Agatha Christie's Poirot Episode Guide - inaf iasf bologna

Agatha Christie’s Poirot Episode Guide
Murder in Mesopotamia
Season 8
Episode Number: 54
Season Episode: 2
Originally aired: Sunday July 8, 2001
Writer:
Agatha Christie, Clive Exton
Director: Tom Clegg
Show Stars: Hugh Fraser (Captain Arthur Hastings), David Suchet (Hercule Poirot)
Guest Stars: Ron Berglas (Dr Eric Leidner), Barbara Barnes (II) (Louise Leidner),
Dinah Stabb (Annie Johnson), Georgina Sowerby (Amy Leatheran),
Jeremy Turner-Welch (Bill Coleman), Pandora Clifford (Sheila Maitland),
Christopher Hunter (Father Lavigny), Christopher Bowen
(Richard Carey), Iain Mitchell (Superintendent Maitland), Alexi Kaye-
Campbell (Joseph Mercado), Deborah Poplett (Marie Mercado), Kamel
Touati (Squat Man), Hichem Rostom (Hotel Receptionist), Zouheir Bornaz
(Police Sergeant), Dejeb Magri (Murdered Man)
Summary: Poirot visits Hastings at an archaeological dig in Mesopotamia (the
present-day Iraq), where he meets an impostor, a missing person, a
thief, drugs, forged letters, sexual jealousy, professional rivalry, dark
secrets and (need we say?) murder. All must be revealed.
Dr. Leidner is a Swedish-American archaeologist on
a dig in Iraq, then a British protectorate. His wife was
previously married to a Frederick Bosner, a young man
who worked for the U.S. State Department but was actually
a spy for Germany during the Great War. He was
caught, tried and sentenced to death. He managed to
escape while he was being transported, but it was to no
apparent avail as he ended up on a train that crashed,
and a body bearing his identification was found in the
wreckage.
Amy Leatheran is a nurse traveling in Iraq when she
meets Dr. Leidner, who asks her to join the dig to look
after his wife. Mrs. Leidner has been frightened by weird
goings on, such as a ghostly face appearing just outside
her window and has received threatening letters.
Mrs. Leidner confides to Nurse Leatheran that she had
received similar threatening letters several years before
that were supposedly from her dead first husband. They
arrived every time she would go out with a new man,
then stopped when she broke off the relationship. One
of the letters was signed with her late husband’s name,
but she had no letters from him - they had been married
only a short time - so she could not ascertain whether
the letters were genuine. No letters arrived when she
met and then married Dr. Leidner, so Mrs. Leidner had assumed they were written by some
crackpot who had either died or given up keeping an eye on her.
Then Mrs. Leidner is found dead by her husband in her room, struck fatally on the head with
a large blunt object. The Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, is also traveling in Iraq and his old
friend, Dr. Reilly - a physician acquainted with the dig - asks him to solve the crime.
Poirot questions everyone informally and employs Nurse Leatheran as his assistant to investigate
functional and logistical questions. There is much speculation that one of the members of
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