Hercule Poirot 100 Years (1916 - 2016)

by Mark Place

  All this helps to make the film enjoyable enough in and of itself. And yet, as an adaptation of one of Christie’s most effective short stories, I can’t help but find it frustrating. Christie’s story has the wonderful central conceit of the murder suggested by a suicide, carried out as a mock-suicide and then made to look like natural causes. Add to that the psychoanalytic way in which the murder is suggested and reconstructed through a carefully deduced association of ideas and you have a whole host of interesting features – all of which are pointedly ignored in David Renwick’s adaptation!

  Now, obviously, the plot needs to be expanded to fit the fifty minutes of screen time, but the fact that Renwick has ditched all of the novel’s subtleties in favour of a whole host of brash new images and clues (broken eggs, a full-blown haunting, a mysterious painting and a second murder) whilst only retaining the culminating ghost scene, the original motive and the central love triangle from the original plot, does rather imply that it is only the ghost scene that interested him. It’s as if the richness of the story, the chilling effectiveness of the human element in the murder, totally escapes him and he focuses instead on the cheap thrills of the ‘spook story’, choosing to make that the basis of the episode and not the psychological complexity of the way in which the murder was suggested. So, for example, the rook rifle is still the murder weapon, but for the purely technical reason that it leaves a small bullet wound. In the novel, the rook rifle is also significant because it leads directly to the utterly horrible way in which the murder is committed as Mrs Maltravers tricks her husband into showing her how one might use it to commit suicide. One would have thought this would have made for compelling and suspenseful drama – but no. In this version she just wanders up and shoots him. Although, in fairness to Renny Rye, the direction restores some of the original horror to the scene by focusing on the eyes of the victim and of the killer – emphasising horrified pleading in the former and ruthless determination in the latter.

  And these new additions lead to some worrying internal inconsistencies. Why, having played her own game of fake haunting for so long, would Mrs Maltravers now break down at the sight of her dead husband walking towards her across the lawn? Surely this version of the character, utterly sceptical and obviously intuitive in her understanding of people’s susceptibility insofar as ghosts are concerned, would suspect immediately that a trick was being played? In the short story, the ghost scene comes out of the blue, so you can see why Mrs Maltravers, already wound up from having killed her husband, would be in such a state – plus it makes thematic sense as a figurative ‘talking cure’, which continues the psychoanalytic strand of the narrative. Here it’s just a shallow dramatic device that works only on the most superficial level, and which fails to live up to the psychological complexity of the original story – and when you’re chastising someone for failing to live up to the psychological complexity of an Agatha Christie short story you know they’re in trouble! And speaking of psychological realism, are we really supposed to believe that Poirot would have mistaken Naughton’s letter for an account of a real murder – especially when Naughton says in the letter that he’s talking about a book?

  Another frustrating inconsistency is the way in which the murder weapon is suggested by a newspaper report about the suicide of a farmer, rather than by a story told by Black at dinner. This appears to be a direct adaptation of the suggestion idea in the original story. But it’s a bungled one. Again, Renwick clearly doesn’t understand the sheer finesse of the suggestion in Christie’s story, where the recounting of the suicide anecdote leads the killer to stage a suicide for, we must assume, purely arbitrary and sadistic reasons (since she then decides to pass off the ‘suicide’ as natural causes). That Renwick misunderstands the significance of this comes from his having Poirot state that Mrs Maltravers killed her husband in ‘exactly the same way’ as in the newspaper report. Well, she does in the original story, but in the absence of the restaged suicide this is not the case in his script. One can only assume, then, that Renwick saw the simple fact of the murder weapon as being the significant plot point here – and not the more subtle idea of the sadistically restaged suicide. All of which results in a superficially entertaining episode, but one which is nowhere near as unnerving or satisfying as the story it’s based on.

