Agatha christie, p.47
Agatha Christie, page 47
Characters: Barrowby, Amelia; Delafontaine, Henry; Delafontaine, Mary; Lemon, Felicity; Poirot, Hercule; Rieger, Katrina; Rudge; Sims, Inspector
See also: Agatha Christie’s Poirot; Games; Krimi-Sommer mit Hercule Poirot; Nursery Rhymes; Poirot’s Early Cases; The Regatta Mystery (story collection)
“How I Became a Writer”
“How I Became a Writer” was a Christie essay published in The Listener in August 1938, likely to promote the movie Love from a Stranger (1938), for which the magazine printed production stills. The content is similar to the commonly-reproduced introduction to Appointment with Death. It was part of a series of articles by popular authors, under the banner I Became a Writer.
See also: “Hercule Poirot: Fiction’s Greatest Detective”; Love from a Stranger, Screen Adaptations of
“How I Created Hercule Poirot.” See “Hercule Poirot—Fiction’s Greatest Detective”
Howard, Evelyn (“Evie”)
Evelyn Howard is Emily Inglethorpe’s manly, stentorian friend with a telegraphic style of speech in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. She is presented as extremely masculine so that the reader will not suspect she is having an affair with anyone, let alone with Emily’s husband. However, Poirot later reveals that the extent of Evelyn’s and Alfred’s animosity was such that it had to be performative.
Hubbard, Caroline
When she has been unmasked as veteran stage actress Linda Arden in Murder on the Orient Express, Hercule Poirot claims that “Mrs. Hubbard” has been this woman’s greatest role. An obnoxious American tourist who talks incessantly, she seems annoying but not sinister—a cover for a ringleader in a revenge plot to kill Samuel Ratchett. Unlike her Caroline Hubbard persona, Linda Arden is a tragic, heartbroken figure, who has not been able to recover from the murder of Daisy Armstrong and its traumatic aftermath. She has been played on stage by some highly distinguished performers, including Lauren Bacall in 1974 and Michelle Pfeiffer in 2017.
Hudd, Georgina (“Gina”)
The granddaughter of Carrie Louise Serrocold in They Do It with Mirrors: her mother, Pippa San Severiano, was adopted, which causes her aunt, Mildred Strete, to resent Gina as an intruder into the family. She is half–Italian and is married to all-American Walter Hudd but flirts with the Restarick brothers. Only Carrie Louise sees that, despite Gina’s behavior, she is clearly in love with her husband. Gina represents the young, modern woman who is not overly attached to her roots—she drives fast cars, kisses men to whom she is not married, and treats unfolding family drama as a joke. It is discovered that her biological family tree includes a notorious poisoner, but Gina turns out to be the product of her upbringing, not her heredity.
Hunt, Verity
Verity Hunt is the central victim in Nemesis, who died 16 years before the events of the novel. Like several of Christie’s female victims, this character exists chiefly in the recollections of others, nearly all of whom construct her as the perfect victim: a kind, beautiful, pure young woman. Marple determines that she was killed by her possessive guardian, Clotilde Bradbury-Scott, because she wanted to get married. Her name, a combination of words for “truth” and “search,” typifies her role in the novel as a symbol for imagined lost innocence. Tellingly, the body buried as hers belonged to somebody else; throughout Nemesis, she is denied her own story.
Hunter, David
A charming Irishman in Taken at the Flood, he represents the allure of danger, especially to Lynn Marchmont, who has grown frustrated with her fiancée, Rowley Cloade. When David suddenly—and unconvincingly—confesses to murder, he says “he had a good run for his money…. I’m a gambler—but I know when I’ve lost my last throw” (190).
Hunter, Megan
One of Christie’s favorites of her own creations, Megan Hunter has not received critical attention, perhaps because her narrative arc in The Moving Finger appears problematic. Megan is 20 years old but acts and appears much younger. Her mother, Myrna Symmington, is “apologetic” about her, coddling her as being “at that awkward age [when she has] just left school but [not] properly grown up” (31). The narrator, Jerry Burton, notices at this point that Megan has not “just left school” but is already a woman. Megan’s stepfather tends to forget that she exists. When she talks to Jerry, who supplies her with her first martini, Megan exhibits extreme naïveté but also an inquiring mind as she makes intelligent observations on Shakespeare, which Christie shared. Her social awkwardness, then, is a problem of her neglectful upbringing.
