Dead Man's Folly

A summer fête in Devon: bunting, lemonade stalls, and a murder hunt organised by Ariadne Oliver for the amusement of the guests. The game is that a girl plays the victim and the partygoers play detective. Miss Oliver has a sense of foreboding she cannot shake, and she summons Poirot. Her fears are realised. The girl playing the murder victim is murdered for real.

Poirot arrives to find a real crime sitting inside a staged one, and the job is to separate the performance from the violence. The estate throws up the usual Christie gallery: Sir George Stubbs, Bickford, Henden, Mrs Amy Folliat, Miss Brewis, Hattie Stubbs, Michael Weyman, and a Dutch girl hiker who wanders into the middle of it all. Everyone connected to the fête has a part in the game, and that is what makes the real murder so hard to see.

Nick Dear wrote the adaptation with Christie, and Tom Vaughan directed. Sean Pertwee is a fine Sir George Stubbs, with Sinéad Cusack as Mrs Amy Folliat, Stephanie Leonidas as Hattie Stubbs, Rebecca Front as Miss Brewis, Chris Gordon as Bickford, Richard Dixon as Henden, Francesca Zoutewelle as the Dutch girl hiker and James Anderson as Michael Weyman. Zoë Wanamaker's Oliver is at the heart of it, which is where she belongs.

The murder hunt is such a good idea for a murder that you wonder no one thought of it sooner. The episode plays fair with it too: everything you need is there at the fête, hiding among the games and the stalls. And the twist at the end reorders the whole afternoon, which is exactly what a good Christie ending should do.

It is a light, summery episode with a serious heart. The foreboding that Oliver cannot explain turns out to be her best tool, and the episode trusts her instincts the way the books always did. A gentle pleasure, and a reminder that Christie could make murder out of a village fête without breaking a sweat.