ – much to Poirot’s chagrin. On board the coach, they meet a young woman named Mary Durrant, who is carrying a collection of valuable miniatures that are to be sold to an American dealer (Mr J. Baker Wood). Also travelling with them is a man who is ‘trying to grow a moustache and as yet the result is poor’. Hastings is quite taken by the flame-haired Miss Durrant; Poirot is intrigued by the man with the ‘indeterminate moustache’.

At Ebermouth, the coach stops for lunch, and the man with the indeterminate moustache (Norton Kane) removes his suitcase from the coach and leaves the party. Later in the day, when they arrive at Charlock Bay, Miss Durrant discovers that her suitcase has been forced and the miniatures stolen. Poirot is fascinated, and promises to help the distraught young woman.

Just in case the reader is still labouring under the illusion that the ‘business’ with Joseph Aarons is going to play any part in the plot, Hastings summarily dismisses this:

‘We lunched with Joseph Aarons, and after lunch, Poirot announced to me that he had settled the theatrical agent’s problem satisfactorily, and that we could return to Ebermouth as soon as we liked.’

Whatever the problem was, the detective managed to solve it over one lunch date, leaving us in no doubt that a) Poirot can work pretty fast when he needs to, and b) this was really all just an excuse for Poirot and Hastings to go on a coach trip. Sure enough, there’s no more mention of this problem, and Poirot devotes his attention for the rest of the story on the mystery of the missing miniatures.

Like the other earlier Poirot short stories, the puzzle is wrapped up quickly and neatly by the great detective. The solution is a satisfying one, but what really makes this story for me is Poirot’s explanation of how/why he was so interested in the case. At the end of the story, he offers several insights, which are so perfectly Poirot you can’t help but smile.

On ruling out Norton Kane as a serious suspect, Poirot says: ‘With that moustache? A criminal is either clean shaven or he has a proper moustache that can be removed at will.’ While this is partly a continuation of what seems to be a small obsession with Kane’s moustache on the part of our fastidious dandy, what Poirot says makes complete sense. We’ve been told several times that Kane’s ‘indeterminate moustache’ simply draws attention to the man – not very handy for a jewel thief. It’s interesting that the TV adaptation of ‘Double Sin’ followed ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’, as dramatic and removable facial hair is central to the disappearing act in that story.

On explaining how Mary Durrant attempted to use the two men in her nefarious scheme, Poirot (with characteristic snark) explains:

‘Mademoiselle Mary has only to find a couple of mugs who will be sympathetic to her charm and champion beauty in distress. But one of the mugs was no mug – he was Hercule Poirot!’

For once, the implications of this don’t go over Hastings’s head, who grumpily thinks to himself: ‘I hardly like the inference.’ But Poirot’s cheeky little comment does remind us that Mary Durrant isn’t the first pretty girl to think she can play Poirot for a mug (that would be Lady Millicent Castle Vaughan – aka Gertie – in ‘The Veiled Lady’), and she won’t be the last (Nick Buckley is just around the corner). Poirot will be approached and befriended by a number of young women in his career – and he’ll always be sympathetic to their charms and a champion in their distress – but because of the likes of Millicent and Mary, we never really know whether we should trust any of them.

Finally, in a hasty attempt to retract his implied insult, Poirot claims that the other ‘mug’ was actually J. Baker Wood, and that the detective felt a strong need to help the hapless American: ‘we visitors, Hastings, must stand together. Me, I am all for the visitors!’ This isn’t a sentiment that Poirot always expresses directly, but there are other stories in which he forms an unspoken bond as a result of shared ‘foreignness’ (e.g. with Mrs Vanderlyn’s French maid in ‘The Incredible Theft’). Significantly, though, it’s rare for Poirot to express this sense of solidarity with Americans; more usually, when confronted by someone from the US, the Belgian aligns himself with his fellow Europeans (the English) against the transatlantic ‘other’. Perhaps it’s the fact that J. Baker Wood has been duped by two (apparently) quintessential English women that provokes his statement.


