Four and Twenty Blackbirds

The title comes from the nursery rhyme, and the episode earns it. Poirot is at dinner when a reclusive painter called George Lorrimer behaves oddly, fussing over his order in a way that seems to mean nothing at the time and everything later. The artist guards his routines jealously, keeping his private life strictly private, and Poirot files the small oddity away. A restaurant is an odd stage for a mystery, but that is the point: a man who guards his habits suddenly flouting them in public.

But then Lorrimer is found dead, and the death looks straightforward until the little grey cells start picking at it. The vital clue sits in the victim's last meal. There is something about what the artist chose to eat, and what he refused, that undoes the simple reading of the death, and Poirot works backwards from a plate of food to the truth of the matter. It is pure Christie: murder hiding in the menu, where nobody thinks to look. The painter's household is small and his circle smaller, which narrows the field without making it friendly.

Russell Murray and Agatha Christie wrote the episode, with Renny Rye directing. David Suchet plays Poirot and Hugh Fraser is Hastings. The supporting cast takes in Philip Jackson's Japp, Pauline Moran's Miss Lemon, Richard Howard as George Lorrimer, Tony Aitken as Tommy Pinner, Charles Pemberton as Stooge, Geoffrey Larder as Harry Clarke, Denys Hawthorne as Bonnington and Holly De Jong as Dulcie Lang.

There is a quiet pleasure in watching Poirot take a mystery this small and this domestic and turn it over until the light catches it. No grand action, no gunfire, just a man who notices what other people ate and what that says about them. The unassuming cases are often the ones that age best. By the end you will think twice about what is on your own plate.