Agatha christie, p.62
Agatha Christie, page 62
This was Christie’s first novel published by William Collins after her unsatisfactory dealings with The Bodley Head. The new working relationship has continued beyond Christie’s death. Although, as a self-consciously written text, it does not naturally lend itself to adaptation, Roger Ackroyd was dramatized by Michael Morton as Alibi in 1928, and this was filmed as the first Poirot movie in 1930. In 1935, the Royal National Institute for the Blind issued the world’s first audiobooks, and this novel was among them. By 1955, a Times Literary Supplement editorial had already elevated to the level of “a classic” in an editorial otherwise dismissing female-authored and Golden Age crime writing (“In the Best Tradition” 124). The book has also been adapted as a graphic novel, published in French in 2004 and English in 2007.
The novel has been adapted for radio widely. A famous 1939 adaptation starred Orson Welles as both Poirot and Dr. Sheppard on the tail of Welles’s controversial The War of the Worlds. In 1956, a German version aired on NDR, directed by Friedrich Pütsch. A French radio adaptation starring Henri Crémeux as Poirot aired in 1957, as part of Les Maîtres du Mystère. In 1987, the BBC aired The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as the first of 25 adaptations starring John Moffatt.
The difficulty of making the novel visual is apparent in the relevant episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, which aired on British television in 2001. In contrast to this condensed, compromised adaptation, a Russian version, Neudacha Poirot (also broadcast in 2001), takes five hours to tell the story, replete with a narrator and an effort to make the production a visual novel. Kuroido Goroshi, a Fuji TV production in Japan, was broadcast in 2018, following an ambitious take on Murder on the Orient Express.
Characters: Ackroyd, Flora; Ackroyd, Mrs. Cecil; Ackroyd, Roger; Annie; Blunt, Major Hector; Bourne, Ursula; Davis, Inspector; Ellerby, Major Ferrars, Ashley; Ferrars, Mrs.; Folliott, Mrs.; Folliott, Richard; Gannett, Miss; Hammond, Mr.; Hayes, Superintendent; Jones, Constable; Jones, Sally; Kent, Charles; Melrose, Colonel; Parker, John; Paton, Captain Ralph; Poirot, Hercule; Raglan, Inspector; Raymond, Geoffrey; Russell, Elizabeth; Sheppard, Caroline; Sheppard, Dr. James
See also: Agatha Christie’s Poirot; Alibi (play); CBS Radio Adaptations; Class; Fuji TV Adaptations; German Radio Adaptations; Hercule Poirot (BBC radio series); Les Maîtres du Mystère; Marple, Jane; Mayhem Parva; Neudacha Puaro; Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie
Murder on Air. See Murder in the Studio
The Murder on the Links (novel; alternative title: The Girl with Anxious Eyes)
Golf would quickly become a sore topic for Christie, but it was a key part of her married life when she wrote the second Hercule Poirot novel. The Murder on the Links, her third book with The Bodley Head, has as its crime scene a golf course on private grounds in France.
Poirot and Hastings receive a letter from Paul Renauld, a millionaire in France, stating that he fears for his life. They arrive at his property only learn that Renauld was murdered the previous night. His wife, who seems oddly calm, has been gagged and tied up by masked robbers. However, when she is called to identify the body, she goes completely to pieces. Crossing swords with a pompous French detective who disdain’s Poirot’s focus on psychology, the detectives uncover a blackmail plot with links to an old case.
Poirot eventually reveals that Renauld and his wife had, in the past, killed her abusive husband, disguising it as a robbery, and fled to France under their current names. Being blackmailed by neighbors, they decided to run away, faking Renauld’s death. They would re-create the robbery idea, using the body of a vagrant who died on the grounds. However, on the night, Renauld was stabbed by one of the blackmailers. The then-necessary romantic subplot concerns Captain Hastings, who meets a highly suspicious young woman and, once she has been cleared, kisses her.
