The glacial blonde in the black veil eyed Hercule Poirot in the restaurant at the Savoy. "I've heard about you. The things you've done. The way you work. It's psychology. It's your forte, n'est-ce pas?" Poirot tipped his head slightly to one side, pondering the historical accuracy of the woman's makeup and hair. "My success, it is founded in psychology," he murmured in his mannered Belgian — Belgian, mind — way. "The 'why?' of human behaviour."
Why indeed.
It's Sunday and it's cold out. Foyle is engaged on other matters in the countryside and the torrid tussle for Miss Marple's tweed skirt continues. ITV's contemporary dramas — Sweet Medicine, Single, Family, Fortysomething — were all flops. It must, therefore, be time for Agatha Christie's Poirot, a ratings warhorse in the shape of a penguin.
The first of five new Poirot adaptations, Five Little Pigs, was, in a lot of ways, vintage Christie. There was a murder (obviously), a country house and selection of suitably suspicious suspects — from a repressed homosexual to a one-eyed archaeologist. There was a scratchy gramophone and a pearl-handled pistol, a severe bob and a tsunami of Marcel waves. There was even a drawing room — or possibly, a draw-ring room — denouement. Annette Badland, so memorably murdered and pegged to the washing line in the Miss Marple mystery A Pocketful of Rye, appeared as Mrs Spriggs, the housekeeper.
But wait. There's a twist in the plot, a swing in the tale. The camera work was jittery, the direction terribly modern, the palette washed out. There was no moustache waxing, no tie-straightening, no comedy-fastidiousness. There wasn't a hint of Captain Hastings or a whiff of Miss Lemon. Instead of picture-postcard vistas, we had painful, lingering close-ups. Jaunty, out. Gritty, in. Poirot has gone NYPD Blue. Christie's come over all Cops.
It was all the better for it. Of course, it was the same old story of love and death, but there was an emotional depth distinctly lacking in adaptations of late; here was tragedy rather than parody. Five Little Pigs was about hate and guilt, about how, if you are remotely human, you can never get away with murder. It was, pleasingly, concerned with the subjectivity of truth. Derrida in the Library with the Candlestick: Post-structuralism in the Work of Agatha Christie. Discuss.
With a "with" for Gemma Jones and an "and" for Patrick Malahide (who would have been missed in a blink), the cast — which also included a rather splendid Rachael Stirling — was a bit top-notch. Despite the inherent feyness of the whole thing, Five Little Pigs had weight.
Nobody, you may be interested to know, went wee-wee-wee all the way home.
