Hercule Poirot

Poirot – Death on the Nile

  • Title: Poirot – Death on the Nile
  • IMDb: link

Murder Mystery Monday takes us back to early 20th Century London and another case for the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Despite a tighter budget than either of the feature film adaptations, Poirot‘s adaptation of Death on the Nile is the best of the bunch. Introducing, then quickly dispensing with, the the superfluous early bits of the story, the double-sized episode gets us to Egypt in less than 6 minutes, gets us on the boat in less than 20, and gets us to the fateful night where murder and shenanigans start occurring prior to the halfway-point of the episode allowing the majority of time to be set aside for Poirot (David Suchet) to solve a case where the two most obvious suspects have iron-clad alibis for the crime.

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Poirot – The Adventure of the Clapham Cook

  • Title: Agatha Christie’s Poirot – The Adventure of the Clapham Cook
  • IMDb: link

Murder Mystery Monday takes us back to early 20th Century London and another case for the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Adapted from one of Agatha Christie’s short stories chronicling Poirot’s early cases, “The Adventure of the Clapham Cook” offers Poirot (David Suchet) a case he believes is beneath him searching for a missing cook (Freda Dowie), and a client who promptly fires him well before the case is closed, only for the detective to stumble on a much larger mystery involving murder, fraud, and the theft of thousands from the local bank.

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Evil Under the Sun

  • Title: Evil Under the Sun
  • IMDb: link

The second Agatha Christie adaptation to star Peter Ustinov as master detective Hercule Poirot works better than the first, even if the awkward opening (necessary to wrap-up the case nearly two-hours later) feels completely out of place until the end of the film. While looking into an insurance matter, Poirot travels to an isolated hotel on an island in the Adriatic Sea where the focus of his inquiry, an egotistical gold digging actress (Diana Rigg) who makes more enemies than movies, turns up dead on a secluded beach.

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A Haunting in Venice

  • Title: A Haunting in Venice
  • IMDb: link

Kenneth Branagh stars and directs in his third adaptation of a Hercule Poirot mystery, this time Agatha Christie‘s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party. Quite different from the novel, screenwriter Michael Green plays up a supernatural element to the story allowing the film to make use of a host of horror tropes. Relocating the story to Venice, where Poirot (Branagh) has apparently retired, the detective gets dragged into attending a Halloween party and séance by old friend and mystery author Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) who made them both famous after basing her fictional detective off of Poirot.

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