Poirot and Me (14 page)

like disguises. Every character actor loves his

costume, which helps him to become

someone else, and Poirot liked not only his

own clothes, which helped to define his

character, but also – from time to time – to

use a disguise to help him achieve his end.

The Veiled Lady, the second film in the

second series, demonstrates that perfectly.

Poirot is asked to meet a mysterious woman

– in a veil – in a London hotel. She turns out

to be Lady Millicent Castle-Vaughan, played

by Frances Barber, who is about to be

married to the Duke of Southshire. The

difficulty is that she is also being blackmailed

over an indiscreet letter she wrote to a

former lover some years earlier, which has

fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous man

called Lavingham, whom Hastings calls a

‘dirty swine’.

Ever anxious to help a lady in distress,

Poirot decides to disguise himself as a

locksmith – complete with elderly bicycle and

black beret – to get into Lavingham’s

Wimbledon home to find the offending letter

and retrieve it, thereby bringing the

blackmail to an end and saving Lady

Millicent’s reputation. All does not go well,

however, and Poirot ends up in the cells,

only to be rescued by Chief Inspector Japp.

The spirited chase involving Poirot, Hastings

and Japp in the spectacular setting of the

Natural History Museum in London, as part of

the story’s denouement, was enormous fun

to do.

The next film to be broadcast, The Lost

Mine, opens with Hastings and Poirot playing

Monopoly in Whitehaven Mansions, with

Hastings winning comprehensively. The

question of money, and in particular Poirot’s

skill with it, is at the heart of the story.

Indeed, their game of Monopoly lasts all the

way through it, until, inevitably, it ends with

Hastings bankrupt and Poirot triumphant.

Along the way, however, Poirot finds his

current account is overdrawn – something

which he would never allow to happen, and

neither would I incidentally – and the

chairman of the bank, played by Anthony

Bate, asks for Poirot’s help.

Once again, there was a rather spectacular

setting, this time including the creation of

Chinatown and a Chinese nightclub in the

studio at Twickenham, which reminded me

again of just how much London Weekend

were spending on this series – certainly no

less than the £500,000 per hour that they

had spent on the first. With a Chinese victim,

Wu Ling, and hints pointing to the opium

trade in the East End of London, there are

also echoes of the Charlie Chan mysteries,

which were hugely popular at the time.

Dame Agatha’s story, with its Chinatown

background, had first appeared in the

American edition of her short stories called

Poirot Investigates in 1925, and the first full-

length Chan novel, The House Without a

Key, appeared in the same year, although

the American author Earl Derr Biggers had

been working on him for almost six years.

Like

Poirot,

Chan

is

an

intelligent,

honourable and benevolent detective, with a

trace of eccentricity. He was to become a

staple of American novels and films for the

next three decades, often played by the

Swedish actor Warner Oland. There are

many

similarities

between

the

two

detectives. Chan is always intensely polite

and unthreatening, while often revealing the

solution to his mysteries in a lengthy speech

at the climax.

In sharp contrast to the exotic locale of

Chinatown, the next film in the series, The

Cornish Mystery, sees Poirot back in England,

returning to the middle-class world of

Clapham Cook. He is visited by Alice

Pengelly, a distinctly nervous, not to say

retiring, lady from Cornwall, who tells him

that she gets stomach pains after every meal

that she eats with her dentist husband

Edward, but none when he goes away.

Indeed, she is very afraid that she is being

poisoned with weed killer, as she has found

a half-empty jar in the house and the

gardener insists that he has never used it.

‘We have here a very poignant human

drama,’ Poirot confides to Hastings when Mrs

Pengelly also tells him that she believes her

husband is having an affair with his

attractive blonde assistant. Hastings and

Poirot travel down to Polgarwith in Cornwall

the next day, only to discover that tragedy

has already struck. Even though the good

Chief Inspector Japp makes an appearance,

and appears to have caught the murderer,

things are not quite what they seem, as

Poirot reveals.

The next three stories to be broadcast in

the second series – though they were not

shot in the order they were broadcast – were

all comparatively slight, and I’m afraid the

truth is that I was never really happy with

Double Sin, The Adventure of the Cheap Flat

a n d The Adventure of the Western Star.

They all seemed a little flat to me, a little

too one-dimensional compared to the others.

Poirot announces his ‘retirement’ at the

beginning of Double Sin, and decides to take

Hastings on holiday to the seaside at

Charlock Bay, where they meet a young

woman, Mary Durrant, who is going to show

a client a case of valuable antique

miniatures.

When they are stolen, Mary asks Poirot to

investigate, but – because of his ‘retirement’

– he instructs Hastings to take over the case,

although he also asks him to ‘tell me

everything’. The lovely Elspet Gray, wife of

Lord ‘Brian’ Rix, played Mary’s wheelchair-

bound mother, and there is rather a fine

denouement in the hotel dining room, but

somehow the film did not quite ‘sing’ in the

way that I wanted it to, in spite of Clive

Exton’s fine script.