Toward the end of the novel, Miss Marple uses Megan as bait in a trap to catch the murderer—her stepfather—and she risks her life in the process. Jerry is so impressed that he takes her to London for a makeover and is struck by her beauty and dancing skills. The two marry and adopt a dog. The villagers are delighted that Megan has found her feet.
It is unsettling to read in the twenty-first century that a young woman can only have value and happiness when she is beautiful and married. However, the city of London represents independence from the world of an insular village, and it is clear that, despite her rather generic narrative arc, Megan has come into confidence and tapped into an existing spirit of independence, rather than dependence. After all, she acquires the dog without asking her husband’s permission, and the novel closes with a wedding gift from Jerry’s sister Joanna—a dog’s lead and collar.
Portrayals on screen have more straightforwardly sided with the villagers, who see Megan transforming from an awkward girl into a sexy woman under the wing of an older boyfriend.
“The Hydra of Lernea.” See “The Lernean Hydra”
“Hymn to Ra.” See The Road of Dreams (poetry collection)
“I Wore My New Canary Suit.” See Poems
“The Idol House of Astarte” (story; alternative titles: “The Solving Six and the Evil Hour”; “The ‘Supernatural’ Murder”). See The Thirteen Problems
Ils Étaient Dix. See And Then There Were None, Screen Adaptations of
Imhotep
A mortuary priest in Death Comes as the End, Imhotep is nominally the head of the house but is easily influenced by those around him. Christie initially sketched out the character as “old fusser—kindly—a nuisance” (Curran, Secret Notebooks 231) and stuck close to this.
“The Importance of a Leg of Mutton.” See “The Adventure of the Dartmoor Bungalow”
“In a Dispensary.” See The Road of Dreams (poetry collection)
“In a Glass Darkly” (story)
Written for radio broadcast but rejected by the BBC as too supernatural, “In a Glass Darkly” is an extremely strong example of the short story form. During World War I, the unnamed narrator is staying with friends. While he is dressing for dinner, he has a psychic vision, seeing in the mirror a man with a scar on the left side of his face strangling a beautiful woman. At dinner, he meets the other house guests, including his friend’s sister, Sylvia Carslake, whom he recognizes from the vision. Her fiancé, Charles Crawley, is introduced—and he has a scar on the left side of his face.
Years pass, and, when the narrator delivers news to Sylvia that her brother was killed in action, he learns that she has broken off her engagement to Crawley. Determined to protect her from the fate he witnessed, the narrator, who has been wounded on the right side of his face, marries her. Eventually, they fall out of love, and when Sylvia meets an attractive man, Derek Wainwright, the narrator becomes jealous and violent. When he sees his reflection—and realizes the scar on the right of his face is reversed to the left in a mirror—he knows that the premonition was in fact a warning. He determines to treat Sylvia well.
This story was published in Collier’s on 28 July 1934 and appeared in the U.S. collection The Regatta Mystery (1939) and the U.K. collection Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979). It has been dramatized twice: for television as part of The Agatha Christie Hour (broadcast on ITV on 14 September 1982) and in a modernized version for BBC Radio 4, broadcast on 24 February 2003.
Characters: Carslake, Alan; Carslake, Neil; Carslake, Sylvia; Crawley, Charles; Oldham, Major; Oldham, Mrs.; Wainwright, Derek
See also: The Agatha Christie Hour; BBC Radio Adaptations; Miss Marple’s Final Cases (story collection); The Regatta Mystery (story collection)
“In Baghdad.” See Poems
“In the Cool of the Evening.” See Star Over Bethlehem (story/poetry collection)
“In the House of the Enemy.” See The Big Four (novel)
“In the Market Place” (story)
A short story written under the name Sydney West when Christie was about 17, “In the Market Place” is a straightforward morality tale. A greedy man finds a magical marketplace that can give him anything he desires. He takes on many gifts and trinkets, returning twice but is still unhappy. Many years later, he returns, says he wants nothing, and is rewarded with real treasure. The manuscript is held in the Christie Family Archive. The author typed in purple ink and sent it to at least one magazine, which rejected it.
