REVIEW: The Lemesurier Inheritance (Agatha Christie)

The Lemesurier Inheritance
Author: Agatha Christie

This Hercule Poirot short story was first published in the UK on December 19, 1923 in Sketch Magazine. Publication in the US followed in 1925 (Blue Book Magazine). It is the last of the stories that Christie penned while on a 10-month around-the-world trip in 1922 leading up to the British Empire Exposition.

This story flashes back to the early days of Poirot and Hastings' friendship just after WWI. The story follows a string of deaths in the Lemesurier family, culminating in a visit to Poirot by the Matriarch of the family. Mrs. Lemesurier states that there are rumors of a family curse on the eldest sons. It seems the eldest sons in the family always die young and the estate passes to a younger son. She is afraid for her oldest son as he seems to be having a lot of near fatal accidents. She doesn't believe in the curse....but her husband seems to be obsessed with it. Poirot agrees to take the case. Can he prevent the boy's death? Or is it an unavoidable curse?

Surprisingly enough, this Poirot short was not adapted for television. The long-running television series, Agatha Christie's Poirot, skipped this one. But I did read that the story is referenced in The Labors of Hercules, a 90-minute Poirot television movie that aired in 2014. Suchet did narrate an audio book version of The Lemesurier Inheritance, so he can still state that he performed in a version of every Poirot story, even if the television show skipped this one. 

I'm trying to figure out why the television series skipped this story. It would have required some editing to adapt for television. Maybe that's the reason? It covers the entirety of the years of Hastings and Poirot's friendship, making it difficult to adapt to film. The actors in the television series had aged since the beginning of the series. And the story would have required significant editing to make the plot work without jumping back in time and working forward.  But, the obsessed reader in me really doesn't understand why they didn't make the effort....they did some pretty major changes in several of the stories to fit them into a hour episode. Why skip this one? They could have easily flashed back in the history of the family and left a younger Poirot/Hastings out of the mix entirely. Just seems a bit odd that they made such efforts to do all of the other stories....even some that were very short and simple....but skipped this one entirely? I haven't seen the Labors of Hercules movie yet, so I'm not sure how much of the plot they worked into it.....but why skip an entire story? This tale is a bit bizarre, but not so strange that it deserved to be left out of the television series. The series did skip over some short stories that were later re-worked into longer versions, opting to film the later versions (The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, Murder in the Mews and a few others). But only one short story was skipped completely -- this one. Hmmmm. Putting a character named Lemesurier into another film (The Labors of Hercules) is more of a homage than a real portrayal of the story.

But....I will withhold judgment until I actually watch the movie The Labors of Hercules. If the plot of this story isn't in there somewhere....I will be really disappointed. Why film all the rest.....and skip this one story??? Seems a bit odd.....    (Another Poirot story not included in the television show is Black Coffee. But....that particular work was actually a play that was later adapted into a novel in 1998. Suchet did a live reading performance of the play for a theater company....so he did effectively perform every Hercule Poirot story Christie wrote in one form or another.)

Well, this completes my backtracking to read the early short stories featuring Hercule Poirot. All 25 of them! I'm enjoying my quest to read all of Agatha Christie's writing in publication order! Now I can jump back into the novels. It's time for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd -- one of my favorites!