Les Petits Meurtres D’Agatha Christie

French Twist

Les Petits Meurtres
D’Agatha Christie
aka The Little Murders
Of Agatha Christie
aka Agatha Christie’s
Criminal Games
plus Agatha Christie
Family Murder Party
France 2006, 2009-2023
Various company’s DVDs
 
Les Petits Meurtres D’Agatha Christie is one of the best TV shows I’ve seen in quite a while but it’s also absolutely frustrating and maddening to actually acquire all the episodes to watch. This is because one company has put certain episodes out while another has put certain other episodes out and, in terms of the running order, especially from what I will call ‘Season 1’ (it gets complicated, as I’ll elabourate in a minute), it’s like each company just divided the episodes, threw them all in the air and then just put them on their respective discs in a random order completely unlike the actual order you’re supposed to watch them in. So if you do as I did and spend a year and a half trying to put all the episodes together, you’ll need to refer to the IMDB for the correct order to watch these in as, yes, there is character development and referrals back to events in other episodes. Of course, it almost goes without saying that the two companies use different sets of titles for the episodes... sometimes French, sometimes English and, sometimes their own translations based on the Agatha Christie story the episode is based on rather than the actual episode title. Then, of course, running in a totally random order on the discs.

So yeah, it’s not been easy and if these weren’t all a series of gifts for my mum, I might have given up but... between the two companies, there are eight sets of discs which do, I assure you, make up all the episodes. At around £30 to £40 a pop from the US, which is the only country so far these have been released with English subtitles, as far as I can make out. Some of which are no longer in print, so you may have to try and Ebay one or two. All I can say is... they’re worth it but, even to try and explain the way the seasons are split up is hard. As one season can run for many years... each episode is a 90 minute feature length story which, by the looks of it, only had about five episodes air in France each year, sort of like TV specials. They are obviously very popular over there... and rightly so.

So for the sake of convenience I’m going to refer to the shows as follows:

Petits Meurtres En Famille aka Agatha Christies Murder Party is a four episode, single story introduction to two characters, set in the 1930s.

These two characters continue in Les Petits Meeurtres D’Agatha Christie (although they shouldn’t, I’ll get to that in a little while) for 11 feature length episodes, which I’ll call Season 1. This is set in the late 1930s.

Season 2 of Les Petits Meeurtres D’Agatha Christie is also known as Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games in the US (though not on the actual prints) and comprises 27 episodes following different set of three characters... except, if you want to see the first episode of this season which introduces these characters, you’ll have to look in one of the ‘Season 1’ sets entitled The Little Murders of Agatha Christie. Which is nuts. This is set between the mid 1950s and early 1960s and the Criminal Games covers present this ‘season’ as, well, four seasons.

Season 3 is better known in the US as Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games - The 1970s. It features another grouping of three characters and is set in, well, like what it says on the title. I think these all take place between 1971 and 1972.

Now the concept of the series is to take various Agatha Christie novels and short stories as the basis, but to change them up with a new bunch of regular characters, who all work in a French police station, in different decades. The stories are used as a basic starting point (in all but a few) and locations, professions, characters and everything else are given a different spin. And the strength of the show lies in the fact that, each set of main protagionists are a delight and there’s a very large streak of humour running through every episode (often bordering on farce).

Okay, with me so far?

Right, Petits Meurtres En Famille (aka Agatha Christie Family Murder Party) introduces us to Chief inspector Larosière, played by Antoin Duléry and his young assistant Lampion, played by Marius Colucci. It took me a little while to warm to these two because I’d watched all the episodes of the second series first (barring the first one, see above) before realising that these were an earlier iteration of said show. And I can tell you, if I’d seen this multi-part adaptation of ‘Hercule Poirot's Christmas’ first then I wouldn’t have watched anymore after that. It’s way too long at what amounts to around 6 hours to tell the one story. But I was surprised because, I knew there was another series featuring these two characters and they actually stick to the ending of the original here (no spoilers but, if you know the ending of that one, well... Larosière is the character who is standing in for Poirot... although bearing no resemblance to him, of course).