See also: Pseudonyms
“In the Third Floor Flat.” See “The Third-Floor Flat”
“The Incident of the Dog’s Ball” (story)
A short story later expanded into Dumb Witness, “The Incident of the Dog’s Ball” was not published in Christie’s lifetime. It is possible that, as with “Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly,” she saw potential to expand it and put it aside. Archivist John Curran, who published the story in 2009, suggests that it was written in 1932, although by this point stories featuring both Poirot and Captain Hastings were relatively uncommon: as Curran points out, most of these were written in 1923 or 1924 (Secret Notebooks 453–54).
The basic idea is the same in both story and novel: an old woman writes to Poirot for help, citing an incident with a dog’s ball; he and Hastings arrive to find that she is dead; he investigates references to a picture being “ajar” and identifies a downtrodden niece as the murderer. Some characters and names are similar, too, in both manuscripts.
The story was discovered among the effects of Rosalind Hicks, Christie’s daughter, after her death in 2004. To promote Curran’s book, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, in which the story appeared, “The Incident of the Dog’s Ball” was published in The Strand Magazine in December 2009.
Characters: Bob; Davidson, Mollie; Ellen; Graham, James; Hastings, Captain Arthur; Lawrence, Dr.; Lawson, Miss; Poirot, Hercule; Pym sisters; Wheeler, Matilda
See also: Dogs; Dumb Witness
“The Incredible Theft” (novella)
“The Incredible Theft” is a novella expanded from “The Submarine Plans,” in which Hercule Poirot is called to investigate the theft of government secrets and an apparent sighting of a ghost at the home of Lord Mayfield, an ambitious politician. There is anger at this: “Why drag in a foreigner we know nothing about?” (MITM 100). Relying more on his knowledge of human psychology than on physical evidence, Poirot unravels both mysteries: the ghost was the invention of a maid who had been sexually assaulted and wanted to explain her scream, whereas the documents were not stolen but hidden by Lord Mayfield, who was being blackmailed and pressured into handing them over to a foreign power. This novella casts a critical eye at patriotism.
The novella was first published in six parts in the Daily Express, from 6 April 1937. It was collected in Murder in the Mews that June. A BBC radio play of “The Incredible Theft” was broadcast on 10 May 1938 as part of Detectives in Fiction. Poirot was played by E.M. Stephan. In the United States, Harold Huber played Poirot in an adaptation for Mystery of the Week (1947–48). David Suchet played him in the relevant episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, broadcast on ITV on 26 February 1989.
Characters: Carlile; Carrington, Air Marshall Sir George; Carrington, Lady Julia; Carrington, Reggie; Leonie; Macatta, Mrs., McLaughlin, Sir Charles (“Lord Mayfield”); Poirot, Hercule; Vanderlyn, Mrs.
See also: Agatha Christie’s Poirot; BBC Radio Adaptations; Murder in the Mews (story collection); Mystery of the Week; “The Submarine Plans”
Indian-Language Adaptations
In 1960, Premendra Mitra directed the first Bengali Christie film, Chupi Chupi Aashey (Silently He Comes), based on The Mousetrap. It starred Chhabi Biswas and Jahar Ganguly as the young couple based on Giles and Molly Ralston, and Tarun Kumar as Inspector Ghoshal, based on Sergeant Trotter. Popular singer Sandhya Mukhopadhyay sang an original song for the title sequence. This is the only known Indian-language Christie movie shot in black and white.
1965 saw the spectacular Bollywood effort, Gumnaam (Nameless), based on And Then There Were None. With a threadbare plot, lavish, colorful choreography, and extensive dream sequences enabling extensive chorus singers to burst into the deserted mansion only to disappear, it remains highly popular with British and American audiences. The film was directed by Raja Nawathe and starred Manoj Kumar, Nanda, Pran, Helen, and Mehmood. Although it does not credit its source material—indeed, few films in this entry do—it is so popular and significant that it is frequently included in “official” lists of Christie adaptations, including those produced or endorsed by Agatha Christie Ltd.
