Mini reviews #37 - Death on the Nile special

In honour of the newly (and finally) released movie, I thought I’d offer a special double-length set of mini-reviews, dealing with ten incarnations of the classic murder mystery. Others exist but one has to draw the line somewhere!

 

Death on the Nile (1937) by Agatha Christie. An iconic mystery novel for a reason, but not a perfect one, Death on the Nile is a passionate and ingenious tale of love, fame, and the end of opulence. Set aboard a Nile steamer, it concerns a wealthy socialite, famous purely for being beautiful and inheriting her father’s new money, murdered on her honeymoon. The prime suspect Jacqueline de Bellefort, the excellently-drawn ex-best-friend whose fiancée the late Linnet Ridgeway married. But Jacqueline has a very dramatic alibi: she was sedated and monitored after shooting someone else. Hercule Poirot, enjoying ‘the little vacation,’ learns that a holiday is never a holiday and gets to grips with the lengthy list of suspects, all of whom have something to hide. It is escapism at its best, even if some of the logic doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I’d recommend checking out the relevant episode of the All About Agatha podcast for a breakdown of the plot holes – because, honestly, I never notice them when I’m reading this book: I just enjoy it too much. An unusual feature of Death on the Nile is that every single character – from the great Christie ‘types’ like the snobbish Miss Van Schuyler to the very minor players who never appear in the films like Mr Fanthorpe – is brilliantly and engagingly depicted. You feel like you’ve met them all. And I can’t go without mentioning Mrs. Otterbourne, the tragic bestselling author of slushy romances whose books no one reads and who insists that she’s being censored. She is rather relevant in this day and age. I believe that she is a comic self-portrait; not of Christie as she became but of Christie as she might have become had she kept writing in her original derivative genre. Thank goodness she turned to crime.

 

Murder on the Nile (1944) by Agatha Christie. Christie’s stage adaptation famously replaces Hercule Poirot with a new character, the worldly Canon Pennyfather (is this the same Canon Pennyfather who will go on to play an unwitting role in the odd goings on At Bertram’s Hotel? Probably not, but it’s fun to imagine). Although the author claimed that Poirot as a character was too bombastic for the stage, it’s highly likely that she didn’t like certain actors claiming ownership of the role and therefore of her creation. Francis L. Sullivan, who had played Poirot a couple of times, starred in the first production of Murder on the Nile. The action takes place on the deck of the Lotus (the Karnak in the novel) and the heavily reduced cast of characters contains amalgamations of those in the book. Ultimately, although Christie recognized correctly the dramatic potential of her own work, I’m not sure this is quite the exploitation of that potential that it could be. For a Christie play, the dialogue is surprisingly flat and unfortunately one or two moments have not aged at all well.

 

‘Hercule Poirot: Rendezvous with Death’ (1945), Mutual Radio Broadcasting. Starring Harold Huber, the Hercule Poirot radio series is typical of the craze for such shows on the American radio waves in the 1940s. Only a handful of episodes survive, as far as we know, and ‘Rendezvous with Death’ is a real curio because it’s the only one we have directly based on a published text – although several of the lost ones were. The scriptwriter does a very good job condensing one key element of Christie’s complex plot into less than half an hour. It was first broadcast on 12^th July 1945 and exploits the novel’s drama for its own purposes admirably. There really are so few characters that it’s easy to spot the murderer, so it’s maybe more of a howdunit than a whodunit. But it works. Compared to the lamentably rushed 30-minute episode of Suspense! based on The ABC Murders, it comes out easily on top.

 

Death on the Nile (1978), directed by John Guillermin. Peter Ustinov's first and best outing as the eccentric Belgian detective, with a super-starry supporting cast. The scenery is beautiful, Ustinov is entertaining, with his own spin on the character, and the other players have delicious fun hamming up their roles. I feel like a whole generation of homosexuals needs to be told about this film, in which Angela Lansbury plays a drunk and Bette Davis and Maggie Smith have a waspish double act. [Review originally appeared in ‘Mini reviews #9’ in November 2017]

 

Death on the Nile (1996) by Paul Lamond Games. There are a fair few Agatha Christie jigsaws around, with the following format: read a booklet containing a heavily condensed version of the story, up to the point of ‘whodunit’, assemble a jigsaw containing a visual clue, then check you’ve got the answer right by reading the solution in either a sealed envelope or mirror writing at the back of the booklet. Death on the Nile was one of the first. What is interesting is that, inevitably, the puzzle is reduced to just a couple of scenes and there aren’t really many characters or possibilities – although in my edition (the first, from the 1990s), you’re given a deluxe list of suspects and motives from the novel, most of which don’t appear in the booklet at all! As always, the jigsaw aspect is enjoyable; anyone who knows the story fairly well can guess what the visual clue will be, especially when it becomes clear that the image centres on the victim’s cabin.

