Showing posts with label Philip Jackson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philip Jackson. Show all posts

Saturday 25 August 2018

Poirot Project: One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (review)


Bet you thought I’d forgotten Hercule, didn’t you? Nah – I’ve just been busy again, but I could never forget Hercule. Slow as my progress is, I’m still working my way through the episodes. I’ll finally get to Curtain one day!

This post is part of my 2016 2016-17 2016-18 who am I kidding? 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 ‘Death in the Clouds’.

Beware: Here be Spoilers

The third episode of the fourth ‘series’ of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 19th January 1992 (have a look at this post to see why I’ve put scare quotes round ‘series’). It was based on the novel of the same name (aka Overdose of Death and The Patriotic Murders), which was first published in 1940. As always, my academic side wants to note the edition I’m using for this post:


Lol! Just kidding!


It’s the HarperCollins paperback edition published in 2016. Just as with The ABC Murders, when I came to do this post, I strangely discovered that I didn’t own a copy of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Not sure how that has happened, as I’m pretty sure I used to own a copy. Anyway, I’ve rectified that now.

There are a few particular episodes of Poirot that stand out for me as ones that I loved when they were first broadcast. Admittedly, there are some episodes that I don’t really remember the first time round (I was only ten when the series started, after all!), but 'One, Two, Buckle My Shoe' isn’t one of them. I can clearly remember watching it and loving every minute of it – it’s one of the episodes that cemented my love of the show.

The novel I came to later – probably during my Agatha Christie binge when I was working at an Oxfam shop after I finished my A-Levels. I mentioned this briefly in an earlier post, but I spent a year working at an Oxfam shop in the day and at Wilkinson's in the evening (some people go overseas to find themselves during their gap year… I found myself in Middleton). Most days, I had an hour and a half between jobs, and I filled it with reading Golden Age detective fiction (a lot of Christie and Sayers), bought for 29p-39p at Oxfam. Although I can remember reading a few novels before this point, I think this was the year when I really became a Golden Age fan.

Anyway, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

The book was published in 1940, so it sits in the second half of the Poirot collection. It was written after the best-known short stories – and after the ‘big’ books (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, etc.) – but before Christie wrote Curtain (so before she was thinking about the ‘end’). The book is in third person, and Hastings is absent. There’s no mention of Miss Lemon, despite her making her first appearance five years earlier. However, the novel does feature Japp (and George), so Poirot isn’t entirely flying solo.

The book begins, though, by introducing a different character: Mr Morley, a diminutive grumpy dentist who is critical of both the government and his secretary (who has been called away to a family emergency). A short section later, and we’re being introduced to a powerful man named Alistair Blunt, who has an appointment to see his dentist. Before I get on to the novel itself, just a brief eyebrow raise at this name… In Death in the Clouds, there’s a mention of another dental patient named Blunt – this time Colonel Blunt. Although the books were written five years apart, the adaptations were aired just a week apart. Reading the books in the order of the adaptations really does draw attention to this repeated name. In the Everyman’s Guide to the Mysteries of Agatha Christie, Bruce Pendergast highlights this curious coincidence of names, making the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that ‘the Blunt clan had a faulty tooth gene’ (and noting seven other individuals with the surname in Christie’s work – as Poirot says in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, ‘The name, after all, is not an uncommon one.’).

After we find out Blunt is going to see Mr Morley, we also find out a certain Belgian detective has a dentist’s appointment. When he later leaves Morley’s surgery, Poirot has a brief encounter with a woman in patent leather shoes, who manages to wrench one of her buckles off as she gets out of a taxi. Given the title of the novel, it’s pretty obvious that this fleeting moment is going to be significant later.

And sure enough, it’s only a couple of pages later that Japp comes round to break some news to Poirot – Mr Morley has (probably) shot himself. Why would the dentist have killed himself? Was the illustrious Mr Blunt the true target?

As the novel rolls on, the bodies start to pile up. A Mr Amberiotis – a new patient of Morley’s – is found dead at his hotel, and his death is ascribed to an overdose of adrenaline and novocaine given by the dentist. And then another patient, Miss Sainsbury Seale, disappears from her hotel. A body shows up in the flat of a Mrs Chapman, which is assumed to be that of Miss Sainsbury Seale, only for it to be revealed through dental identification as that of Mrs Chapman herself (she was another of Morley’s patients). Of Miss Sainsbury Seale (now the prime suspect in Mrs Chapman’s murder), there is no trace. What could it all mean? And why is Poirot so fixated on Miss Sainbury Seale’s (or is it Mrs Chapman’s) buckled shoes?

Lurking behind these dental shenanigans are repeated references to national and international politics. Even on the first page, we get a sense of political unease, as Morley peruses the morning news (someone’s got to do it in Hastings’s absence):
‘He glanced at the paper and remarked that the Government seemed to be passing from a state of incompetence to one of positive imbecility!’
This backdrop – which includes a character who’s signed up to the Imperial Shirts (a fictional fascist organization, presumably based on Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts) and repeated criticism/fear of ill-defined ‘Reds’ – leads to a glorification of centre-ground Toryism that is way more overt than in other Christie novels. Both small-c and big-c conservatism are lauded throughout the book and presented as the only way in which the ship of Britain can steer its way through such dangerous waters. We get impassioned outbursts such as:
‘You bet there are [people in Britain who would like to kill Blunt]. The Reds, to begin with – and our Blackshirted friends, too. It’s Blunt and his group who are standing solid behind the present Government. Good sound Conservative finance.’
Standing solid! Strong and stable!

And:
‘We’re very tiresome people in this country. We’re conservative, you know, conservative to the backbone. We grumble a lot, but we don’t really want to smash our democratic government and try new-fangled experiments. That’s what’s so heart-breaking to the wretched foreign agitator who’s working full time and over! The whole trouble is – from their point of view – that we really are, as a country, comparatively solvent. Hardly any other country in Europe is at the moment! To upset England – really upset it – you’ve got to play hell with its finance – that’s what it comes to! And you can’t play hell with its finance when you’ve got men like Alistair Blunt at the helm.’
Long live England! Conservative to the backbone! The bankers will save us! We can trust the bankers!

Now, Agatha Christie’s personal politics are contentious, and different critics offer different interpretations. Comments in her autobiography often seem at odds with subtext in her fiction, but the latter itself is not always consistent (e.g. Poirot is generally anti-death penalty, whereas Miss Marple seems to mostly approve and actively mourns its abolition at one point). But whatever her personal beliefs, Christie was a mystery writer, and her books are all about playing tricks on the reader. Often, a character will seem to be the (left- or right-leaning) ‘voice of reason’ (like the ethically-minded NHS doctor Quimper in 4.50 From Paddington or the stolidly English racist Norman Gale in Death in the Clouds), only to be revealed as a callous and self-serving murderer in the end. Far from being a mouthpiece for Christie’s own beliefs, the ‘reasonable’ façade is a sleight-of-hand to make us think they couldn’t possibly be the murderer.

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe turns this up to 11. The political message seems so much clearer, more explicitly conservative, based against a backdrop of a Europe gone mad. Of course everyone is terrified of Reds and Blacks – these are major forces duking it out on the European stage, and their figureheads (Stalin and Hitler) are monstrous dictators. Of course Britain wants to preserve democracy, stability and moderation in the face of such horrifying alternatives. Conservative capitalism, as the book repeatedly tells us (way more directly than in most of Christie’s other novels), is the only reasonable path for the nation. And its figurehead, Alistair Blunt, is a screamingly rational alternative to the looming figures of Stalin, Hitler and a government veering from ‘a state of incompetence to one of positive imbecility’.

