The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge

Poirot is not a man for grouse shoots. He joins Hastings at Hunter's Lodge for a weekend shooting party with visible reluctance, and the house does nothing to change his mind: the talk is all guns and land, with people being civil to each other through gritted teeth. He dislikes the whole business of shooting, and the feeling appears to be mutual. But then the host is found dead in his study, and the reluctant guest becomes the only person in the house who knows what to do about it.

The Havering family supplies most of the tension. Zoe (Diana Kent) and Roger (Jim Norton) Havering share the name with Archie (Shaughan Seymour), and around them move Jack Stoddard (Roy Boyd), Harrington Pace (Bernard Horsfall), Ellie (Victoria Alcock) and Joan (Clare Travers-Deacon). Nobody at the lodge liked the dead man much, which gives the police plenty of room to work. Japp takes the official strain. Hastings hovers, guilty in the way he always is when murder interrupts a social engagement. Poirot, for his part, is taken ill at the worst possible moment, which does not stop him from seeing what the healthy people missed. Diana Kent's Zoe and Jim Norton's Roger carry the family's share of the story between them.

T.R. Bowen wrote the script with Agatha Christie, and Renny Rye directed. It is a closed-circle puzzle in the best sense: one house, one weekend, one body, and a dozen reasons not to look your neighbour in the eye. The shooting party setting is used well, all tweed and weather and polite dislike.

The solution turns on the sort of detail Poirot collects without anyone noticing. By the end the grouse are safe, the killer is named, and the shooting party has learned what it should have known from the start: never invite Poirot anywhere if you want to get away with anything. The episode is one of the quieter entries in the run, and it wears the quiet well.