With last month's Curtain, ITV and actor David Suchet concluded a mammoth 14 year undertaking in which they adapted every single story and novel featuring Agatha Christie's famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. While the recent cancellations of Whitechapel and Ripper Street show how short the lifespan even of a generally well regarded crime drama can be, Poirot has simply carried on. Its conclusion now leaves something of a gap in the market. Its labelling as "cosy crime" and the kind of advertising and sponsorship ITV gives it suggests an audience firmly in the stair lifts, bladder weakness and life insurance brigade, but this is doing the quality of classic mystery writing a disservice. The great detectives from the Golden Age of Mystery Writing between the wars are the products of truly entertaining and creative writers and have the potential to engage a much wider audience than the unpleasant conservatism of the likes of self proclaimed "last bastion of Englishness" Midsomer Murders. While the source novels of the latter emerged from the Thatcherite 80s, Christie's Poirot enjoyed success making an asylum seeker into a beloved hero. This list counts down some of the great detectives of the Golden Age that are perhaps a but less familiar on screen in the hope that one of them could be the next enduring TV crime classic. SPOILERS: Obviously this article is about mystery stories, so there's going to be spoilers for classic novels from around 80 years ago.
