Poirot Project: The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge (review)

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 Affair at the Victory Ball’.

Beware: Here be Spoilers

The tenth – and final – episode of the third series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 10th March 1991. It was based on the short story of the same name, which first appeared in The Sketch in May 1923.

Reluctantly, this post comes with a bit of an admission. When I first began this project, I imagined that I would spend 2016 rereading and rewatching the Poirot stories, and that I would reach Curtain by Christmas. Well… it’s now the 23rd December and I haven’t even reached The ABC Murders yet. This has been a much bigger undertaking than I imagined – partly due to my tendency to obsessive completism, which has led to my posts becoming more and more detailed, and partly due to the fact that this year has been a very very busy one. So, sadly, I think I have to admit that ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ will be the last post in my Poirot Project in 2016.

But have no fear! I’ll be back on it and tackling The ABC Murders as soon as the festive season is over. I reckon I’ll totally get to Curtain by Christmas 2017. ;-)

Another slightly reluctant admission… I think the 2016 phase of this project is going to go out with a whimper, not a bang. ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ is an okay Poirot story, but it’s not one of the best. After the delights of ‘The Affair of the Victory Ball’ and the complexities of ‘The Theft of the Royal Ruby’, the final story in Series 3 is a bit of an anti-climax.

This is especially galling as the story promises so much with its first line:

‘“After all,” murmured Poirot, “it is possible that I shall not die this time.”’

But this turns out to be just the little Belgian exaggerating as usual. He’s got the flu, and is sitting in bed, dosing himself up with a tisane and ‘a neatly graduated row of medicine bottles’. His good friend Hastings treats this occurrence with good humour, particularly when Poirot reads out a paragraph in Society Gossip announcing the detective’s illness to the world:

‘Go it – criminals – all out! Hercule Poirot – and believe me, girls, he’s some Hercules! – our own pet society detective can’t get a grip on you. ’Cause why? ’Cause he’s got la grippe himself!’

Throughout the Sketch stories, there are little moments that remind us of how famous Poirot is in London. In some stories – like ‘The Submarine Plans’ and ‘The King of Clubs’ – this is shown by the way government officials and royal personages seek the little Belgian out to solve their problems. But elsewhere – like in ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’ – we see Poirot’s fame more as ‘celebrity’, with socialites and fashionable types asking the detective for help with their asinine catastrophes. The paragraph in Society Gossip appears to belong to the latter category.

But all this talk of influenza and gossip columns is really just a way to immobilize Poirot so that the story’s conceit can play out. This is going to be a case to which the detective is physically unable to attend – and so it’s going to be down to Hastings to be his eyes and ears. This isn’t the first time Christie has removed Poirot from the actual investigation so as to showcase his cerebral powers: ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ also used this plot device. However, while the earlier story had Poirot remove himself in order to win a bet, here he is genuinely unable to investigate. Moreover, the stakes are a little higher here, as Poirot’s mental capacities are challenged by the flu – can he still solve a case while he’s ill?

Wait a minute… what case are we even talking about?

The answer to that question comes almost immediately after Poirot has read out the little column in Society Gossip. The men’s very own Mrs Hudson announces a visitor, a Mr Roger Havering, who has come to consult with them on a matter of urgency.

Poirot consults Who’s Who, which tells him that Havering is the second son of the fifth Baron Windsor, and is married to Zoe, daughter of William Crabb. Hastings has a different line on the man:

‘I rather fancy that’s the girl who used to act at the Frivolity – only she called herself Zoe Carrisbrook. I remember she married some young man about town just before the War.’

We never do find out anything more about Hastings’s old visits to the Frivolity, but it paints a rather cheeky picture.

Roger Havering has called on Poirot because he wants the famous Belgian to investigate the murder of his uncle. It is, he says, imperative that Poirot returns with him to Derbyshire to take the case. Hastings explains that Poirot isn’t able to travel, and offers to take up the investigation himself. To this, Poirot readily agrees – probably because he’s too ill to argue:

‘You want to go yourself, is it not so? Well, why not? You should know my methods by now. All I ask is that you should report to me fully every day, and follow implicitly any instructions I may wire you.’

And so… Detective Hastings is on the case.

Fortunately, things are helped along by two factors. (1) When Hastings arrives in Derbyshire, he finds that Japp is also investigating the murder; (2) It’s not really the most complicated case they’ve worked on, and it has a twist at its heart that’s not massively dissimilar to the one found in ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’. Not that Japp and Hastings spot the similarity, of course.