Obviously… obviously… Alistair Blunt is the murderer. And, appropriately, this is also turned up to 11. Blunt is a bigamist, who married his second wife for money and power; he shoots his dentist simply to allow himself the opportunity to kill Amberiotis (who was threatening to blackmail him); and he is involved with one of Christie’s more brutal murders, the death and mutilation of Mabelle Sainsbury Seale. (Although only the crooked leg and foot of the body of murdered Miss Sainsbury Seale is shown on screen in the adaptation, the idea of someone having their face so badly smashed in they can only be identified through dental records haunted my thirteen-year-old imagination.) He is also more than happy to see Frank Carter – ‘a wastrel’ – hang for his crimes.

Turns out, conservative capitalist bankers can be arseholes.

Before I move on to the adaptation, there are few minor character details that are worth noting in Christie’s novel.

Firstly, Poirot’s fear of the dentist is underlined early on:
‘He was a man who was accustomed to have a good opinion of himself. He was Hercule Poirot, superior in most ways to other men. But in this moment he was unable to feel superior in any way whatever. His morale was down to zero. He was just that ordinary, craven figure, a man afraid of the dentist’s chair.’

This is a facet of Poirot’s character that appears in both Christie’s stories and in the ITV adaptation. Mind you, given the last story we saw on screen was Death in the Clouds, I think there’s every reason to fear dentists. Elsewhere, though, we see a characteristic of Poirot’s that was resolutely not included in the TV show – he travels around London by Tube (the equivalent journey in the adaptation is taken by taxi, as Suchet’s Poirot is never shown travelling on the underground). Interestingly, in the TV version of ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’, these two characteristics also come up: Poirot’s Tube journey in the source text is removed, but his fear of the dentist is added in an alteration to Christie’s novel.

We also learn a couple of other things about our detective as well. He sometimes goes back to Belgium for short visits (first we’ve heard of it!), and he still hangs around with Joseph Aarons (at least, I assume that’s the ‘theatrical agent of his acquaintance’ he goes to see). Aarons, who I talked about briefly in the post on ‘Double Sin’ appears periodically in the Poirot stories – though often ‘off-screen’. Here, while we don’t see him (and he isn’t named), he provides Poirot with some important background information on the case.

Another blast from past here appears to be Countess Rossakoff, who I talked about in the post on ‘The Double Clue’. She’s not identified by name either, but I think it’s clear who this quote refers to:
‘He, Hercule Poirot, remembered women… One woman, in particular – what a sumptuous creature – Bird of Paradise – a Venus…’
Four little bonus points:

1. Japp wears a bowler hat! (Bit hard to imagine Philip Jackson’s Japp rocking a bowler!)

2. Japp also uses some nice slang in this one. We get ‘all my eye and Betty Martin’ – a phrase with unclear origins – but also ‘Na Poo, my lad. Na Poo!’ This latter is a bit of a throwback: it appears to have originated amongst British soldiers in WWI France or Belgium as a corruption of il n’y a plus, and means ‘it’s finished’ or ‘there’s no more’.

3. There’s a curious reference to a film in the book… As the detectives look for the illusive Mrs Chapman, one of her neighbours states that she hasn’t seen Mrs Chapman ‘since we had spoken about going to see the new Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire the following week’. This clearly lets us know that the book isn’t set in 1940: 1939’s The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle was Astaire and Rogers last film together until 1949. Mind you, the fact that there’s no mention of the war in an overtly political story – never mind that the British Union of Fascists hasn’t been disbanded – are probably the more obvious clues that the book is set in the late 30s.

4. One of my relatives is mentioned in the novel! (Don’t know why I put an exclamation mark – it’s a bit grim, to be honest.) While they’re hunting for the lost Miss Sainsbury Seale, Japp wonders if they’ll ‘find her in a quarry, cut up in little pieces like Mrs Ruxton’. Isabella Ruxton (née Kerr) was murdered (along with her housemaid Mary Rogerson) by her husband Buck Ruxton in 1935. Both victims were dismembered and mutilated, and Ruxton even removed teeth to prevent identification by dental records. It was a pretty notorious case. Isabella Kerr was a relative of mine on my mum’s side.

On that bleak little detail, let’s move on to the TV version, shall we?

The episode was directed by Ross Devenish and written by Clive Exton. The first thing that strikes you – and this may be one of the reasons the episode stuck in my mind all those years ago – is the horror film-like opening credits sequence, in which slow-mo, distorted images are paired with ghostly children’s voices singing the nursery rhyme that the book is named after.


As we’ve come to expect from Exton’s work, this is a fairly faithful adaptation of Christie’s story. It’s true to the spirit and plot of the novel (Hastings and Miss Lemon are absent, but it remains a Poirot ‘n’ Japp adventure), but there are changes to the way the story unfolds. Specifically, the backstory of Blunt’s marriage to Gerda Grant is played out in front of our eyes, rather than being discovered (quite late) by the detective.

After the creepy-as-hell credits, the episode takes us to India in 1925 and a performance of Much Ado About Nothing. Amongst the cast, we see clearly, are Gerda Grant and Mabelle Sainsbury Seale. After the show, Alistair Blunt (played by Peter Blythe) calls into the dressing room to see the women, and later that evening he proposes to Gerda (Joanna Phillips-Lane). When Mabelle (Carolyn Colquhoun) runs into Blunt twelve years later, she explicitly refers to his wife as Gerda.

However, I don’t think this ruins the story as such. Obviously it doesn’t, or the episode wouldn’t have fascinated me so much when it was first broadcast. Exton’s script does explain some things up front (particularly Blunt’s relationship with Gerda), but it leaves a lot of things mysteriously unexplained (what happened to Gerda? how did Blunt end up married to Rebecca Arnholt? why does he let the detectives think Miss Sainsbury Seale knew Rebecca, when she was actually friends with Gerda?) And, of course, it retains Christie’s emphasis on a fancy buckled shoe to keep us pondering its significance.


Much of the politics is also retained. Many of those strident speeches on strong and stable conservatism are repeated word-for-word in the adaptation, though Blunt is a helluva lot more arrogant than his literary counterpart and makes much more of the fun he and Gerda have been having. In the episode, as in the novel, Poirot is not impressed with the idea that Blunt’s role in keeping the country stable is a get-out-of-jail-free card. Suchet’s Poirot gives a very similar summing-up to that found in the book:
‘I am not concerned with nations, Monsieur. I am concerned with the lives of private individuals who have the right not to have their lives taken from them.’
While Poirot’s opinion of Blunt and his crimes remains the same, there is quite a dramatic change in his view of another character. We need to talk about Frank…

In Christie’s novel, Frank Carter, the Blackshirted boyfriend of Mr Morley’s secretary, is an unpleasant character whose fascist affiliation is presented almost as a symptom of his underlying nastiness. Blunt refers to him as ‘a wastrel’; Morley calls him ‘a wrong ’un’. Even Poirot, who is usually so repelled by even the thought of the noose, considers the possibility of letting Carter take the wrap for the murders:
‘He did not like Frank Carter. He disliked him very much. In his opinion Frank Carter was a bully, a liar, a swindler – altogether the type of young man the world could well do without. He, Hercule Poirot, had only to stand back and let this man persist in his lies and the world would be rid of one of its more unpleasant inhabitants…’
Things play out differently in the TV version. Here, Frank (played by Christopher Eccleston, who interestingly was fresh from playing Derek Bentley in Let Him Have It) is more troubled and misguided than unpleasant.


When we (and Poirot) see Frank waiting to confront Mr Morley in his surgery, he seems anxious. The little Belgian detective’s curiosity is piqued, but there doesn’t seem to be any animosity or repulsion. Morley (Laurence Harrington) has previously stated that Frank is in with ‘that Black Shirt mob’, but other than that we have no suggestion that he is one of the world’s ‘most unpleasant inhabitants’.

The next glimpse into Frank’s story comes from his distraught girlfriend Gladys (Karen Gledhill). She consults with Poirot – more than once – because she is terrified of what will become of her fella. Poirot is touched by her concern and goes to see Frank with her – at a full-blown British Union of Fascists rally (complete with lightning bolt sign and black shirts galore). This version of Poirot seems determined to get Frank to just be honest and reveals a certain sympathy for the young man.