 

Death on the Nile (1997), BBC Radio 4. Michael Bakewell’s five-part dramatization is the most faithful to the novel’s intricacies and also – perhaps surprisingly – the best paced.  Its episodic nature means there’s always something interesting happening. John Moffatt plays Poirot true to excellent form, and Enyd Williams directs with customary pleasant lightness. There is a definite mix of acting styles here, from the highly accomplished Donald Sinden and Rosemary Leach, to the enjoyable work of the standard Radio 4 players, to one very questionable performance. The only real cock-up is when Linnet Doyle, who has been speaking with an English accent, is referred to as ‘the American lady’. But, overall, a hugely enjoyable adaptation, as we expect in this fabulous series of BBC radio dramas.

 

Agatha Christie’s Poirot: Death on the Nile (2004), directed by Andy Wilson. I remember the day this was broadcast on ITV – 12^thApril 2004. I was fourteen and very, very, very excited. I was a little disappointed, although I’ve grown to like it more over time. Kevin Elyot’s take on the novel is consciously trying to be different to and darker than the 1978 film, but I’m not convinced that anything really underscores that darkness. It does make the most of the Shakespearean heights of passion, and the futility of love in the story and the direction is really superb. A pre-Hollywood Emily Blunt pops up as the doomed Linnet, and there is sufficient scene stealing from Frances de la Tour. But ultimately the pacing is a problem, with a great deal of action and plot crammed into the last 20 minutes.

 

Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile (2008) by Dreamcatcher. An ‘i-spy’ hidden object game, of the typical format: cheaply made scenes where you click on prescribed items and clues among a lot of clutter. The story unfolds passively. It’s perfectly diverting, exactly like any other game of this kind. There are a few Christies in this series, including 4.50 from Paddington, Peril at End House, and Dead Man’s Folly.

 

Mystery Match Village X Death on the Nile (2021) by Outplay Entertainment. Mystery Match is one of those ubiquitous mobile phone games where you play Candy Crush-style levels between rounds of a hidden-object crime story. By some coup, the developers were able to get permission from Agatha Christie Limited to include a Death on the Nile themed ‘special event’ – that is, a game within the game where you do the same thing on a more basic level (it essentially co-opts their seasonal ‘awards scheme’ where you play special rounds that encourage you to buy virtual bling with real money). Remarkably, they have endeavoured to tell the whole story of Death on the Nile – although their source is clearly the 2004 screen adaptation, not the novel – and the result is perfectly playable but a bit … weird. It really is evidence that Agatha Christie’s genius lay far beyond plotting: while the plot is intact, the characters and dialogue are frankly nauseating.  It all feels cheap and silly and like one of 30-episodes-per-week daytime TV mysteries.

 

Death on the Nile (2022), directed by Kenneth Branagh. Branagh is back in what I suspect will be his last brush with Poirot. I’d like there to be more. But this film has been especially beleaguered, not just by the COVID-19 pandemic but also by some very problematic cast members. However, it’s out now and doing moderately well. I really enjoyed this film, and preferred it to Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express. Unlike in that offering, the starry cast gets fair screen time. While Branagh still takes up more screen time than he would if he wasn’t the director (surely young Poirot in flashbacks should have been played by a younger actor?), he doesn’t hog his scenes. It helps that the first hour is spelt ratchetting up the drama before the first inevitable murder. That is of course a feature of the book, too, which has led to criticism over pacing. However, this film doesn’t fall into the trap that both the 1978 and the 2004 versions did: the pace feels beautifully controlled, and the third murder, which feels superfluous in the older films, makes sense here. Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green have made several changes to the book and this is a much lusher, sexier version of the story. As in the stage version, several characters have been amalgamated and some have been completely rewritten, this time to make it more diverse and glamorous – which I think is a very good thing for a big screen film in 2022. It is not something Agatha Christie would have written. But I think it works. And the audience when I dragged my poor spouse to see it was generally younger than us, which was a first. They came for the stars, and clearly enjoyed it.

 

 

Mini reviews #36

 ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’ (1923) by Agatha Christie

Christie’s (and Hercule Poirot’s) take on The Hound of the Baskervilles. Like the Sherlock Holmes case, this short story concerns a family curse preventing certain heirs to a baronetcy from living to assume the title. Of course, the solution is different – and more psychologically interesting – and it ends with a very cheeky joke. Highly recommended.

Herewith the Clues! (1939) by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links

The fourth and final Links/Wheatley crime dossier is extremely dull and boring. See my reviews of Murder Off Miami and Who Killed Robert Prentice? for overviews of the format and more successful examples.  However, it is fund to see photos of Wheatley and his friends, including many peers and famous writers, posing a scallywags of various ilks.

 

The Crocodile Bird (1993) by Ruth Rendell

In this breathtaking novel, young Liza Beck has lived her whole life cloistered away with her mother, Eve, who is intensely attached to their home. When Eve is arrested for murder, Liza goes to live with her secret boyfriend, their gardener, and tells him, Scheherazade-style, stories of Eve’s many crimes. Unable to see her mother, who has killed several men, as a monster, Liza is able to view with fresh eyes the horrors of patriarchy and the brainwashing that comes, not from a sequestered life, but from a mainstream one. This is Rendell at her misanthropic best.

