by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned on KPBS and
watched the latest episode of Poirot, “The Big Four,” which given its origins in the seemingly endless
series of mysteries by Agatha Christie about her insufferably annoying Belgian
detective (don’t dare call him
French!) Hercule Poirot (played by David Suchet, who acts this character as if
he’s thoroughly bored with him) was actually surprisingly good. It’s set
against the lead-up to World War II and centers around the efforts of a
supposed “Peace Party” to stop that event from happening. At a public benefit
for the Peace Party, reclusive Russian chess genius Savanaroff (Michael Culkin)
is killed while in the middle of playing a game — electrocuted by the
combination of a wired chessboard and chess piece, the sort of preposterously
complicated murder method Christie was always overly fond of — and the two
heads of the Peace Party, Abe Ryland (James Carroll Jordan) and Madame Olivier
(Patricia Hodge), mysteriously disappear. Their disappearance and the
subsequent murder of Stephen Paynter (Steven Pacey), who was having an affair
with Olivier even though he was married, are supposedly connected to “The Big
Four,” a terrorist organization led by Ryland, Olivier, a Chinese politician
and a fourth, unknown person. Poirot, faking his own death (and underscoring
yet again how much Christie owed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and how much Poirot
was Sherlock Holmes with a funny accent and an even more annoying manner!),
ultimately learns that the Big Four was a figment of the demented imagination
of Whalley (Peter Symonds), a young man who left home to join the theatre and
became enamored of Flossie Monro (Sarah Parish), his old co-star in the
Methuselah Theatre Company, who turned him down back then, so he decided to
stage a series of crimes that would impress her enough to come back to him.
Whatever Christie’s problems in coming up with believable characters,
especially sympathetic ones, she did have a flair for psychopaths (one recalls Basil Rathbone’s performance
in the Christie-derived Love from a Stranger) and Whalley is a reasonably convincing one, chillingly
matter-of-fact in his weird determination to impress his wanna-be girlfriend no
matter how many other people have to die for his plot to work