Now, don’t get this wrong, Poirot is certainly not letting fascist sympathies slip out. His conversations with Gladys explain the nuance here. Gladys speaks out against the fascist organization, claiming that it exploits young, working-class men like Frank. The Black Shirts manipulate these lads, convincing them that what they’re doing is patriotic. Poirot agrees, and seems as keen to save Frank from the insidious brainwashing of the extreme right wing as he is from the noose. Towards the end of the episode, Frank is reunited with Gladys, who promises to keep ‘a close eye’ on him, to keep him from being exploited by sinister fascist movements that prey on disillusioned young working-class men.

I don’t know for certain why Exton chose to make this change to the source material in early 1992, or why it was important to underline how exploitative the so-called ‘patriotism’ of right-wing movements can be. But I will say that the episode aired at the time of the creation of Combat 18, and just months after the formation of the Anti-Federalist League, which would become UKIP in 1993. Food for thought, n’est-ce pas?

As always, I’m going to end with a couple of more minor things from the episode…

I love the fact that Poirot pops round to see Japp at home. While Christie gave us Japp in a bowler hat, the TV version gives us Japp in his shirt sleeves cutting his privets.


Poirot’s acceptance of his friend’s hospitality is obviously difficult for him – we’ll see this again when he pops round for tea in ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’ – but Japp chides him for requesting tisane instead of tea: ‘Come off it, Poirot. This is Isleworth, not Juan-les-Pins!’

Still, at least it’s only a cuppa this time, and not faggots and mushy peas.

And finally (or almost finally), there’s a couple of weird little threads that connect the episodes in the fourth ‘series’. I’m particularly curious as to what led to the decision to make ‘Death in the Clouds’ and ‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’ back-to-back. Clearly, with so many of the short stories televised already and ‘Peril at End House’ having worked as an adaptation, someone made the decision to do a few adaptations of novels to mix things up. Perhaps the intention at this point was to solely focus on the novels, I don’t know. But with so many to choose from, why do one about the murder of a dentist and one about a murderous dentist at the same time?

I can only assume that someone in the production company was suffering from a pretty bad toothache. Dentistry was certainly playing on their mind when this ‘series’ was planned out.

(And just in case you think I’ve forgotten that ‘The ABC Murders’ was aired a couple of weeks earlier as part of the same group of episodes, there’s a nice connection with this one as well. It’s what I call the ‘hosiery as clue’ or ‘significant stocking moment’.)


And so, time to move on to 1993’s offerings and a return to the short storie… no, wait. I wasn’t going to say anything, but there’s something I want to get off my chest. I know you’ll probably think I’m taking this too seriously, given how fixated I got with a Daily Mirror headline in the last episode, but I’m curious about a phone call Poirot makes to Japp after his visit to see Frank Carter in prison.


With news to tell his friend, Poirot grabs the receiver and dials a number – but it’s clearly seven digits long. And, more confusingly, he appears to get straight through to Japp without speaking to an operator. Is that not a bit anachronistic?

In Christie’s novel, Poirot’s own phone number is given as Whitehall 7272 (though the TV series has Trafalgar 8137, according to his business card in ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’). Any aficionados of ITV’s Poirot or the made-earlier but set-later BBC Miss Marple adaptations will be familiar with the detectives picking up the phone and requesting the operator connect them with the number they require. So what’s the deal with Poirot’s crazy seven-digit dialling?

Well, from 1927 London began to roll out Director automatic telephone exchanges (beginning with Holborn). I’m not an expert in telephony systems, but I think this was when people could automatically be connected with numbers from neighbouring exchanges in a network, without the need to go through an operator to request the connection. A caller had to dial the first three letters of the exchange, followed by the four digits of the number they wished to connect to. So, Poirot’s phone number would be WHI 7272 or TRA 8137. The three letter codes would come to be translated into numbers with the advent of alpha-numeric phone dials (keypads would come much later, kids) – WHI = 944 and TRA = 872 – and then replaced entirely by the numbers with the advent of ‘all-figure dialling’ in 1966.

In 1934, Scotland Yard rolled out a new phone number for the public to use for emergency and non-emergency calls. It was Whitehall 1212 (later 944 1212). In 1937, the 999 emergency number was introduced, and so Whitehall 1212 came to be the number for reaching the information room, rather than reporting a crime in progress. However, Whitehall 1212 would surely have got you through to the switchboard of the Metropolitan Police; you would have had to request a switchboard operator to connect you to the individual person you wanted to talk to.

So, Poirot’s seven-digit dialling is perfectly plausible – it just shows he’s an up-to-date kinda guy, tech-wise (which I guess is plausible, in a way). The anachronism lies in the fact that those seven digits get him straight through to Japp’s phone without having to request a switchboard operator to transfer his call. I’m not happy about this at all.

Am I wrong here? Would a Scotland Yard detective in 1936/37 have had a direct phone number that could be reached automatically from an outside line on another exchange? Or did the programme-makers simply choose not to show the bit where Poirot politely asks to be connected to Japp? Does it matter? Answers in the comments section, please.

I’m sorry this post was so long. And I’m sorry I didn’t say anything about the characters that were missed out of the TV adaptation (I miss Colonel Arrow-Bumby) or Poirot’s own political statement at the novel’s close (a world with freedom and pity, thus avoiding the excesses of both left and right, capitalism and idealism), or the lack of any ‘Mrs Middleton effect’ in the presentation of Helen Montressor/Fake Sainsbury Seale (interestingly also narrowly avoided with Madeleine/Anne Giselle in ‘Death in the Clouds’). I just got so caught up in fascism and phone numbers I ran out of time.

Next up, I’ll be back to the short stories again with ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’

Monday 12 March 2018

Poirot Project: Death in the Clouds (review)


This post is part of my 2016 2016-17 lifelong 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 ABC Murders’, quite a while ago. Because of work commitments, it’s taken me a while to get back to my little project, but I’m hoping I can crack on now… let’s see how that goes…

Beware: Here be Spoilers

The second episode of the fourth ‘series’ of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 12th January 1992. (Have a look at the previous post for an explanation of why I’ve put ‘series’ in inverted commas.) It was based on the novel of the same name (aka Death in the Air), which was published in 1935. The academic in me wants to note the edition of the novel I’m using here:


It’s the Hamlyn Collected Edition from 1969 (which also includes Murder on the Orient Express and Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?). My grandma had a collection of these hardback triple editions, and I inherited them when she died. Obviously, where possible, I’m reading my grandma’s books for this project.

Death in the Clouds was published just a couple of months after the UK publication of Three Act Tragedy, and the two novels share a few minor details and plot points. I’ll come back to this when I get to Three Act Tragedy, I think. For now, let’s talk about Poirot’s airborne adventure.

By this point in Poirot’s story, Hastings has departed for South America (and this novel doesn’t feature one of his periodic returns), and Miss Lemon hasn’t yet joined his team (‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’ wouldn’t be published until August 1935). So this is a Poirot story where our detective is flying solo, at least at first.

The story begins with a group of passengers boarding a plane, the Prometheus, from Le Bourget to Croydon. Amongst the passengers is, of course, Poirot, but we’re actually introduced to someone else first: a young hairdresser named Jane Grey. In fact, much of the novel is told from Jane’s POV, including quite a few scenes in which Poirot isn’t present. In the first chapter, Jane assesses her fellow passengers – including the ‘little elderly man with large moustaches and an eggshaped head’ – and reflects on the holiday she has just taken to Le Pinet and an incident that occurred while she was there.

