The Agatha Christie's Poirot Radio Program

Background

Efforts to bring Dame Agatha Christie's colorful family of both archetypal and unlikely detectives to American audiences was mixed, at best. By 1945 Dame Agatha's characters had appeared on Stage, in Film and over earliest Television since 1928:

• 1928 Alibi [London's West End, starring Charles Laughton ; from her novel "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"]
• 1928 The Passing of Mr. Quin [England; Silent; from her story "The Coming of Mr. Quin"]
• 1929 Adventures Inc. [Germany; Silent; from her novel "The Secret Adversary"]
• 1931 Alibi [England ; from her novel "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"]
• 1931 Black Coffee [England; from her Hercule Poirot play]
• 1932 Lackered Box [France; from her Hercule Poirot play "Black Coffee"]
• 1934 Lord Edgeware Dies [England; from her Hercule Poirot novel]
• 1937 Theatre Parade [Australian TV series; "Wasps' Nest" episode from her Hercule Poirot novel]
• 1937 A Night of Terror [England; from her story "Philomel Cottage"]
• 1938 Love from a Stranger [England; TV movie from her story "Philomel Cottage"]

It's worth noting that all of these productions were foreign to the United States. It's also worth noting that the majority of the foreign productions featured Hercule Poirot, her fussy, quixotic, yet brilliant little Belgian sleuth. By 1944, Dame Agatha had produced thirty-four novels and short stories, twenty of which had featured Hercule Poirot:

• 1920 The Mysterious Affair at Styles [Hercule Poirot]
• 1922 The Secret Adversary [Tommy and Tuppence]
• 1923 The Murder on the Links [Hercule Poirot]
• 1924 The Man in the Brown Suit [Colonel Race]
• 1925 The Secret of Chimneys [Superintendent Battle]
• 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd [Hercule Poirot]
• 1927 The Big Four [Hercule Poirot]
• 1928 The Mystery of the Blue Train [Hercule Poirot]
• 1929 The Seven Dials Mystery [Superintendent Battle]
• 1930 The Murder at the Vicarage [Miss Marple]
• 1931 The Sittaford Mystery [Inspector Narracott]
• 1932 Peril at End House [Hercule Poirot]
• 1933 Lord Edgeware Dies [Hercule Poirot]
• 1934 Murder on the Orient Express [Hercule Poirot]
• 1934 Why Didn't They Ask Evans? [Bobby Jones, Frankie Derwent]
• 1935 Three Act Tragedy [Hercule Poirot]
• 1935 Death in the Clouds [Hercule Poirot]
• 1936 The A.B.C. Murders [Hercule Poirot]
• 1936 Murder in Mesopotamia [Hercule Poirot]
• 1936 Cards on the Table [Hercule Poirot]
• 1937 Dumb Witness [Hercule Poirot]
• 1937 Death on the Nile [Hercule Poirot]
• 1938 Appointment with Death [Hercule Poirot]
• 1938 Hercule Poirot's Christmas [Hercule Poirot]
• 1939 Murder is Easy [Superintendent Battle]
• 1939 Ten Little Niggers (And Then There Were None) [Inspector Maine]
• 1940 Sad Cypress [Hercule Poirot]
• 1941 Evil Under the Sun [Hercule Poirot]
• 1941 N or M? [Tommy and Tuppence]
• 1942 The Body in the Library [Miss Marple]
• 1942 Five Little Pigs [Hercule Poirot]
• 1942 The Moving Finger [Miss Marple]
• 1944 Towards Zero [Superintendent Battle]
• 1944 Death Comes as the End [Hori]

It's safe to say that by 1944 Hercule Poirot was Dame Agatha's most widely known character, both internationally and throughout North America. Given the popularity of Hercule Poirot's exploits throughout the U.S. it's perhaps even more surprising that a Radio program featuring Dame Agatha's quirky, brilliant little sleuth had yet to appear to American audiences. By 1945 America had already seen or heard:

• Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes
  • (Film - 1900)
  • (Radio - 1931)
• Louis Joseph Vance's The Lone Wolf (Film - 1917)
• Jack Boyle's Boston Blackie
  • (Film - 1918)
  • (Radio - 1944)
• Earl Derr Biggers' Charlie Chan
  • (Film - 1926)
  • (Radio - 1932)
• Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade
  • (Film - 1931)
  • (Radio - 1943)
• Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason (Film - 1934)
• Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles
  • (Film - 1934)
  • (Radio - 1941)
• Ellery Queen's Ellery Queen
  • (Film - 1936)
  • (Radio - 1939)
• John P. Marquand's Mr. Moto (Film - 1937)
• Leslie Charteris' The Saint
  • (Film - 1938)
  • (Radio - 1945)
• Michael Arlen's The Falcon (Film - 1941)
• Drexel Drake's The Falcon (Radio - 1943)
• Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe
  • (Film - 1944)
  • (Radio - 1943)
• Francis and Richard Lockridge's Mr. and Mrs. North
  • (Film - 1942)
  • (Radio - 1941)
• Davis Dresser's Michael Shayne
  • (Film - 1940)
  • (Film - 1944)

Given the rights and licensing arrangements Dame Agatha had already undertaken with international producers it may be that those various arrangements limited or precluded acquiring those rights for North American Radio distribution.

Those limitations apparently didn't dissuade durable and versatile Film actor Harold 'Hal' Huber from pursuing Dame Agatha for the rights to produce a rendition of the exploits of Hercule Poirot for American Radio, Film or Television. Huber's persistence was apparently rewarded with The Billboard announcement of March 25, 1944 noting his successful acquisition of the Radio rights to the Hercule Poirot character. Hal Huber intended to produce the series for Radio with the help of Carl Eastman as director. Huber's ambitious plans also called for utilizing his multi-lingual acting talents to transcribe the series in Spanish for South American audiences.

Mutual brings Agatha Christie's Poirot to North America

Hal Huber's first taker was the Mutual Broadcasting System, launching their Agatha Christie's Poirot on February 22, 1945. The series' launch, though unquestionably ambitious, fell a bit short of its goal. Mutual had planned a realtime shortwave hook-up with Miss Agatha Christie from London. After about thirty seconds of dead air, Mutual had to break back in to announce that atmospherics between London and New York were preventing the live shortwave transmission. Not to be denied, Mutual had wisely prerecorded a shortwave message from Dame Agatha earlier that day. The prerecorded message appeared in lieu of the live hook-up, thus almost immediately making the premiere episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot an historic vintage Radio recording.

From that first premiere, it became obvious that Dame Agatha's fussy little sleuth had been repackaged specifically for American audiences--apparently with Dame Agatha's express consent, making the series even more historic within the larger canon of Dame Agatha's multimedia offerings throughout history. Naturally, the characters and customary interactions of 'Hercules Poirot' (in its American rendition) underwent a series of tweaks for its American interpretation. Gone was Inspector Japp, gone was Miss Lemon, gone was Colonel Hastings. Introduced with Agatha Chrisitie's Poirot was 'Inspector Stevens' as Poirot's big city police contact of choice. In lieu of Miss Felicity Lemon, Radio's Hercule Poirot acquired a new female assistant 'Miss Abbie Thresher' who from the premiere forward showed a remarkable talent for utilizing her own 'little grey cells' for crime detection.

Fans of Hal Huber's Film characterizations found his French--or Belgian--accent very familiar and Huber seemed a natural for the Radio interpretation of 'Hercule[s]' Poirot. Huber's accent was solid, his command of the French language inflection-perfect, and his rock-solid characterization of Hercule Poirot's numerous quirks and idiocyncracies, spot on. Both recorded and set in New York City, the premiere episode of the Mutual canon found Poirot relocating to a Gramercy Park apartment in midtown Manahattan from which to tackle the remainder of his American adventures.

The Agatha Christie's Poirot series aired over MBS from February 22 1945 through February 17, 1946. Several legal problems regarding the writing credits and payments for the series were being litigated as high as the New York Supreme Court during the series' run. We suspect the half-hour Agatha Christie's Poirot series may have ended somewhat prematurely over MBS due to that litigation.

CBS and Procter & Gamble premiere Huber's Poirot in serialized form over Mystery of the Week

Having resolved its legal issues, the Hercule Poirot franchise over Radio found new life in the Procter & Gamble-sponsored Mystery of the Week in limited distribution over the CBS network. CBS flagship station WABC, New York for example, didn't carry the Mystery of the Week canon during its April 1, 1946 rollout even though Mystery of the Week was intended primarily for eastern network distribution. The new format consisted of serialized, five-a-week adventures of Hal Huber's Hercule Poirot airing Monday through Friday evenings in a 15-minute format. Airing a five-part adventure each week, the series broadcast a complete new adventure in five 'chapters' of each adventure.

