The Boxing Day Murder - Further Thoughts

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Tom Holland‏ @holland_tom 20h20 hours ago
Well, I’m afraid #ABCMurders was absolutely ruined for me by the implausible rendering of the Waterloo-Andover line.

Tom Holland‏ @holland_tom 11h11 hours ago
Which is a shame, because otherwise it was creepily good...

Paul Matthews‏ @etzpcm 11h11 hours ago
Replying to @holland_tom
They seemed to travel to Andover via Scotland...

(I don’t know the Waterloo to Andover line, but the lovely steam train did go puff-puff through a forest at one point. Oh, and the opening credits of railway lines are very good.)

This adaptation is a crudely modern sensibility tackling the 1930s. That’s why there are no decent and courageous people, who are always an important part of a Christie novel; that’s why the genteel flirt Betty is made over into a foul-mouthed bitch and hen-party slapper; that’s why the sister Morag is turned from plain-but-striking and clever to a fat aggressive lump. The 30s – the subtleties of a repressed society with its tiny class indicators of language, the behaviour expected from well-brought up young women, the importance of respectability – are beyond the vulgar Gothicism of Phelps.

Poirot has been made solemnly tragic with a traumatic back story instead of comic and absurd. It is one of the motifs of the Poirot stories that the absurd, fussy little man is a mighty fighter for justice and always kind. Kindness, that most important of character traits which takes away the harshness of living, and justice, are missing from the Phelps view of the world.

Comments

[Robin Carmody]

I've only ever been through Andover once and it was a dreadful, traumatic End of Childhood day which I prefer not to think about. The other main route to/from Waterloo, on the other hand ...