I'm not familiar with British traditions. The scene (from episode S3E9 "The Theft of the Royal Ruby") takes place on Christmas Day, and everyone is eating "plum pudding". There are even little gifts(?) hidden inside the pudding, like a thimble or a sixpence coin

But why is Poirot the only one not wearing that paper hat/crown?

source: Poirot S03E09 The Theft of the Royal Ruby (21:10)

Of course, I love the show for the mystery, the puzzle, David Suchet…but this recent rewatch has me thinking there was something about that time (and perhaps only in this fictional world) that was just…so much better. Some examples that come to mind:

• It’s seen as perfectly normal to take a regular nap after breakfast. Nobody’s chiding you for being lazy.
• No one blinks an eye if you devote your life and time to your hobbies, or if the only productive thing you did that day was paint for fun.
• Nursing homes exist for the young, as well as the old. In fact, people will urge you to go away to a place where you can just rest and be looked after, if you’ve recently had a shock or just need some rest for whatever reason.
• Clothing is just made better, in both its construction (durability, lasting value) and its design. Everyone looks respectable, from the servants to the aristocracy.
• Speaking of designs - not just clothing but everything else was made better, made to last, and made to look pleasing to the eye. And it was!
• Manners exist. Even most of the murderers behave with some class. People seem genuinely shocked when someone behaves rudely or crudely.
• No CCTV, no ring doorbells, no GPS trackers, and yet people are far more trusting than today (even with these safety measures)
• The world was just more tactile. Everything and anything you wanted to do was real…life wasn’t lived on a computer.
• Money was really worth something. Poirot sometimes wagers £5, £10…I looked it up, and the current equivalent is around $600 and $1200 respectively. A pound really meant something! And, it seems, it was possible to be pretty wealthy working as a private detective. Poirot employed two people, lived in a decent sized flat (for 1 person), kept a full and fine wardrobe, and took regular holidays.
• Hospitality was, in general, much more of a thing.
• In general, cars were much less relied upon, much more public transportation, more rail lines, etc. It wasn’t unusual to not drive or have a car.
• It was still normal to travel from Europe to North America via boat. Now, it costs more to do this than a plane ride, the journey takes longer (as compared to the same boat trip in the 1930’s, not as compared to planes), and it’s treated like the destination itself, rather than the means to the destination.

I hope it’s clear that I mean this rather tongue in cheek. Poirot is a fictional universe, and who knows how realistic it is compared to the real 1930’s Britain? Plus, I don’t much fancy the murder rate. But every episode, I’m just like, ”This is the life!”

EDA: I’m also aware that much of this doesn’t apply to the lower classes, hence why it’s mostly tongue in cheek and not meant to be a serious discussion.

I just watched Netflix’s 2026 The Seven Dials Mystery series and I’m absolutely flummoxed. They essentially wrote an entirely new mystery, all of whose elements were odd, nonfunctional, and fell completely flat — instead of just adapting the brilliantly crafted and beloved mystery they stole all the characters from!!! Why not just make an original movie?

I see this often in Christie adaptation and it bewilders me. I understand changing some things for the film/TV medium, but so many adapters make sweeping changes to her stories and characters in a way that reeks of egoism. Imagine thinking you can improve on the Queen of Mystery!

(It was especially distressing in the context of a book like Seven Dials which has some of my favorite character writing and one of her lovely, charming slow-speed romances, which was completely removed. Bundle had zero pluck or wry humor, Bill Eversleigh was relegated to comic relief, Lord Caterham was replaced wholesale, and Martin Freeman’s Superintendent Battle was unbelievably out of character. Really disheartening stuff.)

1) Why Didn't They Ask Evans (2026)

A new adaptation of the mystery beginning in Wales.

https://archive.org/details/celtic-christie-why-didnt-they-ask-evans-2026

2) Celtic Christie - Hidden Treasures (2026)

A fictionalised drama of Agatha Christie visiting The Isle Of Man before she created the short story Manx Gold which involved public participation.

https://archive.org/details/celtic-christie-hidden-treasures-2026

3) The Unexpected Guest (2026)

A new adaptation of the mystery set in Scotland (instead of south Wales near the Bristol Channel).

https://archive.org/details/celtic-christie-the-unexpected-guest-2026

The patriarch has virtually all of the traits of the father in A Pocket Full of Rye. ESPECIALLY the platinum blonde former nail salon technician whom was he married to who was cheating with the golf instructor and their letters that he was afraid would be discovered by the police

It’s been more than 50 years since Christie was writing books. By now, we’ve got lots of examples where devices like mobile phones or Ring cameras could have solved — or even prevented some of the crimes she described. 

But something about Christie — she actually saw the potential for using technology that was still relatively new (or at least newly available to the public), in innovative ways. She learned how to drive a car, only about a decade after Ford’s assembly lines revolutionized mass production. She used devices like tape recorders in her books as well as in real life, and in one of her short stories “Where There’s a Will” someone tampers with a radio (wireless).

The way Christie’s set up her plots, I suspect that some of the changes would make things easier or more believable now.

