Despite the evident distaste of possibly the most celebrated mystery novelists of the past 80 years (PD James and Georges Simenon), there can be no doubt that the public continues to love the amateur sleuth. People can’t get enough of Holmes (any incarnation), Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, which seems sufficient grounds for the recent production (Amazon Prime Originals) of Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, a Poirot mystery from the 1936 book.
Is the adaptation any good? I suppose that depends on how much fidelity to Christie one demands. The series, like the novel, remains a mid-1930s affair about a killer who goes about the business of murdering people following the letters of the alphabet: a Mrs Asher killed in Andover, Betty Barnard dispatched in Bexhill, Sir Carmichael Clarke brained in Churston. Poirot, a recipient of letters signed “ABC” that forecast each crime, must find the killer before he institutes a reign of terror or, as he writes, releases “the wrath of God”.