The TV adaptation of ‘Double Sin’ was directed by Richard Spence and written by Clive Exton. With the exception of the double-length series opener, all the other episodes so far in this series have been adaptations of Sketch short stories (i.e. the 1923 series of stories in which Poirot and Hastings live together). As I’ve said ‘Double Sin’ is a later post-Links story, but because it’s so similar in style to the 1923 stories, Exton hasn’t had to do too much to make it follow on from ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ and the rest of the series. Hastings doesn’t need to be added, as he was already there as narrator; the story is set when the two men are sharing a flat in London so Miss Lemon fits right in; Inspector Japp, as usual, can replace ‘the police inspector in charge of the case’… except actually that’s not what happens here (but more on that in a moment).

The episode begins with Poirot in a bad mood. The two friends are visiting a park, and Poirot is in a funk. He wants to retire and complains to Hastings that his career is over. This is a departure from the ‘overworked’ Poirot of the short story, but it continues a theme that runs throughout this series of the TV show.

It’s Poirot’s bad mood, rather than a communication from Aarons, that prompts the men to go on a little trip – though it’s up north, rather than down south, that they head here. They travel to Whitcombe (a fictional Lancashire town, actually filmed in Morecambe). Soon after they arrive, Hastings discovers that their old friend Japp is in town – the policeman is doing a ‘North Country’ lecture tour – what a coincidence!


As Poirot doesn’t seem interested in attending his friend’s lecture, Hastings suggests they take a ‘Speedy Tours’ coach to Windermere. Here, they meet Mary Durrant (played by Caroline Milmoe) and Norton Kane (the man with the indeterminate moustache) (played by Adam Kotz) and, as in the short story, Hastings is charmed by the young woman, while Poirot is curious about the young man. There is a small detail removed from the short story, which is a shame. In Christie’s text, Poirot orchestrates the seating arrangements with a delightful tact that goes straight over his companion’s head:

‘Poirot, rather maliciously, I thought, assigned me the outside place as “I had the mania for the fresh air” and himself occupied the seat next to our fair neighbour [Mary Durrant]. Presently, however, he made amends. The man in seat 6 was a noisy fellow, inclined to be facetious and boisterous, and Poirot asked the girl in a low voice if she would like to change seats with him.’

Is it just me? or does it seem like this might have been Poirot’s plan all along? (Though, is it not also a little odd that Poirot appears to matchmaking his married friend, while Hastings’s poor wife waits patiently on the ranch?)

The TV episode omits this little detail – though it would have made more sense within their chronology! – and simply has Hastings sitting next to Mary from the start.

The disappearance of the miniatures is revealed in a similar way to in the short story, and Norton Kane is once again framed as the main suspect. The TV episode gives more attention to the poorly-moustachioed man, making him seem even more suspicious than in the source text, but adds an expanded backstory to explain his bizarre behaviour. I suppose it should also be noted that the miniatures themselves are also slightly elevated here: they’re now Napoleonic and have increased in value from £500 to £1500.

It’s the investigation that is most altered in the adaptation. As Poirot is insistent he is ‘retired’, he refuses to accept the case. It falls to Hastings to take on the mantle of detective, as he does in other episodes in the series (‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ and ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’). This leads to some comical moments, as Hastings puts his theories to the local policemen (played by David Hargreaves and Gerard Horan) and is shot down by the common-sensical northerners, and then is given a series of subtle hints by Poirot, despite the fact that the detective is ‘not investigating’. I particularly like Hasting’s attempts to look after his little grey cells through diet and sleep, and his joyous exclamations when he wakes up with (what he believes is) the solution: ‘It must have been the haddock! I feel wonderful!’

Poirot, though, remains in his funk. He takes no enjoyment in his friend’s investigations, and refuses to accompany Hastings on the case. We discover why in due course: when Hastings goes to bed early to let the haddock do its work, Poirot sneaks out of the hotel to attend Japp’s lecture.


This is a lovely moment. Up until this point, we’ve been led to believe that Poirot is simply jealous that Japp has been asked to do a lecture tour – and this is probably partly the case. But as Poirot listens to Japp discussing private detectives, it becomes clear that Poirot is actually worried that the policeman will either slight his abilities, or else leave them out entirely. I’ve always felt that this isn’t just about Poirot’s ego – throughout the series, the friendship between the men is emphasized, and I’ve always felt that part of Poirot’s worry comes from the fear that his friend might say something mean.

