Poirot and Me (26 page)

country mansion in England. He has

summoned his dysfunctional family to a

reunion, while at the same time inviting

Poirot to join them because he believes his

life is in danger.

Lee’s family are at each other’s throats,

and there is the scent of blood – even

murder – in the air, which is not always the

case in the build-up to Dame Agatha’s

mysteries. On Christmas Eve, Lee is found

with his throat cut in the locked study of his

house and Poirot begins an investigation in

earnest, although he decides to do so with

the help of Chief Inspector Japp, who is

spending his Christmas not far away, across

the border in Wales, with his wife’s Welsh

family. That is another of the elements that

sets this story apart from some others of

Dame Agatha’s. Not only is there more blood

– a brutal killing with a knife, rather than her

more familiar poison – but Japp, rather than

Hastings, plays Poirot’s assistant, away from

his formal job at Scotland Yard. Indeed,

Hastings plays no part whatever in the story,

which is not in the slightest bit ‘Christmassy’.

Philip Jackson enjoyed himself hugely

making the film, not least because Clive

Exton had given him the opportunity to flesh

out Japp’s character, providing him with a

set of hearty Welsh relations, who insist on

celebrating Christmas by singing endlessly

around the piano in the parlour, revealing

Japp’s sense of melancholy humour which is

not always visible in the other stories.

Another joy for me was to appear

alongside John Horsley, one of the great

stalwarts among English character actors,

who played Simeon Lee’s faithful but elderly

butler, Edward Tressilian, who plays a crucial

role in unravelling the mystery. The

denouement, which takes place on Christmas

Day, slightly foreshadows her famous stage

play, The Mousetrap, which began its life as

a short story and radio play called Three

Blind Mice in 1947, in that the least likely

suspect is revealed to be the murderer.

The second film in the new series was one

of Dame Agatha’s better-known stories, and

another with a nursery rhyme in its title,

Hickory, Dickory, Dock , which had first

appeared in England in 1955. The story

opens with the usually faultless Miss Lemon

making not one but three mistakes in a

single letter she is typing for Poirot in

Whitehaven

Mansions,

much

to

his

annoyance and amazement. It transpires

that the good Miss Lemon’s sister, Mrs

Hubbard, who manages a hostel for London

University students in Hickory Road, has

been suffering a string of inexplicable petty

thefts. Out of loyalty to the invaluable Miss

Lemon, Poirot offers to help, only for the

thefts rapidly to turn into not one but three

murders.

When the novel itself was first published,

it was not greeted with the universal acclaim

that Dame Agatha usually garnered. Frances

Iles, reviewing it for the Sunday Times in

London, suggested, ‘It reads like a tired

effort. The usual sparkle is missing,’ while

the novelist Evelyn Waugh, one of Dame

Agatha’s greatest fans, recorded in his diary

that one of ‘the joys and sorrows of a simple

life’ was a new Agatha Christie story. This

one, however, he recorded sadly, began well

enough, which was a joy, only for sorrow to

take its place as the novel ‘deteriorated’ one

third of the way through into what he

described – rather unfairly – as ‘twaddle’.

Our film version was certainly not twaddle.

The director, Andrew Grieve, who had

worked with me so often in the series

before, made a wonderful job of it, adding

the visual theme of a mouse running beside

a clock – a reference to the nursery rhyme

itself – and recruiting a stunningly good cast

that included the then twenty-three-year-old

Damian Lewis, almost straight from the

Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and

long before his successes in Band of

Brothers, Life and Homeland on international

television. As so often, I was aware that

here was a young actor who was going to

have an extraordinary career. It was not just

his performance – in a relatively small part –

but the fact that the camera loved him. I

could see that myself, and so could Poirot,

who was never wrong. We could both always

spot real talent when we saw it.

Andrew not only recruited a terrific cast,

he was also fortunate enough to benefit from

Brian Eastman and London Weekend’s

determination to provide our four new films

with the best possible props and locations –

which in this case included the regular use of

a vintage London Underground train.

On top of that, Anthony Horowitz, who

wrote the screenplay, decided to set Poirot’s

investigation against the background of the

October 1936 march from Jarrow, six miles

from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north-east

of England, to London by 207 unemployed

men and women to protest against

unemployment in Britain and the extreme

poverty that had seen their communities all

but destroyed by the country’s economic

depression. The march meant that no

policeman could take any kind of holiday,

which leaves the redoubtable Chief Inspector

Japp marooned in his office, only too eager

to help Poirot.

I think our film revealed just how good

Dame Agatha’s original story really was and

redeemed it from some of its original

negative reviews. The adaptation was

excellent and the locations stunning. The

one strange thing was that I never actually

saw our mouse on the set – all the scenes

with it were shot by Andrew Grieve after my

performance was over, which meant that the

first time I saw it was in the final version. I

thought it was beautifully done, and added

something special to the story.