 

Unsolved Case Files: Banks, Jamie (2019)

A wonderfully thoughtful birthday present from Alan, who has many times been forced to hear all about how much I enjoyed the Usborne Mystery Files as a child. This is a similar thing: pieces of evidence presented as a cold case, which you work through to solve. We both enjoyed it thoroughly. Of course it’s very easy to crack, and the storytelling isn’t exactly stellar – but I assume it’s aimed at children, families, or drunk people house-partying. We loved going through newspaper clippings, photographs, and transcripts with a magnifying glass. Perhaps it’s just as well we didn’t discover this series during lockdown – nothing else would have got done!

 

Five Strangers (2021) by E.V. Adamson

There is a strong Patricia Highsmith influence in Andrew Wilson’s first psychological thriller written as E.V. Adamson. We follow Jen, a likeable but oblivious young professional with an unnaturally attentive best friend, who witnesses a murder-suicide in central London. As she starts to appear more and more paranoid, and we learn more about her past, the secrets behind the deaths she witnessed emerge.

Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar directed by Sam Yates.

Oh, my God. I quite enjoyed Agatha and the Truth of Murder in 2018, which most people hated. So, when everyone said Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar (2019) was awful too, I took that with a pinch of salt. Well, everyone was right.

Agatha Christie (Lyndsey Marshal) travels to Iraq in 1929, meets her future husband Max Mallowan (Jonah Hauer-King), and solves a murder involving a curse.

Agatha’s first line is a joke about penises. Max is a hunky cockney. The Murder at the Vicarage is apparently a Poirot novel. The Mary Westmacott novels are “about romance” (aaaargh!!!). There’s a massive missed opportunity in the decision to turn Katherine Woolley (look her up) into a sex-mad degenerate (this is a shame because she is played by the superb Katherine Kingsley; if you ever get a chance to see her on stage, do it).

And then there’s the plot – suffice to say that, two days after watching it, I can’t remember who died, who did it, or why. Yes, of course I’ll be watching the third instalment, Agatha and the Midnight Murders, this Christmas.

But If you want a better-researched and more compelling mystery starring Agatha Christie on a dig with the Woolleys in 1929, check out Andrew Wilson’s Death in a Desert Land, also released in 2019. 

The Clocks by Agatha Christie

There are some Agatha Christie novels I know word for word, by heart. For nearly all of them, I can give you a pretty good summary of the plot, name all the characters, and discuss key themes and quotes without doing any prep. This isn’t a boast: if anything, it’s a confession of severe social ineptitude and an unhealthy obsession. But, until now, my definite stumbling block has been The Clocks. I just read it for the third time (to give an indication, I’ve probably read And Then There Were None 20+ times).

During the Coronavirus lockdown, it felt like everyone was asking me to recommend Agatha Christies to them. Everyone seems to be reading Christie and/or writing a novel – both of these are very good things, and I’m normally doing one or more of these on a given day, but for the first two weeks of lockdown, I did neither. I wanted absolute distraction for a bit and so read a lot of new-to-me books, mostly from new-to-me authors. In the crime sphere, these included Dennis Wheatley & J.G. Links’ murder dossiers, Magdalen Nabb’s Death of an Englishman, Edward Marston’s The Railway Detective, Vera Casparay’s Laura, Peter Swanson’s Rules for Perfect Murders, and others I can’t remember off the cuff, and a load of non-crime stuff. It mostly hit the spot but not quite and I realised that to truly escape I needed the master.

So, I looked at my bookshelf and picked the one Christie I can’t really remember. All I could remember from having read it at 13 and again at 18 was that it was a bit boring, the plot didn’t tie up, there was a really silly visual clue, and the narrator was a spy pretending to be a marine biologist. But, I reasoned: come on, I’m the one person alive who likes Christie’s generally-acknowledged worst novels, Passenger to Frankfurt and The Big Four.  And even people who hate those books always acknowledge that Christie at her worst is better than most writers on a good day. I also figured that this couldn't be as bad as I remembered, because Christie wrote it before some of her strongest work including At Bertram's Hotel (1965), Endless Night (1967), and Hallowe'en Party (1969) - which means she can't have lost her marbles at this point. So, with some trepidation, I pulled out The Clocks and gave it a whirl.

And – I loved it. God knows what was wrong with me before but now I think it’s brilliant. Not her best, no, but miles better than so many other crime novels. The Clocks, published in 1963, is an interesting departure from the whodunit formula. Then again, most late Christie departs from the Golden Age format. If you’ve heard or read my academic work, you’ll know that I think she reinvented the genre throughout the 1960s. It’s a mystery novel combining the spy thriller format, the self-referential detective narrative, and a small-c conservative comedy of social change.

Sheila Webb, a bang-average stenographer, receives a command to visit a house on Wilbraham Crescent, which is owned by the elderly Millicent Pebmarsh. She arrives at the allotted hour and, because Miss Pebmarsh is blind and not at home, lets herself in. In the room, she finds a strange scene: seven clocks, with five of them displaying the wrong time, and a dead man. She screams and runs out into the street, and into the arms of our narrator, who calls himself Colin Lamb.

Colin is – although he scrupulously never tells anyone, not even us his readers – a spy. He’s also the son of a senior policeman, and I’m not sure if this is Superintendent Spence or Superintendent Battle from the Christie back-catalogue. He was looking for another house on the same road where he believes a communist agent is hiding out. And because Sheila is very pretty he decides to solve this murder on the side.