There are some obvious influences on The Murder on the Links. Christie herself cited Gaston Leroux’s 1908 novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, more on the grounds of a “high-flown, fanciful type of writing” than of plot specifics (Autobiography 282). In a part of her autobiography that was withdrawn from publication, Christie suggested that the setting in France was a product of her having “read a lot of French detective stories” at the time (qtd. in Aldridge, Poirot 12). At the same time, she argued that this was where the influence of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle started to wane in her work.
However, there are some plot similarities between the puzzle-solution in The Murder on the Links and that in Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange.” Both involve staged break-ins and robberies-gone-wrong attributed to international gangs in the collaborative murder of an abusive husband. In her autobiography, however, Christie gave the plot-influence as a real case that had been “a cause célèbre … in France,” involving “some tale of masked men who had broken into a house, killed the owner, tied up and gagged the wife,” only for the wife’s version of events to be disproved (Autobiography 281). From this scant information, biographers and scholars have drawn some elaborate conclusions about the nature of the case and its influence. Laura Thompson’s biography insists that The Murder on the Links suffers because it is “based … too closely upon a real French murder case” (130), but the only case it might be is quite dissimilar.
In 1908, Marguerite Steinheil, a French socialite with several well-connected lovers, was found bound and gagged at her home in Paris, where her husband and stepmother had been killed. She claimed that a gang of robbers had committed the crime, but this was disproved, and Steinheil was caught trying to frame a servant. She was acquitted at trial in 1909 and lived in England until her death in 1954. There is a clear link between this and the murder plot in Christie’s novels, but “The Abbey Grange” has an equally obvious influence, and the idea of a successful criminal trying to repeat their efforts is new.
The most obvious indication that Christie was moving away from the Doylean influence here lies in her treatment of Captain Hastings. Already, Christie “was getting a little tired of him,” so she decided to “marry [him] off” (282). It is done in a mildly parodic way. Hastings, essentially a conservative character, falls in love with the most unsuitable woman for him—a foul-mouthed, deceitful flapper who will not even share her name for most of the book so becomes known as Cinderella. Formally, the move is clearly sign-posted in both the prologue: the novel opens with Hastings’s remark that cheap modern novelists who want to shock to sell books are advised to begin with “‘Hell!’ said the Duchess” (9), only to announce Cinderella’s appearance with the dialogue “Hell!” (10).
At the same time, Poirot’s comical rivalry with an ultra-modern detective, Giraud (who is made to look ridiculous), reassures readers that there are not too many modernizations in store. “Methods are very different now,” Giraud pontificates at an early stage, to which Poirot responds: “Crimes, though, are very much the same” (75). Another element of Poirot’s traditionalism, highly pronounced throughout this novel and in short stories of the period, but strategically dropped later in the decade, is a passionate belief in heredity—the idea that character tendencies pass down family lines.
Hastings’s marriage leads him to move to Argentina, returning to narrate novels and stories only occasionally. This means dispensing with the Holmes/Watson formula and thus the need for a narrator. The next step toward this kind of formal innovation would be the next Poirot novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in 1926, where the narrator is revealed to be the murderer. In fact, as soon as 1924, Christie would experiment with a version of this in The Man in the Brown Suit.
The first radio adaptation of The Murder on the Links was as a serialized part of Harold Huber’s Mystery of the Week in 1947. It was later adapted for BBC Radio 4 for a broadcast on the centenary of Christie’s birth (15 September 1990). A television adaptation, part of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, was broadcast on ITV on 11 February 1996. A French graphic novel, adapted by François Rivière, was published in 2004 and translated into English in 2007. On 30 December 2005, a Japanese television version appeared as the second installment of Meitantei Akafuji Takashi, and a French version, part of Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie, aired on 10 October 2014.