  The final image of both versions sums up, for me, the disappointing contrast between the superficial, anodyne cosiness of the TV adpatation and the chillingly open-ended literary original. In the former, we end with Poirot at the local waxworks museum (apparently every small northern town should have one) trying to get his friends to admire the wax model of himself prominently on display – only to have them pull his leg and comment instead on the model of Charlie Chaplin nearby. It ends, in short, on a note of reassuring jocularity – the murder is explained, the motive detected, prosaically understood and the killer jailed; normal life is resumed, its demons exorcised and we can enjoy a good joke among friends. The original short story ends differently. Yes, the killer has been brought to justice, but the final image of a woman who feels compelled not just to kill her husband, but to do it in such a psychologically disturbing and arbitrary way (tricking him into putting the barrel of the gun into his own mouth, for goodness’ sake) is altogether more unnerving – it is the revelation of this final chilling detail that forms the story’s climax. Here, the bringing of the perpetrator to justice is no reassurance – it isn’t even, one feels, the point. In psychological, as in structural terms, this resolution is no resolution at all and therefore no catharsis. We are simply not allowed, as we are in the TV version, to pretend that the ‘normality’ to which life has now returned is somehow suddenly rid of such horrors. Instead, it emphasises that these still lurk in the dark unconscious beneath the surface of the everyday. Cosy it most certainly is not.

  The Tragedy Of Marsdon Manor (Book)

  This short story was first published in The Sketch on 18 April 1923 (Issue 1577) and was one of the ten stories from that series to be collected in Poirot Investigates the following year. The tale begins with Poirot being engaged by an insurance company whose client has died of internal hemorrhage. At first, he is happy to accept the verdict, but his suspicions are aroused when he discovers that the dead man was found with a rook rifle at his side. Was it suicide? Or murder? A visit to the (frankly rather rubbish) local doctor suggests why such an investigation might prove necessary. Poirot reminds the defensive doctor that ‘in the case of a recent murder, the doctor first gave a verdict of heart failure – altering it when the local constable pointed out that there was a bullet wound through the head!’ But even with this in mind, the doctor is ‘apoplectic’ at the merest suggestion of an autopsy, citing a rather naïve determination to take the word of the dead man’s nearest relatives on trust: ‘in my profession we see no need to distress unduly the relatives of a dead patient’. A fine sentiment, but a rather worrying one coming from a doctor who has failed to notice that his ‘patient’ has been shot through the head! Needless to say, the doctor is absolutely and completely wrong on this occasion (as, rather alarmingly, one suspects he may have been on others).

  I’ve always had a great fondness for this story. In fact, I think that, with the addition of a few additional subplots and red herrings, the central puzzle is clever and chilling enough to have stretched to a full-length novel. What most fascinates me about the tale is Christie’s unusually perceptive use of psychoanalysis in Poirot’s questioning of Colonel Black: Poirot was silent for a moment, then he said gently: ‘with your permission, I should like to try a little experiment. You have told us all that your conscious self knows, I want now to question your subconscious self.’ ‘Psycho-analysis, what?’ said Black, with visible alarm.

  Poirot’s experiment involves asking Black to state the very first word that comes to mind in response to a given word uttered by Poirot (e.g. ‘day’ evokes the response ‘night’ and so forth). Poirot is able to piece together the entire solution to the case from the answers
dredged up from Black’s unconscious mind, very much in the manner of a Freudian talking cure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his insistence on the psychology of crime, Poirot appears to be totally familiar with the techniques involved, explaining to Hastings like an old hand: ‘To begin with, Black answered well within the normal time limit, with no pauses, so we can take it that he himself has no guilty knowledge to conceal.’ Moreover, the entire solution turns out to hinge on a tragic flow of associated ideas stemming from an anecdote told by Black at dinner the night before Maltravers’s death. In fact, the tale almost single-handedly proves that Christie’s use of ‘psychology’ as the corner-stone of Poirot’s method doesn’t (as some critics have argued) constitute a dismissal of Freud’s ideas or the idea of the unconscious, with which she is obviously acquainted. One thing I’d add to my previous comments on the issue though is that I’m willing to concede that Christie does sometimes seem to confuse psychiatry or psychoanalysis with psychology more generally understood (i.e. the ‘psychology’ of human nature). Then again, it might be that this device (a detective who uses explicitly psychiatric techniques to solve crime) would get old very quickly, hence the relative lack of applied psychoanalysis in her stories.

