Sat 26 May 2012
A TV Movie Review: AGATHA CHRISTIE’S POIROT “Murder in Mesopotamia” (2001).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[20] Comments
“Murder in Mesopotamia.†An episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. ITV, UK, 8 July 2001. (Season 8, Episode 2.) David Suchet (Hercule Poirot), Hugh Fraser (Captain Hastings), Ron Berglas, Barbara Barnes, Dinah Stabb, Georgina Sowerby, Jeremy Turner-Welch, Pandora Clifford, Christopher Hunter, Christopher Bowen, Iain Mitchell. Based on the novel by Agatha Christie (1936). Dramatized by Clive Exton. Director: Tom Clegg.
In this film Agatha Christie’s famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is in what is known as Iraq today, visiting an archaeological dig, and so is his good friend Captain Hastings, although he was not in the novel. In the book the story was largely told from the point of view of Nurse Leatheran (Georgina Sowerby), but in this made-for-TV adaptation her role has been cut down considerably.
There are a few other relatively minor changes and enhancements, but for the better, I can’t swear to it. The nurse’s patient, the new wife of the expedition’s leader, is the primary victim.
She is found dead in her room beside her bed, having been hit in the head by the old stand-by, a blunt instrument. Strangely, though, the window is locked and the only access to her room was a door that was under watch at all times.
The exterior scenes were filmed in Tunisia, a very worthy stand-in for that other war-torn part of the world, and are beautifully done, if not out-and-out stunning. Suchet, as usual, is the pitch perfect Poirot, and all of the other players play their roles with distinction.
The problem is, and I really do hate to say that there are problems, but for a film that is less than two hours long, there are simply too many characters involved. There were a couple of them I did not even recognize in the final “let’s gather all of the suspects together and I will name the killer†scene.
A second viewing would also help in putting together the various scenes that took place both before and after the murder, many of them too brief to make sense at the time – but of course they are needed to fill in the details as Poirot begins his final re-creation of the crime before his enraptured audience.
The puzzle of the “locked room†is very cleverly done, however, which makes watching this movie worthwhile, even in the face of a motive (and how it came about) that seems quite unbelievable to me. Perhaps Agatha Christie made a better job of it in the book, but checking Robert Barnard in A Talent to Deceive, he agrees with me: “Marred by an ending which goes beyond the improbable to the inconceivable.â€
This episode is available on DVD, and at the moment, it can be seen in several parts on YouTube.

May 26th, 2012 at 11:46 am
I’d agree with pretty much all of that. Like you said, there are parts of the denouement that leave one’s jaw lying on the carpet. Still great fun, though. Strange to think that this was one of the last of the ‘old style’ Poirot productions. After EVIL UNDER THE SUN, they would ditch Hastings, Lemon and Japp and move towards a much gloomier tone. I’ve enjoyed most of these new productions, but I still miss the warmer style of the old shows.
May 26th, 2012 at 12:46 pm
I’m working through the Suchet adaptations only haphazardly. So far I’ve not run across any of the darker ones you’re referring to. I’m sure I’d have noticed if I had. This one definitely falls in the lighter category, with Poirot often on display in fine semi-comic form, with the audience smiling with him and his eccentricities and minor woes, and never quite laughing at him.
May 26th, 2012 at 9:42 pm
I am all for the productions with Hugh Fraser as Captain Hastings. Without him, not as much.
May 27th, 2012 at 11:41 am
I wonder which of the Poirot productions with David Suchet has come the closest to having followed the novel. The ones I’ve seen so far have all had changes made to them to one degree or another.
ROGER ACKROYD presents a huge challenge to movie-makers, of course. How does one make a filmed version of it? It’s one of the Suchet adaptations I’ve seen, and I wasn’t all that impressed:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=894
May 27th, 2012 at 4:44 pm
Quite possibly I’ve answered my own question, and it was right here on my own blog.
See my review of LORD EDGEWARE DIES, another Suchet-Poirot production that’s in the same set of DVDs as MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1311
I said: “With Lord Edgware Dies, however, they writer, producer and director get another chance to do it right, and except for one or two details, as far as I could tell, they did. I’ve read all of the comments on IMBD, and they all agree. This was an almost perfect reproduction of the book.”
May 28th, 2012 at 12:50 pm
I recall talking to a friend about Roger Ackroyd after it aired on TV. She said, “Where’s Captain Hastings?” I asked her if she’d ever read the book and she had not. Since the other Poirots she had seen had largely been with Hastings as the point of view I think I said you could hardly have him as narrator and still do justice to the book. While I’ve seen all of the early Poirots adapted from the short stories it wasn’t until Orient Express that I realized there was a darker side to the little Belgian.