Characters: Aarons, Joseph; Arrichet, François; Auguste; Berroldy, Jeanne; Bex, Lucien; Cinderella; Conneau, Georges; Daubreuil, Madame, and Marthe; Durand, Dr.; Duveen, Bella; Duveen, Dulcie; Hastings, Captain Arthur; Giraud, Monsieur; Grosier, Maitre; Hautet, Monsieur; Japp, Inspector James; Marchand, Monsieur; Oulard, Denise; Oulard, Leonie; Poirot, Hercule; Renauld, Eloise, and Paul; Renauld, Jack; Stoner, Gabriel
Murder on the Nile (play; alternative titles: Hidden Horizon; Moon on the Nile)
Christie dramatized Death on the Nile (1937) as a play, originally titled Moon on the Nile, in 1942. By 1943, she had changed the title again to Hidden Horizon, a line from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It was written as a vehicle for Francis L. Sullivan, who had played Hercule Poirot in Black Coffee (1930) and Peril at End House (1940), but Christie removed Poirot from the story, replacing him with the avuncular Canon Ambrose Pennefather. The official explanation for this was that Poirot tends to dominate the action as a bombastic character, although there may also have been an element of tempering Sullivan’s feelings of ownership over the character.
The play, which is somewhat convoluted, struggled to find a backer and eventually opened regionally in January 1944 with Sullivan in the lead. It would take two more years to open in the West End, retitled Murder on the Nile. The production at the Ambassadors Theatre featured David Horne in the lead, with a cast that also included Helen Hayes, who would later play Miss Marple on screen, as Helen ffoliot-ffolkes. It opened on Broadway in September that year with Halliwell Hobbes in the lead. The run at the Plymouth Theatre was only 12 performances.
The essence of Death on the Nile’s “trick” survives the translation to stage, but characters are largely reduced or combined to make a cast of 13, whereas all action takes place in the saloon bar of the S.S. Lotus. An example of character reduction is the loss of the eccentric novelist Salome Otterbourne. Her characteristics are merged with those of Marie Van Schuyler into the new character, Miss ffolliot-ffolkes, an extremely English snob. Her death is merged with that of Louise the maid, who is, in the play, shot when about to reveal something rather than stabbed because of attempted blackmail.
The play’s ending is different as well. In the novel, the two murderers die in a murder-suicide when they realize there is no way out (it is a typically convenient Christie death because Poirot has no evidence). In the play, Pennefather confronts one murderer who has a gun. He gives her a choice: “take your own life” or face justice, with the chance of spiritual healing (MOTN 64). She chooses to face justice. The 2012 touring production has the curtain fall before she makes the choice. It is little known that Christie provided an alternative ending, in which it is revealed that most of the action was a fantasy sequence and that Canon Pennefather has talked her out of her actions. The play ends back in the “present” as she steps away from the boat.
The play was poorly received by critics and audiences. Nonetheless, it was televised in 1950 as an episode of the U.S. series Kraft Television Theatre, starring Lex Richards, Guy Spaull, and Patricia Wheel.
Characters: Bessner, Dr.; de Severac, Jacqueline (“Jackie”); ffoliot-ffoulkes, Helen; Grant, Christina; Mostyn, Ka; Mostyn, Simon; Louise; McNaught, Mr.; Pennefather, Canon Ambrose; Smith, William
See also: Death on the Nile (novel)
Murder on the Nile (television adaptation). See NBC Television Adaptations
Murder on the Orient Express (game). See Games
Murder on the Orient Express (novel; alternative title: Murder in the Calais Coach)
The solution to Murder on the Orient Express is so well-known that it has almost become a joke. When Richard Rodney Bennett’s suite from the 1974 film adaptation was played at the BBC Proms in 2003, host Timothy West was able to follow it with the words, “They all did it!,” eliciting laughter. So well-known is the basic twist that the novel has become an international favorite, frequently adapted and selling consistently well, despite not being as widely read as other Christie works. The twist ending, the presence of series detective Hercule Poirot, and the world of colonial opulence summoned by the title have combined to make it an attractive property for filmmakers that has in turn made it a classic of the genre.
