The ABC Murders (BBC, directed by Alex Gabassi)

This is my first blog post in a while, and I’m putting it on my main website and my review blog. Over

the last couple of months, I’ve started and not finished numerous blog posts and reviews (psychic vampires, a new book deal announcement with Routledge, reviews of Fiona Barton, Edmund Crispin, Henry Slesar, and more). But I’ve been having a frankly terrible go of it lately and prioritising accordingly. However, I couldn’t let the TV adaptation of the year, the BBC’s The ABC Murders, pass by without comment.

According to many self-proclaimed ‘purist’ Agatha Christie fans, I rarely have the correct opinion on screen adaptations. I enjoyed Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express. I thought that Agatha and the Truth of Murder was fine and more authentically structured than the majority of Christie adaptations. The ITV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot frequently annoyed me, and I certainly don’t picture David Suchet when I read the books. I also think that Sarah Phelps, whose name has succeeded Princess Diana’s as the curse-word of choice among Daily Mail readers, is the best dramatist of Agatha Christie’s work ever to put finger to key.

The ABC Murders is Sarah Phelps’s fourth Agatha Christie adaptation. And Then There Were None was universally praised. The Witness for the Prosecution and Ordeal by Innocence split viewers into two camps: those who loved them as great dramas, and those who insisted they were bastardisations of Agatha Christie’s work and essence. So, The ABC Murderswas always going to cause a bit of a tizz.

Director Alex Gabassi has done a masterful job. The adaptation uses light and dark, as the previous ones did. In The Witness for the Prosecution, the shadows became slightly overdone, but here they work brilliantly. The adaptation is set in 1933, a dark time for Britain and also for Europe. There are Brexit parallels throughout, as Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective, frequently runs into fascists, openly flaunting their xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism. Others are questioning his relevance, or whether he should even be in the country, despite all that he has contributed to it since the First World War. On Caroline Crampton’s excellent podcast, Shedunnit, Phelps said, ‘I want it to feel like it’s the first time it’s ever been touched - that it’s the first of the stories to have ever been told.’ And she has achieved this with a vengeance. A remarkable reimagining of a well-known novel, The ABC Murders is also a powerful drama in its own right.

Christie’s 1935 novel is not her best. That’s another opinion of mine that many of my friends disagree with. I think that it’s a fabulous idea – the serial killer narrative, the apparently motiveless murder, and the detective who wants to read meaning into his own involvement in the case – but the execution feels rushed and the narrative too light. It feels almost bashed out. It’s brilliant – of course it is; it’s Agatha Christie – but not her best. I feel similarly about Five Little Pigs, another novel that’s widely praised by Christie fans but which I think represents a missed opportunity. Both those books have excellent premises and fabulous plots and concepts but I don’t think Christie wrote them as well as she could have. What the story does give us, though, is something that can be taken in any number of ways. Well, almost any number. The less said about the Carry On-style adaptation, The Alphabet Murders (1965), the better. But there was a perfectly reasonable frothy and earnest whodunit dramatization on ITV in the 1990s and a rather immersive video game a couple of years ago.

The world Sarah Phelps shows us is not a clean or pretty one. It’s not that smooth and simple, whitewashed past we revel in in the David Suchet version. It’s a grim, gritty, violent, and horrible one. And it’s all there in the book, if you read the book a certain way. In the final episode, Poirot decries ‘vapid nostalgia for the gentle past. Cruelty is not new,’ he adds, in a remark that Agatha Christie herself frequently made throughout her work.

The big shocker here is not the identity of the murderer (which was changed in Easter’s adaptation, Ordeal by Innocence) but the character of Hercule Poirot himself. The dust had just settled on manufactured outrage over the fact that Poirot as played by John Malkovich would not be sporting a pantomime accent or an obviously fake moustache when genteel viewers spilt their Earl Grey and soiled their finest doilies beyond repair. You see, in Episode Three, we find out that Poirot has a past.

A past? A past?! Twitter users were not happy. One Twitter user wrote:

The point of Poirot is that he doesn’t have an inner life in the books. He doesn’t need one. Detectives in crime drama don’t exist to be complex characters. They exist to be our guides out of Hades. #ABCMurders is a lesson in how not to do it.

— Jane #FBPE (@JaneP1678) December 27, 2018

I couldn’t resist responding:

Hercule Poirot begins in canon as a refugee, personally motivated to investigate because of his experience of xenophobia. He reveals in the books a struggle with faith & the perception of foreignness, as well as a mysterious history in which he killed a man as a police inspector. https://t.co/mErqXDWz8Q

— Dr Jamie Bernthal-Hooker (@jcbernthal) December 27, 2018

But it got better – or worse, depending on your perspective. Poirot, the guilt-ridden Catholic who has killed a man in his murky history, who acts as confessor and calls himself ‘Papa Poirot’, who is constantly calling people around him ‘mes enfants’ (that’s all in the books, by the way), reveals himself in flashback to have been a priest.

