Feminism, folk horror and an outsider hero: how I brought Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Easy to the small screen | Books

Agatha Christie adaptations are an annual Christmas tradition, as is the nervous anticipation of viewers sitting down to witness the snipping and streamlining of another beloved novel to fit the screen. This year my adaptation of Christie’s relatively little-known 1938 Murder Is Easy joins the ranks of this murderously festive family fare.

The original Murder Is Easy sees Christie experimenting with form and themes, class and gender commentary, even some Wicker-Man style folk horror in a darkly romantic comedy with as much seduction as deduction. Murder Is Easy is not a Marple or a Poirot. Fitzwilliam and Bridget, the two-hander’s screwball heroes, aren’t even detectives, let alone iconic ones, but no doubt the book will have its aficionados for whom my interpretation is an irritating interference. To them I say: adaptation is not translation.

Traditionally, the task of turning novels into drama asks for invisibility from the secondary writer; that we be pure, blank vectors. Should our presence be felt at all in the finished product, it’s as grit in the oyster at best. Vandals at worst. Like Pericles’ virtuous woman, our “greatest glory is to be the least talked about, whether in praise or blame”.

If only the adaptor was some kind of transparent transmission equipment by which the original author’s work could be beamed into flesh? Preferably with all your favourite bits intact and faithful to your tastes and opinions. Instead, we dramatists enter like a third wheel in a couple, butting in on your beloved. But why not be entertained, enjoy listening to our brief encounter? In the end, books are faithful companions; they can pass through many hands and still be entirely yours.

I’ve come to think of adaptation as a conversation between two writers, colliding at a specific moment in time like strangers at a dinner party. Me, the new acquaintance, a bit of an unknown quantity, is introduced to the host’s best friend from school, The Book. Sparks could fly, it could all go horribly wrong, but our host – in this analogy, the commissioning producer – has done due diligence and made sure to invite people who will get on. Conversation commences delicately. Like any good guest, I might probe for areas of common interest – “Did you say social breakdown/postcolonial anglophilia/the silencing of women? What a coincidence, I’ve been thinking about that a lot myself, of late” – and then you’re away, chatting your heads off, running from one thought to another. Finishing each other’s sentences.

All of which, by the way, Christie packs into this strange novel. A police officer from a fictional territory of empire returns to an England he longs for but barely knows, only to find the perfect village ruled over by a religious fundamentalist newspaper tycoon, as intelligent women howl with nihilistic despair, and the lower classes and dissident voices are picked off by an unknown killer. Cosy Little England this is not. If you only read this novel, you’d take Christie for a revolutionary feminist.

But the scriptwriter shouldn’t dive too deeply into the author’s opinions and beliefs – it’s a party after all, not an interrogation. Adaptation is not some kind of biography. How rude would that be? Like Googling your fellow guests under the dinner table. I save that kind of research for my original work. A play about Fanny Burney and Germaine de Staël required reading all their novels, then the literary criticism, plus contemporary accounts and French Revolutionary history. As an adaptor, there’s no need to become an expert in the writer behind The Book. I take them at their word, in the moment of writing, as expressed on the page alone. Their past, their future, are none of my concern. I might never meet them again, but I’m utterly immersed in this conversation … “What was that you said about self-made men? Oh, that’s so good. Hilarious. I’m going to remember that.”

And I will have to remember. Once I start writing my script, I pretty much put the novel down. I can’t be flipping through its pages for quotes like a crib sheet in an exam. Memory will serve me up the dialogue that sang to me when I met The Book. Thematically, I make no apology for only remembering what interested me. I’m a 21st-century woman of colour and inevitably there will be parts of The Book that don’t speak to me, that were directed at other guests around the table. I couldn’t adapt Les Liaisons Dangereuses for radio without comment from a modern perspective.