It’s fourteen chapters before Hercule Poirot gets involved, very much in the background. Perhaps this is evidence that Christie was growing tired of Poirot as is commonly supposed. But I wonder if it actually represents Christie’s negotiation of a trope from spy fiction: the all-seeing deus-ex-machina, the M figure, who swoops in and sorts it out.

If so, Poirot’s presentation this time is a masterstroke. He’s mostly squirreled away in Whitehaven Mansions, but when he talks it’s in full Golden Age manner: he quotes childish riddles in lieu of actually explaining things and he’s going through a phase of reading all around the crime genre. So, he sees everything – including this murder plot – through the eyes of fictional detectives (the creations of real authors like John Dickson Carr, Anna Katherine Greene, and A.A. Milne and of authors like Ariadne Oliver and Gary Gregson, who exist only in the Christieverse).

The solution to the crime utterly bamboozled me and I could not be happier because I thought that feeling of getting hoodwinked by Christie was lost forever. It’s a brilliant blend of intricacy and extreme simplicity. I do remember hearing from other readers that the relevance of the clocks fizzles out but I don’t think that’s true. Their relevance is simply not what we expect it to be. And there’s a really nice twist at the end.

Thematically, the novel is ahead of its time in its treatment of disability. My friend Tina Hodgkinson gave an excellent paper on ableism in The Clocks at last year’s Agatha Christie conference, and I’d like to thank her for drawing our attention to this important theme.

Another key theme in the book is change: most of the characters, especially the unsympathetic ones, are afraid of change. They talk of atomic bombs, the EEC, and supermarkets with equal disdain. And they tie themselves up in knots trying to explain what they mean. Nobody challenged nostalgia while fuelling it with quite such brilliance as Agatha Christie.

If you want some fun, absorbing lockdown reading, you can’t go wrong with Agatha Christie. And I recommend The Clocks without hesitation.

Mini reviews #32

Hello from lockdown! Given the gloom and uncertainty of the world around us, I thought that today I'd offer only positive reviews ...

Colour Scheme (1949) by Ngaio Marsh

This enjoyable mystery has all the elements of a good Marsh: waspish characters, colourful setting that bleeds into the plot, a detective in disguise (who really isn’t relevant to the action, but the author hasn’t worked that out), and a really nice concept at its heart. It’s one of those mysteries where everything is relevant, but you only realise that at the end.

An Autobiography (1979) by Agatha Christie

So rich, so funny, so eminently human. Agatha Christie’s autobiography is everything is should be. It’s remarkably candid in so many ways, and if it doesn’t illuminate the writing process, it certainly sheds light on that personal connection an excellent writer cultivates with her readers.

Knives Out (2019) directed by Rhian Johnson

Yes, it is as good as people are saying. How amazing that we can get a blockbuster movie in this day and age directly referencing John Dickson Carr!

Never Have I Ever (2020) by Joshilyn Jackson

A pleasant surprise. Entrancing characters and dialogue meant I read it keenly. This book had been so hyped and offered around so many places for free that I thought it would be … lacking in something. But it’s very, very good. Joshilyn Jackson is not a new author but an established one, turning to crime/suspense for the first time. That probably explains the publicity drive. And the experience pays off. 

The Guest List (2020) by Lucy Foley

The follow up to last year’s The Hunting Party is just as promising. I really enjoyed this, and didn’t guess the ending. The plot revolves around a group of characters and at their heart is Will, a thoroughly horrible person whom all of us can put an irl name (or multiple irl names) to.

Mini reviews #31

Death at Breakfast (1936) by John Rhode

I downloaded this a couple of years ago as part of a commissioned project looking into literary estates but only got around to reading it this year. Let me tell you, tracking Rhode’s estate on Google is a nightmare: his real surname was Street and his descendants are called Green and Park, meaning I ended up with a lot of roadmaps (should that be rhodemaps?). Anyway, Death at Breakfast is enjoyable. It’s very much a puzzle and little more. I didn’t solve it, because I was so convinced I’d spotted something (either a red herring or plain irrelevant) on page 2. So… Rhodes did his job well!

The Pale Horse (1961) by Agatha Christie

One of Agatha Christie’s finest novels and convincing evidence that she was an author, particularly in her last decades, of biting social relevance.  A series of apparently unconnected deaths may have at its heart ancient witchcraft or something much more modern and equally sinister. Shed your preconceptions about Christie as a writer, laser away any television adaptations from your retinas, and enjoy.

The Sixth Window (2017) by Rachel Abbott

The sixth book in the DCI Tom Douglas series, and my introduction to both the character and the author, The Sixth Window is an excellent psychological thriller/police procedural hybrid. A twisty and compelling narrative about a woman discovering her husband’s dark side and feeling she has nowhere to turn. If the twists are predictable, that doesn’t matter: as is so often the case, it’s the journey that compels.

Deadly Scholars (2018) directed by Danny J. Boyle

Quite possibly the worst, most pointless piece of drama ever committed to film. It’s an American high school slasher mystery and I get that I’m not in the target audience but who is…? There’s a real mystery.