Aside from Poirot, the passengers observed by Jane are: Lady Horbury, a cocaine-addicted former chorus-girl turned peeress-by-marriage; Venetia Kerr, a ‘horsey, county type’; a nice man in a periwinkle-blue pullover, who Jane had met at the roulette table one night; Dr Bryant, a tall man with a flute; the Duponts, two excited French archaeologists; Daniel Clancy, a detective fiction writer; and James Ryder, who is worrying about money. The final passenger to be mentioned, right at the end of the first chapter, is Madame Giselle. But Madame Giselle is already dead…

As the murder must have occurred while the plane was in the air, these passengers form our list of suspects (along with the two stewards, Mitchell and Davis, I guess… though no Christie fan would genuinely suspect a young lad called Albert Davis whose first word in the novel is ‘Coo!’). As the victim was sitting across the aisle from the great Hercule Poirot, the detective is naturally inclined to investigate. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to fly solo for long. When the plane arrives in Croydon, he’s joined by his old friend Inspector Japp, who views it all as a ‘rum business’.

You see, the initial investigation of the body on the plane (carried out by Poirot and Dr Bryant before they land) seems to suggest that Madame Giselle was killed by a poisoned dart. Daniel Clancy is able to supply further information:
‘“This object, gentlemen, is the native thorn shot from a blowpipe by certain tribes – er – I cannot be exactly certain now if it is South American tribes or whether it is the inhabitants of Borneo which I have in mind; but that is undoubtedly a native dart that has been aimed by a blowpipe, and I strongly suspect that on the tip –”
“Is the famous arrow poison of the South American Indians,” finished Hercule Poirot.’
Readers of Three Act Tragedy will already be aware of how seriously they should take this suggestion, of course, but Poirot can’t ignore the fact that a dart has been found, and that a number of the passengers were carrying tubes that could have been used as a blowpipe (Lady Horbury’s long cigarette holder, Dr Bryant’s flute, the Duponts’ collection of Kurdish pipes). It certainly does seem to be a ‘rum business’.

The investigation, then, turns to the background of the victim. Madame Giselle – or Marie Morisot (her real name) – was a Parisian moneylender, who had a client list comprising ‘the upper and professional classes’. She travelled to England regularly, as she had a habit of learning her clients’ deepest, darkest secrets, and then using this knowledge to ensure they didn’t fail to repay their debts. In order to find out more, Poirot and Japp have to work with the Paris Sûreté, specifically M. Fournier, who has heard all about Poirot from a M. Giraud. Readers familiar with Murder on the Links will already know about Poirot’s relationship with Giraud, but fortunately it doesn’t cause any problems on this case!

What’s interesting about Death in the Clouds, though, is that this is not the only investigation. Jane Grey and Norman Gale (the nice man in the periwinkle-blue pullover) are also keen to team up to solve the crime and exonerate themselves. Or are they just keen to team up (wink wink)? Poirot sees an opportunity and deputizes the young couple into his investigation, using them as a fake secretary and a disguised blackmailer in turn. After all, he can trust these two as they’re without doubt the most unlikely suspects from the plane. And at least the reader can trust that the killer would never be one of the characters from whose perspective the story is told. Lol.

In a bit of typical Christie slight-of-hand (or arrogance), we’re directly warned against trusting these deputy-detectives. But of course, we pay no attention to the warning, couched as it is in a sly joke from Japp at his friend’s expense:
‘“Well,” said Japp with a grin, “detectives do turn out to be criminals sometimes – in story books.”’
Similarly, we probably paid no attention to the barrage of clues that appeared before Madame Giselle’s inquest, as it’s so very easy to gloss over the wealth of incriminating details Christie often stuffs into the opening chapters of her books.

I’m going to move on to the adaptation in a sec, but there’s a few other bits of the book that are worth noting first…

There are a few references to other Poirot books in Death in the Clouds, but the weird thing is that some of them were yet to be written. Poirot is clearly still thinking about two of his previous cases, for instance, as he makes mention of both Three Act Tragedy and Murder on the Orient Express. When he and Fournier discuss the possibility of a ‘psychological reason’ why no one on the plane noticed someone whipping out a blowpipe to dispatch Madame Giselle, Poirot says:
‘I remember a case in which I was concerned – a case of poison, where that very point arose. There was, as you call it, a psychological moment.’
I should think you do remember it, Poirot – it only happened a couple of months ago!

Then, when an exasperated Japp says that he’s already questioned the passengers about this ‘psychological moment’ to no avail, declaring ‘Everyone can’t be lying’, Poirot notes that in one case he investigated ‘everyone was!’ (Japp just shakes his head at this – ‘You and your cases!’)

But then, we also have a few hints at the future as well. Jane Grey’s performance as Poirot’s secretary (‘As an efficient secretary, Miss Grey has at times to undertake certain work of a temporary nature – you understand?’) reminds us that in a few months Poirot will have engaged the services of a very efficient secretary (though she won’t always be willing to ‘undertake certain work of a temporary nature’). Jane accompanies Poirot to interview Daniel Clancy, a crime writer whose detective, Wilbraham Rice, is a very popular character with a number of quirks and a predilection for eating bananas. In just over a year, Poirot will have teamed up with another creator of popular detective fiction (though it’s Ariadne Oliver, rather than Sven Hjerson, who has the fruit habit).

But the future hint that made me smile most on rereading comes in Chapter 14. We get one of our little glimpses into the mind of dentist Norman Gale – the book really is quite head-hoppy – who briefly considers what it must be like for his patients: ‘Nasty helpless feeling you have in a dentist’s chair. If the dentist were to run amuck…’ Now, perhaps this is just one of those moments where Christie near enough tells you whodunit, but I like to imagine that, at some point over the next few years, she remembered this line and thought, ‘Now that could be a good plot to use.’ And it’s interesting that the programme-makers chose to follow Death in the Clouds with an adaptation of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

A flippant point, and then a serious one before I go on to the TV version.

Flippancy: In one of the early chapters, there’s a list of items included in all the passengers’ hand luggage. I was a bit thrown to discover that Venetia Kerr, Jane Grey and Lady Horbury were all carrying some delicious oaty treats, presumably for a snack on the plane. Thinking about it, though, it is possible that a ‘flapjack’ here means a powder compact.


On a less palatable note, it would be wrong of me not to mention one of the most uncomfortable passages in the book. Jane, as I’ve said, is a hairdresser. She works at a salon run by a man who calls himself ‘M. Antoine’, but whose real name is Andrew Leech. We’re told that his ‘claims to foreign nationality consisted of having had a Jewish mother’. Jane’s co-workers are… not cool with this. One woman, Gladys, refers to their employer as ‘Ikey Andrew’, after the man has (probably rightly) questioned Jane’s demands for a pay rise while she’s still a suspect in a murder investigation. Then, on the same page as Gladys’s anti-Semitism, comes another bit of gross casual racism: Jane and Norman go on their first date, and discover that they have a lot in common. They both like dogs and smoked salmon; they both dislike fat women and Katherine Hepburn. And: ‘They disliked loud voices, noisy restaurants and negroes.’ Wow. Nice couple.

It’s easy to dismiss these racial slurs as being a product of their time – and in many ways that’s what they are. There are other examples of such views going unquestioned in Christie’s work. But it’s notable that, here, the racism is coming almost entirely from unpleasant characters. Gladys is not a sympathetic character – she is described as having a ‘haughty demeanour’ in public and being ‘hoarse and jocular’ in private. Jane can’t seem to wait to be away from her. The other comment comes during a date with a murderer, so I’m not sure there’s any moral high ground here.

As it turns out, Poirot has a scheme in mind to draw Jane away from these anti-Semitic hairdressers and racist murdering dentists… he sees a different path for his heroine and hatches a match-making plot. It’s not clear whether this plot is due to his suspicion of Gale, or whether he just genuinely believes it is a better match for Jane, but he devotes some time and money to orchestrating a relationship between Jane Grey and Jean Dupont, the French archaeologist from the plane. After Gale’s arrest, Poirot believes he has finally been successful in this, noting that Jane and Dupont will likely soon be married. Jane will be accompanying Dupont to Persia, and specifically tells Poirot that she’s looking forward to having her worldview expanded.

Of course Agatha Christie would see hooking up with an archaeologist as a happy ending.

