1994 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1942 mystery,
in a single 90-minute episode. Amyas Crale's widow went to prison for
poisoning him, and died there; now their daughter plans to marry, but
worries about the possibility of a hereditary murderousness, and asks
Poirot to investigate.
Digging up a past murder as a fictional frame is always
frustrating: the wrong person has already been punished, and in this
case getting the right person punished may well never happen. The
implicit promise that justice will be done, whether by law or "natural
justice", underpins the murder mystery, and when it's broken the thing
feels incomplete.
Bakewell doesn't try to fix this minor problem, and makes only small
rearrangements to the plot: for example we close with Poirot telling
Carla about his plan to seek a posthumous pardon rather than Elsa
walking away, but it's only a slight shift of mood. John Moffatt as
Poirot effectively supplies narration, but sometimes seems to be
treating the case more as an academic exercise than as a matter of
wrongdoing, and his is the only voice that carries all the way through
With an adaptation like this which doesn't do anything remarkable in
itself, any flaws in the original are highlighted; this is one I'd
like to hand to Joy Wilkinson to see how she'd pep it up.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.