Identity Crisis (2019) by Ben Elton

After reading and loving David Nicholls’ The Understudy, I was in the mood for more satire. So, I picked up this book (remembering that Dead Famous by the same author was recommended to me a lot when it came out in 2004 but I never got round to reading it). Well, I was disappointed. It’s probably unfair to compare them, but it does show the difference between the two writers. Nicholls’ satire plays into universal tropes/types/themes, whereas Elton has specific contemporary targets. There is a lot of thin veiling here – Brexit, Boris Johnson, Germaine Greer, Cambridge Analytica, etc. As such, it all becomes a bit gestural and ultimately quickly dated. The concept is that the twin evils of social media and political correctness are stifling a murder investigation that ultimately exposes sinister cabals at the heart of capitalism itself.

The Eleventh Little Indian by Jacquemard-Sénécal

This is a fascinating French novel from the 1970s and, although I read the first English translation, I’ve given it its slightly less offensive US title here.  The Eleventh Little Indian (1979) is currently out of print, but hopefully it will be picked up by one of the small presses with a suitable new title. The edition I have was published by Agatha Christie’s own literary home, the Collins Crime Club.

Yves Jacquemard and Jean-Michele Sénécal were established playwrights when they wrote the book as their debut in 19976 and submitted it as a candidate for the Prix du Quai des Orfèvres. The prize committee - or possibly the publishers - rejected the novel as ‘too daring’, possibly because of its offhand dealing with homosexuality (that’s purely a guess), and the authors dashed off another novel, by all accounts inferior, which won. Sadly, Jacquemard died in 1980 at the age of 37, cutting short an interesting partnership.

I’m currently rehearsing for an amateur production of Christie’s And Then There Were None, using the book’s ending as opposed to the play’s traditional one, so the premise for this was irresistible.

A French theatre company is performing a special new adaptation of And Then There Were None, using the book’s original ending. One evening, the actor playing the murderer turns up late to the dressing room and finds all ten fellow cast members dead. At his own dressing table is an eleventh victim — someone apparently unknown to everyone, wearing theatrical make-up.

What follows is an often witty and generally enjoyable investigation into a complicated backstory, as the central character, Paul Samson, and policeman Hector Parescot (note the initials) join forces to uncover the link between these apparently unconnected actors, the identity of the eleventh corpse, and the murderer’s name.

The solution — and the several red herrings and backstories — owe a lot to Agatha Christie, whose books weave in and out of the plot through indirect or direct nods.  I particularly enjoyed the character of the gay director/writer who has a cherished collection of Christie’s novels, because he reminded me of so many real Christie fans. This is the first time I’ve seen authors address Christie’s camp legacy so directly, and the fact that the book was published so soon after her death and — in English, at least — by her own publishers, is rather nice.

My only gripe was that the narrator does not play fair, and I don’t mean that in any artificially indignant Roger Ackroyd-y way. The narrator actually lies us, the readers, at a key moment. Perhaps that was an issue of translation. There’s only one thing to do … I must learn French and read the original!

As several characters promise throughout the course of the investigation, you will find the solution in the pages of Agatha Christie. But it won’t be one of the more famous ‘twists’ you’re being pushed towards at every turn. I put down this novel with a very specific feeling of ‘How could I not see that?’ that I haven’t had since reading Christie in my pre-teens. All in all, The Eleventh Little Indian is thoroughly recommended.

While there are several titles in French apparently by Jacquemard-Sénécal, all but one (which has also been translated, as The Body Vanishes) were written exclusively by Sénécal. It’s a shame, but perhaps this novel deserves to stand alone as a curiosity and a one-off.

(In cast anyone’s wondering, I’m playing Lombard.)

META MATTERS

See above(!)

Death in a Desert Land by Andrew Wilson

 Welcome to my one-hundredth post on A Sign of the Crimes! 

Andrew Wilson’s series of mysteries featuring Agatha Christie as a detective are hugely escapist and enjoyable. They stand not just as curiosities but as decent novels in their own right. While Agatha Christie has solved several crimes in print and on screen – especially in the last few years – Wilson’s series is set apart from the others by the skillful blend of three key components: historical research, literary research, and genuine affection for the author and her legacy. 

I count Andrew as a personal friend, and he’s been in my life longer than he knows: one of his first books, Voices from the Titanic, provided a hefty chunk of the backbone to my MA dissertation. So I am delighted to report that Death in a Desert Land (2019) lives up to its Golden Agey title and the beautiful dust-jacket artwork. I read it in one sitting, appropriately enough on what felt like the hottest night of all time and, perhaps less appropriately, to the backdrop of a thunder and lightning storm. 

This third instalment in the series sees Agatha Christie in 1928, encouraged by the Secret Service to travel to Ur in Iraq, investigating the death of Gertrude Bell (Bell, who helped found the modern state of Iraq, was, in real life, found dead of an overdose in 1926). At Ur, she meets an eccentric and international cast of characters, and discovers that no love was lost between Bell and the dig’s own ‘belle’, a certain Katharine Woolley. 