The rationale behind the limited distribution was accounted for by a net-sharing, 15-minute feature, The Lanny Ross Show, airing in the same timeslot in markets not receiving CBS' Mystery of the Week. That initial Mystery of the Week series aired from April 1, 1946 through August 2nd, 1946, for a total of eighteen separate five-part mysteries.

From the August 22, 1946 edition of the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

"Mystery of the Week" 

     Just for the record--since probably Hercule Poirot is well known to all of you--this is to say that there is nothing quite like him on the air, on the screen, on the stage, nor between the covers of a book (other, of course, than those of Agatha Christie, his creator).
     The fictional Monsieur Poirot, "formerly Chief of the Belgian Surete," but now devoting his time to the solution of baffling crimes in a purely amateur way, has the virtue of being completely human even while his deductive genius can find no peer.
     He is somewhat vain, to be sure--a quality to which he has a great amount of right but in a charming a disarming way, and his particular species of vanity adds to rather than detracts from his attractiveness as a character.
     While he is a thinker who solves the apparently unsolvable "by the use of the little grey cells" he is also a doer, and he swings into dramatic action whenever his super-intelligence anticipates the nefarious actions of keen, but inferior-witted, criminal minds.
     As a result, in Master-Detective Hercule Poirot, you have no pure armchair detective, but rather a man of action, motivated by an abiding hatred of crime and criminals.
     After creating the enormously successful character of Monsieur Poirot, Mrs. Christie discarded all other forms of mystery writing and concentrated solely upon Poirot's activities for her writing output.
     For the radio series, "Mystery of the Week," in which Poirot is the mainspring and mainstay, the scene of action has been transplanted from Europe to the United States.  This liberty--taken with Mrs. Christie's consent, and for obvious reasons, since it is being broadcast in the United States--in no way detracts from the flavor of the character which has won so many millions of admirers.  "Mystery of the Week" is on Monday through Friday at 9:00 p.m. over station WMT.

Beginning on August 19, 1946 CBS premiered Mystery of the Week yet again, this time over the entire CBS network. The timeslot had previously been shared nationally by the Lanny Ross Show and Mystery of the Week. The Lanny Ross Show had been cancelled in favor of a Lowell Thomas and the News segment for CBS. The nationwide Mystery of the Week series ran from August 19, 1946 to November 21, 1947 in the same, serialized 15-minute format as the initial Mystery of the Week run that preceded it. Both of CBS' Mystery of the Week runs of the Hercule Poirot adventures comprised completely new adventures, possibly owing to the litigation that arose out of the Agatha Christie's Poirot series over MBS.

The far longer run of Harold Huber's Hercule Poirot franchise, Mystery of the Week was the series that garnered much more attention for Huber, steadily gaining in popularity over the entire Mystery of the Week run. All told, Harold Huber's entire Hercule Poirot fanchise over Radio comprised fifty-one half-hour mysteries and another seventy-seven mysteries serialized in five parts each for a total of 128 unique mysteries of between 30-minutes and 60-minutes in length depending on the format. Not a bad return on Harold Huber's original investment, even discounting the estimated $16,000 judgement against him from the writers' suit. According to The Billboard the talent costs for the 1947 productions were an estimated $3,500 per mystery. One might reasonably assume that Harold Huber was being compensated approximately 40% of that weekly tab or about $1,400 per five-part mystery. That would have worked out to approximately $108,000 for the seventy-seven 5-part mysteries--or about $1.2M in today's dollars. Not bad side money to augment his continuing Film work for a couple of years.

Huber's Hercule Poirot adventures were ultimately replaced by Beulah, starring Hattie McDaniel, in a similarly serialized, 15-minute situation comedy vehicle previously aired to mediocre fanfare in an half-hour format over ABC.

Agatha Christie hadn't been letting any grass grow under her own feet between 1945 and 1947. In addition to her licensed adventures of Hercule Poirot over Radio several of her other short stories and novels were beginning to appear over other Radio drama anthology programs of the era. During 1946, Dame Agatha and King Features syndicated a serialized version of her Hercule Poirot novella, Towards Zero. King Features and Agatha Christie syndicated a second Hercule Poirot novella, The Hollow, in 1947. Her play, Ten Little Indians was also breaking all records on Broadway during the same period.