Which puzzled me because, continuity fails right away when we’re into the first season of Les Petits Meurtres D’Agatha Christie because, bearing in mind how the previous tale ended, it’s just been completely forgotten about and it’s Larosière and Lampion investigating other crimes together again after these events. So, yeah, they just decided to forget about the intro series and move on as if nothing had happened. And it’s pretty good, after the sheer brilliance of what I am calling Season 2, I found I warmed to these two predecessor characters pretty quickly and looked forward to seeing their various quirks and methodology tackling the basic premise of the stories in new ways.

And then, comes Season 2. Here we have the no nonsense but very clever Inspector Swan Laurence, played by the brilliant Samuel Labarthe. We have his love/hate relationship with the local newspaper reporter who is often on the scene of the crime before he is, the equally outstanding Blandine Bellavoir as Alice Avril. And, finally, with a role that keeps growing and growing, we have Elodie Frenck as Swan’s admiring and completely ditzy blonde secretary Marlene... who also provides a great deal of the comic relief in certain scenes. She even is featured as one of the main characters of the title sequence after a few episodes, as she becomes more popular in the show. These episodes are absolutely top notch and each of the three leads get to play a dual role at least once over the course of the show, to showcase their enormous acting talents even more.

And, like in the third season, there are even supernatural elements to the occasional story or two, with the odd ghost from the characters’ pasts appearing every now and then. Indeed, one lady coroner who Swan is infatuated with, who dies in a plane crash at the start of an episode, even comes back from the dead as a spirit to point him in the right direction in an investigation in a later episode. This is something that is carried over memorably in the third season, where one of the characters gets some extra assistance (and irritation) from her long dead mum when the episode includes the investigation of a psychic. The chemistry between the three leads in this second season (and indeed the third) is so well written and performed that the mystery aspect of the show almost plays second fiddle. It’s these characters you want to return to, time after time. And the last episode of this season, which involves Swan, Marlene and associated regular characters hiding Alice Avril away as they try to find the culprit behind a murder she is accused of, even features Antoin Duléry as a relation of the original Larosière. Not only that, the last episode of this season, which ties things up very nicely in terms of the three regular characters, is an out and out musical, with all of the many characters we’ve come to know and love bursting out into song as the episode continues.

Lastly, we have the short Season 3, comprising just ten feature length episodes and running up to the end of last year. This one features the brilliant Emilie Gavois-Khan as Inspector Annie Greco, Arthur Dupont as the tearaway 70s sexist sidekick with anger issues called Beretta... and Chloé Cahudoye as consulting psychologist Rose Bellecour, recruited by Annie after her involvement with the mystery in the first episode. And these are all pretty great too... it has to be said. With the wah wah music and 1970s attitudes used as part of the comedy, in much the same way they were in the TV show Life On Mars. Now, a few episodes in Season 2 were only ‘inspired by the works of Agatha Christie’ because they were running out of plots and usage rights (I’m guesssing) but, in the third season, only the first couple of episodes are actually based on Christie works. The quality doesn’t drop though and... I wish they’d decided to keep the show going, although they had to shoot these ones through Covid so, yeah, as far as I can find out, there will be no more decades forthcoming (if you fdiscover any different then please let me know).

Another star of the show is the wonderful music and opening titles, which also features animated cardboard cutouts (probably computer generated) of the main characters, pertinent to that series, running around. It’s good stuff and I shall miss these tunes, titles and the wonderful actors and actresses who populate these stories. But at least, in the pursuit to find my mum something to do with Agatha Christie that she hadn’t already seen, I managed to get to see all of them over the last year and a quarter. And she absolutely loved these too... as did my dad. So these were well loved communal evenings watching the odd episode of this completely likeable and entertaining (not to mention extremely funny) French TV mystery series. And I shall definitely be looking out for some of these actors and actresses for years to come. Maybe skip the Petits Meurtres En Famille four parter but, if you watch the others, I’m sure you’ll have a good time with Les Petits Meurtres D’Agatha Christie, for sure.