My new but rather old-fashioned interlocutor, The Book, has certain issues of posture. Like a chiropractor, I gently push and prod it forward, on to topics The Book may have remarked upon in passing but that ring more bells with current audiences than the author ever anticipated. I may elaborate, exaggerate, and explore, but I never change the bones of the story. I try to help it stand up straighter; getting The Book on its feet for screen always requires structural intervention. And dramaturgically speaking, Murder Is Easy needed a little help.

Written as part of the Superintendent Battle series, while Fitzwilliam and Bridget may solve the novel’s murder mystery, neither has the power to close the case. Christie’s Fitzwilliam has no jurisdiction or reputation, and not much insight. His sole detective superpower is listening to women – very admirable, but not dynamic enough for a heroic investigator. Previous adaptations have done away with him altogether, but finding a way to represent and utilise Christie’s hamstrung hero intrigued me.

Making Fitzwilliam a Black man wasn’t an attempt to fix diversity in casting, it was how to make his character work. As a wealthy, educated Nigerian, his limitations as a detective are external obstacles imposed by his immigrant status, not his weakness as a protagonist. An African anglophile in the post-second world war England of the NHS, rationing and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Fitz’s outsiders eye exposes the social unease and bitter cynicism of The Book.

The first time I read it, I thought: “What a furious little book.” It seemed experimental, raw, even edgy about class, gender and the potentially poisonous glue that holds England together. If I have exacerbated these issues in any way or excavated those themes further, I put it down to The Book kicking me under the table and shooting me some rather pointed looks. Short of spilling a drink down my dress as a cover to smuggle me a note, I don’t know how much more explicit Murder Is Easy could have been in its excoriation of class inequality and the oppressive invisibility of women. Nodding enthusiastically across the dinner table, I felt happy to oblige and adapt accordingly. There’s nothing better than meeting and conversing with someone new, whose concerns so fortuitously align with your own.

If novels really were guests we meet at dinner parties, I’d like to think that as soon as I began to recount the fascinating story whispered to me over the soup, just from the characteristic cock of the head and tilt of the chin in my dramatisation, you would recognise your beloved old friend, The Book. And if not? Well … then you’d be meeting a whole new story – and what could be nicer than that?

Agatha Christie adaptations are an annual Christmas tradition, as is the nervous anticipation of viewers sitting down to witness the snipping and streamlining of another beloved novel to fit the screen. This year my adaptation of Christie’s relatively little-known 1938 Murder Is Easy joins the ranks of this murderously festive family fare.

The original Murder Is Easy sees Christie experimenting with form and themes, class and gender commentary, even some Wicker-Man style folk horror in a darkly romantic comedy with as much seduction as deduction. Murder Is Easy is not a Marple or a Poirot. Fitzwilliam and Bridget, the two-hander’s screwball heroes, aren’t even detectives, let alone iconic ones, but no doubt the book will have its aficionados for whom my interpretation is an irritating interference. To them I say: adaptation is not translation.

Traditionally, the task of turning novels into drama asks for invisibility from the secondary writer; that we be pure, blank vectors. Should our presence be felt at all in the finished product, it’s as grit in the oyster at best. Vandals at worst. Like Pericles’ virtuous woman, our “greatest glory is to be the least talked about, whether in praise or blame”.

If only the adaptor was some kind of transparent transmission equipment by which the original author’s work could be beamed into flesh? Preferably with all your favourite bits intact and faithful to your tastes and opinions. Instead, we dramatists enter like a third wheel in a couple, butting in on your beloved. But why not be entertained, enjoy listening to our brief encounter? In the end, books are faithful companions; they can pass through many hands and still be entirely yours.

I’ve come to think of adaptation as a conversation between two writers, colliding at a specific moment in time like strangers at a dinner party. Me, the new acquaintance, a bit of an unknown quantity, is introduced to the host’s best friend from school, The Book. Sparks could fly, it could all go horribly wrong, but our host – in this analogy, the commissioning producer – has done due diligence and made sure to invite people who will get on. Conversation commences delicately. Like any good guest, I might probe for areas of common interest – “Did you say social breakdown/postcolonial anglophilia/the silencing of women? What a coincidence, I’ve been thinking about that a lot myself, of late” – and then you’re away, chatting your heads off, running from one thought to another. Finishing each other’s sentences.