At this stage, the committed Christie enthusiast will squeal with recognition, because the real Mrs Woolley has made almost as much of an impact on us as she did on the real Agatha Christie. It is common knowledge – so common that no one bothers citing a source – that the first victim in Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) was based on her.  If you are a die-hard Agatha Christie fan, you will spot the murderer a few chapters in, simply by whittling out the real people and identifying applying a bit of plot insight gleaned from Christie’s own work. This does not in any way spoil the clue-hunt, as knowing what you’re looking for is just as enjoyable as, if not more so than, going in blind. 

There is a subtle shift in scope between Wilson’s previous two novels and Death in a Desert Land. While A Talent For Murder and A Different Kind of Evil reminded me in many ways of Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey Mysteries – even having similarly titled first instalments (Upson kicked off in 2008 with An Expert in Murder) – this third entry harks back to the technique David Pirie applied in his Murder Rooms series. In Pirie’s books, and the television series, Arthur Conan Doyle solves various mysteries that bear striking similarities to the Sherlock Holmes stories he would go on to write. In Death in a Desert Land, Agatha Christie inhabits a mystery that bears more than a little resemblance to Murder in Mesopotamia and, surprisingly, to one or two of her later novels including A Caribbean Mystery (1965). 

In fact, I wondered if there was a bit of sailing close to the wind. When a water glass filled with hydrochloric acid turns up on the camp site – exactly as it does in Murder in Mesopotamia – ‘this’, Christie says, ‘is beyond anything even I could have dreamt up’, which might suggest that she couldn’t have thought it up; that her creative genius has to be rationalised with external influences. But the last thing Andrew Wilson or indeed Agatha Christie would want us to do is to take their work too seriously. 

It is, though, extremely fun and thoroughly satisfying to be in the company of Wilson’s Agatha Christie once again. She is a warm and human character, who gives a voice to those of us who shyly observe life from the sidelines. I am looking forward to the next instalment, Who Saw Him Die?, which has already been written for publication in 2020. In particular, I’m hoping that a certain Max Mallowan might crop up…

Meta Matters

The whole thing is a meta moment.

Mini reviews #26

The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944) by Edmund Crispin. Crispin’s debut is a good place to start. A marvellous meta locked room mystery  featuring the eccentric academic sleuth Gervase Fen and revolving around the death of a promiscuous actress in an Oxford college.

The Mousetrap (1952) by Agatha Christie. There’s a reason Christie’s play is the longest-running in West End (and theatre) history: it’s bloody brilliant. I’m pretty much unique in thinking it is Christie’s best play, but I just think it’s perfect. And it features at least two LGBT characters, which is always a plus. A perfect balance of suspense, humour, familiarity, and fresh, contemporary horror, this story of a snowed-in post-war guest house visited by a murderer out for revenge remains relevant in most contexts. I must have seen at least a dozen productions (the West End cast changes each November) and it never gets old. The current incarnation is the best yet, so go and see it if you’re in London. If not, catch the UK tour or one of the regular amateur productions done in other countries. You won’t regret it.

Lord John and the Private Matter (2003) by Diana Gabaldon. Outlander, the TV series based on Diana Gabaldon’s time travel romances, is one of my guilty pleasures (and pretty much confirms me as a middle-aged woman in a dashing young buck’s body). This historical spy novel takes one of the supporting character from the Outlander universe, the gay-or-possibly-bi Lord John Grey who is a spy. I’m not generally a fan of historical fiction but found this engaging, and the research not too overwhelming or besides the point. It’s a surprisingly fun novel, too. You probably need to care about the characters to enjoy it, though.

The Widow (2016) by Fiona Barton. A stunning debut psychological thriller. Barton seamlessly inhabits a range of different voices, with the most effective being that of the journalist, Kate Waters, determined to solve an old case.

The Child (2017) by Fiona Barton. A very good second novel. Barton’s writing style is as engaging as ever. However, there is a big twist which I saw coming from the midway point, and it became increasingly difficult to believe that none of the characters could see it coming or at least think of it. It was a disappointment to have this twist be the big reveal and the end of the book.

Mini reviews #25

Today’s mini-reviews, the twenty-fifth set brining the total number of this pithy summaries to 100, are all television productions!

Case Closed (YTV, 1996-present). Also known as Detective Conan and based on the manga series of the same name, this is a fun, long-running murder mystery anime with a ragged bunch of child detectives and plenty of allusions to Golden Age detective fiction. If you like anime or classic crime, if you’re a child or an adult, Case Closed is worth a watch.

How to Get Away with Murder (ABC, 2014-present). Overblown, preposterous, and compulsively watchable series about illogically sexy postgraduate law student and their intense relationships with barrister-cum-law professor Annalise Keating (played by Viola Davies, who singlehandedly elevates the programme from utter rubbish to must-see television).

You Get Me (Netflix, 2017). Frothy, silly teen psychological thriller from Netflix. You Get Me owes a great deal of its plot to Swimfan (2002) following a young couple whose relationship descends into bloodshed with the arrival of an obsessive Other Woman. Interestingly, I recently read an upcoming novel by a bestseller (not to be reviewed on this blog), which routinely rips off this rip-off TV film. Half the cast are Youtubers, which should tell you enough.

