Mindhunter Meets Poirot In Agatha Christie’s Darkest 3-Part Adaptation

1 week ago 24

Published Jun 1, 2026, 5:58 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

There have been plenty of Agatha Christie movies and shows over the years, but only the darkest take on Hercule Poirot managed to make one of his stories feel like an episode of Netflix’s Mindhunter. Agatha Christie is arguably the most influential mystery author of all time, as the legendary British writer’s output helped shape the familiar conventions of the murder mystery genre in the early 20th century.

While writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle created a basic blueprint, Christie finessed the murder mystery into an art form. As such, it’s no shock that upcoming shows like Tommy and Tuppence are still mining her work for source material, while countless Agatha Christie TV shows and movies have brought iconic sleuths like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple to life onscreen for decades. Christie’s darkest book And Then There Were None has been adapted to the screen no less than five times, and that’s not including a surprisingly faithful feature-length parody of the bestselling mystery novel ever from Family Guy.

However, even 2015’s And Then There Were None isn’t quite the darkest screen adaptation of Christie’s work. To find that, viewers need to seek out 2019’s The ABC Murders, starring John Malkovich as the oddball detective Hercule Poirot. Loosely based on the 1936 novel of the same name, The ABC Murders seemingly alters Christie’s typical murder mystery setup by revealing the character who is committing the killings early on in the story. However, all is not quite as it seems.

2019’s The ABC Murders Featured The Darkest Version of Poirot Ever

Anya Chalotra as Lily Marbury looking surprised in the ABC Murders

There are plenty of reverse whodunits where the killer is revealed at the beginning and the mystery lies in how they’ll evade detection, a formula used in both Columbo and Peacock’s recent homage to the series, Poker Face. However, The ABC Murders doesn’t quite fit this approach. Instead, the reality of who is arranging the murders is a little trippier and more convoluted than Christie’s usual modus operandi, so the killer’s identity is complicated.

This works fine in the source novel, a jaunty travelog that sees Poirot and his beleaguered sidekick travel up and down Britain by train to try and stop the killer from attacking again, as the villain seemingly chooses picturesque seaside towns based on their initials. However, while there were plenty of other fun campy murder mysteries on TV around the time of the show’s release, the 2019 series made the fatal mistake of taking its source material way too seriously.

The ABC Murders Wasted John Malkovich’s Poirot Performance

John Malkovich in The ABC Murders Amazon

The ABC Murders is far too dark for a Poirot adaptation, meaning the typically fun Malkovich can’t have any fun with his take on the quirky, diminutive, offbeat detective Poirot. This leads the show to highlight a broader Agatha Christie adaptation problem, as while Miss Marple and Poirot mysteries are often cozy, plenty of her works are surprisingly unapologetically dark, like And Then There Were None. The problem is, people come to Poirot expecting fun, not True Detective-style psychological unease, which makes The ABC Murders feel jarring. Even if the series impressed some critics, it betrayed its source material.

There are Poirot books, such as the late-career Hallowe’en Party, that are dark, morose, and perfectly suited to a modern adaptation that feels more like Mindhunter or Silence of the Lambs than Death on the Nile. However, The ABC Murders picked the wrong novel to adapt in this style, loading a fairly fun, lightweight mystery with psychosexual complexity and a sense of mounting unease that is at odds with Poirot’s usual mysteries. Thus, while The ABC Murders may have brought Mindhunter’s darkness to the world of Agatha Christie, this wasn’t necessarily a good combination.