Perhaps there is enough for a second chance, especially if you’re a Jessica Raine fan. Whether there’s been enough accomplished in the first episode to coax you back next week is up to you. Just as things start getting up to speed, the credits roll and we’re left on a cliffhanger without ever fully appreciating the cliff. It’s the big gripe in an episode which is otherwise a stylish introduction to the principal players.

It’s Christie with a tip of the hat to Hitchcock.Īnd yet, having reeled off that list, it never quite feels like the story achieves full pace before the cliffhanger. So here we have Part 1-of-3 of the time-shifted adaptation of Christie’s 1922 novel, ‘The Secret Adversary’, which begins with a stranger on a train and rapidly becomes a mystery that involves tracking down a missing woman, infiltrating a gambling den, disguises, chases, Soviet assassins, and more than a few furrowed brows across the kitchen table. Writers Claire Wilson and Zinnie Harris have taken the middle-class couple from their native roaring Twenties and transplanted them into the transitional Fifties: a Cold War playground where the sparkling cyanide and deadly Deco of Christie’s early 20 th century world has peeled away, and the optimism for the post-WW2 future is diluted by the threat of Reds under the bed rather than, say, a bachelor with a Derringer and a reputation that needs protecting. Housing estates rather then country estates. No drawing rooms, more suburban living rooms. They’re Christie’s own antidote to her country house homicides. She’s the unflappable wife, stylishly protruding against mid-century anti-feminist expectations. He’s the well-meaning but vaguely buffoonish husband wedged into a trilby hat. They’re husband and wife on the express to Calais and about to become parters in(vestigating) crime. Esio Trot, Poldark, Strange and Norrell, The Outcast, and now a series based on two of Agatha Christie’s least well known sleuths: Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. This year more than ever, Auntie Beeb is determined to borrow everything on your bookshelf. There’s the smoky whiff of The Orient Express, Le Train Bleu, and the 4:50 from Paddington as we commence the latest in BBC One’s Sunday night syllabus of bestseller adaptations. A setting that’s unmistakeably Dame Agatha.

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