You (Netflix, 2018). Engrossing ten-part Netflix adaptation of the novel by Caroline Kepnes, charting a bookseller’s obsession with a young writer, as it descends through social media stalking into very dark places.

Agatha and the Truth of Murder (Channel 5, 2018). In my December post, I mentioned that I thought this drama was not terrible and some of my friends let me know that I was wrong. But I stand by what I said: while the budget is clearly not great, Tom Dalton’s script mishmashes real events in a bizarre way, and Ruth Bradley’s performance as Christie is underwhelming, I thought the whole thing was fine. Agatha Christie as detective — especially in those missing days in 1926 — has been done to death, and this Channel 5 drama doesn’t offer anything particularly new. But it’s relatively inoffensive, and the plot is structured along the lines of an Agatha Christie novel of the period. That is a first for one of these projects, and makes it worth watching. Bradley has indicated that she might reprise the role. With Andrew Wilson’s series along similar lines expecting a TV home soon, that would be interesting. 

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.

Mini reviews #19

Poirot Investigates (1924) by Agatha Christie. It's been said that Arthur Conan Doyle should have stuck to writing short stories and Agatha Christie should have stuck to novels. The mysteries are too complex, people claim, to work in a 4,000 word format. Maybe. This was Christie's first collection of stories, originally published in the trendy Sketch magazine and featuring Hercule Poirot, who was becoming a household name. Poirot's on top form here, and the faithful Captain Hastings is wonderfully idiotic. Christie is still trying to write like Doyle, which can be grating. But 'The Mystery of Hunter's lodge' is melodramatic and keyed in, satirically, to debates around psychoanalysis. 'The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb' is full of entrancing period detail.

Raffles' Crime in Gibraltar (1936) by Barry Perowne. Perrowne, a pseudonym for Philip Atkey, was appointed by the estate of E.W. Hornung to write new novels and stories featuring gentleman thief A.J. Raffles. This is one of his two novels pitting Raffles against the ever-popular poor man's Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake. Raffles' Crime in Gibraltar is par-for-the course pulp. It's enjoyable enough, with obvious padding in places... and cigarettes are lit whenever dialogue needs breaking up. Full of sinister foreigners and implausible chases, it is forgettable. As it was designed to be.

Endless Night (1967) by Agatha Christie. A masterpiece. A psychological thriller, a literary novel, and everything they say she couldn't write. It's hard to believe Christie was 77 when Endless Night came out. Slap a random name on the cover, change a few details, and release it to day: it would become an instant bestseller and then a classic in its own right.

Monk's Hood (1980) by Ellis Peters. 'It was now imperative to find the murderer, otherwise the boy could not emerge from hiding and take up his disrupted life.' The third Brother Cadfael novel features a mysterious poisoning. Try as I might, I cannot get into these books. The writing style fails to engage me, although I have enjoyed some of Peters' short stories, historical or otherwise. However, I shan't be giving Cadfael another chance any time soon.

The Actor's Guide to Murder (2003) by Rick Copp. A mostly fun, campy crime novel about a former child star in Hollywood and his police detective boyfriend solving another former child star's murder. They are put onto the case by the main character's personal psychic warning that someone close to him will die. Reading it, I developed two theories as to whodunit: one was based on logic and the other on the least-likely-suspect theory. The latter was correct. The solution tries to veer into social commentary which is, perhaps, a mistake, as the author is not as informed on the issues as the glamorous setting. Also, a reference to 'an Agatha Christie pot-boiler' irritated me! But I plan to read the second in the series, The Actor's Guide to Adultery.

Mini reviews #17

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893) by Arthur Conan Doyle. This collection of short stories was supposed to provide the final word on the great detective – and, of course, it didn’t. For reasons we may never deduce, Arthur Conan Doyle brought back the character who got him paid-by-the-word less than a decade after killing him off. But Holmes dies here, in ‘The Final Problem’, which has an excellent concluding line. There are twelve stories in all, including ‘The Gloria Scott’, in which Holmes recounts his first case in his university days, and ‘The Greek Interpreter’, in which we meet his brother. Rereading in order, I was surprised to remember how socially functional the original Sherlock Holmes was. That charm that Basil Rathbone captured on-screen, so pointedly sublimated in later adaptations, is certainly there in the stories.

4.50 From Paddington (1957) by Agatha Christie.  The buoyant Elspeth McGillicuddy boards a train after a hard day shopping. As the 4.50 rushes past another train, she glances through the woman and sees, in the other train, a woman being strangled! When the police dismiss her as a lonely biddy, she calls on Miss Marple… This is Christie in her element, writing about a fantasy England and a changing world. Characters – from the grandiose patriarch who made his fortune in biscuits to the domestic helper with a triple first from Oxford – are quirkily realised and the plot is silly enough to class as genius.

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966) by Patricia Highsmith. Don’t read this as a ‘how-to’ guide, but do read this for the fascinating insights into Highsmith’s own creative routines. Very accessible and very humane.

