Of Swords and Parasols

Full disclosure: I own almost every Poirot episode and movie starting David Suchet, and have seen every episode and movie two or more times, except for Curtains, which I've only seen once.
 
This is one of those movies that is a perfectly decent movie in and of itself, but is...not good in terms of being an adaptation of the source material.  The acting and production values and costuming can't really be questioned, but it...was not Poirot. Kenneth Branaugh is an excellent actor, but he's physically all wrong for Poirot.  Poirot is small and egg shaped.  You don't take him seriously until he opens his mouth to explain exactly how you are going to fail at your life because you tied your shoes wrong, and through no fault of his own, Kenneth Branaugh will never be considered small or unnoticable.  He has a "larger than life" air about him no matter what he does.

But really, Murder on the Orient Express, though one of the more famous and acclaimed Poirot stories, is very much not a standalone.  I mean, the plot works well as a standalone, but the character work for Poirot doesn't because because, while the final resolution of the mystery is effective any way you do it (unless you just do it terribly) what it means for Poirot himself isn't felt as much if you don't have a history with Poirot.

So while I get why they chose this as the first movie for a potential new Poirot franchise, I think it was also a bad choice for the story to choose to introduce a new Poirot.

Apparently they're doing Death on the Nile next, which should be interesting.  I grew up watching the Peter Unistov versions of that and Evil Under the Sun because my parents had them on VHS.  (But not any of the others. Don't know why.)

I have to say, people certainly aren’t kidding when they say that the Miss Marple adaptations get rewritten a lot. But then, I’m not sure how to avoid that when your title character is usually a supporting character. (Obviously, some things got changed more than others, especially in the more recent versions.)

The character of Miss Marple, the “old biddy” sitting in the corner who no one takes seriously but who is actually a brilliant detective who uses her observational skills and knowledge of human nature to solve crimes, is actually only the main character in couple of her books. In most books, she plays a supporting role, and has relatively few scenes in a couple, and the POV characters are often the person she eventually helps, and some books have multiple POV characters. As such, I think the success of individual books depends a lot on how much you like that book’s POV character. While I don’t know if Christie ever actually intended for Miss Marple to be a serial character, I actually think this works interestingly in prose, especially as Miss Marple is frequently isolated from the actual action, and often solves crimes based purely on how events have been related to her (this is more evident in the short stories than in the novels, I think). I remember a Poirot episode where they made a big deal of Poirot being able to do this once, and have to laugh at that now. That said, while it’s interesting in prose form, it’s not something I think would work well on screen, where Miss Marple would likely come across as a bit of a deus ex machina. (Though, that’s basically what she is in the novel for The Moving Finger, where she doesn’t appear until about ¾ through, when the main character is getting absolutely nowhere with anything.) The adaptations, though, also portray her as considerably more worldly than the books, which…doesn’t make her skills less impressive, necessarily, but does remove the “wow, you figured out the killer’s 10 layer alibi while knitting a scarf because of how your neighbor’s gardener was lazy and didn’t weed well?” effect.

As mysteries (and, often, character studies), these are excellent, but as books I actually don’t like them a whole lot, at least partly because they’re so classist and xenophobic. I mean, I noticed this with the Tommy & Tuppence books, but it wasn’t as bad there, and I can tell that it’s being lessened in the adaptations, and I can accept (not like, but muster through) a certain degree of that with older books, but here, Christie frequently had me drawing up short with how frequently everyone but white, upper-class British (and the occasional American) existed only to provide clues, or to show how much better the white, upper-class British people were. This may have almost caused my eyes to become permanently stuck behind my eyelids a few times when the esteemed one had no discernable useful skills and was literally hanging around, waiting for someone to die and hoping they were still in the will.


The books are:

Murder at the Vicarage
The Body in the Library
They Do It With Mirrors
A Murder is Announced
4.50 From Paddington
A Pocket Full of Rye
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
The Moving Finger
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder

And a number of short stories in various collections. I read a collection that was all the Miss Marple short stories

Alas, there are no more Tommy & Tuppence books for me to read! For the first time, that is.

The book opens with Tuppence (now in her 70s, but apparently not slowed down much because of it) indulging in extreme book geekery as she goes through the books she and Tommy brought to their new house and the books the previous owners left behind. Then she finds letters underlined in a book, and realizes that the letters spell out confirmation of a murder decades before.

Like some of the other Tommy & Tuppence books, this eventually spirals into a Conspiracy Theory story with all sorts of reveals in the resolution of the mystery, and many references to their first adventure. It was lots of fun, though I wonder how Tuppence survives the years without adventure- without going stircrazy. I’m sure Tommy stays entertained just trying to keep up with her. (I get the feeling their daughter more thinks she raised Tuppence than the reverse, which I actually almost get.)

Set a few years after The Secret Adversary and years and years before N or M?, Partners in Crime is a collection of short stories about Tommy and Tuppence Beresford as they run a detective agency. Which was pretty much bought because Tuppence was bored.

Most of the mysteries are introduced and resolved in a single chapter, though a few get several chapters, and Tommy and Tuppence also deliberately take on the methods, and sometimes personalities, of various famous detectives, including when they first meet their clients, not to mention other charades. Surprisingly, Tommy doesn’t get kidnapped. Probably because none of the stories are long enough for that. It’s a bit odd to read it knowing that people are coming to them for help with something important and knowing that Tommy and Tuppence are doing it more as a lark than anything else, but they apply themselves to the cases pretty seriously, so that’s only a bit jarring. For the most part, it’s a marvelous bit of fluff. (Err…can something be fluff when dead bodies are involved?)

Out of luck and out of money, childhood friends Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley re-meet in London and decide to join forces to become “The Young Adventurers, Ltd.,” planning to hire themselves out as adventurers. Overheard plotting their adventure, Tuppence is almost immediately offered a job, only to be accused of blackmail when she gives her name as “Jane Finn,” not realizing it was a name she had overheard earlier. Jane Finn, it seems, is a young American woman who disappeared after surviving the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, where she was entrusted with important documents by a man who worried that he wouldn’t be able to get on a lifeboat. Further complicating matters are a secret conspiracy, another detective, and Jane’s rich American cousin, who has come to England looking for her.

Christie relies a lot on coincidence and clichés, but deliberately so. My understanding is that the “Tommy & Tuppence” stories are often largely comprised of Christie deliberately using the clichés of the mystery genre as having Tommy and Tuppence mimic famous detectives. Whatever it is that she’s trying for, it works, and the book is a very enjoyable romp. I think Tommy ends up more the detective than Tuppence does, but Tuppence is a bit more of an adventuress, and is the main driving force of the venture, and I’m particularly fond of how she’s absolutely shameless about wanting and needing money, and being willing to marry for it, rather than being nobly destitute.