Agatha Christie's Poirot - Hallowe'en Party

Hallowe’en Party is the latest instalment of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, due to be shown in the UK at 8 p.m. tonight, and as I’ll be away, I’ll be setting my recorder with a view to doing a review soon. For although the original book is one of Agatha’s least impressive, in my opinion, I am told by John Curran that the TV adaptation is excellent. And John, as the author of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, is a very good judge of these matters.

This brings me to the question of whether TV adaptations can actually improve on the original book. The acting is crucial, of course, and David Suchet is always good value as Poirot. Much also depends on the quality of the screenplay, and Hallowe’en Party is written by Mark Gatiss, whose many credits include Sherlock and Doctor Who, as well as previous Christie stories. He’s a talented writer, to put it mildly, and more respectful, I think, of the source material than some other TV writers. But with Hallowe’en Party, the challenge unquestionably is to improve on the original, since Christie was nearing the end of her life when she wrote it, and I recall my disappointment as a teenager when I read the first edition. It simply wasn’t a good mystery.

Of course, only a major writer is ever likely to have his or her unsuccessful books adapted for TV. With Christie, the name is a brand, an assurance of enjoyable mystification, and such a strong brand that the quality of the original isn’t the key issue. Several of her masterpieces have been butchered by others over the years (The Sittaford Mystery was one of the most dismal recent examples) and so it will be a pleasing irony if Hallowe’en Party proves to be a triumph.

Good as Colin Dexter’s books were, I think the TV versions did improve upon them, and the same is true of some of the later and weaker Sherlock Holmes stories. On the other hand, the consensus seems to be that the first DCI Banks show did not live up to the standard of the books, while Tim Heald, Liza Cody, Marjorie Eccles and Frances Fyfield were not especially well served by the TV versions of their books. It’s all the luck of draw, I guess.

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.