CRIME OF THE CENTURY
RICHARD E GRANT SALUTES POIROT’S ‘LITTLE GREY CELLS’… AGATHA AND POIROT: PARTNERS IN CRIME | ITV EASTER MON
One thing that master detective Hercule Poirot never lacked was a high opinion of himself. “Always I am right!” he would assure you. “It is so invariable it startles me.”
Immodest though this may seem, others hold Poirot in equal esteem – as here he is, the subject of a new documentary to celebrate both his first century and the work of his creator, Agatha Christie.
“Poirot is the eternal outsider,” observes the film’s host, Richard E Grant. “He’s utterly fastidious and observes everything with a humane curiosity. And as a foreigner living in England, he sees through all the strange eccentricities of his adoptive land.”
Introduced in Christie’s first book, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, in 1921, Poirot is a freelance detective renowned for his great brain, towering ego and overweening vanity: manifested most famously in his perfectly primped moustache. In this show, talking heads – ranging from Stephen Fry to somewhat unexpected Christie expert,
Birds Of A Feather’s Lesley Joseph – honour the world’s most famous Belgian…
“Christie is the undisputed queen of detective fiction,” insists Fry. “Consider her masterpiece: The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd. The shock of who the murderer is in that book resounds through the genre to this day. Other crime writers just bowed down and said, ‘She is the queen! None of us can touch this!’”
Christie wrote 33 novels, three plays and 69 short stories featuring Poirot: the most famous of which – Death On The Nile and Murder On The Orient Express – mix mystery, glamour and mortal peril in a heady (and often poisoned) cocktail. Footage from their many star-studded adaptations help to bring this homage to life.
And in case you’re wondering why Poirot has been singled out for this star treatment, well, Miss Marple doesn’t celebrate her century until 1927 – so we’ll likely see you back here in six years!