Lord Edgware’s body, to be precise.īecause Horowitz restructured Agatha’s novel, we had already met and disliked Lord Edgware. Which showed up the next morning right on schedule. The gang’s back together!The scenes showing the gang settling back together demonstrated genuine warmth, culminating in Japp at the welcome home dinner saying all they needed was a body. Instead, she stayed home with her adopted Siamese cat (rescued in The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman). That’s a pity because Miss Lemon (Pauline Moran) has the wattage and acting chops to headline a great TV series about a lady detective in the 1930s. She’s back in Argentina trying to sell the ranch.ĭuring Poirot’s retirement, Miss Lemon apparently did not open either a secretarial and filing school or a detective agency, both of which she would run efficiently. Sadly, we don’t get to meet Bella again, the woman he met and suspected of murder in Murder on the Links and then married. Are you surprised? It’s perfectly in keeping with his nature. Our man Hastings returned to England because he lost his ranch in Argentina due to his incompetent financial management. Hastings and Miss Lemon were handled far more skillfully. He’d previously reunited - in idiotic fashion - with Chief Inspector Japp in Roger Ackroyd. Lucky for us, unlike Roger Ackroyd, Edgware’s script by Anthony Horowitz was excellent.ĭealing with the movers is here job, too.One of the additions to Agatha’s plot showed Poirot moving back into Whitehaven Mansions. The various production companies never followed Agatha’s own timeline.

With a thoughtful script, any of the remaining, unfilmed novels (or the criminally neglected short story “The Lemesurier Inheritance”) could have worked. The world still awaits a decent filmed version of that novel.Īfter rebooting the series with Roger Ackroyd, the producers next chose to film - for mysterious reasons - Lord Edgware Dies. I’m ignoring the travesty of the first movie bringing back Poirot in 2000: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.Īlso, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movies on her podcast.ĭespite the lengthy hiatus between the first end of the Poirot TV series in 1996 and the start of sporadic movies in 2000, cast, script, director, settings, and music all came together here as though they’d never been separated by the vagaries of TV ratings and running out of money.

Otherwise, this movie fired on all cylinders with very few missteps. I’d have given it another half-dagger but with no subtitles, I couldn’t understand some of the witty banter. Teresa reviews “Lord Edgware Dies” (2000) and finds it’s the best of the three versions, with some reservations.Įvents are rearranged, Jane Wilkinson impersonates Lady Macbeth, a thieving butler leads our gang on a fatal chase, but almost everything important is there.

Jane wilkinson lord edgware dies