Yeah, there’s a bit of an eye-roll with a conveniently placed tramp who figures into the circumstances, but overall it’s a mystery where the pieces line up nicely and none of it really stretches credulity too much.
The crime itself is another one of those rooted in the past, with a 10-years-ago-prologue planting the seeds of what’s to come quite chillingly – a woman on trial for murder, her lover has fled the country, and the newsreel footage telling us all this freezes on her 9-year-old daughter staring forlornly, while the BBC editor deadpans, “Her mommy’s going to hang.” Yikes!Īnd the solution to Renauld’s murder isn’t really awe-inspiring, but the way Poirot deduces who didn’t do it – and why – is pretty damn clever, coming as it does after no less than three people have been accused of the killing. It is still Hastings we’re talking about here.) Well, he thinks he conceals information, anyway.
( Side Note: You may be saying to yourself, “ Dude, Hastings falls in love with a pretty young thing every other episode.” And that’s largely true, but here he’s so deeply entranced that he outright lies to and conceals information from Poirot, which tells me it’s something more. It’s a sweet, sometimes corny subplot but one that nevertheless pays off in canon, with Hastings and his dearest presumably tottering off to Argentina at the end of the show. You can probably guess how that turns out, given that there’s no Poirot episode anyone remembers as “the one where he shaved his moustache off”.īut I’m burying the lead here, which is that in the midst of all this investigatory squabbling Our Man Hastings falls desperately in love with a suspect, and Hugh Fraser plays smitten like no other. If Poirot wins, “Le Pipe” surrenders his… er… “le pipe”. If Giraud wins, Poirot must – mon dieu! – shave off his vaunted moustache. The French may not be at the top of their nickname game, is what I’m saying.ĪNYHOO, Giraud bets Poirot he can find the killer first, and the two men agree to the wager in a good old-fashioned TRADEMARK WAR! (Note: these are not good, nor old-fashioned.) They call him that because he, um, smokes a pipe. Giraud is a walking, talking walrus a celebrity, one of those only-in-literature detectives who get marked with a nickname, in this case… “Le Pipe”. What follows is a tale of Our Belgian matching wits with the blustery, arrogant Inspector Giraud of the Surete. (Hastings, lucky devil, finds the body while chasing down an errant ball during a round.)
He asks Poirot to stop by the next day, as he’s a-feared for his life – with good reason, as the very next day Renauld turns up dead – stabbed in the back – in a shallow grave dug into a golf course bunker. Our Man Hastings and Poirot vacation in the north of France, a seaside town called Deauville, where they meet rich and reclusive businessman Paul Renauld.
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