Teresa Reviews Poirot: Super Sleuths (2006)

Teresa reviews Poirot: Super Sleuths (2006) and wished the documentary was longer so we could hear more from the behind-the-camera workers.

(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel

Is it entertaining? 4 Agathas

As always, this documentary was too short!

Is it educational? 3 Agathas

There’s wasn’t enough time devoted to what the writers, directors, and producers must do to make Poirot do justice to the stories, please the Christie family, and fit within the constraints of TV.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

When we started the Agatha Project, we had no idea what we were getting into. The majority of what she wrote has been filmed. There’s not much left untouched, apart from a few novels and many of her short stories and plays. We didn’t understand that she’s so popular, her works have been filmed in multiple countries and adapted to their cultures.

We didn’t know that she’s also been the subject of numerous documentaries promising to delve into every aspect of her life, her characters, and her novel-writing prowess. I can imagine her reaction to being asked about that. A notoriously private, even shy woman, she’d roll her eyes and change the subject.

And thus we arrive at the Super Sleuths TV series. Each episode looked at a different mystery show, and the first episode starred the Poirot series.

But first, a digression. I normally watch the films without reading up on them. I want to view a movie like an audience of the time would see it, fresh and new, and without expectations.

But there’s a big difference between me and the original audience. When I watch a decades-old film for the first time, I’m not part of the social milieu where the audience would spot Shirley Eaton (b. 1937) prancing onscreen in her undies and say, “Look! It’s that blonde from the James Bond flick where she was painted gold!” I can’t do that because I didn’t watch Ten Little Indians in 1965, and I didn’t just see Ms. Eaton in Goldfinger (1964). I often have no idea who those actors are or were. Household names of the past are forgotten today.

Instead, I see a film like Ten Little Indians and the actors and actresses have no past, present, or future. I only see how the film works or doesn’t and how it compares to other versions of the same intellectual property.

I can watch numerous adaptations of a novel, say, A Caribbean Mystery, and each of the four films will be noticeably different. There also can be connections between film adaptations. Caribbean is a good example because when Sue Grafton wrote the screenplay for the 1983 version, she enhanced the character of Mr. Rafiel’s secretary that was repeated in two subsequent versions. The exception was the Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie episode. That series rarely paid attention to what their predecessors had done.

Documentaries are supposed to have some connection to reality no matter how tenuous (*cough* The Agatha Christie Code (2005) *cough*) and can’t be as flexible as fiction. The format varies slightly: a series of talking heads, a chat show with audience participation, interviews interspersed with film clips, house tours of significant locations, and so forth.

So after watching several Agatha documentaries one after another, they start looking and sounding the same. How much new ground is there to cover in Agatha Christie’s life? How much new is there to say about her staying power as a writer? About how Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple will likely live on in people’s memories for generations to come?

So we push Poirot: Super Sleuths into the DVD player and immediately recognize the usual suspects. Because this documentary is part of ITV’s Poirot project, I expect and get many scenes with David Suchet discussing how he becomes Poirot. We also get interviews with Hugh Fraser, who made the very most of the thankless task of playing Captain Arthur Hastings, Poirot’s dear friend and frequently idiotic sounding board. We see Philip Jackson, who turned Chief Inspector Japp into a fully-rounded policeman who must cope with Poirot’s genius and eccentricities while collecting evidence that will stand up in court. My goodness, but he looks wrong without his mustache. As wrong as David Suchet without his!

And we get not nearly enough time with Pauline Moran, who embodied Miss Lemon, super-secretary and cat lover. Watching Ms. Moran reminded me again that Miss Lemon should have been given a TV show of her own. She would run a secretarial bureau, training her secretaries into perfect administrators and versatile investigators because who ever looks at the clerical help?

The film clips woven into their interviews remind you to rewatch the episodes instead of wasting time on documentaries.

Matthew Prichard speaks several times about his grandmother Agatha. He agrees that Suchet is as close as we’ll ever come to her vision of Poirot. Laura Thompson, noted biographer of Agatha, also is interviewed. She gets more air time than Val McDermid who might have recorded a half hour about Agatha but only about one minute showed up onscreen.

Where this documentary got more interesting was when three non-usual suspects were interviewed. Simon Brett was the president of the Detection Club from 2000 to 2015. Agatha Christie was one of the club’s founding members in 1930, along with Baroness Emma Orczy (1865-1947), G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Freeman Wills Croft (1879-1957), Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) and others who used to be household names and, like Shirley Eaton, no longer are. I had no idea the group was still going strong.

Brian Eastman is a long-time producer, with a remarkably varied career in television. Of all the TV shows he’s shepherded, Poirot is most likely what he’ll be remembered for. I wanted much more time with Eastman. Why did his production company make the decisions they did, such as setting everything in the 1930s? It’s visually a great era, and it works for virtually everything the show filmed. How did he keep the show going? Why didn’t he film The Labours of Hercule as a cycle of short stories? That would have made a great season of Poirot all on its own. The film version, cramming all twelve labors into one film worked surprisingly well, but I’d have taken twelve 50-minute episodes rather than one 90-minute film to get more of Poirot and the gang.

Anthony Horowitz got some time too, but again, not nearly enough. He wrote 11 Poirot episodes and did his best to work in Hastings saying “Good Lord” as often as possible. Some of his scripts were excellent. Others — I’m looking at you, Dead Man’s Mirror (1993) — are not so good.

An unexpected guest and therefore not one of the usual suspects was Margaret Kinsman. She’s an academic with, based on what she said, a serious interest in mysteries on both sides of the Atlantic. She spent some of her time discussing how different Agatha’s mysteries were from Americans like Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) and Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961). She was interesting.

So what is my conclusion, fellow super sleuths? This documentary has bits you won’t see duplicated elsewhere, but you’ll also get more of the same.