Cat Among the Pigeons: review

Cat Among the Pigeons was one of the first detective stories that I read. I liked it a lot the first time round, but later I realised that it was a long way short of Dame Agatha at her best. The plot is rather cluttered, and Mark Gatiss, who wrote the screenplay for Agatha Christie’s Poirot, addressed that by making a number of pretty radical changes to the story. By and large, however, they worked, and the result was very watchable.

One change sees Poirot in at Meadowbank School from the outset. The soon-to-retire head teacher (a suitably imperious Harriet Walter) has invited him to make a speech, but then asks him to stay on at the school to assess the quality of the potential candidates to succeed her. Not very likely, but a device to allow Poirot to dominate proceedings from start to finish, and in story-telling terms, this was a good idea.

Mrs Upjohn (played by Pippa Haywood, who I used to like in The Brittas Empire, and who seems destined to be typecast as a scatty woman) recognises someone at the school who is supposed to have died years ago – but nobody follows up on this tantalising remark, and she promptly takes herself off to Anatolia. A sequence of murders and other crimes duly ensue.

The cast includes Claire Skinner (best known as the harassed mum in Outnumbered), but inevitably David Suchet turns in the most memorable performance, somehow convincing us that Poirot would be completely at ease in the (to him) wholly alien surroundings of Meadowbank. Overall, I’d say this is one of those Poirots where the television version is on a par with the book which sourced it.

Gaudy Night

I made a mistake with Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Gaudy Night. Having devoured, and enjoyed hugely, most of her output, I read it in 1970 at the age of 14. At this point, I'd never once visited Oxford (and certainly I'd never dreamed that one day I’d be a student at Lord Peter's old college, or be invited to tea at Somerville, Sayers' college, on which the fictional Shrewsbury College was based.)

The result was that I was horribly disappointed – the youthful Martin Edwards really didn’t fit the profile of the sort of reader who would get something out of a long story, set in an all-women’s college, that doesn’t even include a decent murder mystery. Even after I fell in love with Oxford, and even though I remain a fairly ardent Sayers fan, I never broached Gaudy Night again.

I felt it was time to give it another chance, but I decided to wimp out by watching the 1987 tv adaptation by Philip Broadley (a prolific and talented writer of mystery screenplays, who sadly died a few weeks ago.) It was part of the series featuring Edward Petherbridge as Wimsey and Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane – casting choices made in Heaven, I think.

I enjoyed the adaptation much more than the book, and appreciated the thinking behind the story in a way I failed to do as a teenager. But I remain to be convinced that Gaudy Night is a masterpiece of detective fiction (a view that a number of good judges hold.) Along with Five Red Herrings and Busman’s Honeymoon, it ranks as the type of Sayers ‘mystery’ that simply doesn’t excite my interest because the good stuff is buried with too much long-winded material that isn’t necessary for the story.

It wasn’t the fault of the excellent cast, or of Broadley, who did his best to jazz things up, but still couldn’t avoid the need to pad the story out. My own feeling is that, if anyone tries to adapt Gaudy Night in future, the best plan would be to make fairly radical changes to the action of the plot, while trying to remain faithful to some of the underlying themes – and to make it short and sharp.