A loose retelling of the story in Tamil appeared in 1970. Veena-player S. Balachander produced, directed, and composed the music for Nadu Iravil (In the Middle of the Night). This film was completed in quickly in 1965 to capitalize on the success of Balachander’s 1964 thriller Bonmai but failed to find a distributor for five years. When it did, it was a modest success. It relocates the action to a domestic house and posits a link between all the suspects, which rather undermines the novel’s main premises.
Almost as popular as Gumnaam in the United Kingdom is Dhund (The Fog), a 1973 Hindi film based on The Unexpected Guest. This has been remade in other Indian languages: Tarka (Logic, 1989) is a Kannada version with a less lavish set and more straightforward story-plot. Puriyaadha Pudhir (Mystifying Puzzle, 1990), a Tamil version, was a box-office flop. This film bears no relation to the 2017 hit of the same name. Aar Ya Paar (Now or Never), a 1997 Hindi film directed by Ketan Mehta, is sometimes cited as an unofficial adaptation of Endless Night, but it is more properly a version of James Hadley Chase’s The Sucker Punch.
The 2003 Bengali film Shubho Mahurat (title roughly equivalent to “Break a Leg”) is generally considered a hidden gem. Directed by Rituparno Ghosh and based on The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, it starred vert actress Raakhee as Ranga Pishima, the equivalent character to Miss Marple, with Nandita Das as her journalist niece. The film has received several accolades, and although it was screened in the United Kingdom on Channel 4 almost immediately, it has not been released commercially in the United Kingdom or the United States.
Christie adaptations gathered momentum in the 2010s. In 2011, Thakkali Srinivasan directed Aduthathu (Next), a Tamil film based on And Then There Were None, with the plot involving a survivor-themed reality television program, with the ten characters lured to the island for a competition. Controversially, the same premise was used for K.M. Chaitanya’s 2015 Kannada version, Aatagara (Player). Although both directors have claimed that their versions of And Then There Were None are unique, there are several similarities in the two plots, both of which involved work by Kannan Parameshwaran.
A 2012 Malayalam take on The ABC Murders, B. Unnikrishnan’s Grandmaster is only loosely connected to Christie, drawing equal influence from Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander. This relatively successful thriller was the first Malayalam film to receive an international release on Netflix, and garnered two national awards. Subhurajit Mitra’s 2016 Bengali film Chorabali (Quicksand) is an easily accessible adaptation of Cards on the Table. It stars Tarun Chanda, Sayani Datta, and Shataf Figar, turning the novel’s Orientalist slant on its head by looking awry at the British Raj.
In 2020, director Vishal Bhardwaj read many Christie works and watched Alfred Hitchcock films during lockdowns imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He approached Agatha Christie Ltd. for the rights to make a socially distanced film, one of the first officially licenses Indian adaptations, to shoot in 2021. This turned into a high-profile major deal for a multi-movie franchise featuring new characters in films inspired by various books. The inspiration for this model comes from the success of the French series Bélisaire et Prudence Beresford and Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie, although viewers can expect a very different tone.
See also: The ABC Murders (novel); And Then There Were None (novel); Cards on the Table (novel); The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side; The Unexpected Guest (play)
Inez
Maria’s beautiful daughter in “The Harlequin Tea Set,” Inez is a young woman of the “dark Spanish type” (PPB 99). Mr. Satterthwaite seems to assume that because she is spending some time in a house with two attractive men—who happen to be her cousins—she will fall in love with one of them. He wonders which, but this idea goes nowhere.
Inglethorpe, Alfred
Alfred Inglethorpe is Emily’s much younger husband who murders her in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Christie spun Inglethorpe’s character from the premise that she wanted her murderer to have a thick black beard. He does his best to incriminate himself, so that he will be charged and then acquitted when new evidence is released, exploiting the law against double jeopardy. Christie invented this character after deciding that the murderer in her first book should boast a big black beard.
Inglethorpe, Emily
Emily Inglethorpe is the matriarch of Styles Court and the murder victim in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. “Emily” appears to have been a suitably Victorian name for many of Christie’s elderly female victims.
“Ingots of Gold” (story; alternative titles: “Miss Marple and the Golden Galleon”; “The Solving Six and the Golden Grave”). See The Thirteen Problems
