Tony Randall

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The original 1936 novel The A.B.C. Murders features another one of Christie’s more ingenious plots, and this wacky flick sets it in the swinging ‘60s. This is a peculiar time-capsule of a movie, very much in the vein of the successful Pink Panther films which had come a couple of years before. Tony Randall, famous at the time as a comedic character actor and later known as Felix Ungar of TV’s The Odd Couple, plays Poirot more like Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau; but some of the hallmark qualities we expect are evident. Of course, there’s the extravagant mustache and the fussy sartorial style, but there’s also a keen sense of detection amid all the buffoonery. Like Coco, Randall gives us a ridiculous Poirot, but he’s still recognizable as Poirot, even if the world he inhabits isn’t always recognizable as that of Agatha Christie.

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Ian Holm

MurderbytheBook, 1965 (made-for-TV) 6.

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A one-off curiosity based in fact, MurderbytheBook imagines a face-off between Hercule Poirot and his creator Dame Agatha. The true part of the story involves two manuscripts that Christie had written during World War II: one a Poirot novel, and the other a novel featuring her elderly spinster detective Miss Jane Marple. Each was meant to serve as a farewell to its main character, and Christie stored them in a vault with the intention of having them released in the event of her death. Some thirty-five years later, in 1975, Christie’s literary output had dwindled; and her publishers encouraged her to release the secret Poirot novel, entitled Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. The catch? Christie had grown to hate Poirot in his heyday, and the manuscript she wrote ends with his death.

The rest of MurderbytheBook is clever invention. The publishers leave the manuscript with Christie for her to review, and that night she is visited by none other than Hercule Poirot himself. He states that he’s there to prevent a murder: his own. What happens next is an existential battle of wits between creation and creator. Ian Holm, the aging Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations, is Poirot here; and despite a slightly cartoonish appearance, he is every bit as priggish and punctilious as you might expect Poirot to be. At times, you can see why Christie, played by Academy Award winner Peggy Ashcroft, would want to kill him. You can also see why he’s her most enduring creation.