Agatha Christie's Poirot

Twenty-four years and one lead actor brought nearly every Poirot story to the screen, so the books can feel familiar before you open them. They still offer what television cannot quite reproduce. Christie wrote these mysteries across decades, and reading them in order lets you watch Poirot and the world around him age in a way the series, fixed around 1936, deliberately sets aside. The novels also give you Christie's own Poirot: vain, amused, and entirely sure of himself, without the doubts and religious weight the later episodes add. His famous decision in Murder on the Orient Express reads quite differently on the page, and books narrated by Hastings, such as The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Peril at End House, let you see Poirot through a friend's baffled admiration. Then there is the puzzle itself. On the page you get every clue at your own pace, with time to turn back and test your theory before Poirot gathers the suspects. For novels built on the voice of their narrator, only the book can play its trick in full.

The 2010 Murder on the Orient Express is where the series departs most from its source, with added scenes that are not in the novel. Its ending is bleaker and more religious, and Poirot is far less at ease with his final decision than Christie's detective is on the page. The series also moves stories Christie set across several decades to around 1936, which creates a single period world but scrambles the order of events found in the novels. To give Poirot a 'basic family unit', producer Brian Eastman and writer Clive Exton added Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon to many stories where they never appear. Those three were dropped for series 9 to 12 and returned for the final series, and at least one reviewer feels the middle episodes follow the books more closely without them. From around 2003 the adaptations give Poirot's Catholic faith much more weight than Christie ever did, down to a rosary, and show his self-assurance cracking in a way the novels never allow. The later series are darker in tone, and some episodes reportedly take liberties with characters and invent new motives. The Big Four and Appointment with Death are often named as the most heavily changed. Curtain drops Hastings's first-person narration to show Poirot alone, and some fans feel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which depends on its narrator, suffered in the move to screen. Even so, the series as a whole is widely regarded as largely faithful, far more so than the companion Marple series.