When I first heard the news that the BBC was producing a new Hercule Poirot prequel – featuring heartthrob Edward Bluemel as a young, sexy version of the detective – I had my valet prepare me a cup of fortifying tisane. As a lifelong enthusiast for the works of Agatha Christie, the so-called “Queen of Crime”, I am used to regular sacrileges. Yet the pace at which the estate is being gouged appears to be quickening, a story that tells us much about the rotten core of the modern entertainment complex.
It has been reported this week that Agatha Christie Limited, the company that operates the writer’s estate, made pre-tax profits of more than £20m last year. That has made her descendants extremely wealthy, some 50 years after Christie went the way of Roger Ackroyd, Lord Edgware and Mrs McGinty. When she died in 1976, Robert Knittel, editorial director of her publisher, reflected on her enormous impact. He observed that she “was read all over the world, including Russia, was translated into 28 languages and in her lifetime her thrillers had sold about 300 million copies”. In the half century that has passed since then, that figure has risen to over two billion. It is widely claimed that her sales record is surpassed only by William Shakespeare and the Bible.
Maintaining that level of popularity over the 105 years since the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles requires a lot of creative dexterity. At the heart of Christie’s success is the timeless quality of her prose. It is simple but exact, witty without being satirical and precision engineered to be reliable. Many of her Golden Age contemporaries – Dorothy L Sayers, say, or Margery Allingham – feel more dated in the 21st century, their plotting more reliant on social mores and topical news stories. Christie’s books present a view of England that, even in the 1920s, was beginning to feel old fashioned. All these years later, it has the paradoxical effect of making the stories seem more vital and accessible.
Agatha Christie in 1969 (Photo: Bettmann)And in the figures of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, she created two heroes who transcend language and cultures: the fastidious Belgian sleuth, with his striking moustaches and egg-shaped head, and the overlooked biddy, defying expectations of her age and gender. As characters, they make sense whether you’re a teenage boy in suburban Britain or a young woman in a bustling Indian metropolis or an old man sat on a deckchair in the Australian outback. Timeless and borderless, they are novels that help people learn English, or master it.
But recent attempts to create a Christie Cinematic Universe run contrary to those comforting foundations. The BBC has been making steadily more hysterical adaptations, which attempt to bring adjectives like “edge” and “grit” to the stories. A low moment was the 2018 adaptation of The ABC Murders, which saw John Malkovich as a version of Poirot who, it turned out, had previously been a priest who’d witnessed his congregation murdered during the German invasion of Belgium. Kenneth Branagh’s dismal Death on the Nile also gave Poirot a ludicrously overwrought backstory: his moustache was hiding the scar from a landmine injury sustained in the war.
Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot (Photo: 20th Century Fox)With Hercule, the upcoming prequel, the Christie estate are proving they do not understand their detective’s appeal. Poirot is not young; he is not handsome. He is, in Christie’s words, “an extraordinary looking man”. That this unthreatening dandy can foil such devious murderers is the punchline to the series. Removing that might make him more palatable to Generation Z (a false assumption, I suspect) but it is as absurd as making Miss Marple young and sexy (an alluring prospect to some commissioners, surely). Young, handsome Poirot is simply not Poirot – it is just borrowing his name to ensnare an audience.
In their haste to maximise revenue, the Christie estate is turning her distinctive oeuvre into slop. Netflix recently released a three-part adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery, and the BBC did the same with Towards Zero. A new Tommy and Tuppence series will shortly hit screens, and author Lucy Foley will release the first Marple continuation novel in the autumn (Sophie Hannah has been doing the same duties for Monsieur Poirot since 2014, with extremely diminishing returns).
Christie has long been over-saturated, but now her work feels stretched to breaking point. The brand equity of Christie’s name, the public recognition of her characters, and her unchallenged status as the Queen of Crime are creating a regurgitative ecosystem that seems decreasingly able to grasp her true appeal.
She is the great popular fiction writer of the 20th century, whose works tell the story of narrative evolution during (and despite) the invention of cinema, television, and then, in her posthumous afterglow, the internet. She deserves better than being used for an easy cash grab.
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