Gaming with Poirot

This is going to be a tale of a very odd coincidence.  Anne & I have been watching the old Poirot series with David Suchet as the best Poirot ever.  The episode 'The Lost Mine" opened up with Poirot and Hastings playing Monopoly.  The story was meant to be set in 1935, and it felt a bit early, since the 75th anniversary of Monopoly felt to me like it was just a few years ago.  But in fact, Monopoly was first released on a large scale in late 1935.  And that 75th anniversary was so ten years ago.

Then I noticed that the money was the "wrong" color.  So when it came up that Poirot won a beauty contest and collected "10 pounds", of course, it was the British edition.  Here it is:

But was there already a British edition by 1935?  Turns out, yes, and instead of rushing to the internet to answer that, I found out in the strangest way.

Three or four days later, while taking the dog for a quick walk around the block, some neighbors were throwing boxes of stuff into the back of a pickup truck to take them to Goodwill.  Then they threw a bundle of board games in.  All of them were editions of Monopoly, and the one on top was the red and white box with the big pound-sign on the cover.  The Waddington's British edition.

So there it was.  The copyright notices say that the first UK edition was definitively 1935, though mine was the 1972 edition.

The cards were unusually poor quality, barely more than thick paper.  But the board was the usual sturdy production.  The change of color of the game money was interesting to me.  They were the same colors, just shifted to different bills.

At the end of the Poirot episode, Hastings lands on Mayfair and Poirot asks for £2000.  Also accurate.  Hastings has a bit of a hissy fit handing in everything he owns, and of course Poirot is stylishly condescending.

To satisfy my curiosity, I went back to the original short story by Agatha Christie (first published in the U.K. in The Sketch in November 1923), which you can read here.  No game of Monopoly in the story.  What an odd thing to add to a script, and it was entwined throughout the story to backup Poirot's dislike of speculative financing.  But I guess converting from a 10-page story to a 42-minute script was a considerable exercise of the little gray cells.

Just seeing board games being played on popular TV shows opens up a new topic to talk about.  But this unlikely series of events gave the story a lot more personal effect.