The recently-begun Moriarty the Patriot is proof that classic mystery novels can be turned into great anime. In fact, Moriarty the Patriot is just one of many anime that draws inspiration from or is based on, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detective. However, Britain's other famous mystery writer and bestselling fiction writer of all time, Agatha Christie, hasn't received the same attention. But that doesn't mean that people have not tried to make anime adaptations of her work.
Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple was made by the Oriental Light and Magic company. The series was broadcast on the NHK network in 2004 and 2005, before being released across seven DVDs. It also received a three-volume tie-in manga that came out while the show was airing. The series took two of Christie's most popular characters, elderly sleuth Miss Marple and stuffy Belgian gentleman Hercule Poirot and adapted several of the novels and short stories they starred in.
In the books, Poirot and Miss Marple never meet, staying firmly within their own continuities. However, to get around that issue, the writers introduced a new character called Mabel West. Mabel West is the daughter of mystery writer Raymond West. Raymond wants his daughter to lead a normal life, but Mabel has other ideas. So she gets on a train to London with her pet duck Oliver and gets a job as Hercule Poirot's assistant. Eventually, Raymond gives in and lets Mabel continue her new job on the condition that she spends a little bit of time with her great-aunt, Jane Marple, in the small (and surprisingly murder-filled) village of St. Mary Mead.
You would be forgiven for suspecting that the addition of a girl and her pet duck would mean that this series massively deviates from the books they're claiming to adapt. However, the writers handled Mabel's introduction in a very creative way. Aside from a few sections that act as a framing device, most of Mabel's dialogue is made up of things said by the original story's side characters. This is great as it means that Mabel feels like she has a purpose without getting in the way of the original narrative. It also allows the show to cut out a few less-important side characters to help the stories fit within the show's runtime. However, seeing Mabel and Oliver during darker cases like The ABC Murders can be quite jarring.
Over the show's 39 episodes, it adapted 20 of Christie's famous mysteries. This is because many of the stories are broken up over several episodes, with the longer novels getting four episodes dedicated to them. This flexible format means that every story is allowed to develop at a natural pace without the writers having to pad out the short ones or cut out massive parts of the longer novels.
The most noticeable change is that some of the stories have had their time period updated. While the anime takes place in the 1930s, some of the stories were originally set in the 1910s, forcing the writers to make some changes to make the stories fit the new time period. This change is most noticeable in the show's adaptation of The Kidnapped Prime Minister. In the original, the Prime Minister is going to Versailles to take part in WW1 peace talks. In the anime version, the Prime Minister is traveling to a conference to discuss what to do about Adolf Hitler.
The other major change is the removal of Poirot's frequent police contact, Inspector Japp. Japp is replaced by Inspector Sharpe, a similar character who only appeared in the novel, Hickory Dickory Dock. This is presumably because the name Japp sounds very similar to an anti-Japanese racial slur that became popular in the 1940s. These changes are very well done, to the point that you likely won't notice them if you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the original books.
If you're a fan of mystery novels and anime, you need to track down Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple. They are fantastic adaptations of the source material that capture what makes Christie's characters so memorable. Poirot's charming yet stuffy nature and Miss Marple's caring and motherly tone come across perfectly, and the mysteries are given time to shine, allowing you to appreciate why Agatha Christie is known as the queen of crime.