The murder took place at Hunter’s Lodge in Derbyshire. Havering’s uncle, Harrington Pace, was at the lodge for the shooting season, and on the night of the murder he was in the house with Havering’s wife Zoe and the housekeeper Mrs Middleton (Havering himself had been unexpectedly called away to London).

According to the two women in their separate statements, a visitor called at the house shortly after dinner and was shown into Pace’s gun-room. Neither woman recognized the stranger, but they both gave an almost identical description of the man. After a short time, they heard the sound of raised voices, and then a shot. As the door was locked from the inside, they had to run around the house to reach the window – it was then that they discovered Pace had been shot, and the murderer had fled the scene.

Despite the running commentary via telegram from Poirot, Hastings is distinctly underwhelmed by his investigations:

‘I may as well confess at once that they were rather disappointing. In detective novels clues abound, but here I could find nothing that struck me as out of the ordinary except a large blood-stain on the carpet where I judged the dead man had fallen.’

While it’s rather comical seeing Hastings play detective again, I have to agree with him that the case is a bit disappointing. Although there is a neat riddle at the heart of it, there isn’t really much to get your teeth into. There are a few clues, and a couple of red herrings, but there aren’t really any suspects apart from the two people who turn out to have committed the crime in the end.

Instead of narrowing down a list of suspects, it’s more like we’re supposed work out what, exactly, has happened at Hunter’s Lodge. More importantly, we’re supposed (like Hastings) to decipher the cryptic messages from Poirot, who has apparently worked things out from his sick bed.

Ultimately, Hastings and Japp are able to piece together the deductions of their illustrious friend, but aren’t particularly excited by his conclusions. Hastings listens ‘fascinated’ to Poirot’s explanation of how the murder was carried out, but there’s a general feeling of deflation at the end of the story. Perhaps this is partly because there isn’t a bonkers Poirot denouement, but perhaps it’s also because there’s no arrest at the end of the story. Although Poirot has worked out what’s happened, he doesn’t really have any evidence and so has to just pass his findings on to Japp. The policeman is unable to arrest the killers, but the men later find out they were – karmically – killed in air crash a short time later.

As I say, it’s all a little bit of a let-down, really. I much prefer the jovial banter of ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’, which I think is a much stronger take on the ‘detective can solve a case without leaving his room’ theme. Poirot with the flu just isn’t the same as Poirot winding Japp up for a bet.

Ah well… can’t win ’em all, I guess. Let’s have a look at how the adaptation approaches things…

This episode was directed by Renny Rye and written by T.R. Bowen. And first thing’s first… after the disappointingly snowless scenes of ‘The Theft of the Royal Ruby’, ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ immediately treats us to some pretty impressive snowy vistas.

As with many of the early episodes, the events of the short story are slightly altered to insert the detective into the scene of the crime (rather than have him hear about it after the fact). In ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’, Poirot and Hastings are actually attending Pace’s shooting party, and so are able to get a sense of the key players before any skulduggery has taken place.

One thing I will say for this episode is that it is very good at evoking the effects of the weather. As the hunters crunch over snowy ground, and the women (and Poirot) muffle themselves up to observe, you really can feel the cold seeping into your bones. I’m writing this with a stinking cold, and this has really increased my sympathetic shivering with Poirot as he huddles in the cold to await the end of the shoot (equipped with a shooting stick and earplugs, of course).

The opening pre-murder sequence allows us to get a good idea of the ways in the writer has expanded on Christie’s short story. In the original, Pace was a rich American who didn’t get on with Havering’s father, but who was on reasonable terms with his nephew and his wife. The TV version of Pace (played by Bernard Horsfall) is now Irish, and has made his money from swindling his associates.

The TV Pace is distinctly not a nice man. He has an illegitimate brother who works as his gamekeeper (Jack Stoddard, played by Roy Boyd); he treats Stoddard with contempt, and refuses to give him money to enable him to marry. The cast is also augmented by the inclusion of Archie Havering, Roger’s cousin, a poor schoolteacher who’s disgusted by Pace’s shameless displays of wealth. As Archie points out, Hunter’s Lodge lies empty for most of the year, while some of his pupils ‘live six to a room’. Suspiciously, Archie has still agreed to take part in the shooting party, despite despising his host.

In addition to Jack Stoddard and Archie Havering, the list of suspects now also includes an unidentified ‘Bolshie’ who appears to be hounding Pace and, as the detective quickly discovers, probably anyone else who ever met the horrible man.

Following the shooting party, Poirot succumbs to a bout of flu. He really does seem to be very ill, and it’s quite sweet to see Hastings rush to his friend’s aid when the little Belgian is unable to get out of bed without falling.