But I also felt the film demonstrated the

confidence that we all now felt in the

character of Poirot on the screen, which had

been growing steadily since the series had

begun five years earlier. By now, he no

longer had to prove that he was interesting

to the audience by displaying his foibles. He

could just be himself, idiosyncratic, polite

and a fully realised person that everyone –

both behind and in front of the camera –

could understand, and perhaps even love.

The third film was Murder on the Links,

which is set principally in Deauville in France,

where Poirot is being taken on holiday by

Hastings – the first story in the new series to

feature Poirot’s old friend. It too had a script

by Anthony Horowitz and was directed by

Andrew Grieve, but – just as important to me

– it was also a story that gave me an

opportunity to explore Poirot’s inherent

loneliness.

Significantly, this was Dame Agatha’s

second Poirot story, published in 1923, just

three years after he was introduced in The

Mysterious Affair at Styles, and, as she

explained in her autobiography, in 1977, was

influenced by Gaston Leroux’s classic French

detective story, The Mystery of the Yellow

Room, which had appeared not long before

she had started writing.

Just as importantly, it was also the novel

that proved to her that she was ‘stuck with

Poirot’ and how wrong she had been to

create his character ‘so old’ at the very

beginning. As she put it herself, ‘I ought to

have abandoned him after the first three or

four books, and begun again with someone

much younger.’ I can only say that I am

delighted that she never did.

Dame Agatha did, however, provide

Hastings with a love interest in Murder on

the Links – in fact, she was even thinking of

marrying him off, as she was ‘getting a little

tired of him’, as she put it. She also created

what she called a ‘human foxhound’ for the

story in the shape of Inspector Giraud of the

French police, who regarded Poirot as ‘old

and passé’, to use her own words. In the

end, Poirot and Giraud face up to each other

with a wager that means that the Frenchman

will present Poirot with his beloved pipe if

the Belgian solves the mystery before he

does, while if the Frenchman succeeds in

solving the case first, Poirot will be obliged

to cut off his moustache.

I loved being in France, and Brian Eastman

kindly brought Sheila and the children over

to stay with me during the half-term holiday

for a few days. We seldom spent much time

filming out of the country because of the

cost.

The film itself was not quite the success I

had hoped, however, as I seemed to be

struggling to keep Poirot human against the

rather more caricatured portrait of Inspector

Giraud. But it did give Poirot the opportunity

to reveal his affection for his old friend, when

he reunites Hastings and his love interest at

the end of the story, while Poirot himself

returns to England alone, and obviously

rather lonely.

For me, the final two-hour film in this

series was the most delightful. Dumb

Witness, which was first published in 1937, is

one of the best-loved of all Dame Agatha’s

stories, not least because it contains a wire-

haired terrier called Bob, who is the dumb

witness of the title. In fact, the original novel

was dedicated to her own wire-haired terrier

– ‘To dear Peter,’ it read, ‘most faithful of

friends and dearest of companions: A dog in

a thousand.’

I felt exactly the same way about the

terrier in our film. He captivated me from the

moment I set eyes on him. The little dog,

whose real name was actually Snubby,

became my dear friend, and even managed

to capture Poirot’s heart, no easy task, as my

little Belgian did not care for dogs, regarding

them

as

rather

smelly

and

dirty.

Nevertheless, Bob allowed Poirot to show

some

affection

for

animals,

without

compromising his natural suspicions about

dogs.

Directed by Edward Bennett, from a script

by Douglas Watkinson, the film was set in

the Lake District, which was another reason I

found it so wonderful to do. The scenery was

spectacular and the cast were excellent,

especially the unforgettable Muriel Pavlow as

one of two spiritualist sisters, an actress I

had spent my childhood admiring in the

cinema. The special effects were equally

impressive, especially when showing, in a

kind of haze, the death of Emily Arundell, the

lady who has invited Poirot to investigate in

the first place. And, of course, there was

Bob, complete with his trick of sending a

tennis ball bouncing down the stairs and

running down past it to catch it in his mouth

at the bottom.

The shoot was a joy from beginning to end

– fresh air and wonderful locations,

especially the cottage on Lake Windermere,

which was so dear to me because of my own

love of water and narrow boats. I simply

could not have asked for anything nicer. I

love the Lake District, and have done since I

went on a hiking holiday with Sheila and the

children, before Poirot. I can vividly

remember carrying Robert around as a small

boy and loving every minute of it. I think all

this helped my performance, as I felt more

relaxed and more at home than I had

sometimes done in the past couple of series.

Certainly, my now ever-expanding fan club

wrote to tell me how much they enjoyed it,

and, so they also told me, the sales of wire-

haired terriers shot up exponentially after it

was shown for the first time in March 1996.

I was lucky that I had enjoyed Dumb

Witness so much, however, for no sooner

were the four new films finished in the late