The best blog on Agatha Christie's Poirot that you'll ever find

While looking up crime writer Sophie Hannah, who has been given the go-ahead from the Christie estate to write the new Poirot novel, I found this gem of a blog, Investigating Agatha Christie's Poirot.  It's a must read for all Christie fans.


Eiric writes this blog and does a fine job of assessing the TV adaptions of Poirot. As I am a TV producer, I find his assessment of the TV versions to be very insightful.

Here is an excerpt from Eiric's take on the episode Taken at the Flood: 

Setting a distinclty 1940s novel in the 1930s isn't easy. Guy Andrews makes a series of major and minor changes to Christie's story... First, Andrews adds a subplot involving malicious phone calls to Rosaleen that was not in the novel. Second, Lionel the doctor becomes a morphine addict, and David Hunter has made Rosaleen/Eileen an addict, too. Lionel steals some of her morphine, and consequently prevents an (added) attempted suicide from her part. Third, and most importantly, Hunter deliberately impregnated Rosaleen and forced her to have an abortion. As a 'simple Catholic girl' (in Poirot's words), she was so traumatised that she would do anything he said to make it right again. Fourth, Andrews adds a suggestion of dynamite to the denouement scene (a result of making David an engineer, which I will come back to shortly). Finally, an execution scene is added, in which David Hunter is hanged while reciting 'Your Baby Has Gone Down the Plughole'....
Some of these changes are a result of the fact that the episode has been set pre-war rather than during WW2. Consequently, the script writer has tried to come up with ways of explaining the crime (in the book, the explosion was blamed on an air raid - here, it is said to be an accident, a gas explosion) and the title ('Taken at the Flood', a quotation from Shakespeare) is supposed to refer to the opportunity the air raids provide for covering up the crime...

Perhaps would-be producers of an Agatha Christie TV series, should take serious note of Eiric's reviews!

Louise Phillips's next transfixing thriller The Dolls' House

Louise Phillips, best-selling author of Red Ribbons, is bringing out her next transfixing thriller,  The Dolls' House on August 1st.

One reason that I began reading Louise Phillips's work is that I am an Agatha Christie fan.  I was ferriting out novels that were as satisfying and where I felt that I was 'inside' the mind of the characters, such as those by both Christie and Phillips. 

I find that Louise Phillips and Agatha Christie have a driving force in common: they stay true to human nature. Their plots are formed inside the characters' heads. 'Human nature never changes' is a proverb that I used hear a lot growing up. Times change, fashions change, the weather changes, but there is only timelessness in literature if the characters are flesh and blood, and if you can see the absolute link between their personality traits and actions. 

Take Phillips' Red Ribbons and Christie's Five Little Pigs. Both novels have mothers who have been the victims of blame-shifting and victims of their own overwhelming and incriminating sense of guilt.

Red Ribbons has a central character, Ellie Brady, a mother who has been institutionalized in a mental home, after being convicted for murdering her daughter.  In Christie's great murder mystery Five Little Pigs, the mother is charged with murdering her husband. Both mothers have assumed the air of a criminal because they feel so guilty that they fit the role, without necessarily having done the crime that would make them culpable.

Agatha Christie fans will really appreciate Louise Phillips' literature that plumb the depths of the darker waters of the human psyche.

The water scene in The Doll's House trailer has me intrigued. The young chap floating face down is no doubt a murder scene, that must be deciphered by Kate Pearson, the criminal psychologist who takes a very forensically detailed approach to her work. Why did the young man die - in the outdoors - without a coat on? Was he dragged from his home? Is the watery burial meant to wash all traces of the killer's hands?