May 28th, 2012 at 1:29 pm
In spite of what a lot of people may think, mostly people who have never read her books, Agatha Christie was never a “cozy” writer.
May 29th, 2012 at 12:45 pm
You’re right about Christie NOT being a cozy writer. Actually, I think she was fairly blood-thirsty, in proper British fashion, of course. I may be in the minority, but I’ve found the last half dozen Suchet/Poirot episodes on PBS inferior to those of 10 years ago. Maybe Suchet is tired of playing the character.
May 29th, 2012 at 1:27 pm
Depends how you define cozy. How important is setting and the traditional mystery. Too many readers simplify mystery into hardboiled and softboiled (aka cozy, aka traditional, aka classic).
Even the cozy today go beyond the original meaning. Today cozies are romance novels with touches of mystery, suspense or humor.
May 29th, 2012 at 3:01 pm
Right you are, Michael. Defining the term “cozy mystery” is as slippery and as hard to pin down as the definition of “film noir.” Here’s my take on it, taken from a previous post on this blog:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=707
“It has belatedly occurred to me to describe what I call a cozy mystery. A definition on Wikipedia summarizes my own thoughts very well, if not quite exactly:
“‘Cozy mysteries’ began in the late 20th century as a reinvention of the Golden Age whodunnit; these novels generally shy away from violence and suspense and frequently feature female amateur detectives. Modern cozy mysteries are frequently, though not necessarily in either case, humorous and thematic (culinary mystery, animal mystery, quilting mystery, etc.).â€
“I do not think of Golden Age puzzle mysteries as cozies. Agatha Christie is NOT a cozy mystery writer. If I were to add to the Wiki definition, I would include a phrase to the effect that large chunks of cozy mysteries are taken up with the personal relationships and interactions between the characters, their families, their friends and fellow hobbyists, but with such relationships having nothing to do with the causes of the crime or the solving of the crime, nor are they in any way a consequence of the crime, except in the most incidental fashion.
“Current-day cozies can very well include a puzzle plot approach to solving the crime. As the Wiki definition says, and I hadn’t thought of this in so many words, the current cozies are a “reinvention of the Golden Age whodunnit.†But the way cozies become flawed — or even fail, in my opinion — is by either including too much non-crime related material, or (as in the example I mentioned above) by not taking the process of solving the crime seriously enough.”
This post (and my comments) was written almost four years ago, but I don’t see anything I’d change. Nor do I see more than a sliver’s worth of difference between your concept of the term and mine.
May 29th, 2012 at 3:41 pm
I love the setting of this particular episode and always love the pairing of Hastings and Poirot. I am a huge fan of Suchet and Hugh Fraser.
In fact, I wrote about two of my favorite episodes of Poirot on todays blog.
At any rate, yeah, that ending. Well, they were only face to face for a couple days – once married AND he was in a train wreck AND he was twenty years older – more or less.
What I most didn’t like about the PBS version is the tacked on reason for Poirot showing up at the behest of some countess (she appeared in one of the short stories I believe and served kind of the same function as ‘the woman’ Irene Adler in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
This ‘countess thing’ is not in the book. The book is told from the point of view of the nurse called in to coddle the murdered wife. Poirot only enters the story about midway.
I feel this ‘countess’ addition only serves to make Poirot look ridiculous. That’s the main reason I’m not so crazy about this episode. Poirot is many things, but he is never ridiculous, most especially when it comes to women.
I also think that the actress playing the wife who is eventually murdered has zero sex appeal and is possibly a bit too old for the part. She just doesn’t work for me.
May 29th, 2012 at 5:03 pm
Yvette
First of all, let me post the link to your blog and the reviews you mention:
http://yvettecandraw.blogspot.com/2012/05/tuesdays-overlooked-or-forgotten-films.html
I haven’t seen any of the Suchet episodes based on Christie short stories, so I enjoyed your comments on the two you wrote about very much.
Re the ending of MESOPOTAMIA, I agree that while it’s possible, it still doesn’t seem likely to me.
But your point is well taken, and so are the rest of your observations, especially where the “countess” is concerned!
(I also agree about the lack of sex appeal of the murdered wife, but I wasn’t going to say that.)