Okay… time to talk about the TV version…


‘Death in the Clouds’ was written by William Humble and directed by Stephen Whittaker. It follows the book in having Poirot ‘flying solo’ (so there’s no Hastings or Miss Lemon), then picking up Japp (Chief Inspector Japp here) along the way.

The adaptation keeps the bones of the story and characterization from the novel, but there are a few revisions and omissions to fit the television format. Dr Bryant, James Ryder and Armand Dupont (Jean’s father) are dropped, presumably to streamline the list of suspects. Jane Grey is no longer a hairdresser, but instead is one of the air stewards, replacing Albert Davis (Coo!). There’s also no mention of Giraud in the TV episode, which makes sense given there’s been no previous mention of him in the series.

Not only are things streamlined, some of the ‘hidden secrets’ of the novel are presented more explicitly in the adaptation. Lady Horbury’s gambling addiction and money problems are clear from the start; her relationship with her husband, and with Venetia Kerr, aren’t hidden either. We also see the wedding of Anne Giselle – the victim’s daughter – on screen, though we don’t find out who the groom is until the end.

Christie’s first chapter is a very neat piece of introduction and subterfuge. It introduces the various suspects – giving us a glimpse into everyone’s thoughts – without telling us what the crime is, or why we might need to know about these people. This technique wouldn’t translate well onto the screen, so we get some pre-flight sequences in Paris to establish the characters. It is 1936, and so several of our cast are attending the French Championships, watching von Cramm vs. Crawford, and then von Cramm vs. Fred Perry.


Although we don’t meet Jean Dupont and Daniel Clancy at this stage, these early scenes set up the love triangle between Lord Horbury, Cicely Horbury (who is a drinker, but not a cokehead in the episode) and Venetia Kerr. It also allows the ‘nice’ Norman Gale to accidentally meet Jane Grey without having the pair of them gambling the night away in Le Pinet, though Jane appears to prefer the company of the avuncular Belgian detective who talks her through the Surrealist art in a gallery. And who wouldn’t?

Because we see the pre-death activities of the main characters, rather than just having them narrated from the perspectives of the characters themselves, this set-up means that the programme-makers have to pull off a trick that’s had mixed results in the series as a whole: we have to see a character playing two parts, and it’s important we don’t see through her disguise (okay, maybe not as important as it is in some other stories, but still). In my opinion, they pull it off here to an extent. Jenny Downham’s first appearance on screen is as Madeleine, Lady Horbury’s maid. Madeleine is undoubtedly in frump-face – a technique used in other Christie adaptations – but she’s not as unbelievably made-up as, say, Mrs Middleton in 'The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge'. I think they just about get away with us not thinking of Madeleine when Poirot asks if he’s ever met Anne Giselle before (perhaps they were playing with the idea that nobody notices a maid particularly).

The other effect of the pre-flight scenes is that we get a sense of Madame Giselle (Eve Pearce) before she dies – in the novel, we don’t even know she exists until she is dead. Still, the adaptation doesn’t labour the point of Madame Giselle too much; she remains a shadowy figure, who seems to have a hold on Lady Horbury but is giving nothing away.


Reading other reviews of this episode, there seems to be a bit of disagreement among fans as to whether this is a faithful or good adaptation of the novel. Personally, I think it’s a good one. The plot is pretty much unchanged, and many of the minor alterations are due to the constraints of the format.

The biggest changes, really, are to do with characterization and the relationships between characters. Anne Giselle, for instance, is slightly revised to become a willing accomplice in her mother’s death (though not, obviously, an accomplice in the second murder). The inexplicably German-sounding Jean Dupont (Guy Manning) is a little more sinister – orchestrating a meeting with Jane Grey (Sarah Woodward) for the purpose of getting money out of Poirot – and the detective doesn’t do any match-making in the TV version. And Fournier (Richard Ireson) is much less competent here, playing sidekick to a rather bombastic Japp. (I find it ironic that Japp happily invades Fournier’s office and steals his desk, given how much he hated it when a foreign detective did that to him in 'The Adventure of the Cheap Flat'!)

One of the questions I’ve mused on with this episode is whether or not Lady Horbury is a more sympathetic character in the TV adaptation. In the book, she’s a rich, pretty drug addict (often a figure of pity in the Poirot novels – c.f. Freddie Rice and Coco Courtenay). Her husband clearly prefers – and is possibly having an affair with – Venetia Kerr, to whom he is engaged by the end of the book. Poirot, however, is having none of it: ‘[s]he is not the type I admire,’ he says.

In the TV version, Cathryn Harrison plays the actress-cum-peeress with a mixture of brash arrogance (she’s rude to waiters and stewards) and tragic vulnerability (she’s ignored by waiters and stewards). She’s no longer a cokehead, but rather someone who likes partying, while her husband (David Firth) is out being horsey with his mistress (Amanda Royle). Harrison’s portrayal makes us question, through small gestures and facial expressions, if Cicely is neglecting her wifely duties, or if she was never given a chance to fulfil them in the first place. I like this interpretation of the character.

Some final – rather random – observations about the episode…


1. Daniel Clancy’s character is a little exaggerated here. In the TV version (played by Roger Heathcott), he’s a rather distracted man who talks to his fictional creation. He tells Poirot that he can’t help solve the crime, as it’s only Wilbraham Rice who’s able to do solve mysteries. This underlines Clancy’s character as a proto-Ariadne, as Christie’s more developed character often mentions talking to her detective Sven. I like that the programme-makers kept the title of Clancy’s book, The Clue of the Scarlet Petal, to stay faithful to Christie’s version; however, in Christie's novel The Clue of the Scarlet Petal features death by South American arrow poison, but in the TV show Clancy is familiar with the poison but has never included it in a published book. (They take out some red herrings, they put some red herrings in.)

2. In this episode, the French characters actually speak French. Japp has to ask Fournier to speak English, and Poirot questions Giselle’s maid Elise (Gabrielle Lloyd) in French. The show won’t always be consistent with this, but at least here there’s no weird speaking-English-with-a-French-accent characters.

3. Nice return of one of Poirot’s classic accessories: the walking stick spyglass.


4. There’s a line in the adaptation – which is based on a line (earlier) in the novel – in which Poirot describes the disguised Gale as ‘wearing American spectacles’. This seems to have caused a bit of confusion with reviewers and commenters, so I looked into this. ‘American spectacles’ or ‘American-style spectacles’ are horn-rimmed glasses. Thanks to Vision Aids in America: A Social History of Eyewear and Sight Correction Since 1900 by Kerry Seagrave, I now know that horn-rimmed glasses were introduced to the UK in the early 1930s and popularized after King George gave them a whirl. Prior to that, they’d been associated entirely with Americans, and cartoonists and satirists had used them in images lampooning our transatlantic cousins. So there you go.

5. Okay. I shouldn’t care about this one. I shouldn’t have spent so much time looking into this one as I have done. I shouldn’t be so bothered about this. But I can’t stop pondering it, so I have to get it out. Maybe you can help me clear this up?

When Poirot goes to see Japp to discuss Lady Horbury’s connection to Madame Giselle, he walks in on his friend reading the Daily Mirror. We get a quick shot of the paper Japp is reading:


That’s a pretty believable copy of the Daily Mirror. The masthead, layout and fonts are from the 1930s. It’s a broadsheet (the Mirror didn’t go tabloid until 1937). The advert on the back page appears to be for Genaspirin, which was advertised in the top right-hand corner of the back page of the Mirror in the 30s. (You can see I’ve spent far too much time on this.)

A genuine Mirror front page from 1933 for comparison

But it’s ALL WRONG. And I’m so confused.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that headline definitely says ‘Big fight lasts 100 seconds’, doesn’t it? And if I squint, I’m pretty sure the subheading says ‘Record crowd for Petersen win’. (I’m not 100% sure of that one, but I think I’m right.)

But that’s ALL WRONG. That would mean that the front page of the paper is referring to the light-heavyweight fight between Jack Petersen and Jack Doyle at White City, which drew an audience of 30,000 and ended with Doyle being disqualified in less than two rounds (trust me, I went through all of Petersen’s fights till I found one that matched). But the Petersen vs. Doyle fight took place on 12th July 1933!