Dark Corners (2014) by Ruth Rendell. Rendell’s final novel showcases her ambitions and her weaknesses, especially when she tries to be edgy. I wish she had set this novel in the 1960s, as that’s clearly where her imagination has strayed to and the use of ‘the Internet’ (with a very capital ‘I’) at the heart of the plot is slightly awkward. Had all the action taken place in the 1960s, I think this could have been as taut and compelling as vintage Rendell.

Bring Me Back (2018) by B.A. Paris. Paris has a knack of writing compulsively readable prose. You can sit down with her debut, Behind Closed Doors, and not look up until far into the night. She established a formula with that book and largely stuck to it in her second. This is her third and it’s different. For one thing, Paris is trying a male narrator for the first time (there are two narrators here, and a bit of a Gone Girl vibe), and for another the twist is supposed to be unexpected. One thing that made Behind Closed Doors so great is that you know the entire plot, everything that’s going to unfold, more or less from the off – and you know that the author knows that you know. The only person who doesn’t know is the narrator. And that’s compelling. Here, the twist comes right at the end. The problem is that twists are hard to pull off. I saw it coming as soon as the plot had been established, and found myself increasingly frustrated. I turned the pages quickly, but that was to escape some unfortunate writing. The kind of rookie errors I missed – despite their being there – in the first book, and noticed but forgave in the second. B.A. Paris has a genuinely talent but I really, really want her to take more than a year to produce each book, in order to do that talent justice.

A Different Kind of Evil by Andrew Wilson

Last year, Andrew Wilson, biographer and author of The Lying Tongue, published his first crime novel featuring Agatha Christie as a central character, A Talent To Murder. He’s not the first to have fictionalised the author’s 1926 disappearance, and there have been some seriously zany explanations proposed. However, even the Doctor Who episode, which put the whole thing down to a giant alien wasp, stuck in familiar Christie territory — the wasp was disguised as a vicar and hanging out in a country house — so I was intrigued by Wilson’s decision to go ‘dark’ in his first Christie book. In A Talent for Murder, Christie is blackmailed by a truly evil man, and forced to commit a murder of her own… It all resolves, though, without a stain on our favourite author’s character, and the result is that she takes on a top secret role with Intelligence.

A Different Kind of Evil (2018) will be published in May. It is set a few months after the annus horribilis, with Agatha (as I shall now call her) struggling to write her next book and voyaging to Gran Canaria. She’s there at the bequest of Intelligence, to look into a mysterious death involving partial mummification. The trip really happened, although it was a straightforward holiday; she went with her secretary Carlo Fisher and her daughter Rosalind, who both appear in Wilson’s version, to get away from England in the aftermath of all the unpleasantness in December. However (back in the world of fiction), early on in the trip, Agatha witnesses a young woman jump off the SS Gelria to her watery grave. Why did she jump? And could this mystery somehow be connected to the partially-mummified corpse?

Agatha teams up with Mr Davison, who was also her mentor in the last book, and discovers that the case has a personal connection to him. As she digs deeper, she learns about a tangled web of unrequited passions, incest, and, and black magic. Agatha’s experience of poison helps her out more than a little, and she draws on her mother’s interest in the supernatural to enter an isolated gothic world.

The mystery itself is complex. I worked out about half of the solution, so I’m happy with that. There was one element which I wasn’t sure about; which I felt could have been explained a bit more, but overall it was a satisfying read. Wilson’s Agatha Christie is not the real Agatha Christie. She can’t be. For one thing, I doubt that the real writer would ever have gathered together the suspects and explained the solution to the case — she was painfully shy — and, much as it pains me to say, she was much too conservative to have had a gay best friend. However, that doesn’t matter.

Inevitably, I want to compare Wilson’s Agatha Christie to Josephine Tey in the books by Nicola Upson. Both women were extremely reticent and didn’t like talking about their private lives. As a result, we tend to create both of these people in whatever image suits us best: a popular one for Christie is the Kindly Grandmother. This is something Wilson does not descend to; he simply makes her a nice, shy person who can’t really offend anyone, and that’s smart. Upson does something similar with Tey, although her Josephine ends up so drastically unlike the real Elizabeth MacKintosh that one wonders why she didn’t just give her a new name. Wilson’s Agatha is grounded in research. Not only do her memories, experiences, and friends line up with history, but so too do her interests and attitudes. For instance, her childhood love of music and her tastes in drink (a cup of cream when other people drank alcohol, if you’re interested) are all woven into the characterisation.

I like the fact that Wilson is making Agatha’s shyness the impetus for investigation — because underneath shyness are two things: a cynicism that sees social life as a performance, and a desperate desire to get involved in the play. I understand that, Agatha Christie understood it, and Wilson gets it, too. It’s nice to be reunited some of the people we met in A Talent For Murder, and to get to know them a little better. There’s also an interesting mystery, with more than a few nods to stories and novels Christie would go on to write, including ‘The Man from the Sea’ and, most conspicuously, Death on the Nile. The literary style, the plotting, and the execution of ideas are not in Christie’s ballpark; this is a different kind of mystery.

The novel is, finally, eminently readable. It’s a page-turner. The prose isn’t sparkling but it does draw you in. I read A Different Kind of Evil in three 130-page-sittings, and look forward to the next one.

Source: Advance review copy from the author