I don't know if you've ever seen Murder by Death (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_By_Death) which has characters that parody Miss Marple and Poirot but one of the characters goes off on a rant that every Christie reader I know has agreed with at one point or another - "You've tricked and fooled your readers for years. You've tortured us all with surprise endings that made no sense. You've introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before. You've withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it."

I think it's still probably funny, even if it's more of a rainy Sunday afternoon film than a must-watch.

And now, the view from in front of the tv screen. I tried the books long ago, but never got into them. They seemed thin, too much of their time, for their contemporaries and compatriates. To become real, they had to be filmed from hindsight as lush period pieces.

The Ustinov version was one of my favorite Christies; the wonderful score carried it, if nothing else. And those long sequences of nothing but music and hill climbing showed the 'locked terrain', and Poirot's musing about sunbathers was prominent enough, memorable enough, then left behind long enough.

Yes - I found this with her too. Annoying.