To make matters worse, I’ve had a look through issues of the Mirror from 1933 (because that’s the sort of madness I’m prone to), and there’s quite a bit of coverage of the controversial fight, the massive audience, and Doyle’s subsequent six-month ban – but I can’t find the ‘Big fight lasts 100 seconds’ front page in the online archive. (But it is clear that the masthead and the Genaspirin advert are from 1933 and weren’t used in 1936.) ARGH! PLEASE HELP ME!

My working theory is that this is a copy of the late edition of the 12th July paper, or an early edition from the 13th. The online archive has a different edition, and the controversial fight was either bumped to or bumped from the front page at a later stage.

But that means that Japp is definitely reading a paper from 1933, despite the tennis match we saw at the beginning setting the episode firmly in June 1936.

When Poirot notes Japp’s choice of reading material, he wryly points out that he’s reading an old paper. But then he simply points out that it’s a day old. What he should have said is that the paper is nearly three years old, and so it’s unlikely to have any bearing on the case.

Alternatively, I’ve read the headline wrong.

It doesn’t really matter, does it?

Anyway, all this talk of dentists and disguises is making me keen to move things along. On to the next episode: ‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’

Monday 26 June 2017

Poirot Project: The ABC Murders (review)


This post is part of my 2016 2016-17 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 Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’.

Due to the various commitments and stresses of life, I’ve had to take a little bit of a break from this project. It’s been over six months since my last Poirot Project post. But I’m pushing on now, and I’m totally sure I’ll get to Curtain by Christmas this year (haha!). In a way, it’s kinda appropriate that I’ve had a six-month break, as that fits quite nicely with The ABC Murders, which is where I’m picking up.

Beware: Here be Spoilers

The first episode of the fourth ‘series’ of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 5th January 1992. I’ve put inverted commas around ‘series’ here, as the 1992 episodes were a bit of a departure from the previous adaptations. There were only three stories shown this year, and each one was a feature-length adaptation of a novel, rather than the (at this point) standard hour-long short story episodes. It’s now usual to refer to these three episodes as the ‘fourth series’, and they were broadcast in a regular weekly slot that January, but I’m just not sure we really thought of them as a ‘series’ in 1992. In fact, I don’t think we thought about TV in terms of series in the same way at all back then. We had ‘serials’ (usually long-running dramas, often soap operas, where a continuous narrative developed episode-to-episode) and ‘series’ (often sit-coms and crime dramas, where a set of related episodes – most commonly six – were shown weekly, though the narrative wasn’t necessary continuous). But we also had a lot of one-off or self-contained programmes, where a single story was presented (either in one go or in instalments). The BBC’s adaptations of the Miss Marple stories were like this, as were The Ruth Rendell Mysteries. I don’t remember ever referring to these as a ‘series’ in the 90s – you’d just say ‘there’s a new Inspector Wexford on this week’, not ‘there’s a new series of Inspector Wexford starting on Sunday’.

But time – and technology – have changed all that. Once long-running shows were packaged up (retrospectively) for VHS, DVD and then streaming, they were divided up into series. So ‘The Dead of Jericho’, ‘The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn’ and ‘Service of All the Dead’ stopped being ‘three feature-length dramas shown in January 1987’ and started being ‘Series 1 of Inspector Morse’. And so ‘The ABC Murders’, ‘Death in the Clouds’ and ‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’ became ‘Series 4 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot’. On the whole, this makes sense: these particular episodes of Poirot, like the Inspector Morse adaptations, were shown weekly as a short series, and they were sandwiched between two clearly defined series of eight and ten episodes. But I might have to return to this niggly little point when we move on to the run of feature-length episodes, as they’ve been lumped together into ‘series’ almost at random, in order to better fit the boxset model of TV-watching that we’re all more comfortable with now (at least, that’s the only reason I can think of why ‘Appointment with Death’ is counted as part of ‘Series 11’ and ‘The Clocks’ as ‘Series 12’).

NB: There is no ‘Season 4’ of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, just as there is no ‘Season 4’ of Sherlock. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I start referring to UK TV shows in terms of ‘seasons’.

Right… that said…

‘The ABC Murders’ was based on the novel of the same name, which was published in early 1936. Just to satisfy the academic part of me, I should say that the edition I’m using here is the paperback edition published by HarperCollins in 1993. This is the first Poirot book I’ve had to go out and buy specifically for this blog project, as (weirdly) I discovered that I didn’t actually own a copy of The ABC Murders. Turns out my Agatha Christie collection is a little haphazard – I own four copies of Death on the Nile, but had to buy ABC.


Although The ABC Murders was published after Murder on the Links, it is narrated by Hastings. Like The Big Four and Peril at End House, it begins with Hastings making a trip back to England and reconnecting with his old friend. As the opening pages tell us, it’s now June 1935, and Hastings has come to England for six months to deal with certain business affairs. However, he soon forgets that was the reason for leaving his wife in Argentina:
‘I need hardly say that one of my first actions on reaching England was to look up my old friend, Hercule Poirot.’
Hastings discovers that some things have changed. Poirot has moved out of lodgings and into a brand new flat:
‘I found him installed in one of the newest type of service flats in London. I accused him (and he admitted the fact) of having chosen this particular building entirely on account of its strictly geometrical appearance and proportions.’
This flat, as we later discover, is in Whitehaven Mansions, EC1 (the postcode area covering City of London, Islington, Camden and Hackney). The TV show had this as Poirot’s permanent address throughout the episodes – though the style and size of the building’s interior changed as the programme progressed – but Christie only moved her Poirot into this ‘newest type of service flat’ in 1935. The 1930s saw a number of new art-deco constructions in central London that might have inspired Christie’s description of a building with ‘strictly geometrical appearance and proportions’ – including Guy Morgan and Partners’ Florin Court, EC1, which was being constructed as she was writing The ABC Murders and which, of course, was used by LWT as the TV version of Whitehaven Mansions.


While Poirot’s residence has changed, the man himself remains curiously unaltered. Hastings is initially baffled by this, exclaiming that his friend looks ‘hardly a day older than when I had last seen him’. This feels, at first, like Christie having a little joke at her famous creation’s longevity. After all, given that Poirot had a distinguished career in the Belgian police force before The Mysterious Affair at Styles (set c.1916), he has to be in his 60s by now – and yet, he seems no different to when he made his first appearance. But it turns out this isn’t the case. In fact, Hastings’s comment on Poirot’s unchanged appearance kicks off a weird little hair obsession that runs throughout the story.

Hastings notes that Poirot has ‘fewer grey hairs than when I saw you last’, which makes his friend beam with pride and reveal a little secret:
‘REVIVIT – To bring back the natural tone of the hair. Revivit is NOT a dye. In five shades, Ash, Chestnut, Titian, Brown, Black.’
After this little exchange, Poirot reveals to Hastings that he has received an anonymous letter (signed only ‘A.B.C.’) suggesting that a crime will take place in Andover on the 21st of the month. Poirot believes that the note should be taken seriously, and so the two men head over to visit another old friend and begin their new adventure.

