RogerBW's Blog

Death on the Nile 16 April 2022

1997 audio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of Christie's 1937 mystery, in five 30-minute episodes. The heiress gets married (to her best friend's former fiancé), then murdered; she's joined in the latter by what seems like half the cast.

The plot is reasonably well known: what appears to be a very standard love triangle is of course something rather different. As usual with Bakewell, this adaptation sticks pretty closely to the original.

Donald Sinden makes an appearance as Colonel Race, but plays him as Blimpish, which I think is the wrong approach: Race is meant to be a good investigator in his own right, as seen especially in The Man in the Brown Suit, and in style here he's rather closer to Hastings.

Still, we also get Stratford Johns in a welcome late role, and of course John Moffatt as Poirot. Most people who aren't Poirot or Race are lying about something, but the cast does a game job of making things look as though they might make sense in the obvious way and that people are telling small lies to cover up small sins, until it becomes apparent that the small sins are merely cover for the larger ones.

It's a tough acting job, and they do it well; perhaps the story is too familiar, because I didn't feel much of a spark with this one.

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