The novel sees Poirot aboard the Orient Express, surprisingly well-populated for the time of year with an international, cross-class array of passengers. Poirot is approached by the very unpleasant Samuel Ratchett, who wants him for a bodyguard; Poirot refuses. That night, a snowdrift traps the train, and Ratchett is stabbed to death several times. During his investigation, Poirot learns that Ratchett was in fact the gangster Cassetti, who was responsible for the abduction and murder of an American girl, Daisy Armstrong. He slowly draws connections between the Armstrong case and 13 other individuals on the train—12 passengers and a conductor had their lives smashed by Cassetti’s crimes. At the end of the novel, Poirot proposes two solutions to the crime: the first, inadequate, one is that Cassetti was killed by an intruder who disappeared into the snow. The second is the theory that 11 passengers and the conductor conspired to execute Cassetti, whom the law had failed to punish. When the conspirators admit to the truth of this and testify to the heartbreak they have endured, Poirot decides to present the intruder story to the police.
Murder on the Orient Express is transparently inspired by two real events. The most famous is a case that was front-page news when Christie wrote the book in 1933. The previous year, Charles Lindbergh Jr.—the son of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh—was kidnapped. After ransom had been paid, the toddler’s corpse was found not far from the Lindbergh home in May 1932, and the coroner determined that Charles Jr. had been dead for two months. The crime caused an international media sensation and triggered calls for the perpetrator to be executed. Eventually—after Christie’s book was published—a single man, Bruno Hauptmann, was executed, although few people suspected that he was the mastermind or even directly involved in events. The case caused great upheaval and sorrow in the Lindbergh family; for example, a staff member under suspicion in the household of the toddler’s grandmother, Elisabeth Cutter Morrow, committed suicide and was later proved innocent (see FBI). These events are reflected in Christie’s book, and their emotional legacies are explored. For example, Pierre the conductor is the father of a maid who killed herself when she came to be regarded as a suspect. Ratchett represents a real figure of evil, and the crowd justice administered to him allowed contemporary readers a fantasy of resolving an emotionally-charged current event that was unlikely to ever reach an “entirely satisfactory” (MOE 243) conclusion in real life.
The other main inspiration was Christie’s second journey aboard the Orient Express, in 1931. On this occasion, rain washed away sections of the track, causing a 24-hour delay. Christie used the time to observe her fellow passengers and the placement of light-switches and candle-holders, also learning about a 1929 incident when a blizzard stranded a different Orient Express for several days. Following the journey, Christie wrote her husband, to whom the novel would be dedicated, a long letter detailing the events and especially the reactions of her fellow passengers. She was struck by an “amusing wife of 70 with a hideous but very attractive face” (qtd. in Morgan 202) who would become the Princess Dragomiroff; “lady missionaries who never seemed to be there because they had scant food” (202)—who were turned into Greta Ohlsson; and especially “an elderly American lady” (201), Mrs. Hilton, who was “full of USA bewilderment” and kept saying things would be done differently “in the States” (202). She and “a very talkative Bulgarian lady” who vowed “never to travel again” and would not stop talking about her daughter (203–04) became the entertaining Caroline Hubbard. On her first Orient Express journey, also taken alone, Christie had noted with interest the mix of nationalities and personalities that only came together on such a journey. This focus would become central to the plot: where would such diverse people work together? Only on a train, says Poirot, or in America. From there, he unravels the Armstrong kidnapping story.
The novel was published in 1934 following a six-part 1933 serialization in the Saturday Evening Post. In the United States, it was retitled Murder in the Calais Coach to avoid confusion with Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train (1932), which was known in that country as Orient Express. It has been widely reprinted and always sold well. In 2001, a magazine, The Agatha Christie Collection, launched, with each issue accompanied by a Christie book. The first was Murder on the Orient Express and, if magazines and partworks had been included in bestseller lists, it would have topped that month’s charts. A graphic novel version by François Rivière was released in 2007.
In the 1940s, playwright Ben Hecht inquired about adapting the book for the stage, but Christie’s agents communicated that Christie was thinking of dramatizing it herself. This version would “not [have been] a conventional ‘whodunnit’” but would have opened with the death of Daisy Armstrong (Morgan 269). This project never came to fruition, but a stage version in 2017 by Ken Ludwig does indeed open with the Armstrong kidnapping.
