I’ve been watching Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot Mysteries recently, and I’d be hard pressed to pick a most convoluted.
I do think One, Two, Buckle my Shoe is a candidate.
Important man in the government kills his dentist, so that he can pretend to be a dentist and kill someone by administering an overdose of novacaine.
Along the way, he sends the dentist’s assistant a telegram to get her out of the way, and hires her boyfriend as a gardener, so he can be the suspect.
In general, though, I am more amused by the frequency that Poirot is in close proximity to a murder, and sometimes, a little skeptical about some of the clues he finds.
In one episode, he goes to a flower show, and an older woman hands him an empty seed packet and tells him her name urgently. The next day, her letter shows up, and when he goes to investigate, finds she is already dead.
But the empty seed packet has words that point them to a Catholic Church, I believe, and later, when he’s truly desperate for a clue, he realizes that the flowers pictured are “stocks” like the “stock market” where the murderess has gambled away all her money. Really? In the limited time the woman had to pick out the right seed packet to give him?
My favorite Columbo episode is the one where Dick Van Dyke wants to kill his wife, and so hires a guy to purchase a camera and pretend to want to buy some properties — so Dick can break into the guy’s motel room and steal said camera before visiting one of said properties with said wife, so Dick can tie up his wife for a ransom-note photo before shooting her with Gun #1 — before then having the guy phone him so a witness will be sure to only hear the half of the conversation that sounds like a kidnapper is making demands while the guy is just getting instructed to go to a certain place at a certain time, so Dick can break back into the guy’s motel room and replace the camera while also planting the periodicals he cut the ransom-note letters out of, so Dick can later arrive with a ransom-money briefcase and shoot the guy with Gun #2 and press Gun #1 into the suspect’s cold dead hand and shoot himself with it.
Forgive me if someone else commented on this, but it appears to me that this is an aspect of mysteries that playwright Anthony Schaffer was poking fun at in Sleuth. At the very beginning of the play (and the first movie version) author Andrew Wyke is reading from his latest “St.John Lord Merridew” mystery “THe Body on the Tennis Court”.
The solution in Sleuth is different:
The murderer used to be a ballet dancer with the Ballet Russes. After he murders his victim, he walks out onto the tennis court on the tape marking the divisions of the court on his points. He tosses the body onto the court, executes a neat reverse, and walks back along the tape, never setting foot on the clay.
The murder plot in Hitchcock’s Vertigo is certainly convoluted/improbable.
Gavin Elster pays Judy Barton to impersonate his wife Madeleine, because Judy looks like her. Gavin asks Scottie, a police detective who was forced into retirement because of his vertigo, to follow “Madeleine,” whom he claims to suspect is being possessed by the ghost of Madeleine’s great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide many years before Madeleine was born. There’s no chance of Scottie running into the real Madeleine because she lives far away from both Scottie and Gavin, and never comes to San Francisco, where most of the story takes place. Judy/“Madeleine” gets Scottie to fall in love with her, then tells Scottie about visions of hers that Scottie recognizes as being set in Mission San Juan Bautista, about a hundred miles south of San Francisco. Scottie takes Judy/“Madeleine” to the mission, where, driven by her “visions”/“possession,” she runs into the church and up to the bell tower. Scottie is unable to follow her because of his vertigo. When she gets to the top, Gavin is waiting for her with the body of the real Madeleine, whom he has already killed. He throws Madeleine’s corpse out of the tower, and it lands on a roof below. Scottie is so traumatized that he flees rather than try to get help, so he never sees that the body isn’t the same person as Judy/“Madeleine.”
If someone wanted to get away with murdering his wife, would he come up with an absurd plan like this, that depends on things that are entirely outside of his control?
IMO, Vertigo is a great film, perhaps Hitchcock’s best, despite the absurdity of the murder plot. As a study of obsession, it’s without peer.
Almost as improbable/implausible is that an experienced detective would think that tailing someone in a car and parking about 20 yards behind them in an alleyway would be inconspicuous behaviour. I mean, come on Scottie (he doesn’t know that Madeleine/Judy knows she’s being tailed and is playing a role, so he should be a lot more careful!).
Putting aside my disagreement that Vertigo is a “great film” (I don’t think Hitchcock ever made a “great film”) or his “best,” and adding that its murder plot is not only an “absurdity,” but clumsily told to boot, I will take issue with the last sentence. Have you seen the Argentinean film Beyond Oblivion/Más allá del Olvido (1956)? As a study of obsession, I thought it put Vertigo to shame.