"The ABC Murders" and "The Pale Horse"

Minor spoilers ahead

The Sarah Phelps penned BBC miniseries adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries have been produced at the rate of about one a year since "And Then There Were None" in 2015. I like a good crime procedural, so I went and sought out the two most recent series, "The ABC Murders" and "The Pale Horse." Both follow roughly the same template of using more psychologically complex characters with expanded backstories. This includes the newest version of Christie's beloved sleuth, Hercule Poirot.

The biggest selling point of "The ABC Murders" is that it's the first of these new BBC adaptations to feature Poirot, played here by John Malkovitch. The celebrated Belgian detective is now facing old age and obsolescence, still famous but no longer in demand. When he receives a series of ominous letters, he brings them to the attention of the new head of Scotland Yard, Inspector Crome (an unrecognizable Rupert Grint), who dismisses them as a prank. Once murders do start piling up, following an ABC pattern, Poirot traces them to a troubled young salesman named Cust (Eamon Farren), who is living in the boarding house of Mrs. Marbury (Shirley Henderson) and her daughter Lily (Anya Chalotra).

I like the ways that the story has been expanded - even Poirot has an entirely invented new backstory. However, it's a sad and troubling world that Poirot finds himself in, as an immigrant in an England that has become hostile to immigrants. Bad memories follow wherever he goes, and his friend Inspector Japp (Kevin McNally) has retired in disgrace. The series intercuts Poirot's side of the investigation with Cust's travels throughout England. Cust is a socially awkward loner with a lot of inner demons, and he seems to encounter one awful set of people after another. His disturbing behavior reflects a sad life lived in seedy circumstances. Mirroring the hunter and hunted against each other also allows the series to spend more time with the various sets of victims and their loved ones, so we get to know Betty Barnard (Eve Austin) as more than just a set of convenient initials, and her sister Jenny (Lizzy McInnerny) gets her own poignant little subplot.

"The ABC Murders" works as well as it does because of the acting chops of Malkovitch and Farren. Phelps' adaptations have generally been more introspective, more focused on character over the intricacies of the mystery plotting. They've also been darker and more psychologically fraught. We get a few demonstrations of Poirot's famous eccentricities, but these are mostly used to show how out-of-date and obscure he's become. There's a strong sense of melancholy to the series, and bringing out the anti-immigrant themes and additional historical grounding further serve to demystify the character of Hercule Poirot and his universe. Malkovitch's accent is a little dodgy, but I've heard much worse over the years, and his Poirot's gradual reinvigoration by the case is a delight to see.

Now, on to "The Pale Horse," based on one of Christie's novels written later in her career. Here, we follow Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell), an antiques dealer with a complicated personal life. After the death of his first wife Delphine (Georgina Campbell), he marries the unstable perfectionist Hermia (Kaya Scodelario), and is now seeing a woman named Thomasina (Poppy Gilbert) on the side. One day a shopkeeper, Jessie Davis (Madeleine Bowyer), turns up dead with a list of names in her shoe. The list includes Easterbrook, his nephew Ardingly (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), and a man named Zachariah Osborne (Bertie Carvel). As Easterbrook looks further into the death, he discovers connections to a trio of witches (Rita Tushingham, Sheila Atim and Kathy Kiera Clarke) working out of the village of Much Deeping.

The supernatural elements in the story set this Christie mystery apart, but the adaptation reflects much of her later work. The stories became darker and more cynical, and the heroes much more flawed. Departing from the source novel, the adaptation turns Easterbrook into a full-fledged antihero and his wife into a woman on edge. This is one of the shorter Christie miniseries, with only two installments. The narrative belongs solely to Easterbrook, and the cast of characters is fairly limited, making the twists and turns of the plotting much more dependent on the slipperiness of our leading man. Sewell pulls it off, but I can't help thinking that the role would have been better suited to a more unorthodox actor with a little more slime in his screen persona. Fortunately, Scodelario and Carvel do excellent supporting work.

Like "The ABC Murders," "The Pale Horse" is very interior and moody, but features more shocks and excitement. The climax, however, relies on some turns and revelations that are deployed very quickly, and there's not really a denouement, when there probably should have been. Aside from that, I found the series very satisfying, with some good twists, and a fun premise. It's not as thematically well developed as the other Christie adaptations Phelps has done, but provides more than enough murderous entertainment for me to appreciate the effort.

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