All of which, by the way, Christie packs into this strange novel. A police officer from a fictional territory of empire returns to an England he longs for but barely knows, only to find the perfect village ruled over by a religious fundamentalist newspaper tycoon, as intelligent women howl with nihilistic despair, and the lower classes and dissident voices are picked off by an unknown killer. Cosy Little England this is not. If you only read this novel, you’d take Christie for a revolutionary feminist.

But the scriptwriter shouldn’t dive too deeply into the author’s opinions and beliefs – it’s a party after all, not an interrogation. Adaptation is not some kind of biography. How rude would that be? Like Googling your fellow guests under the dinner table. I save that kind of research for my original work. A play about Fanny Burney and Germaine de Staël required reading all their novels, then the literary criticism, plus contemporary accounts and French Revolutionary history. As an adaptor, there’s no need to become an expert in the writer behind The Book. I take them at their word, in the moment of writing, as expressed on the page alone. Their past, their future, are none of my concern. I might never meet them again, but I’m utterly immersed in this conversation … “What was that you said about self-made men? Oh, that’s so good. Hilarious. I’m going to remember that.”

And I will have to remember. Once I start writing my script, I pretty much put the novel down. I can’t be flipping through its pages for quotes like a crib sheet in an exam. Memory will serve me up the dialogue that sang to me when I met The Book. Thematically, I make no apology for only remembering what interested me. I’m a 21st-century woman of colour and inevitably there will be parts of The Book that don’t speak to me, that were directed at other guests around the table. I couldn’t adapt Les Liaisons Dangereuses for radio without comment from a modern perspective.

My new but rather old-fashioned interlocutor, The Book, has certain issues of posture. Like a chiropractor, I gently push and prod it forward, on to topics The Book may have remarked upon in passing but that ring more bells with current audiences than the author ever anticipated. I may elaborate, exaggerate, and explore, but I never change the bones of the story. I try to help it stand up straighter; getting The Book on its feet for screen always requires structural intervention. And dramaturgically speaking, Murder Is Easy needed a little help.

Written as part of the Superintendent Battle series, while Fitzwilliam and Bridget may solve the novel’s murder mystery, neither has the power to close the case. Christie’s Fitzwilliam has no jurisdiction or reputation, and not much insight. His sole detective superpower is listening to women – very admirable, but not dynamic enough for a heroic investigator. Previous adaptations have done away with him altogether, but finding a way to represent and utilise Christie’s hamstrung hero intrigued me.

Making Fitzwilliam a Black man wasn’t an attempt to fix diversity in casting, it was how to make his character work. As a wealthy, educated Nigerian, his limitations as a detective are external obstacles imposed by his immigrant status, not his weakness as a protagonist. An African anglophile in the post-second world war England of the NHS, rationing and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Fitz’s outsiders eye exposes the social unease and bitter cynicism of The Book.

The first time I read it, I thought: “What a furious little book.” It seemed experimental, raw, even edgy about class, gender and the potentially poisonous glue that holds England together. If I have exacerbated these issues in any way or excavated those themes further, I put it down to The Book kicking me under the table and shooting me some rather pointed looks. Short of spilling a drink down my dress as a cover to smuggle me a note, I don’t know how much more explicit Murder Is Easy could have been in its excoriation of class inequality and the oppressive invisibility of women. Nodding enthusiastically across the dinner table, I felt happy to oblige and adapt accordingly. There’s nothing better than meeting and conversing with someone new, whose concerns so fortuitously align with your own.

If novels really were guests we meet at dinner parties, I’d like to think that as soon as I began to recount the fascinating story whispered to me over the soup, just from the characteristic cock of the head and tilt of the chin in my dramatisation, you would recognise your beloved old friend, The Book. And if not? Well … then you’d be meeting a whole new story – and what could be nicer than that?