Someone thinks they can write better than Agatha.

Enough I say! I have recently watched two television series based on Agatha Christie's stories: Ordeal by Innocence and Witness for the Prosecution.

For some reason scriptwriter Sarah Phelps thought she could do better than Agatha and in both cases rewrote large parts of the stories, so much so that in Ordeal By Innocence all that is left is the actual names of the characters. The plot line changes, the characters' backgrounds change, the character of the characters change, situations are invented, and to top it all, the murderer is completely different. It is not the same story at all, and yet is promoted under the banner of an Agatha Christie story.

I was alerted to all of this by my bibliophile friend BB who had memories of a different story entirely. I immediately reread the book to see if she was right, as it has been many years since I last read it.  And indeed it was so. In interviews, screenwriter Phelps said that she wanted to make it more modern and to be different because she reckoned a lot of people knew how it ended. (Though I wonder how many young viewers have read the book; even Phelps admits that she hadn't read any Christie before beginning these adaptation projects.)  'I don't give a bollocks about people saying it has to be pure. No it doesn't. If you want a pure adaptation, go and get someone else to do it', she said.

I love the response from a purist who, like me, can't understand the wholesale changes that were made: 'Why doesn't she write her own books if she thinks she can do better than someone who's sold millions of books. '

In a little defence for Phelps, I know that Christie often changed her own work for different media as she knew what would work better in a play than a novel. It is perhaps not so well known that she completely wrote Hercule Poirot out of a couple of her stories and substituted him with other characters when she adapted them for plays or simply rewrote them later.

And of course she's not the first to have a go at invention: a 2007 adaptation of Ordeal By Innocence popped Miss Marple into the plot!!!!

Moving on to the recent Witness for the Prosecution adaptation we also find a different ending to the one in Christie's original 1925 short story. But here the water gets murky, because Christie herself didn't like her ending and changed it in 1953 when she adapted her own story into a play.  But the recent television series, while using the original ending, then added to it with another twist - evidently, so a review said, to make it 'more emotional and give a greater depth and contemporary resonance'.

Film poster for the movie adaptation (Wikipedia)

In a similar vein, the recent French adaptations of Christie stories veer way off course, but it is openly acknowledged that these are only loosely based on Christie stories. I actually enjoyed the French flavour of these presentations; they are definitely in the Christie spirit but have no intention of being anything else.

It seems that everywhere, producers wish to cash in on the Christie name but want to bring her stories into a more modern era where audiences appear to demand more depth, insight and familiarity with modern thinking. Indeed, the latest film version of Murder on the Orient Express was criticised for not adding anything new to it! If that is so, then why not leave Agatha where she belongs and let other writers have a go at inventing their own 21st century murder mysteries.

To my way of thinking Agatha Christie knew a lot about those universal passions that all murders hang on - greed, money, vengeance, love - and those haven't changed one jot.