Classic TV Series ‘Agatha Christie’s Poirot’ Launched With a Modest But Engrossing First Episode
Of all the actors who’ve played Agatha Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot over the years, David Suchet has spent by far the most screentime inhabiting the fussy Belgian crime-solver. Over the course of 24 years, 13 seasons, and 70 episodes, the British TV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot covered every single Poirot story Christie ever wrote, with Suchet starring in all of them. Even as major stars like Kenneth Branagh, Peter Ustinov, and Albert Finney have taken on Poirot in other adaptations, Suchet’s portrayal remains rightfully definitive.
The Poirot TV series may start out modestly, but Suchet has a handle on the character from the start, in 1989 pilot episode “The Adventure of the Clapham Cook.” Rather than beginning with a famous Poirot novel like Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express, creators Clive Exton and Brian Eastman launch the series with an adaptation of a lesser-known early short story. Set in 1930s London, “The Adventure of the Clapham Cook” is a small-scale mystery that allows the notoriously pompous Poirot to express a bit of humility.
As his dedicated associate Capt. Arthur Hastings (Hugh Fraser) reads him newspaper articles about various high-profile crimes, Poirot is blithely dismissive of the prospect of taking on any of them, deeming them all uninteresting. “I think the moment is right for the trimming of the mustache,” he says, listing off the mundane tasks that would be better uses of his time. Suchet’s mustache is less ornate than on some other versions of Poirot, and while Suchet’s Poirot still has an inflated sense of his own importance, he’s slightly warmer and less condescending than other Poirots.
That may be why he’s only slightly aghast when Mrs. Ernestine Todd (Brigit Forsyth) arrives in his office to hire him to find her missing cook. This is clearly a case that’s beneath the great Hercule Poirot, but there’s something about Mrs. Todd’s insistence that intrigues him, and he surprises Hastings by insisting they head at once to Clapham, to gather evidence at Mrs. Todd’s house.
It’s amusing enough to watch Poirot apply his precise deductive skills to the minor matter of a domestic servant who seems to have quit her job unexpectedly, but of course it doesn’t take long before Poirot discovers that there’s more to the case than an errant employee.
In typical Poirot fashion, there’s eventually a corpse involved, and a chance for Poirot to show up his Scotland Yard rival, Chief Inspector Japp (Philip Jackson). When Mrs. Todd attempts to discharge Poirot from the case, he’s indignant about being fired from an assignment he didn’t even want in the first place, because no one tells Hercule Poirot that he can’t solve a crime.
Thus “The Adventure of the Clapham Cook” puts most of the pieces in place for the Poirot series to come, with supporting characters including Hastings, Japp, and Poirot’s helpful secretary Miss Lemon (Pauline Moran), plus Suchet’s fastidious and slightly mischievous take on Poirot. The case itself isn’t one of Poirot’s most memorable, although the resolution involves ridiculous disguises, races against time, and Poirot’s use of his “little gray cells.”
The strength of Suchet’s performance—and the Poirot TV series as a whole—is the ability to make any case memorable, to give even such a modest investigation the weight of the grandest murder mystery. That all began in 1989 with a missing cook.
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Josh Bell is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He’s the former film editor of Las Vegas Weekly and the former TV comedies guide for About.com. He has written about movies, TV, and pop culture for Vulture, Polygon, CBR, Inverse, Crooked Marquee, and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year.