  Here though there is no such confusion and the novelty of the technique makes it seem clever and fresh. Beyond its efficacy as a tool for detection, however, Christie’s story also trades on the popular image of psychoanalysis as something to be viewed, if not with scepticism, then certainly with unease. Black’s initial ‘alarm’ at Poirot’s mention of the topic is an example of this – but at the same time, his easy (if horrified and, indeed, mistaken) acceptance of Poirot’s conclusions also illustrates the way that a popular knowledge of psychoanalysis was widespread in the collective early twentieth-century consciousness: ‘You mean my story suggested to him – oh, but that is awful!’

  What really impresses me about this story, however, is the actual solution to the crime – that Black’s widow has tricked him into showing her how one might go about committing suicide with a rook rifle then, when he’s put the gun into position, calmly pulls the trigger herself. It’s a chilling image and a splendidly unsettling way to end the tale: ‘And then – and then, Hastings – she pulls it!’ Along with the much later Endless Night, it’s one of Christie’s nastiest and most unpleasant solutions and it still sends a shiver up my spine.

  ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’ (1990) (TV)

  Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Series 2, Episode 9

  Screenplay by Clive Exton, Directed by Richard Spence 50 mins

  Dramatised by Clive Exton, the head writer and ‘script consultant’ on the early series of Poirot, this adaptation is a very typical episode of the early years of the series. As usual, Inspector Japp and Miss Lemon are drafted into proceedings despite not appearing in the source material, while new subplots and action sequences open out the story and provide added interest to sustain the fifty-minute running time. Hence, in this adaptation, Gregory Rolfe is not just a filmstar, but an international diamond smuggler, in league with the villainous Mr Van Braks (an original character not present in the short story). This makes perfect sense as an expansion of the basic plot, but also provides welcome comic relief in a running gag involving Japp’s rather rubbish surveillance of the criminal. Highlights of this narrative strand including Japp being discovered in a bush outside Yardley Chase and suspected of the diamond theft (echoing the suspicious reception that meets Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone). Also amusing is the scene near the episode’s climax where Japp ends up effectively arresting Van Braks for carrying his own money and Rolfe for being in possession of a paste diamond. Further comic relief is had via the simple device of making Marie Marvell a Belgian film star, with much disbelief from Hastings and Japp as to the existence of such a species (‘You’re pulling my leg!’ quips Japp on hearing the news and Philip Jackson milks the line for every drop of comic potential) .

  Poirot’s crush on his screen idol is also very sweet, and leads to a really rather heartbreaking climax, where Poirot has to inform Marie that her husband has absconded after deceiving her for years. The scene is played in French with no subtitles and the look on David Suchet’s face when Marie says that she has been living in a dream, but that all is finished now, is heartbreaking. What’s lovely about this scene is the way the viewer ends up pitying not only Marie, but also Poirot himself.

  Without words David Suchet easily conveys Poirot’s intense desire to comfort Marie, the gentlemanly reserve and professionalism that stops him from doing so, and the pain that this causes him. It foreshadows the more persistent reminders later in the series that Poirot is a man full of romance whose romantic liaisons fail because of the very discretion that makes him so in-demand as a detective. It’s as if he wants to involve himself romantically with Marie, but doesn’t quite know how to get beyond the formality of the ‘order and method’ that governs his life and which transforms everything into a series of facts to be sorted out. Indeed, when Marie is about to call on him at the opening of the episode, Poirot arranges the table symmetrically because ‘Marie Marvell is a great artiste’. This is very like Poirot, of course, but it’s also telling that his idea of ‘art’ is one of supreme order and formal brilliance.

