Agatha Christie's 'Murder is Easy'
Considering the role of screenwriters in novel adaptations
Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, where I discuss the work of 20th century women writers and their relevance to contemporary culture.
Over the Christmas holidays, I enjoyed watching a new BBC two-part re-telling of Agatha Christie’s 1938 novel, Murder is Easy. As I had not read Christie’s original novel itself, I was completely new to the story, but became intrigued from the start of the drama as the central character Luke Fitzwilliam, a young Nigerian man who has just arrived in England to take up a post in Whitehall, is introduced. He becomes entangled in a series of suspicious deaths in a small English village after a chance encounter on a train with an older woman on her way to Scotland Yard.
I was left wondering whether Fitzwilliam, as a newly arrived immigrant, was the choice of the scriptwriter or Christie’s original intent for the story when I luckily happened upon this article in the Guardian written by the screenwriter Siȃn Ejiwunmi-Le Berre. In it, she discusses her own reaction to a first reading of Christie’s novel, and her reasons for writing the script as she did, coming from the place of a 21st century woman of colour.
“Traditionally, the task of turning novels into drama asks for invisibility from the secondary writer; that we be pure, blank vectors.”
Siȃn points out that when she first encountered Christie’s book, she found within its pages a 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.’
As she points out, the story does not contain the usual Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot style detective. Instead, a young man named Fitzwilliam (Fitz) and a secretary he meets in the village called Bridget, are the book’s two unofficial ‘detectives’.
Siȃn discusses Christie’s original book, which tells the story of a police officer’s return from a fictional territory of the British empire to find a perfect village ruled over by a religious fundamentalist newspaper tycoon, and intelligent women and the lower classes who are being, at best, routinely ignored, at worst, murdered.
She goes on to claim that if you only read this one novel of Christie’s you would assume her to have been a revolutionary feminist. She states that she first found the book to be ‘furious’ and ‘experimental, raw, even edgy about class, gender and the potentially poisonous glue that holds England together’, and felt that the themes of ‘class inequality and the oppressive invisibility of women’ required excavation in her rewrite. She achieved this with aplomb.
From this reading, it is not difficult to see how she made the connections with ideas of the outsider and the silencing of women for her take on the script.
“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…”
In Murder is Easy, Siȃn points out that Fitz's main superpower is that he is able and willing to listen to what the women are saying. As heroes go, he is not particularly dynamic in Christie’s novel, and she states that some adaptations have completely taken him out of the script altogether. She, however, saw some potential in the young hero, and decided to make him a young Black man, not, she points out, as an attempt to fix diversity in the casting of the show, but to make his character work in the story. He arrives at the village as an educated, wealthy Nigerian man, an outsider within his immigrant status. As such, he arrives within the story able to expose the social unease within the village.
She is fully aware, however, that some viewers prefer to see a faithful adaptation of a beloved book, saying of Fitz and Bridget that ‘no doubt the book will have its aficionados for whom my interpretation is an irritating interference.’ She counters this by stating: ‘To them I say: adaptation is not translation’.
She makes no apologies for this, saying she wrote her script based on the parts of the novel that spoke to her as a 21st century woman of colour.
I found this interesting: as a reader (and viewer) I have been known to bemoan the fact that a televised production or film version of a book I’ve enjoyed has left me feeling disappointed. Only this same holiday, in fact, I sat down with my grown daughter to watch Greta Gerwig’s version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and have to say, I didn’t like this version of one of my favourite books at all.
Being a life-long lover of Alcott’s heartwarming story set during the American Civil War, I brought my own expectations to Greta Gerwig’s version. I am a fan of the 1933 adaptation which saw Katharine Hepburn as Jo March (every young female writer’s heroine) and the 1939 version starring June Allyson in the role. I even have fond memories of the 1994 film adaptation with Winona Ryder in the starring role.
When I began to read the interview with Siȃn Ejiwunmi-Le Berre, however, I began to question the role we bring to the stories we love, both on and off the page.
Little Women holds for me a strong affiliation with family and growing up. Watching one of the older film versions around Christmastime with my own mother as a girl holds special memories, and this newer version just didn’t land in the same way for me.
I understand the need as a reader to feel a screen version of our favourite book has been done well. However, I think it’s important to recognise that a screenwriter or director is also an artist in their own right, and they can bring something new and fresh to an old story.
Within my experience of Little Women above, for example, I can appreciate that Greta Gerwig had brought her knowledge of Alcott’s own life and experience of writing the book, as well as our modern day ideas on feminism and women’s choices in the past, to bear on her re-telling.
I really warmed to Siȃn’s viewpoint that she sees adaptation as a ‘conversation between two writers, colliding at a specific moment in time…’. This makes so much sense: as both readers and writers, we each bring our experience of the world, our individual personalities, and our ideas to a novel. We see the world the author creates in vivid detail within our minds as we read, choosing the face of the hero or heroine as we go. When this is recreated on-screen, it is obvious that it will often clash with the vision in our heads, as it will for other readers.
Entertainingly, Siȃn likens the process of adaptation to a dinner party, whereby ‘The Book’ appears as ‘the host’s best friend from school’, and the screenwriter as a guest probing for areas of common interest.
“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.”
But she is keen to point out that she never changes the bones of a story, though once she does begin work on a script, she puts the book down. She remembers the dialogue that ‘sang to me’, remembering the themes which interested her, that spoke to her. I think we all likely do this when we read. I often find books difficult to connect with when told from the perspective of a male narrator, for example, though this is not exclusive. In fact, I just read Anne Tyler’s A Redhead by the Side of the Road, which features a forty-something male as its protagonist, and I loved The Great Gatsby, which again is told by a male narrator.
But there is often a connection within a book that we may not even realise. When I read Tyler’s book recently, for example, I found the central character’s need for routine and order chimed with my own.
In Siȃn’s new screen adaptation of Murder is Easy she has managed to make a classic detective story into something which, I felt, could stand on its own and resonate with a modern audience. The themes and intrigue within the who-done-it are brought wonderfully to life by actor David Jonsson as Luke Fitzwilliam, and the settings and costume design of the show was impeccable.
As Siȃn’s parting words point out, hopefully, once the story unfolds, readers will recognise their ‘beloved old friend.’ ‘And if not? Well … then you’d be meeting a whole new story – and what could be nicer than that?’
Are you a purist when it comes to adaptations? Have you read the book/seen this production and have an opinion on it? Let’s chat in the comments!
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I have read much of Christie's work but this one escaped my attention. I am of the mindset that adaptations should be true to the spirit of the original story. They don't need to be word for word or even scene for scene. There is room for creative license as long as the overall arc of the original story remains visible in the new adaptation.
Great article Kate.
As a big Christie fan I too would say that this adaptation is a quality piece. It is well written and develops character, plots and changes of time so well. A great write up and I really hope that she takes hold of another Christie to adapt in the future.