Inspector Japp has previously dismissed the anonymous letter, but he seems pleased enough to see his old sleuthing buddies back together again. He gives Hastings a ‘hearty welcome’, but this camaraderie is short-lived. Never mind the anonymous note, we’re back to hair again. Japp’s enthusiastic surprise at seeing Hastings reveals something of a raw nerve in our narrator:
‘Quite like old days seeing you here with Monsieur Poirot. You’re looking well, too. Just a little bit thin on top, eh? Well, that’s what we’re all coming to. I’m the same.’
This does not go down well. Hastings winces, as he believed the ‘careful way’ he brushes his hair ‘across the top of [his] head’ made its thinness ‘unnoticeable’. A couple of pages later, he’s still not let it drop. When Poirot jokes that Japp ‘does not change much’, Hastings can’t resist making a dig:
‘“He looks much older,” I said. “Getting as grey as a badger,” I added vindictively.’
Poirot – tactful as ever – realizes that Hastings is still smarting after Japp’s jape, and suggests that Hastings could buy a toupee. This also does not go down well. Hastings has a massive rant, ‘roaring’ about Poirot’s ‘confounded hairdresser’ and the fact that Japp ‘always was an offensive kind of devil’, and blaming his hair loss on the ‘hot summers’ in Argentina. He eventually recovers his temper and admits he is a bit touchy about his hair, but this doesn’t stop him making several sly digs about other characters’ hair later in the book (he comments on Poirot’s moustaches drooping in the heat, and bitchily notes that Megan Barnard’s hair must have recently been permed, as ‘it stood out from her head in a mass of rather frizzy curls’). Let it go, Hastings, let it go.

Anyway… that anonymous letter… obviously, The ABC Murders isn’t really a book devoted to Hastings’s insecurities about his bald patch. It’s about a serial killer. The letter Poirot receives is only the beginning of the case. As forewarned, there is a murder in Andover (Mrs Alice Ascher), and a copy of the ABC railway guide is left near the body. Shortly afterwards, Poirot receives a letter warning that the next murder will take place in Bexhill-on-Sea.


This type of crime is a complete departure for our dynamic duo. As Hastings himself says:
‘Do you know, this is the first crime of this kind that you and I have worked on together? All our murders have been – well, private murders, so to speak.’
When the murder of Carmichael Clarke at Churston follows Betty Barnard in Bexhill, the pattern of the killings is clear, and Poirot has to face the fact that he is well and truly out of his comfort zone. The victims are unrelated, and appear to have been chosen simply for their initials. The main clue – the ABC guide left at the site of each murder – is more a ‘calling card’ than a clue. Poirot’s investigation has to unfold in quite a different way than is usual, with lengthy ‘conferences’ (with police experts and psychologists) replacing the more common one-to-one interviews. There are discourses on the nature of serial killing, expositions on the motivations of anonymous letter writers, and discussions of ‘deadly mania’ and varying types of ‘insanity’.

And it isn’t just the investigation that’s different. The narrative itself is different. Although Hastings is our narrator, and he pretty much carries out this role as he always did, he’s not the only voice we hear. Interspersed with the first-person reportage of our follicly-challenged friend are short chapters titled ‘Not from Captain Hastings’s Personal Narrative’, which are written in third person and describe the movements of a character named Alexander Bonaparte Cust. Poirot (and the rest of the gang) have no knowledge of Cust’s existence until the end of Chapter 27, and even then they only have a signature (which they misread as A.B. Case or Cash).

So The ABC Murders offers the possibility of a technique that Christie very rarely uses in her detective fiction – dramatic irony. The readers are aware of a character and a set of actions that are explicitly not known to the detective (or the narrator). From Chapter 2 onwards, we know that there is a man who has the initials A.B.C., and we know he has both a railway guide and a list of names that he’s checking off methodically. The mystery is not whodunit, but (as all those confabs about psychology and motive reminds us) whydunit. What a dramatic departure for Poirot and Hastings! No domestic intrigues or jealous family members, no murderers hiding their true nature under a façade of jovial compliance! Not a country house or an inheritance to be seen!

LOL. This is Agatha Christie we’re talking about.

The ABC Murders is an absolute gem of a bastard of a book. Of course there’s no dramatic irony. Of course the reader doesn’t know the murderer’s name before Poirot does. Of course the question is whodunit (with the ‘why’ turning out to be the most mundane of all Christie’s stockpile of motives). As with a lot of Christie’s ‘trick’ books, rereading this book is a lot of fun, as you spot all the ingredients that you weren’t supposed to notice the first time round. Christie is in cahoots with the murderer, forcing us to investigate the wrong sort of crime, when the real clues were under our nose all along.

Before I move on to the adaptation, just a couple of other things I like about Christie’s novel (aside from the fact that Hastings is back! and this time he’s paranoid about his hair!)

A few of the Poirot stories refer back to earlier stories (in more or less spoiler-y ways, depending which one you’re reading). The ABC Murders pulls off the interesting trick of referring to stories that have yet to be published (or even written). In Chapter 3, Poirot outlines his ‘ideal’ murder case:
‘“Supposing,” murmured Poirot, “that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four, while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?”’
Hastings isn’t convinced.
‘“Well,” I said. “I can’t see any excitement in that!”’
If Hastings isn’t enthused by this teaser for Cards on the Table (which was published in November 1936, just ten months after The ABC Murders), Japp has a bit more fun coming up with future plotlines for the detective:
‘“I shouldn’t wonder if you ended by detecting your own death,” said Japp, laughing heartily. “That’s an idea, that is. Ought to be put in a book.” “It will be Hastings who will have to do that,” said Poirot, twinkling[.]’
Now. There’s an idea.

In some previous posts, I’ve had a bit of a muse over Hastings’s financial situation, and the reason why he spent so much of the 20s apparently mooching off Poirot. A while ago I suggested that Hastings might be upper middle class, but without any real family money or property. His lack of aptitude or enthusiasm for a career may have left him cash-strapped and in need of free board with his illustrious associate. It seems in The A.B.C. Murders that Hastings is still trying to make a go of things in South America, though his ranch has been struggling due to the ‘world depression’. (That he’s left his wife to manage things for six months on her own isn’t too much of a surprise – after all, Poirot slyly suggested that in Peril at End House that Mrs Hastings is the real business brain in that family.) As I’ve said, we don’t learn very much about Hastings’s background in the Poirot stories, though we can deduce certain things from his character. There is a little nugget in The A.B.C. Murders though – a blink and you’ll miss it moment that confirms my suspicions about Hastings’s class and status.

Towards the end of the novel – just before Poirot meets Cust for the first time – he and Hastings overhear some children singing a song about catching a fox. Poirot comments that fox-hunting is a ‘strange sport’. Hastings is quick to defend the practice, attempting to claim that it isn’t really as cruel as it sounds. So far, so upper-crust English gent. But then, when Poirot asks if people really hunt foxes in England, his friend says: ‘I don’t. I’ve never been able to afford to hunt.’ Poor old Hastings – follicly and fiscally challenged as ever.

One final little detail that always makes me giggle before I move on (though it’s probably just me): after Poirot receives the letter warning them about Bexhill, the Chief Constable of Sussex (one of the many people drawn into the investigation) demands that the local constabulary keep a watch on any small shopkeepers with a ‘B’ initial, and also that they keep tabs on all strangers arriving in Bexhill. The local superintendent immediately objects:
‘With the schools breaking up and the holidays beginning? People are fairly flooding into the place this week.’
Nous aurons besoin d’un bateau plus gros, mon ami.


So on to the TV adaptation… ‘The A.B.C Murders’ was written by Clive Exton and directed by Andrew Grieve. With that team at the helm, it probably goes without saying that it’s a pretty faithful adaptation. All of the key elements of the story are included, and the changes that are made are necessary to fit the format (and chronology) of the TV series as a whole.

Just as in Christie’s book, we begin with Hastings arriving back in England after a period of absence. However, as we’ve not reached Murder on the Links yet, Hastings hasn’t actually moved to Argentina. Instead, he’s been on holiday to South America for six months. His old friend picks him up at the station, and the two have a warm reunion. Hastings is meant to be staying at a hotel, but Poirot won’t hear of it:
‘There is no hotel, mon ami. Until you regain your apartment, you stay with Poirot!’
This neat little switch allows for some of the dynamics of Christie’s novel to be replicated in the adaptation (despite the fact that TV Hastings hasn’t yet left home for good). It means that Japp can beam with pleasure at being reacquainted with Hastings – and also that he can comment on his thinning hair without it seeming out of place. Part of this exchange is retained from the source material, though the TV-Hastings lets it drop a lot quicker than his literary counterpart, but the earlier reference to Poirot dyeing his hair is removed (presumably because his pride in doing this wouldn’t fit with the hint dropped in the adaptation of ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’ that Poirot is surreptitiously tinting his barnet).