It therefore goes without saying that diminutive Hercule Poirot, quirks, arrogance and all had found a new home in the Colonies. Throughout the mid to late 1940s newspapers and magazines throughout America were abuzz with the latest Hercule Poirot sightings, among Agatha Christies other fiction novels and characters throughout the era. It was a marketing bonanza for Dame Agatha and her franchise--and Harold Huber didn't do too badly himself. Procter & Gamble also did pretty well sponsoring Mystery of the Week for two years, only really abandoning the series once CBS had decided to follow NBC's lead and self-impose its own curfew on crime and murder shows, relegating them to the post-9:30 evening timeframe. Not exactly the ideal timeslot for any soap--let alone a mystery soap--that had attracted so many loyal fans during the previous dinner hour timeslots.

Hercule Poirot and his little grey cells did very well for anyone associated with the character. Harold Huber's inspired interpretation of Monsieur Poirot became the benchmark for the character over any medium for the following thirty years until Albert Finney's marvelous interpretation of Poirot in the award winning Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Thereafter followed Peter Ustinov's superb interpretations of Poirot in Death On the Nile (1978), Evil Under the Sun (1982), and Appointment with Death (1988). It wasn't until ITV's amazing cable series Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989) that brilliant David Suchet became synonymous with the name 'Hercule Poirot,' and probably will be for another thirty years. In yet another interesting irony, David Suchet's first involvement with Hercule Poirot had come while portraying Inspector Japp in the 1985 TV-movie Thirteen At Dinner against Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot.

All in all Harold Huber was in pretty good company: Finney, Ustinov, and Suchet. Something tells me Hal would be pretty pleased with himself.

Series Derivatives:

Mystery of the Week [CBS]
46-04-01 01 Title unknown

Mystery of the Week [CBS]
46-08-19 01 The Case of the Roving Corpse

Notes on Provenances:

The most helpful provenances were the log of the radioGOLDINdex and newspaper listings.

OTRisms:

The radioGOLDINdex, while usually an excellent resource for transcription information cites problematic dates for its 15-minute CBS Mystery of the Week entries:

• The radioGOLDINdex cites January 1945 dates for the 1st and 3rd chapters of The Case of the Roving Corpse
• The 1945 Agatha Christie's Poirot canon was American Radio's first regular series from the Agatha Christie canon of fictional characters.
• CBS Mystery of the Week wasn't inaugurated until April 1, 1946. It was the CBS Mystery of the Week canon that featured the 15-minute, five a week series of Hercule Poirot adventures, serialized for the 15-minute format.
• The Billboard article in the Dee-scription sidebar above cites the announcement of the serialized Mystery of the Week adventures of Hercule Poirot as beginning April 1, 1946 under P&G sponsorship.
• As indicated in the sidebar left, Hal Huber and Carl Eastman were in litigation over the writing for Agatha Christie's Poirot as late as January 19, 1946. It's unlikely that CBS, of all networks, would have undertaken a reprise of Huber's Hercule Poirot canon until the legal issues behind the writing for the series had been resolved by New York's Supreme Court.
• We have as yet no irrefutable proof as to the dates we cite for the broadcasts of the five-part serialized The Case of the Roving Corpse ourselves, but we feel our citation of the dates below in our Mystery of the Week log are better supported than those cited by the radioGOLDINdex.

It remains unclear to us as yet whether Huber's serialized Hercule Poirot adventures were the primary offerings of the entire Mystery of the Week canon. We suspect that at least the first Mystery of the Week run may have reprised other serialized mystery dramas that preceded it, but we cannot as yet prove--or disprove--our theory from contemporaneous sources.

As an example, though we can demonstrate that CBS Mystery of the Week premiered in limited distribution on April 1, 1946, we also have numerous citations of at least a midwest premiere of CBS Mystery of the Week promoted as exclusively featuring Huber's Agatha Christie's Poirot in serialized, 15-minute, five a week format beginning August 19, 1946. That series ran well into 1947 over CBS. We believe that run to have been the one during which the five-part The Case of The Roving Corpse may have first aired. As we know more, we'll update it here.

The Case of the Murder In Red remains problematic. We have only one citation of that title on 45-03-01 and the premiere recording, The Case of the Careless Victim, announces The Case of the Murder by The Sea as the following weekly installment, almost as if the production knew beforehand that the week's following installment might be preempted for the Red Cross Special drama that aired on March 1, 1945. The Case of the Murder In Red may well have aired on March 1, 1945 but we simply can't state that with conviction at present.

As a consequence all of the above, our CBS Mystery of the Week log below will remain a work in progress for the forseeable few months.

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