It’s a masterstroke. It ties the character together as neatly as any exposition in any example of detective fiction or drama. It explains so much not just about the character as envisaged by Phelps but also about the world in which Christie was writing and which this drama reflects. Poirot, with his out-dated arrogance, his uncertainties and crises in interwar Britain, has a background as a figure of religious authority. And, when faced with the greatest of all tragedies, he gave it up. Michel Foucault theorised that in the twentieth century, the authority of the priest gave way to the authority of the doctor. We see mental illness galore in The ABC Murders, and the detective finding his relevance coming under fire. Throughout the three episodes, Poirot is looking for purpose, and the serial killer is giving it to him. It’s perfect.

Even if this adaptation had been a big pile of poo (which it is not), it would hold a special relevance for me, because I make a very fleeting appearance in it! In the last few minutes of Episode 2, if you squint, you can see me getting off the underground at Paddington Station. It was filmed at Aldwych Station on the last day of shooting, in August 2018, and I thoroughly enjoyed my first – and probably only – experience of extra-ing.  We were all put up in the Waldorf Hotel (which is decidedly not normal, according to other extras).

Here are ten fun things that might interest you:

1.    In a scene that was evidently cut, a group of drunken fascists sings ‘Jerusalem’.
2.    I was very confused when the wardrobe mistress lined us all up and pointed to certain young men, saying ‘You’re BUF, you’re BUF, you’re BUF.’ Then she stuck British Union of Fascists pins to their clothes and all was clear.
3.    Every costume is meticulous. Even though I appear for half a second in poor light in the background, I wore a full three-piece suit including period socks and braces, underneath a thick overcoat, and my hair was styled under the hat I never took off.
4.    When Cust appears through the smoke on the platform, he is played by a body-double.
5.    Nearly all extras smoke roll-ups.
6.    Many extras don’t get haircuts, because if the studio has to cut your hair or shave you on-set, they pay you.
7.    John Malkovich is very down-to-earth and friendly, but few of us dared to talk to him.
8.    A two-second scene took four hours to film.
9.    Aldwych Station is used in several period dramas. There are remnants of posters from each decade of the last century on its walls.

10.  The reason there’s a lot of period advertising in the underground scene is that the ‘No Smoking’ signs had to be covered.

Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie

Happy birthday, Agatha Christie! The grand dame of crime fiction turns 127 today (15 September), and as a birthday treat – because I’m sure her ghost has nothing better to do than to read a blog with an audience of about 6 – I wanted to review one of her books.

I’ve chosen Cards on the Table (1936) because I think it encapsulates something about Christie’s strengths as a writer, and the extent to which she is still misunderstood. This novel has always been one of my absolute favourites, and it never ceases to amaze me that so many people can take it or leave it. I read it at a young age – on my first ever day off school due to illness. I had a ridiculously high fever and simply lay in bed all day until I’d finished with my grandad’s old Fontana copy. It was amazing.

The premise is pre-empted in The ABC Murders (1935), when Poirot describes his idea of a perfect case:

‘Supposing,’ murmured Poirot, ‘that four people sit down to play bridge and one - the odd man out - sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four - while he is dummy - has gone over and killed him - and intent on the
play of the hand - the other three have not noticed. Ah – there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?’
 ‘Well—' I said. ‘I can't see any excitement in that!’

Christie alludes to this exchange in her foreword to Cards on the Table, when she writes:

[T]his story [...] was one of Hercule Poirot's favourite cases. His friend, Captain Hastings, however, when Poirot described it to him, considered it very dull! I wonder with which of them my readers will agree.

Already, subtly, she has blurred fiction and reality – not simply by pretending that Poirot and Hastings are real, but also by describing something that was presented one year previously as a hypothetical game as an honest-to-God literary memoir. I think that we need to accept and deal with the fact that Christie was one of the foremost genre destabilisers of her day. She always acknowledged the essential artificiality of her genre; but more than that, she exploited it.

Therefore, we have a very simple, very artificial set-up. Mr Shaitana – see what she did there? – is a parody of Oriental otherness; dripping with sexual nonconformity and esoteric artistry. He has a ‘collector’s mentality’, but what does he collect? Murderers – and ‘only the best’. That is to say, murderers who have got away with it. One day, Shaitana invites Hercule Poirot, some of his friends, and four of his ‘exhibits’ to a bridge party. In one room, four detectives play bridge. In the next room, four murderers play bridge. The host sits out. By the end of the night, the host has been stabbed.