Sadly the same was true for The

Adventure of the Cheap Flat, which starred

Samantha Bond in one of her early television

roles, six years before she became Miss

Moneypenny to Pierce Brosnan’s James

Bond. The plot revolves around two of

Hastings’ friends, the Robinsons, who cannot

believe their good luck in renting an

expensive flat in a fashionable block for a

tiny sum per month. Poirot is so intrigued

that he decides to rent a flat in the same

block himself – only to encounter an

undercover FBI agent in pursuit of some

secret plans for a submarine that may have

been stolen by the Mafia. The FBI man

pushes Chief Inspector Japp from his office

at Scotland Yard, but it is Poirot who solves

the mystery.

The Adventure of the Western Star is

another of Dame Agatha’s trifles. The

beautiful Belgian actress Marie Marvelle –

whom Poirot much admires – has received

threatening letters demanding the return of

a spectacular diamond known as the

Western Star, which is reputed to have once

been the left eye of a Chinese god.

Meanwhile, the wife of an English aristocrat,

Lord Yardley, who owns a similar diamond,

known as the Eastern Star, has also received

threatening letters demanding the return of

their stone.

Poirot travels to meet Lord and Lady

Yardley, but fails to prevent a daring

robbery, and then races back to London, only

to find that the Western Star has also been

stolen. Engaging enough, and with a

delightful portrait of Poirot becoming ever

more excited about meeting Marie Marvelle,

it depends on another of Dame Agatha’s

magical subterfuges. Poirot may have

enjoyed the chase to find the diamonds, but

I cannot say I was very happy with my own

performance.

Western Star did, however, give me an

opportunity to demonstrate Poirot’s passion

for cooking, when he serves Hastings supper

and watches him eat with ill-concealed

delight, all the while explaining the

importance of exactly the right ingredients.

It was my one opportunity in the story to

bring out his humanity. For the rest,

however, I felt uncomfortable and rather too

near a parody in my desire to do Poirot’s

passion for Miss Marvelle justice.

Some people tend to see Poirot as one-or

two-dimensional, but those who do so are

almost always the ones who have never read

the books. If you do read them, you realise

at once that there are certainly three

dimensions to his character. And every time I

played him, I tried to bring those extra

elements of Poirot’s character to the surface,

reflecting the different dimensions revealed

in Dame Agatha’s own stories about him.

Andrew Grieve, who directed the two

remaining one-hour films in the second

series, The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim

and The Kidnapped Prime Minister, and who

would go on to become a stalwart, positively

revelled in Poirot’s complexities, and has

always been a delight to work with. It made

Prime Minister one of my favourite Poirots of

all, because the little man proves that no

matter how idiosyncratic he may appear, he

is exactly right, proving everyone else –

particularly the British political establishment

– wrong. Andrew had clearly read both

stories, and wanted to talk to me at length

about Poirot. He allowed me to explore the

nuances in his character. There is no denying

t h a t Mr Davenheim is a quite delicious

mystery, which opens with Hastings, Japp

and Poirot at a theatre on location, watching

an illusionist (another of Dame Agatha’s

magicians) – and the theme of illusions

remains throughout the story. Banker

Matthew

Davenheim

disappears

one

afternoon on his way to post a letter, after

he gets home from his office, and Poirot tells

Japp that he will solve the mystery before

the police – without even leaving his flat.

In the story, Poirot delights in teaching

himself magic tricks, as well as building a

spectacular

house

of

cards,

while

comfortably

ensconced

at

Whitehaven

Mansions. As he explains to Hastings, ‘Non,

mon ami, I am not in my second childhood. I

steady my nerves – that is all. This

employment requires precision of the fingers.

With precision of the fingers goes precision

of the brain.’ An expert was brought in to

help me hone my skills in manipulating

cards, which was rather fun, though I don’t

think I would make a good magician.

The only irritation on the horizon is that he

is also looking after a rather talkative parrot,

a

bird

that

Poirot

hates.

Hastings,

meanwhile, is indulging his appetite for

driving fast cars at Brooklands race track in

Surrey. The delicious script was written by

David Renwick, who would go on shortly

afterwards to write the hugely successful

BBC television comedy One Foot in the

Grave.

I n The Kidnapped Prime Minister Andrew

allowed me to expand on Poirot’s supreme

confidence in himself. The story first

appeared in a London illustrated weekly, the

Sketch, in April 1923, as part of a series of

twelve, but was quickly included in the

collection of Dame Agatha’s stories, Poirot

Investigates, which was originally published

in the United States.

Set against the background of the

Versailles Peace Conference in the wake of

the ending of the First World War, it opens

with the kidnap of the British Prime Minister,

who is on his way to address a League of

Nations disarmament conference near Paris

and is intent on stopping any possibility of

German re-armament. Alone with his

chauffeur, the Prime Minister boards a ferry