Second thoughts

The BBC 2018 version of The A.B.C. Murders, now showing on amazon video, fundamentally misleads viewers from the very beginning as to who is doing what.

Still, it's a fine bit of work, anyway, that production.

And all the same in the first episode it's openly acknowledged that the killer is someone who knows Poirot well.

And that's a kind of correction for the misdirection.

Japp's fate, and Poirot's fall from grace with the police and the public, are the work of rising xenophobia.

Very topical.

The sense of Poirot's Catholicity is presented perhaps not altogether consistently.

In the first episode he has, and of course uses, a prie-dieu (a kneeler) in his apartment before a framed photo of the Virgin, provided with a shelf for a burning candle.

In the last it is revealed that in Belgium, before he went to England as a refugee in 1914, he was a priest and not a gendarme.

And in the first we are shown that even his name, "Hercule Poirot", is an invention of his, made up as a refugee in that year.

These are major departures from Christie.

But in the middle it is shown that while he attends masses he has not confessed since he fled Belgium in 1914 (it's 1933) and has not taken communion since then because he cannot forgive either God or the Boche, it's not clear which, for the atrocities of the invasion of his country.

To be clear, the introduction of malignant xenophobia as a serious source of evil in this production does not so much depart from Christie as make a theme already always present in her Poirot stories stronger.

She always used him to point up and tweak British insularity and anything that looked like the old "the wogs begin at Calais" attitude.

You know, mocking Colonel Blimp.

This BBC production just sharpens the tone of the rejection, and darkens the evil, of xenophobia.

But it's more than that.

The production repeatedly flashes back to tragic and violent events during the German invasion of Belgium, depicting the murder of civilians by German troops on the express orders of their officer, witnessed by the man we know as Hercule Poirot.

And the European war of 1914, like the one of 1939 in which it led to even worse and more devastating crimes, originated in malignant nationalism, especially German malignant nationalism.

Those repeated flashbacks put the xenophobia in England of 1933 in the broader context of the rampant, malignant nationalism of which it was a feature.

Well done, I say.

Update.

This is absurd.

If the eggs are soft boiled the toast cannot have jam.

It's for dunking, of course.

And I often have that very breakfast, sometimes with 8 ounces of V8, sometimes with a half strip of bacon.

Always with black coffee, though, like any good continental of Western Europe.

Or any American, North, Central, or South.

Never his disgusting tisane.

Oh, Sergeant Yelland's use of "choice Anglo-Saxon" for English profanity is a delightful and entirely correct departure from the offensive and lying label found in the stupid but common remark, then as now, "Pardon my French".