YMMV / Lord Edgware Dies

• Funny Moments: Poirot doubts that Miss Carroll could have identified Jane Wilkinson from her position at the top of the stairs, so he has Hastings stand up on the stairs and watch as Poirot and Japp cross from the front door to the library, then come down to join them. Poirot determines that Miss Carroll could not have seen the visitor's face after asking Hastings if he saw the rose Poirot was holding in his teeth. The image of this makes Japp double over with laughter.
• Hard-to-Adapt Work: The solution to the mystery hinges on an impersonation that is rather difficult to pull off on-screen without being obvious. The actresses playing Jane Wilkinson and Carlotta Adams have to look similar enough to each other that the audience won't guess that it was not Jane at the dinner party, but not similar enough for the resemblance to stand out and raise suspicions (the 1985 film, for instance, had Faye Dunaway play both parts). The director of the 2000 Poirot adaptation showed the real Jane Wilkinson (Helen Grace) at the dinner party rather than Carlotta (albeit only for a few seconds and from an oblique angle).
  • Also very difficult to adapt the whole thing into other languages because the clue of Carlotta Adams' letter to her sister depends on a particular characteristic of the English language.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Poirot describes Hastings' toothbrush mustache as a "horror". In a few years' time, the rest of the world would come to despise the style too.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: David Suchet played Inspector Japp in Thirteen At Dinner. It's fun to compare and contrast him both with Philip Jackson (Japp in the series) and Peter Ustinov (when Suchet plays Poirot a few years later).
• Ho Yay: In Hastings' narration, he gushes about the good looks of Bryan Martin and the butler Alton; especially the latter, whom he describes as "one of the handsomest young men I have ever seen. Tall, fair, he might have posed to a sculptor for Hermes or Apollo."
• Values Dissonance:
  • In the beginning of the novel, Hastings and Poirot throw out a casually antisemitic observation about Carlotta Adams—that although she is a nice person, as a "Jewess" her fatal flaw is love of money. Christie clearly doesn't mean this remark to show they don't like Carlotta, or to make Carlotta unsympathetic—readers are obviously supposed to feel bad when she's murdered—which makes its offensiveness all the more jarring. These days, no character you're supposed to like would repeat a nasty stereotype like that, at least not without learning better, and you're not likely to see a Jewish woman described with that particular word unless a character is actively trying to insult her.
  • Other Jewish characters are mostly mentioned in relation to money or their noses.