Albert Major parlait trop (Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie)

Albert Major parlait trop (Albert Major Talks Too Much) is the 16th episode of season 2 of the French TV series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie. It was produced by Escazal Films and France Télévisions, directed by Eric Woreth and first aired on France 2 on 23 September 2016. It is an adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel A Caribbean Mystery.

Synopsis
Like the rest of the episodes of season 2 of this series, the original Christie detective characters have been replaced. The lead roles are taken by a French detective Commissaire Swan Laurence assisted by a journalist Alice Avril and Laurence's secretary Marlene. The action is set in Lille in the 1950s. In this episode, Alice is hospitalised after a traffic accident. When a fellow patient dies mysteriously, Alice decides to investigate. This is the first episode with a new forensic pathologist Timothee Glissant.

Plot Summary
(may contain spoilers - click on expand to read) Alice is teaching Marlene to ride a scooter when they have an accident. Marlene is unhurt but Alice lands up at Hôpital Saint Paul. There she meets an English crime columnist Albert Major. He tells Alice he is writing a book about "a perfect crime" which he witnessed years ago. Albert is taken to his ward before Alice can persuade him to say more. That night Albert is murdered. His body is found with a large syringe poking in his eye. Victoria, the nurse on duty claims she heard nothing. The manuscript disappears and we later see it being burnt.

The large syringe would suggest a killer of unsound mind. Suspicion first falls on Dany Courelle, the wife of one of the doctors Paul Courelle. He had her warded because he was concerned about her erratic and occasional violent behaviour including an episode where she stabbed and killed her cat. She turns herself in saying she is dangerous and cannot remember what she is doing. Laurence keeps her warded guarded by a policeman. She is later found on the bathroom floor having apparently attempted to commit suicide although she survived. A scalpel is found in the ward. But to Laurence it appears to be too convenient.

Timothee Glissant, the new forensic pathologist discovers that Albert did not die from the stab wound of the syringe but by a small cut on the jugular--a cut so precise it would have required the konwledge of a trained surgeon.

At the hospital, Laurence meets a wealthy patient Raymond Rafil and his secretary Esther. He has a ailing heart and is hoping a procedure for a heart transplant can be developed. He shows Laurence his dog Phoenix--he says Dr Vidal, head of the hospital had given it an experimental heart transplant which succeeded and saved its life.

Meanwhile, Jojo, a tramp and acquaintance of Marlene has a heart attack. He is taken to the hospital by ambulance. Late in the night Alice sees from her ward that men are unloading Jojo. They do not use the main door but a side entrance.

Next we see the nurse Victoria going to an operating theatre to wait for someone. We had earlier heard her call her mother saying she knows who the murderer is and this could give them money. Alice explores the hospital by night and discovers Victoria's body. It is the same neat cut on the jugular. As in the previous case Dany Courelle had somehow got out of her ward and had been wandering around and later found with blood on her hands. Laurence dismisses the possibility because she could not use a scalpel but Jacqueline, the head nurse mentions that Dany used to sit in the operating theatre to watch operations. What was Victoria, who was off duty, doing in the hospital? Laurence speculates that she might have seen the murderer and had been blackmailing him.

Alice gets out of the building and explores the side entrance which leads to an apparently unused basement and sees two people operating on someone inside a room but she is knocked out be someone and dumped outside. Meanwhile Marlene has been trying to trace Jojo's whereabouts but Saint Paul denies he had ever been there. Laurence and Marlene go to the hospital where Alice tells them about the basement and they explore it. The operating equipment has been cleared away but Laurence does find a ring that Marlene knows used to belong to Jojo.

By now Laurence can put some pieces together and he arrests Doctor Vidal for illegal medical experiments on patients. Vidal confesses that he has been trying to experiment with making the first successful human heart transplant, which is still illegal, but he denies killing Albert Major. He is right because Marlene next visits the hospital and finds a body with a paper bag over the head. Everyone thinks it is Dany who has finally succeeded in committing suicide, but it is Lucette! And Laurence determines that it is murder. There is a thumbmark on the jugular.

Lucette was in a nightgown. Her clothes are later found hidden in Dr Bouchard's office. Alice tells Laurence she saw Boucard having an affair with Lucette, so Laurence arrests Bouchard and releases Vidal. But there's still the disappearance of Jojo the tramp. Vidal takes Laurence to the basement where Jojo is alive and cheerful, having been the successful patient of a heart transplant--a procedure Vidal didn't want to reveal earlier because it is still illegal. Shortly after this, Esther also discovers Raymond Rafil dead in his room, but this time, Glissant confirms it is by natural causes.

