Published: 1932
Series two began with what I guess at the time would have been called 'a feature-length episode'.
It's funny how that phrase has become largely redundant today. The two-hour episode - pioneered, to an extent, by Inspector Morse - became increasingly popular in the 1990s, in long-running crime series such as A Touch of Frost and the indefatigable Midsomer Murders. All Agatha Christie's Poirot episodes followed this format from 1995 but, back in 1990, it was novel. Yes, pun intended: the two-hour episodes are all adaptations of Poirot novels, rather than short-stories.
Peril at End House was a good choice to launch the foray into novels. It comes fairly early in the Agatha Christie canon and the original - like many of the short stories - has Hastings narrating. This all meant it fitted easily into the world the producers had created in the first series.
It is also, I think, a good story. Poirot and Hastings, on holiday in St Loo, bump into Magdala 'Nick' Buckley, who lives in the somewhat run-down End House, and who, it seems, has recently survived a series of attempts on her life. Poirot becomes involved, but the plot thickens when her cousin, Maggie, is shot during an evening firework display - while wearing Nick's shawl. Nick's cocaine-user friend Freddie (that's short for Frederica, by the way), is an obvious suspect, as she is a beneficiary of Nick's will, as is her lawyer-cousin, Charles Vyse.
I began this project with a theory that the two-hour productions were likely to be less scrupulously faithful to the originals - if only because adapting a full-blown novel inevitably involves more by way of condensing and omission than would be the case with the short stories.
I have to say, however, that this first two-hour production is remarkably faithful once again. Yes, of course, some of the comings-and-goings are simplified or re-arranged to conform nearly 300 pages of narrative into the time-frame, and we get to the killing sooner. Even so, the general structure, flow - and a good deal of the script - follow the original closely.
The summing-up is somewhat simplified, in which Nick is unmasked as the killer, pretending to have been engaged to the recently-killed airman Michael Seton (heir to a fortune), when, in actual fact, Maggie was. A sub-plot, involving Australian con-artists the Crofts, is retained, but another, involving Freddie's estranged husband, is omitted. In the original we as readers know Poirot lets everyone believe that Nick has died, in order to 'make something happen'. In the adaptation more tension is created by this not being revealed to the viewer until his fake-seance finale.
Japp, who, in the original, is consulted briefly in London and then turns up at the end, now has a bigger role. Miss Lemon (not in the original) comes down to St Loo with some information for Poirot on the cocaine-dealing antics of another character, George Challenger.
Interestingly, there are references in the original to The Mystery of the Blue Train (the previous Poirot novel) as well as to The Mysterious Affair at Styles and the short story The Chocolate Box. These were omitted in the adaptation.
In the novel's opening scene at the Majestic Hotel Poirot is retired or, at least, on the threshold of retiring - a theme that crops up regularly in the books. As all serious fans will know, chronology is something of an issue with Poirot. Agatha Christie later admitted she had made a mistake depicting him as elderly in the very first novel. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and, of course, she originally killed him off in the early 1940s, which would have made the chronology workable. That story (Curtain) was suppressed for four decades; a capitulation, I suspect, to commercial pressure (particularly given the fact that Christie had by then become thoroughly fed-up with her Belgian hero). Nevertheless, who can blame her?
The retirement issue is ignored in the TV production. It is, however, a theme we will inevitably re-visit as the episodes continue.
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