This week saw the second in the series of four final Poirot mysteries on ITV, the last four never to have been filmed. It started, appropriately, with “The Big Four”, and this week we had “Dead Man’s Folly”, one of the Ariadne Oliver mysteries. It seems hard to believe there will be no more, particularly since Sophie Hannah was recently commissioned to write a new one.
Perhaps it’s time to follow another well-worn TV trail and start making “Young Poirot” in pre-war Belgium (or even a teenage Jane Marple in Victorian St Mary Mead?). Or alternatively, for fans of the BBC4 European subtitled epics, how about a Euro-pudding with the feisty great-niece of Poirot as a Belgian cop investigating murders at the EU headquarters in Brussels, ably assisted by a young British diplomat called Hastings, whose grandfather was a good chum of Great-Uncle Hercule? They could investigate a murder of someone from a different EU country each week, and provide work for subtitlers of multiple nationalities. Hmmm. I feel a script coming on.
