Teresa Reviews When the Mice Play (2021)

Teresa reviews When the Mice Play (2021), an original story from Les Petits Muertres and enjoyed spotting the Agatha-adjacent tropes.

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

(Quand les Souris Dansent)

Agatha adjacent? 3 stranglers
This original story includes a callback to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and the main suspect’s situation recalls three other novels.

Quality of movie: 4 stranglers
Loads of ’70s eye candy clothes on display here, and all in service of the story too.

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

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

From here on, season Three of Les Petits Muertres is forging into brave new territory; jettisoning Agatha and writing their own scripts. And yet, you’ll recognize Agatha’s tropes.

The main one is from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). If you recall — we aren’t kidding when we say spoilers abound for the film being reviewed, and it looks like we’ll be including other Agatha properties too — the murder hinged on witnesses hearing Roger Ackroyd’s voice and deducing, naturally, that he was still alive. They heard him speak, and the dead can’t speak, right?

Except when they’ve been recorded and the wax cylinder, dictaphone, record, tape, CD, MP3, etc. is played back. A recording is why you can still listen to Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) singing from La Bohème or Pagliacci. And so it proves here. Mme Maud, proprietress of the most exclusive whorehouse in Lille and catering to its elites however kinky their taste, is heard to speak by witnesses. This fixes the time of her death, causing issues for Dr. Blum since his autopsy indicates her time of death was earlier than the witness statements suggest.

The script did a fairly good job of concealing the evidence onscreen but if you’re a devoted Agatha reader, you’ll spot the crucial device at once. Mme Maud has been recording her life story so she can do what mistresses to powerful men have done since the dawn of time which is write a tell-all and use it for blackmail.

She’s following in the perfumed path of Harriette Wilson (1786-1845), also known as the Queen of Tarts. Harriette wrote her memoirs and asked men for money to keep their stories from being published. Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) and one of her many, many, many well-connected and rich lovers, famously replied, “publish and be damned.” So she did.

He wasn’t worried about what she’d reveal about his bedroom talents.

Mme Maud is in a similar situation. She’s getting older, and how much longer does she want to pimp young women to rich old men? Or service them herself? She’s got an elite clientele extending past the movers and shakers of Lille to foreign diplomats and important cabinet ministers. She’s got money, but she’s got bills to pay and a future where she doesn’t have to worry about being arrested to secure. Respectability beckons. Thus, the memoirs she’s recording.

Then she’s found strangled. The tapes are gone. It’s a good bet many aristocratic men breathed a sigh of relief when they heard she was dead and worried anew when they heard the tapes had vanished into someone’s pocket.

Suspects abound. The drug-dealing bartender, Serge, who has eyes for Beretta.

Maud’s son, Antoine, a photographer and druggie. At least two of her girls, Mona and Flore. Future cabinet minister, Thierry Faucon, who’s also a dear friend of Rose’s father, Arnaud Bellecour. Arnaud also frequents Maud’s brothel, a fact he will pay anything to keep from his wife and daughter. But could the suspect list go further?

The Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) thinks so. They’re the French equivalent of the FBI and, judging by the evidence onscreen, appreciated just as much when they take over an investigation to cover up high crimes and misdemeanors. Rules are for little people, not ministers and wealthy industrialists and foreign diplomats.

The DST team is led by Captain LeClerc, code-named Cassandra. Like Gréco, she’s a woman working in a man’s world, but the resemblance stops there. She’s fine with circumventing the law if higher-ups want it done. She’s okay with her agents harassing the girls. She’ll turn tricks herself to get the job done. Rules? Those are for peasants.

But I mentioned this episode uses another classic Agatha trope she used in three novels! Antoine, Maud’s son, hates his mother’s oldest profession. He hates himself. He’s a gifted photographer but also a drug addict severe enough that he blacks out and doesn’t know what he’s done. He and mom fight constantly, and he’s been heard threatening her.

So, when he comes to after another blackout and discovers that mom’s dead, his shoes are muddy, his shoeprint is outside her château window, and the rope used to strangle her is on his dresser, what is he to think?

He must have strangled his mother in a fit of rage, while stoned.

But that’s not what happened. Someone, like Franklin Clarke in The A.B.C. Murders (1936) or Tim Kendall in A Caribbean Mystery (1964) or Frances Cary in Third Girl (1966) gaslit him and made him into the fall guy. True to Agatha’s trope, Antoine was cruelly used by someone he trusted.

The other classic Agatha trope to remember is that, just like anyone can be the victim, anyone can be the murderer. Victims can be blackmailing madams or fine, upstanding pillars of society. Murderers can be mustache-twirling villains or the grieving brother, spouse, or beloved daughter. Policemen can go either way. They can support law and order or, for reasons of their own, be the murderer or at least break the law if it helps them. About the only truism you can say is that blackmailers nearly always come to a bad end.

So Gréco is faced with officials who don’t want to solve the case because it might implicate more important officials and keep France from making an important oil deal with Uganda (the reverse of “The Theft of the Royal Ruby” where Poirot had to solve the crime to keep a business deal with Egypt). She’s getting very little support from Chief Inspector Legoff. Beretta is being his usual self, seducing potential suspects and punching out DST agents. Rose is trying to keep the money flowing from mom and dad rather than — shudder — go to work as a menial secretary. And Blum, from whom Gréco expects quality work, insists Mme Maud died earlier than those corroborating witness statements suggest.

You’ll enjoy a wonderful piece of detecting towards the end of the episode. Gréco is riding with Beretta in his yellow Renault and fooling with the tape deck. She freezes and you can see her thinking. She holds the tape, looks at it, slides it into the tape deck, and the singer begins singing as if he were in the backseat with the band. Isn’t he wonderful, she says. And Beretta says something about how sad it is that he died too young.

But we’re listening to his voice. Even though he’s dead. This is what makes a great detective, in real life or in fiction. They make the intuitive leap between what they see and what really happened. The facts didn’t lie, but they weren’t all there.
This was a fun episode, and it worked. I’ve got better hopes for the rest of Season Three!