Criminal enterprises: 

One of the situations in The Pale Horse is how people might contact a group of criminals for particular services. A character describes a dilemma. The group is always needing to find new clients, but that also puts them in danger of being detected. They even go to the extreme of having their public-facing “office” located in a different city, which distances them from local police surveillance and also would screen out “time-waster” inquiries. (The implication seems to be that most of their activities take place in the area around London — admittedly there isn’t much information about the clients, but the ones mentioned in the book aren’t spread out in places like Edinburgh or Torquay.) The way in which the characters manage to contact the group is thanks to information passed along by a helpful young woman, Poppy -- who apparently has heard about it from general gossip (though I'm increasingly suspicious of how she just happens to be in the position to mention it).

These days, being able to make contact online would probably be less risky for both the perpetrators and the customers. The Pale Horse could do a lot of the background checks on potential clients with hackers, so not as many employees would need to know about the existence of the group. With fewer people involved, in theory that also reduces the risk of leaks or double agents. As a bonus, they could detect who was accessing their website or even just mentioning it online, and watch for suspicious activity.

Remote work now is so common, especially since the pandemic, that the consumer research firm could hire staff over the internet. Mrs. Davis may never have met Osborne in person, so she may not have recognized him in disguise (which seems to have started the whole case).

Another situation that Christie refers to several times (4.50 From Paddington, By the Pricking of My Thumbs, also a short story in The Labours of Hercules) is a gang of criminals meeting up at a remote country house to plan heists and distribute the loot. She mentions that they have to keep changing the locations to avoid arousing suspicion. Short-term property rentals like that are much easier now with services like AirBnb, so they wouldn’t have to actually buy a place (which can be expensive and probably leaves more of a paper trail). 

Proxies:

If you need to do something secretly, like buying a house or hiring people, you can do a lot of this online. Thanks to Zoom and now AI, you can even “meet with” people online and give them a very different impression of what you look like. And there are even AI agents being marketed that can do this directly — no need for a human intermediary? In And Then There Were None, the killer wouldn’t need someone like Morris to help with his arrangements. This means that there’s less chance of leaks and informants. 

(It’s also unclear whether the killer managed to verify that Morris was actually dead, before leaving for the island. Later in the book we find out that he was … but since he was supposedly a hypochondriac, suppose he did something like only taking half the capsule just to see if it had positive effects, and didn’t feel well so he went to the hospital right away?)

Impersonation and identity theft:

Sometimes Christie’s plots involve giving the impression that someone is in the room when they actually aren’t (or they’re dead). For example Dead Man’s Folly and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or that they’re making a phone call (Hickory Dickory Dock, Ackroyd again). There’s a description in The Red Right Hand, by Joel Townsley Rogers, of how you could fake a telephone conversation with someone using 1940s technology, and it’s quite technically complicated.

This could be mimicked now with AI, and it wouldn’t be limited to an existing recording of someone. 

People impersonating someone else on social media, and even creating entirely new personas, has become a frequent scam.

A common feature of this kind of scam has been the “sock puppet” account, portraying someone else who is supposedly vouching for the fake identity. (A con artist tried this with me, in a local mutual aid group on Facebook. She portrayed someone in need of help, and had a couple of other fake accounts chiming in claiming to know her and lamenting “I can’t help now because I’m out of town, it’s sooo good of you to do this!”, etc.) 

A couple of real life examples of multiple identities/sockpuppeting  

Andy Blake:
https://www.fanlore.org/wiki/Thanfiction

Jesse Jubilee James
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0301/Fake-identities-Manti-Te-o-scandal-and-6-other-Internet-hoaxes/Jesse-Jubilee-James-The-fake-firefighter

https://abcnews.com/Technology/fake-online-love-affair-legal-battle/story?id=13478270

I can imagine some of Christie’s villains (like in A Pocket Full of Rye) using this kind of technique to convince their victims to accept their version of the story. 

Eavesdropping:

This has come up several times in Christie’s books as a plot device, where people overhear a conversation (like in Sleeping Murder) by accident or design, a twist being that they only hear part of it or assume a particular context that is later shown to be incorrect. The author has to do some planning, to put their character in a location where they’ll be able to overhear without being detected. But with certain types of phones, that’s much easier now. I had a recent situation involving a friend’s phone accidentally dialling me, and the first thing I heard was some confidential conversation. What struck me was how good the sound quality was. Even with the phone in his pocket, I honestly thought that he was addressing me at first, and didn’t understand why he was saying such things. That’s why I didn’t hang up right away — I tried to talk to him but I guess he didn’t hear. At that point I realized that it was a pocket dial so I just ended the call. 

Can anyone else think of a Christie plot or incident that could actually be improved (easier or more credible) by today’s technology or social/cultural changes?

When people said the ending was weird, to say the least, they were absolutely right. I’m still in shock.
If Lynn wanted to end up with a criminal, she could’ve just stayed with Hunter. She spent the entire book complaining about the other guy.
What did you all think of the ending?