The Many Labours of Hercules: From Agatha Christie’s Short Stories to David Suchet’s Penultimate Poirot

Agatha Christie’s The Labours of Hercules is a set of short stories. The prologue starts with a friend, a classical scholar and Fellow at All Souls College, who asks Poirot about his first name, which is hardly apt, as well as that of his brother, Achille.

Do I not resemble the classical hero?, asks Poirot, apparently innocently.

Having ascertained that the famed detective never studied ancient Greek, the professor is keen to enlighten him, while urging on him a retired life of leisure and devotion to great books:

The don’s criticism launches Poirot into a study of the labours of Hercules, with Miss Lemon’s able assistance.

He’s not impressed by what he learns about the Greeks and their Gods, with their “drink, debauchery, incest, rape, loot, homicide and chicanery.” Worst of all, there is no “order” or “method” to the way they live their lives.

Nonetheless, Poirot decides that in his semi-retired state he will await cases that suggest parallels to the labours of Hercules.

In Agatha Christie’s Poirot, several of these stories are intertwined to craft an episode in which the famed detective travels to a hotel high in the Alps, accessible by a single funicular. In some unsavoury and dangerous company, Poirot has to wait out a storm after an avalanche cuts the hotel off from the rest of the world.

This is fun: Lucy Foley is re-starting Christie’s Miss Marple series with a novel set at a hotel high in the Alps.

The TV story works surprisingly well, drawing on several of the stories in The Labours of Hercules to craft a plot involving a vicious serial killer/art thief, who may be in disguise at the resort; a pair of sisters who are grifters; and a languishing ballerina in the control of her steely psychiatrist.

Poirot, of course, investigates. And the TV screenplay gives him a compelling rationale for doing so: his own guilt at having promised a young woman, some months earlier, that she was perfectly safe, shortly before she is brutally murdered at a party.

The short stories are bagatelles, but the TV episode is effective, and the cast is exceptionally strong.