Another (welcome) example is that there’s only one Duveen – and, mercifully, she isn’t a trained acrobat. It’s a shrewd move and is much more believable than the novel’s clumsy ‘it all came flooding back…’ infodump. As well as helping to give a sense of period detail, it is also one of the film’s many successful attempts to restructure the plot in order to streamline the story and clarify it for a TV audience. The newsreel footage has a different function here than it did in the earlier Styles. The only plot change it necessitates is that Jack’s daggers are not made of aircraft wire, as in the novel, but have a distinctive blue sapphire in the hilt – a memento of his work at a South African mining firm, rather than of his experiences in the first world war, in which his film counterpart is too young to have taken part. The newsreel of the Beroldy trial of 1926, which opens the film, emphasises how long ago the novel’s temporal setting is in relation to the film’s setting – although this timeshifting doesn’t really affect the plot or atmosphere of the piece in the way it does with some of the other Poirot adaptations.

Clearly this was a busy year for Suchet’s version of the detective.

We learn later that the film is set, along with most of the nineties Poirot episodes, in 1936. Cast: David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, Hugh Fraser as Captain Hastingsįrom the outset, the very ‘thirties’ title sequence announces loudly that this is definitely not 1923.

Poirot murder at the links