His fears are unfounded, of course. Japp sings Poirot’s praises to the rafters, speaking of his pleasure and gratitude at being able to work alongside the little Belgian detective. David Suchet plays Poirot’s response to this beautifully, allowing a series of emotions to play over his face that take us from his initial surprise, through his touching affection, and back to his characteristic pride. At one point, you can even see the tiny hint of a tear in his eye.


The three men come together to wrap the case up and confront the thief at the end of the episode. Japp and Poirot light-heartedly tease Hastings for barking up completely the wrong tree; however, the tables are then turned when Hastings discovers a newspaper clipping in Poirot’s wallet – it seems he knew about Japp’s lecture all along, and that was the reason for his sudden desire to see the Lake District. Now it’s Hastings’s turn to rib his friend – and Japp laughs along. It’s quite charming, really.

So… while the boys are on their jollies in the Lake District, what’s Miss Lemon up to?

Poirot’s secretary isn’t in the short story, and it seems there’s no place for her on the TV version of the Speedy Tours coach either. Instead, she gets her own (rather odd) little story. After being confronted by some kids doing penny-for-the-guy, Miss Lemon is flustered and loses her keys. This means she can’t leave the flat until she finds them – and she can’t find them until she employs the ‘order and method’ espoused by her employer.

While this little vignette is a bit superfluous, there are a couple of nice bits. George Little is back as Dicker – hooray! – in his last (physical) appearance in the series. It’s Dicker’s longest scene, as well, and we get a slight sense of him as a character as well.


When poor Miss Lemon is forced to sleep in her office, as she can’t leave Mr Poirot’s flat unlocked, she has a very weird dream. In an evocative mist, the faces of Poirot and Hastings float towards her, speaking snatches of characteristic dialogue – only Hastings’s voice comes out of Poirot’s mouth, and vice versa. It’s bit trippy, but I kind of like it.


To finish, some miscellaneous thoughts…

I’m afraid I don’t like the TV version of Miss Penn (played by Elspet Gray). In the short story, Mary’s aunt is a sweet little old lady with ‘pink-and-white skin’ and ‘a cape of priceless old lace’. This exterior ensures that Hastings (and, perhaps, the reader) never suspects that Miss Penn might be the ‘masculine woman’ who sold the ‘stolen’ miniatures to J. Baker Wood.

In the TV episode, Miss Penn uses a wheelchair, and this serves as the reason Hastings doesn’t suspect her. However, she does seem like she could disguise herself as a ‘masculine woman’. Even in the chair, her height is apparent, and she’s been divested of the frilly, lacy, pink-and-white innocence of her literary counterpart. (As soon as my husband Rob saw her – bearing in mind he’d never seen a single episode until I started this project – he pointed at the screen and shouted ‘It was her!’) Turns out a fake wheelchair is a much weaker disguise than simply ‘being a little old lady’.

The episode makes up for its far-too-obvious Miss Penn with some stunning settings. Maybe it’s because I’m Cumbrian, but I’m glad the programme-makers switched the location to the Lakes (Poirot goes to Devon far too much). The Midland Hotel in Whitcombe is actually the Midland Hotel in Morecambe, and J. Baker Wood’s hotel is being played by the gorgeous mock-Gothic Wray Castle in Ambleside.

Also nice is a little exchange between Hastings and Miss Lemon at the beginning of the episode. After Poirot and Hastings return from the park, the detective continues to grumble. Miss Lemon comments sotto voce that her employer is acting very middle-aged, to which Hastings replies: ‘Well, he’s always been middle-aged. Have you seen that picture of him at his christening?’

Finally, there’s another detail that shows Clive Exton knew his source material well. In Christie’s short story, Poirot explains to Mary Durrant that he will discover the whereabouts of her miniatures:

‘Ah! But it is an idea that! You think I take the rabbits out of the hat? No, mademoiselle. Me, I am the opposite of a conjurer. The conjurer, he makes things disappear. Me, I make things that have disappeared, reappear.’

(That’s right… it’s another reference to conjuring!)

As the TV Poirot refuses the investigate, this little speech is cut from the adaptation. Instead, Poirot simply asks Mary if she knows who he is. She replies:

‘You’re not that conjuror, are you?’

After Poirot’s little hobby in the previous episode, she can be forgiven for making this mistake.

Time to move on though, as these reviews seem to be getting longer and longer. God knows how much I’ll be writing by the time I get to Curtain.

The next episode is ‘The Adventure of the Cheap Flat’