  This is in direct contrast to Hastings, of course. In the scene between Hastings and Lady Yardley in the short story, events are narrated through Hastings’s eyes. Here, however, we see it as it actually is – from outside, as it were. Hugh Fraser plays it very amusingly (I particularly like the smug way he enunciates ‘Ice. Cold. Logic.’), impersonating Sherlock Holmes, adopting a suave manner and a comically deep voice. Hastings’s sheepish look when he discovers he gave Lady Yardley the perfect excuse not to tell them the truth is also brilliant: ‘Well I… er… assumed.’ This essentially sums up Hastings’s role in the plot – he is there to assume the wrong idea, to get the wrong impression and fall directly into the guilty party’s trap.

  Yet, for all the scene’s comic value, I think a telling comparison emerges here between Hastings’s idea of order and method and Poirot’s. Hastings is impersonating the formal generic qualities of the screen/literary detective – he is playing the detective as he believes the part should be played and the result is ineffectual parody – is, indeed, a part to be played rather than a job demanding the production of a new insight into real events. In his encounter with Marie Marvell, however, Poirot is a detective – and the order and method he practices is geared precisely to seeing through the forms, traditions and dramatic modes of the detective thriller that appears to be taking place around him. The trouble is, when he is confronted with passion or excitement in his own life (as he is in his desire to comfort Marie Marvell for a very real tragedy and hence to act according to his attraction for this lady) he is at a complete loss as to what to say or do. Unlike Hastings, he has no formula to fall back on.

  Elsewhere, of course, the film itself is hardly above utilising the sensational and sentimental tricks of the screen thriller’s trade. Lady Yardley is shown playing with her children in a domestic idyll, leaving the audience in no doubt as to where its sympathies should lie. A similar dramatic device is used in the adaptation of ‘The Adventure of Johnny Waverly’. Here though, there is at least a precedent in the source Matrial although, regrettably, we are not shown Poirot ‘romping’ with the Yardley children, as per Christie’s original story. A more welcome borrowing from the film thriller’s stock devices is the use of music to heighten the ambiguity of whether the belle histoire attached to the diamond is true or not. Scratchy violin music heralds its appearance, tempting the audience into believing in the Chinaman’s involvement. The waters are muddied further in an excellent piece of misdirection on Lady Yardley’s part, as she exclaims that the jewel thief wore ‘pig tails’ and a ‘robe’. This either implies a Chinaman or someone pretending to be a Chinaman – certainly, had I not read the original story, I would have immediately leapt to the latter conclusion. This red he
rring is particularly good, then, because it is designed to take in not only those gullible viewers who are convinced that a Chinaman is behind the diamond theft, but also those viewers well-enough versed in detective drama to spot that the whole Chinese aspect is a massive distraction. It is a red herring within a red herring – a double-edged fish, if you will.

  Happily, the adaptation’s conclusion is less uncomfortable than the (admittedly more realistic) ending of the short story. Instead of storming off in a huff at what he perceives to be Poirot’s conscious attempt to humiliate him, Hastings merely produces a little book, recording what he doesn’t understand in one column and the explanation in a column next to it. Instead of protesting against the unequal relationship he and Poirot have, Hastings’s little book demonstrates both Hastings’s function as a cypher and (in contrast to the short story) his willingness to accept this role. His and Poirot’s cordial toast to one other, which ends the episode, emphasises this – and it is the sign not of an unequal relationship but a reciprocal one. Hastings’s inability to appreciate the fine meal that his friend has prepared him could also be read metaphorically. Hastings sees in the cases they encounter only the raw material for a sensational, incident-filled thriller, which he writes up as a ‘juicy read’ (to be consumed without thought). Poirot, on the other hand, sees subtlety of detail and an excuse for mental stimulation, to be carefully savoured. It is this very combination that characterises Christie’s brand of detective fiction – a quick thrill dignified by the sheer cleverness of the underlying puzzle. Finally, I need to mention one particular period detail that made me chuckle. Towards the end of the episode, when Gregory Rolfe is attempting to flee to Johannesburg, the airport staff are seen weighing not only passengers’ luggage, but also the passengers themselves! I mean – really? Granted that modern aircraft are more robust, but even so, I can’t imagine this would be tolerated nowadays. All the same, better not mention it to Ryanair…