Meanwhile Alice calls Marlene. She says she has a new clue but does get to complete her sentence. Paul Courelle comes up behind her and knocks her out with anaesthetic and then wheels her to the basement where he hooks her to a potassium chloride drip. It will slowly induce a heart attack that will look natural, he tells her. His whole backstory comes out. He had engineered a perfect crime where his apparently and heroically saved his first wife from suicide at a resort. She then seemed to succeed in committing suicide a few days later, but no one thought of blaming him after what he had done. Except that Albert Major was staying at the same resort and saw through it. Now he had to deal with his second wife, Dany.

Alarmed by the truncated phone call, Laurence and Marlene rush to the hospital (Marlene on a scooter) where they are just in time to stop Paul trying to poison his wife and arrest him. They also find Alice and Vidal revives her. Laurence assembles the final pieces of the puzzle. Paul's motive had been money, to set up a hospital to do heart transplant experiments in South Africa. The money from his first wife is not enough. When Rafil is admitted to the hospital, he sees another chance. Rafil had made his will and asked Paul to be a witness, so he learned that Rafil had secretly left his entire vast estate to his secretary Esther. So Paul started working on Dany with the same MO as with his first wife, by drugging her to convince her that she was going insane. However the first few attempts at "faked" suicide were botched. Then he attacked and killed Lucette by mistake because she was also blonde. Finally Rafil had died much too early because Dany was not dead yet, and this forced Paul to make a last, desperate attempt to kill her.

There is a sideplot added for humour. Because of a mix up in lab reports, Alice is diagnosed with cancer and givn two weeks to live. Laurence and Marlene start being very nice to her, Laurence, especially, allows Alice full access to the investigation and discusses the case with her on many occasions. Alice can't understand what is going on but later finds out and then plays along, pretending to be very ill and asking for a new scooter and a trip to America. Fortunately or unfortunately for her, the mix up is sorted out before she gets any presents.

Comparison with the original story
(may contain spoilers - click on expand to read)
 * The setting is changed to a hospital but the themes from the original novel are largely retained and visible. Unusually, many of the parallel characters have recognisable names related to the ones in the original novel.
 * Albert Major is a crime columnist who is writing a book about the perfect crime. Unlike the original major, he is not a talkative bore whom nobody listens to. In fact Alice Avril wants him to talk more about his book but he doesn't want to say anything about it before he is led away to his hospital room. There also isn't the plot device of him wanting to show Alice a photo and then hurriedly changing the subject, nor the plot device of him having a glass eye. In fact he doesn't appear to see anybody that he recognises while he is talking to Alice.
 * Albert Major's death is not disguised as a natural death--it is quite obvious and the forensic pathologist Glissant quickly determines that he had been killed by a neat slice on the jugular--something that requires a surgeon.
 * The motives for the killings are largely the same and revolve around Dr Courelle, the Tim Kendal parallel, wanting to get hold of Mr Rafil's money which he had willed to his secretary Ester. Here Courelle plans to open a hospital in South Africa.
 * The side plot concerns the race to be the first person to conduct a heart transplant--certain aspects of this were still illegal in France in the 1950s--such as harvesting a heart from a brain-dead patient. Brain death was not recognised in France at that time. Dr Vidal (the Greg Dyson parallel) and his other doctors work secretly on various experiments, including heart transplants on dogs. Their secretive activities are observed by Alice and for a time, Vidal's suspicious movements make him a prime suspect in the deaths going on in the hospital. Marlene's friendship with the tramp Jojo and her efforts to trace his whereabouts in the hospital after a heart attack leads to all the secret experiments being exposed.

Cast

 * Samuel Labarthe as commissaire Swan Laurence
 * Blandine Bellavoir as Alice Avril
 * Élodie Frenck as Marlène Leroy
 * Dominique Thomas as Ernest Tricard
 * Eric Beauchamp as Flic Martin
 * Cyril Gueï as Timothée Glissant
 * Frédéric Pellegeay as Grégoire Vidal
 * Pierre Khorsand as Paul Courelle
 * Mona Walravens as Dany Courelle
 * Cédric Zimmerlin as Edouard Bouchard
 * Beatrice Rosen as Lucette Vidal (as Béatrice Rosen)
 * Laure Josnin as Esther
 * Marie-José Billet as Jacqueline (as Marie-Jo Billet)
 * Roch Leibovici	as Raymond Rafil
 * Christian Joubert as Albert Major
 * Patrick Brasseur as Jojo the tramp
 * Nanou Harry as Victoria
 * Cédric Le Maoût as Ambulanceman
 * Fanny Leurent as secretary
 * Noémie Leroy as nurse (uncredited)

Mentioned
 * Phoenix
 * Gaëlle Vidal

Filming locations

 * EPSM Lille-Métropole site d'Armentières - interiors and grounds of hospital