What does have to be dropped, though, is the reference to Poirot having moved to a new flat. Obviously, within the TV series, he hasn’t moved at all, and so they return to a Whitehaven Mansions that is familiar from previous adventures. Similarly, the reference to Poirot having previously retired to grow vegetable marrows is removed, as we’ve not got to that yet in the TV series. Oddly, one of the more domestic scenes between Hastings and Poirot is also removed (despite the fact that this would have fitted in well with the on-screen version of their relationship). In Christie’s novel, after the misdirected Churston letter arrives, Hastings decides there’s no time to waste, and so bursts into Poirot’s bedroom and starts packing his friend’s clothes into a suitcase. To be fair, Hastings is only following suit here – after the Bexhill murder, Hastings wakes up to discover his friend standing over him, offering to bring him a cup of coffee.

The adaptation seems a bit coy about showing Hastings and Poirot popping in and out of each other’s bedrooms, folding each other’s clothes and bringing each other coffee in bed. So we lose the lovely ‘regard what you have done to my pyjamas’ line from Christie’s novel. Instead, it’s replaced by a similarly domestic (but less boudoir) scene of domestic harmony, in which the two friends do the dishes together while discussing the case.


The investigation is also played out on similar lines to that in Christie’s original novel, but with some changes made here and there to keep the episode to time. The murders and anonymous letters follow the same pattern as in the book, and the ‘Legion’ of interested parties formed to assist Poirot is retained, though it meets for the first time with much less preamble than in the novel. Miss Lemon is sadly not present in this episode, but she was also absent from Christie’s novel, despite having made her debut appearance as Poirot’s secretary the previous year (George is also missing from Christie’s novel, by the way – it’s almost as though these surrogate Watsons are just sent away the second Hastings sets foot in England).


Some things are cut from the adaptation. Many of the investigators are cut, with their roles being conflated into the all-purpose Japp (a common occurrence in the early episodes of the series). A lot of the early interviews, particularly those conducted in Andover, are also cut, as are the lengthy conferences on the nature of serial killers and mania. Presumably the programme-makers thought they were on safe ground excising most of the explanations of ‘the “chain” or “series” type of murder’ in 1992. The psychology of serial killers might have been brand-new when Christie was writing her novel (the German term Serienmörder was coined in 1930), but it needed little exposition in the early 90s. (First principles, Clarice. What does he do, this man you seek?)

However, the episode is very clear on when it is set (August 1936, which doesn’t really give Hastings time to have had a six-month holiday since their last case, so it’s a good thing I’ve given up on any sort of coherent timeline), so the programme-makers needed to keep some sense of the ‘newness’ of this type of murder investigation. To keep things concise, they give a flavour of the more academic discussions of A.B.C.’s crimes through a number of shots of newspaper stories and headlines.


Despite the condensed investigation and the chastened Poirot/Hastings relationship, the episode does a good job in capturing the flavour of Christie’s novel. There are trains everywhere, and much of the ‘action’ consists of the gang running back and forth to catch trains to other destinations. There are plenty of fab shots of steam trains hurrying across the countryside, and a number of head-to-heads with Poirot and Hastings discussing the case in various train carriages.


In addition to this, an attempt is made to keep the feel of Christie’s narration style. On the whole, the episode follows the dynamic duo’s perspective, just as the book was told through Hastings’s first-person reportage. However, interspersed throughout are little scenes of the man we’ll come to know as Cust going about his daily business in a more and more suspicious way. This is a nice touch, and a good way of remaining faithful to Christie’s novel, but it does lead to a slightly annoying anachronism early on. When we first see Cust, he is in the cinema. The man on the screen exclaims:
‘That’s where you’re wrong. I am the Dorset murderer! I killed Lily James, and all the others, and now I am going to kill you!’
Cust is enraptured by this, his excited face picked out in the flickering glow of the screen, while the rest of the audience remain obscured by shadows. The snatch of dialogue we’re given allows us (perhaps) to spot that the film is Black Limelight, which is about a series of random murders carried out by a madman and which spark a sensationalist press frenzy. It’s a very apt film to use in this first introduction to Cust, and it plays along with Christie’s game. But it came out in 1939. Sigh.

(We see Cust in the cinema again towards the end of the episode. This time he’s watching Number 17, which came out in 1932. I can only assume from this that the programme-makers wanted to suggest that Doncaster was somewhat behind the times.)

What about Cust though?


The casting in this episode has its ups and downs. But Donald Sumpter’s portrayal of Alexander Bonaparte Cust is just perfect. He is exactly the character I imagined when I read the book. In particular, Sumpter manages to capture the darkness of the character – Cust is a man who, unusually for Christie’s fiction, is utterly broken by his experiences in WWI. The scene in which Cust has a conversation with a younger man about the Churston murder is retained (though it’s conducted in a library, rather than in a public gardens, in the TV episode), and it conveys perfectly the sense of a man mentally unravelling:
‘“Sorry, sir, I expect you were in the war.”
“I was,” said Mr Cust. “It – it – unsettled me. My head’s never been right since. It aches, you know. Aches terribly.”’
Other casting is also good. Pippa Guard makes a good Megan Barnard (though she’s a tad more forceful than her literary counterpart), and Nicholas Farrell (in his first of two Poirot appearances – he’ll be back for another train-based adventure in The Mystery of the Blue Train) is a good choice for poor old Donald Fraser.

Where the casting falls down, though, is with Franklin Clarke (played by Donald Douglas). Christie’s Franklin was ‘a big fair-haired man with a sunburnt face’. When everything’s out in the open, Poirot describes ‘[t]he daring adventurous character, the roving life […] [t]he attractive free and easy manner – nothing easier for him than to pick up a girl in a café’. This really doesn’t fit with the character as portrayed by Douglas, who ditches ‘free and easy’ for ‘uptight and serious’. Annoyingly, the episode actually draws attention to this problem. After Cust’s arrest, Poirot throws a question over his guilt by asking whether or not Cust would have been able to flirt with Betty Barnard and persuade her to remove her own belt:
‘Can you imagine Monsieur Cust, as you English say, getting off with a pretty young girl?’
No we can’t. But neither can we imagine the staid old Franklin Clarke out on the pull on Bexhill beach.

These niggles aside, it’s still a great episode and a good adaptation of a very enjoyable book. I feel I may have waffled on far too much about this one (that’s what comes of taking such a long break from writing about Poirot), so I’ll end (as I often do) with some of the little details that made me smile.

Of course, I have to mentioned Hastings’s cayman.


Hastings has brought this ugly-looking specimen, which he calls Cedric, back from Venezuela as a gift for Poirot. There’s quite the story behind it as well – but Poirot and Japp seem a wee bit reluctant to hear it. Poirot is also rather unsettled to discover that he is expected to display Cedric in the middle of the ‘geometrical appearance and proportions’ of his cherished apartment.

For some people – like my husband Rob, who was watching this episode for the first time – it’s the resolution of the running Cedric joke that gets the biggest laugh. For me, though, it’s the moment when Poirot complains about the cayman’s smell and Hastings proudly announces that he’s doused it in some cologne he found in the bathroom. Poirot’s face is the perfect picture.

Cedric aside, my other favourite little snippet comes near the beginning of the episode. After Poirot and Hastings have their little reunion, we cut to Japp hard at work in his office. Except he’s not really – he’s taking down a shopping list being dictated over the phone by his wife, Emily. And he’s not happy about being asked to keep sausages in his desk drawer.


Good old Mrs Japp. If Mrs Columbo could get her own show, I have no idea why Emily Japp Investigates was never made.

And on that note, I really do think it’s time to move on. Two more episodes to get my teeth into for this ‘series’. Get my teeth into… do you get it? Well, you will do shortly.

Next up: ‘Death in the Clouds’