The Lost Mine

A Chinese man arrives at a London hotel; he has with him the map to a long-considered "lost" mine, and he has agreed to sell the map to an English bank. But the next day he doesn't turn up at the time of the meeting; in fact, after a few hours, he turns up dead. The president of the bank asks Hercule Poirot for help.

Apart from the Oriental flavor (it's partly shot in London's Chinatown), and a brief look at Scotland Yard's methods in the 1930's, this is for the most part a rather trivial episode of the Poirot series. But it is saved at the end by the startling revelation of the killer's identity. Up until then, it's a ** out of 4, but the last 5 minutes make it a ***. One of the clues is so obvious in retrospect that you may feel like hitting your head on the wall if you miss it (and I did....miss it , I mean).

A man of Chinese descent but from Burma arrives in town to conduct a business deal. Apparently, he has a map of a lost silver mine and he's planning on selling it. But the Asian guy is soon found dead and Poirot investigates his killing. Inspector Japp is ready to arrest a guy who sure seems like the killer, but Poirot isn't convinced he is the man they want and perhaps he's been set up to take the fall. So who DID commit the crime?

This is an okay episode...not bad but certainly not one that stands out in any way apart from learning that Poirot and Hastings like playing Monopoly together. The acting and sets are the usual high quality you'd expect...and it IS worth seeing despite being not especially memorable.

This time, we have Poirot trying to decipher the murder of a Chinese man in China Town. It's a story of betrayal, money, business, Opium and gambling. The Red Dragon Club is very exotic and ticks all the right stereotype boxes. You can see it's one of the older episodes, but it retains everything that's usual quality of the series, so it's amusing and enjoyable, especially with his indispensible team of Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon.

Very good, amusing, and tricky episode.

Poor Hercule, he knows his bank balance to the farthing but the bank clerk insists he's overdrawn. Poirot is furious. On the home front, he and Hastings are playing a vicious monopoly game.

When the head of the bank, Lord Pearson, comes to visit Poirot, Poirot thinks it's to straighten out the incorrect balance deficit. Instead, it's to hire him. A Mr. Wu Ling was due at a bank meeting that morning, but has disappeared. He was to sell the bank a deed to a silver mine.

Unfortunately, when Wu Ling is located, it's too late. He's dead. Poirot now has to find the killer. The killer seems to be Charles Lester, an American, but for Poirot, that's too easy an answer.

This episode reminds us of how people lived and banked in the 1930s. Real people instead of machines at the bank and no television in the home. People talked with each other and played games. Also, there were some interesting locations here, including Chinatown.

Great episode with an obvious clue to the killer that everyone misses.

I believe there is an error in this episode in that the monopoly set used by Poirot and Hastings has as its 'men' the little silver coloured items such as the top hat. But that was a later version of monopoly dating I think from the late seventies or the eighties.

The version in my house when I was a child dated from the fifties and had as its 'men' types of transport such as ship, car, motor bike, train and they were coloured such as blue and red, not silver. There may have been an earlier version in the thirties when this was set, but it was not the one using the silver 'men'.

I would be very grateful if someone could advise me on the contents of the monopoly sets going back to the 30s so that it might be possible to check back to what would have been in place in 1935 when this Poirot story was set.

This is a very simple and basic error of poor research but unfortunately the scenes with the monopoly set recur rather frequently through the whole programme and therefore it could not be re-recorded, as I initially thought when I saw the opening scene.