“People don’t like their police being made to look like fools,” he says. He tells Poirot that Japp was removed from the force when they couldn’t find any record of Poirot being a detective in Belgium as he claimed. An Inspector Crome has replaced the retired – and by the end of the first act, late – Inspector Japp (death by natural causes, I should note). The police and public now hold Poirot in contempt. He is not prim but careful, watchful – of others and perhaps even himself, as although Poirot’s glory days have passed (he even dyes his facial hair), the latent violence in this Malkovich performance is as potent as ever. But he is quite magnificent as a suffering Hercule, beset by flashbacks to what seems to be his younger self during the invasion of Belgium and letters from someone signing himself “ABC” and promising mayhem. Of course there has been much disapproving muttering, especially in the village of Much Muttering which I think is where most of the Marple murders take place. This year, an extra-special treasure lies inside, in the form of John Malkovich as Poirot. It is Christmas, after all.Īs it has been for the last few yuletides, this new adaptation has been gifted us by Sarah Phelps (in a few more years I’m going to be able to relax and consider it an unbreakable BBC tradition). For last night’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 13th Poirot novel, The ABC Murders, was for the rest of us for those who like their Christie underbelly-up and a nail raked down its pale, fetid flesh. Those of you who side with him – who hunt out repeats of The Murder Next to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Fireguard or The Mystery of the Missing Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph – should look away now. My husband, by way of relations-severing contrast, loves it for precisely this. The determined retention of the worst aspect of Christie – the constant feeling of cipher-characters being moved into place by an all-knowing hand, like chess pieces with Marcel waves and costume jewellery.
I did understand that it was A Quality Affair but I just couldn’t bear it. Nor – for lo, these last five years since the series ended – has anyone on TV dared to try. From the moment he smoothed down his moustache and sallied primly forth as the Belgian detective in 1989 in the first of what would become 70 episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, to devote himself to the solving of mysteries in Art Deco properties across the land, he simply was Hercule. And by Poirot I mean the bespoke-padded, neatly-pomaded form of David Suchet, who dominated the Christie cultural landscape for a quarter of a century.
M y husband and I married across many divides – class, political, minimal personal hygiene levels – but nothing separates us so firmly as our attitudes to Poirot.
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