 

We have here a straightforward case, then: four detectives and four suspects. There are no clever-clever twists: one of the four suspects is the villain.

But Cards on the Table is more than a whodunit in its purest form. It is, among other things, a metatextual masterpiece. Here, Poirot is joined by three sleuths who have only appeared so far in other series of books: Inspector Battle, of The Seven Dials Mystery, Ariadne Oliver, of Parker Pyne Investigates, and Colonel Race, of The Man in the Brown Suit. Hastings and Japp do not appear. In this way, Poirot is thrust into an artificial, stylised world, where he is meeting his own creator’s other creations. At times, this gets extreme: we encounter Ariadne Oliver, a crime novelist and the author of The Body in the Library, complaining about the trials of writing about an eccentric European detective. And who does she ask for advice? Hercule Poirot!

Still more is going on, because, quite simply, from the outset, we know that all the suspects are murderers. They would not be there unless they had killed, and gotten away with killing. And Agatha Christie was far too good a writer to make one of them innocent. These are eminently respectable figures: a wealthy widow, a paid companion, a high-end doctor, and a military adventurer. All respectable, and all downright horrible. So, in the end, does it really matter who killed Shaitana…?

While the police start looking for witnesses and physical evidence, Poirot examines the bridge scores, and asks questions designed to probe psychological make-ups: will the suspect have observed the furniture or the game play? That kind of thing. Our four detectives – though Poirot is the main one – quickly uncover everyone’s closeted skeletons and, eventually, Hercule triumphs.

Poirot captures the murderer by lying shamelessly. He hires an actor to play the part of a window cleaner who saw everything. The murderer promptly confesses all (I didn’t say Christie was perfect).  It reminds me of those times in other cases when Poirot lies about finding fingerprints, to force the criminal’s hand. In Death in the Clouds, the murderer snaps back: ‘That’s impossible, I was wearing gloves!’, which is AMAZING. In The ABC Murders, the baddie breaks down and confesses, whereupon Poirot tells Hastings ‘I put [the made up finger print] in for you.’ The point is, he doesn’t care a fig for this kind of physical evidence – this male and traditional way of thinking – which can be counterfeited and manipulated. There is something purer and better about his methods.

Part of Cards on the Table that I particularly like is the romance between Major Despard and Rhoda Dawes, because it is utterly twisted.  Despard is the colonial adventurer-slash-murderer who also exhibits barely challenged racism. We are told all along that, regardless of our sex, we should be completely in love with him. I think he’s a prick and was sorry that he not only survived the novel but returned in The Pale Horse (1961). For much of the novel, he is sniffing around Anne Meredith, the pretty young companion who once fed her employer hat poison.

(That was an in-joke, by the way. Lucy Malleson, a friend of Christie’s, wrote crime fiction under two pseudonyms: Anthony Gilbert and … Anne Meredith. One of her best Meredith books is being reissued by the British Library in a special edition as the 50^th in their Crime Classics series, later this month.)

When Anne turns out to be a wrong ‘un, the Major barely bats a tanned and war-painted eyelid. He turns his attentions to Anne’s dumpy roommate, Rhoda, who is also a crime fiction geek – Poirot shows her the knife used in Murder on the Orient Express – and way too good for him. Then the major makes a weird psychopathic joke about murdering Poirot, the new feminised foreign threat and the only character who doesn’t like him. Everyone chuckles, and the book draws to its frankly alarming close.

Of course, when Cards on the Table was filmed, it became unthinkable that a pretty girl could be bad and her frumpy friend could be good, so the story was rewritten to make Rhoda an evil lesbian, secretly in love with Anne and slaying everyone who gets in her way, willy nilly, with no apparent logic. Anne ends up with the major and Rhoda ends up at the bottom of a river. I moan much more eloquently and extensively about this adaptation in my book, Queering Agatha Christie.

Cards on the Table is a tour de force from the sharpest mind in twentieth century crime fiction. It has been unjustly savaged by reviewers and horrifically treated on television, and I hope that in the future this golden age gem will be given its due.

P.S. That cover looks like a Tom Adams, doesn’t it? Sometimes, it’s listed as one. I asked Tom Adams about it one day, and he was quite indignant. He said he’d never do a painting like that. Scott Wallace Baker, expert on all things Agatha Christie and Tom Adams, tells me the artist is Ian Robinson.