October 12th, 2012 at 8:45 am
As far as I know, this and POIROT’S CHRISTMAS are Christie’s only novels with locked room puzzles – I think this one is reasonably well done though I’m not sure the mechanics are actually very convincing (the bars would need to be very far apart). My recollection is that the TV version was only OK and was one of the last made by the original production team before it was passed over to new personnel, with mostly disappointing results (no more Hastings, Japp or Miss Lemon for starters) I’m afraid to say, despite the excellence of Suchet himself though.
October 12th, 2012 at 9:48 am
Sergio
I have been watching the Suchet series only randomly, but the set I’ve been slecting from most often comes from the original production team, and even then I have been disappointed, sometimes only in small ways, but on occasion in a big way. If they later on deleted Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon, that is certainly discouraging news.
My copy of Adey’s Locked Room compendium has surfaced again — it had temporarily vanished to the bottom of a stack of other books — and in it Bob lists the following Christie novels as having impossible crime components:
CURTAIN
MURDER FOR CHRISTMAS / POIROT’S CHRISTMAS
MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA
AND THEN THERE NONE / TEN LITTLE INDIANS
WHY DIDN’T THEY ASK EVANS / THE BOOMERANG CLUE
Most of these I read a long time ago, with one exception: CURTAIN. I was not ready to read it at the time it came out, and for one reason or another, none good, I have never gotten back to it. The others I have put on my To Be Read Again list, which unfortunately is so huge now I know that I am lying to myself, alas.
October 12th, 2012 at 2:27 pm
My definition of a cozy has always been pretty simple and straightforward: the violence and bloodshed, no matter how much or in what form, occurs off stage. That’s it. None of that “it has elements of romance” or “it has old ladies”, or teapots, or whatever.
I have a few of the sets of the Suchet Poirot, and have watched most of them and enjoy them. I don’t remember any of the darker type.
October 12th, 2012 at 3:31 pm
Richard
I think definitions of what books fit into which category (and which don’t) are pretty much doomed to failure. It’s always the books on the fringe which cause all the problems. Yours, though, is as good as any, and maybe even better than most. I’ll have to think it over some, but right now, I kind of like it.
October 13th, 2012 at 8:12 am
The more recent Poirots–the ones for the most part without Hastings, Japp, or Miss Lemon–have been rather a bust. All this emphasis on Poirot’s Catholicism (never raised at all, as I can remember, in the books), fingering his rosary, etc. Just out of nowhere. And the adaptation of “Appointment with Death” was an absolute travesty. They basically kept the characters’ names and changed everything else.
As for “cozy,” I define it more as how the book makes you feel as opposed to a book’s setting or how elements in the book play out. When reading a “cozy,” I don’t get anxious; I know things will end if not well then at least with the culprit punished (in one form or another). Yes, the bloodshed usually occurs off-stage and there is always a motive for the murder, never just some crazed psychopath on the loose. For this reason, I believe Christie’s work qualifies as “cozy”–and I mean that in a good way.
October 13th, 2012 at 11:22 am
It’s really too bad that the later Suchet films diverge so greater from the Christie stories. Suchet should be proud of his work in them, but really, wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have a complete set of the books filmed exactly as they were written, or as close as possible?
My concept of what is a cozy is always in a state of flux. Today’s cozies are light-hearted romps with less emphasis on plots and more on wacky characters. The people in Christie’s books have a lot more edge to them than that. See my Comment #10 above. But, Deb, you and Richard are talking about a wider category of mystery, and while I’m not there yet, I see your point and I’m starting to lean your way.
October 29th, 2012 at 11:57 am
I think the productions with Hugh Fraser and Philip Jackson are overrated. I was surprised at how many of them were unfaithful to Christie’s novels . . . including this one. In my opinion, the qualities of the Poirot/Hastings era and the post-Hastings era are even stevens.
If they later on deleted Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon, that is certainly discouraging news.
There are some very good Poirot movies after 2001. Among the best are “SAD CYPRESS”, “FIVE LITTLE PIGS”, “CAT AMONG THE PIDGEONS”, “CARDS AT THE TABLE” and “AFTER THE FUNERAL”.
And not all of the Poirot movies featuring Hastings, Japp or both are that great.
February 22nd, 2014 at 2:27 pm
I think people have allowed sentimentality to compare the old Poirot movies to the ones that aired between 2003 and now, to the latter’s detriment. The additions of Japp, Hastings and Miss Lemon had no effect on the qualities of the movies, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know about Hastings, but at least of the movies featuring Japp did not require his presence – namely “HERCULE POIROT’S CHRISTMAS” and “EVIL UNDER THE SUN”.