While many of Christie's murderers are often motived by financial gain, in Curtain our 'X' is driven by much more fiendish impulses. Their banter was as amusing as ever, especially in those occasions when Poirot teases Hastings about his partiality for redheads. Hastings' feelings mirrored my own ones: being at Styles again brings about a bout of nostalgia, and his reunion with Poirot reveals that underneath his somewhat priggish British exterior, lies a deep affection for his Belgian friend.

Surprisingly Hastings was not as irritating as he could usually be, and while his younger self was more of a stick-in-the-mud kind of chap (at times acting like little more than disgruntled child), this older Hastings seems far more genial. Still, in spite of his physical appearance, his mind remains as sharp as ever and he is, as per usual, always a mile ahead of his naïve friend Hastings (who is yet again played like a fiddle). I will admit that seeing the formidable Poirot altered in such a visible way did indeed affect me. Rather than hurrying Poirot off from the stage, Christie grants him one final performance. While I know that by this point Agatha Christie feelings towards him were less than amicable, her novel doesn't convey its creators impatience. GĬurtain bids a bittersweet farewell to the one and only Hercule Poirot. Enjoy, my friends, this delightful performance by Hugh Fraser (Who does a lovely David Suchet impersonation, btw), and dream of what might have been. Here, therefore, is a chance for us fans of the older series, fans of the time when Agatha Christie's Poirot was a good show to watch, one that didn't make you cringe at the obvious changes (so obvious, a non-reader can spot them), to experience something of the 'Curtain' experience which we deserve, but will never get. I spent quite a lot of time waiting for the more iconic tales to swing around, and now that they have, they are horrible to behold. The new trend of adaptation, that of deviating heavily from Christie's story, is painful for someone who was used to the quality of the early series.

After years of waiting for a David Suchet adaptation to replace the awkward accent and strange paleness of Albert Finny, I got a Murder on the Orient Express which I could hardly recognize. But as the years went on, my love for the old Christie books had changed to horror at the most recent adaptations. I grew up watching the old Joan Hickson Marple movies (pocket full of rye used to scare the living daylights out of me), and the early series of the David Suchet tv adaptation of Poirot. I am not an avid Christie reader, but I am an avid Christie fan. A corrective experience for fans of the TV series'

Curtain by Agatha Christie