Air date: 11/02/1996
Published: 1923
From the first post-Second World War novel Agatha Christie's Poirot lurched back in time to the second-ever novel to feature the Belgian detective.
Murder on the Links, like its predecessor, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, has Captain Hastings narrating, and repeats some of the latter's description of Poirot himself.
The original plot is a clever one, although, in my opinion, drags somewhat towards the end, with possibly one or two twists too many.
It opens with Hastings meeting an unidentified young woman on a train from France. Poirot then receives a letter from a P.T Renauld in France asking for his assistance. However, when the couple arrive Monsieur Renauld has just been murdered! His body was found in a newly dug grave on the golf course adjacent to the family home. His wife, meanwhile, had been left bound and gagged in their bedroom. An Examining Magistrate, one M.Haulet, takes initial responsibility, and we are later introduced to Inspector Giraud from the Surete, who forms a dislike of Poirot.
Renauld was visited by a woman on the evening of the murder, possibly neighbour Madame Daubreuil, or possibly the mysterious Bella Duveen (a letter from her is found in the dead man's coat pocket). His son Jack, it seems, was on his way to South America that evening (dispatched by his father on some mysterious business matter). Jack is in a romantic relationship with Madame Daubreuil's daughter Marthe.
Hastings meets the mysterious woman he had met on the train again, and shows her the dead body (being kept by the police in a shed adjoining the house). The dagger later goes missing.
Then a second dead body turns up in another shed on the grounds. Initially it appears the stolen dagger was used, until the examining doctor declares this person had died earlier than Renauld! In fact, he had been stabbed after having died (probably of an epileptic fit).
A visit to Paris by Poirot uncovers a photograph showing that Madame Daubreuil was, in fact, the Madame Beroldy of a notorious murder case years earlier. The circumstances of that case had been similar (her husband had been murdered and she had been found bound and gagged). It was later claimed that she had been party to the murder and that it had been carried out by a friend of her husband's, Georges Conneau, who had subsequently disappeared.
To cut a convoluted story short, Poirot eventually reveals (quite a while before the end of the story) that Renauld was, in fact, Conneau. He had stage-managed his own (fake) death, because he was being blackmailed by Madame Daubreuil. His plan was to disappear, and for his wife to later join him. The death on his grounds of an argumentative tramp had given him the opportunity. However, while digging the grave near a planned golf course bunker (to put the tramp in, dressed in his clothes) he had himself been stabbed in the back. He and Jack had taken each other's overcoats, so the letter in the pocket was for Jack, not his father.
Evidence points to Bella Duveen as the most likely suspect, and Hastings resolves to protect her. The police, however, eventually arrest Renauld's son Jack. At the preliminary trial hearing Bella Duveen turns up dramatically to confess. However, she is not the Bella Hastings thinks is Bella! She is, in fact, her twin sister. Hastings' Bella is Dulcie. Confused?
As it turns out, it wasn't Jack. It wasn't Bella (they were protecting each other), it was Marthe. Renauld had disapproved of her relationship with his son. Poirot concocts a plan in which it seems Madame Renauld is going to disinherit her son with a newly written will, to flush out Marthe, who attempts to kill her before she can do so.
The story ends with Hastings and Dulcie together - it was Dulcie he had actually met on the train at the beginning.
The adaptation is, as has often been the case, very faithful to the essential elements of the plot, with some simplifications. It opens with a news footage report of the Beroldy case. Keen eyed viewers shouldn't have too much difficulty recognising, from the albeit grainy photos, that Conneau (or Connor as he is for TV) is Renauld.
Notably there is only one Duveen girl, Bella, who Hastings first sees singing at a club where he and Poirot are dining. She had been in a relationship with Jack Renauld. The chain of events on the night of the murder had led both to believe the other was the murderer.
An interesting, but rather irrelevant, backdrop to the story is the Deuville cycle race, which Jack is taking part in. It is at the conclusion to the race that Geraud has him arrested. Interestingly, Geraud's antipathy toward Poirot comes over even more strongly on TV. In the book the two have a £500 wager over solving the case - but this comes well into the story. For TV this comes much earlier, and is now a winner takes all, with Geraud agreeing to give up his famous pipe if he loses - provided Poirot agrees to shave off his mustache if he loses!
In the tender finale Poirot reunites Hastings with Bella Duveen. In the books Hastings would subsequently marry Dulcie and move to Argentina. His appearance in later novels being confined to occasions when he was visiting Poirot.