Initially, Poirot’s illness does allow for Hastings and Japp to take over the investigation as in Christie’s short story. Again, there isn’t anything like the humour of ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’, and there’s little sense of competition or rivalry between the two men. We do get to see little glimpses of Hastings in detective mode, but it’s just not as comically dramatic as in stories such as ‘Mr Davenheim’ or ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’.

Moreover, Poirot isn’t incapacitated for the entire case. In fact, he’s able to start interviewing suspects quite quickly. In particular, he focuses on the testimony of Mr Anstruther (played by Arthur Whybrow), a railway worker who had his bike pinched by a man matching the description of Harrington Pace’s mystery visitor. Poirot takes it open himself to retrieve Mr Anstruther’s bicycle, despite the fact that his associates can’t see any relevance in this to the case as a whole.

By the end of the investigation, Poirot is up on his feet again, ready to hunt down the missing bicycle and perform a slightly more dramatic denouement than that found in Christie’s short story (both of which feats involve the assistance of a helpful tracker dog, loaned to the detective by Stoddard).

These final scenes are probably the most entertaining in the episode. The return of Mr Anstruther’s bicycle is done with the humour that’s characteristic of the early series. And the sniffer dog denouement is more entertaining – and more typical of Poirot’s theatrical tendencies – than the anti-climactic explanation offered in the episode’s source material. The TV version of the story also throws in a reminder of Poirot’s repeated association with conjuring in the finale (something which is absent from Christie’s story) – as he offers a bag of clothes to the tracker dog’s nose, he promises ‘to make Madame Middleton appear in our midst as if by magic!’ In a way, this feels like a much more Poirot ending to the story than the one written by Christie.

There’s one other bit of the ending that I really like. After Poirot, Japp, Hastings and Stoddard discovers the unfortunate Mr Anstruther’s bicycle, there’s a brilliant shot of the men triumphantly returning from the field (in that epic almost slo-mo that’s used for portraying returning heroes). It’s only a short little sequence, but it’s very well-done and manages to be both dramatic and comical at the same time.

Now, I’ve got this far, and I’m really close to finishing up this post, but I need to talk about the elephant in the room. I hope you noted the spoiler alert at the beginning of this post, because there’s no way of discussing this particular pachyderm without giving away the story’s twist.

The fact is, ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ involves one woman pretending to be two different people. And these two people are almost seen in the same place at the same time, and so the audience has to be thoroughly distracted from the fact that they’re the same person.

In Christie’s short story, this isn’t a problem. Obviously, we never see Zoe Havering or Mrs Middleton. We just have Hastings’s brief descriptions of the two women. He believes they are two different women, so we are led to conclude the same thing. But a TV episode is a different kettle of fish, and for this version of the story to work, the audience has to see both women with their own eyes.

And I just don’t think it works.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of effort has been put into making Diana Kent look drastically different in her two guises. But, perhaps, the difference is just too drastic. Because we’re watching the action unfold in front of our eyes, it’s just too noticeable that Mrs Middleton is always out of the room when Zoe Havering is in it (and vice versa). And, unlike in ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ (where careful camera angles are used so we never get a good clear look at either Mr Davenheim or Billy Kellet’s face), we get enough shots of Mrs Middleton to see that something isn’t quite right.

Even when I first watched the episode as a twelve-year-old – which was some time before I read the short story – I knew from the very start that Mrs Middleton was wearing a disguise. It’s not that she looked like Zoe Havering; it’s that she looked like she was wearing a costume.

Do you know what it is that gives her away? It’s the glasses. No one in a TV programme has ever worn glasses that thick unless they were part of a disguise. And as soon as you twig this, you know she must be Zoe Havering, because there aren’t any other female characters who could get away with pretending to be the housekeeper.

This isn’t the first episode that has had to deal with showing a disguise that was described in Christie’s text – as I’ve said, it’s a key point in ‘Mr Davenheim’, but also in ‘The Dream’ and ‘The Million Dollar Bond Robbery’ (although that disguise was actually invented for the episode, rather than taken from Christie’s story) – and it certainly won’t be the last. Some episodes – including one that I’ll be coming to very soon – manage to get away with it better than others. Sadly, ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ is not one of the more successful ones.

And so… on that slightly disappointed note, I come to the end of Series 3 and the last post of 2016. I’ve not reached Curtain as quickly as planned, but it’s been a lot of fun trying. My next post will be in 2017, when I’ll be rereading/rewatching The ABC Murders.

See you next year!