Review of Crime Is Our Business

Three years after the first outing for the Beresfords, By The Pricking Of My Thumb, Pascal Thomas brings back the impeccable Catherine Frot and Andre Dussollier for Crime Is Our Business, his third and best adaptation of Agatha Christie. This is our old friend the murder without a corpse - there IS a corpse, of course, but only Prudence's aunt witnessed the actual murder which, in a nod to Rear Window, she witnessed taking place in a railway carriage as her own train passed in the other direction. In the fullness of time the corpse does turn up and the murderer is exposed but what makes the movie - as it did the first - is the wonderful rapport between the two leads, punctuated with wisecracks in the style of Bill Powell and Myrna Loy. If it's unadulterated entertainment you're after - to say nothing of arguably the best reading of the Holmes-Watson joke that went round the globe around ten years ago - then this one has your name on it. Bring on the DVD.