Agatha Christie Wiki
Advertisement

In Pension Vanilos, the French Télévisions film adaptation of Agatha Christie's Hickory Dickory Dock, for the Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie TV series, Eugène Moucadeau is the parallel character of Sir Arthur Stanley in the original novel. Moucadeau does not appear in person but is mentioned on numerous occasions.

Like Sir Arthur, Moucadeau is also an eminent scientist, in this case, a Nobel Prize winner for Biology (fictional--there is no Nobel Prize for Biology, only Physiology-Medicine). Moucadeau is also the father of Jean-Baptiste Millet, the Nigel Chapman parallel. Jean-Baptiste tells commissaire Laurence that he left his father's house and cut off all links when his mother died some three years previously. He changed his name so that his father could not find him. Despite his scientific achievements, his father was "a bastard" at home. His cruel and hard behaviour broke Jean-Baptiste's mother and drove her to depression. The sideplot of Jean-Baptiste's secret family history is considerably less developed in this adaptation than in the original. There is no mention or suggestion that Jean-Baptiste's mother had been poisoned nor that he had poisoned her. It is not even esablished whether what Jean-Baptiste claimed about his father is true or not. His father also does not die during the episode and instead had been actively trying to find him through private investigators.

Advertisement