Air date: 11/02/1990
Published: Thirteenth story in "Poirot's Early Cases" (1974)
My first use of the 'Little Grey Cells' for several weeks concerned a rather tame affair of genteel fraud.
Double sin sees Poirot and Hastings on holiday down in Devon. They bump into Mary Durrant, a young girl in the process of delivering a collection of miniatures to an American client of her antique-dealing aunt.
The miniatures go missing, but it quickly transpires they were in fact delivered to the American by an elderly woman. Suspicion falls on an odd-looking man, Norton Kane, who may have disguised himself as a woman and sold the collection for the cash.
Poirot works out that it is all, in fact, a scam, being perpetrated by Mary Durrant and her aunt, Elizabeth Penn, with the aim of selling the miniatures - then getting them back as stolen items, in order to sell them again!
While faithful to that basic plot, the adaptation adds a number of embellishments. Norton Kane's character is beefed up and something secretive is clearly going on - although it transpires that in reality he is planning to elope and start a new life with one Lady Amanda Manderley.
In the original Poirot goes on holiday because he is overworked. In the TV production he is somewhat listless because of a lack of interesting cases and, during the course of his vacation, makes it clear to Hastings that he is going to retire. This leads to Hastings doing much of the leg-work in trying to solve the case. A predictable car-chase is shoe-horned in (Hastings and the police pursuing Kane and Lady Manderley before eventually discovering they are not involved in the theft).
Inspector Japp is not in the original, but appears - would you believe - giving a lecture on detective work at the holiday restort Poirot and Hastings are staying in. Poirot slips in to listen, and it is Japp's complimentary words about him that renews his interest in detecting! Miss Lemon (also absent from the original) features at the beginning and end in a rather irrelevant search for some keys at Poirot's flat.
In the original the miniatures are valued at £500; our producers clearly felt this needed bumping up for television: in the adaptation they go for £1500!
