I have been busy on other things and neglecting this blog. But I do want to write about non-cycling matters and the telly version of Ordeal by Innocence, which was on back in April, and the irritation it caused is still with me, like incurable thrush.
The original book was later period Christie, and at least the adaptors hadn’t parachuted in Miss Marple to do the detecting, as they did in a recent travesty of Endless Night.
Like Endless Night, this novel has a post-war feeling. The grown up children are evacuees adopted by the barren Rachel Argyle and her scholarly husband; there’s a coloured girl, Tina, a librarian who drives a bubble car; Waiting for Godot is on at the local theatre. The cast are quite a remove from the pre-war gang of country house dwellers. The house where it is set is an upper-middle-class house with daily help instead of the 1930s butlers and maids.
Christie’s set up is a grabber. Jacko Argyle has been found guilty of the murder of his mother, Rachel Argyle, and has died in prison. Then his alibi, Dr Calgary, turns up to prove he was innocent. The family are under suspicion and police investigation again, and they start breaking under the strain One more dead body, one wounded body, and voila, the explanation in the library with a couple of marriages at the end.
The red herring is that Rachel Argyle’s damaged children and her own lack of imagination towards them are thought to be the motive behind the murder. The plot twist is that that view is mistaken and the motive is quite simple – money. What did the adaptor (Sarah Phelps) do? Turned Rachel Argyle from a well-meaning if unempathetic woman desperate for children, to a raving Mommie Dearest. Turned Jacko Argyle from a greedy ruthless crook into a damaged case. Turned the kindly husband Leo Argyle into a psychopath. Turned the loving secretary Gwenda into a crude vamp. Turned the motive into reasonable revenge instead of straightforward unscrupulous avarice. Changed the identity of the murderer. Inflicted on the murderer a particularly sadistic punishment. Lost the over-arching theme, that it is the innocent who suffer undeservedly.
In short, turned a clever story in more or less humdrum surroundings into a high-coloured, vulgar, Gothic psychological drama of stock type set in a Scottish castle in a forest. Added a Chief Constable cover up, Dr Calgary turned into a physicist driven mad by the atom bomb and it was yet another piece about a colluding and corrupt establishment. Also the rude brutality by the son-in-law – I don’t think 50s and 60s families of the Argyle class would have been quite so free with the fuck yous at the dinner table. A forced atmosphere of thunder and lightning instead of the drizzling corrosiveness of the original.
One Guardian reader had it well summed up:-
“We do indeed get the “Agatha Christie we deserve” – or rather, we get the TV adaptations we deserve, if by this we mean screenplays that mistake bleakness for profundity and cliche for character – and that reveal an innate misogyny that has little to do with Christie’s often complex, courageous, unexpected female characters.Take Mrs Argyle. In the book, she’s conflicted, a social reformer (probably a Guardian reader!) whose painful longing for children and blindly possessive attitude to those she adopts is at the heart of the story. But here, she’s a cruel, racist abuser who even in Lucy Mangan’s review pretty much deserves to die. Well hello there, bad (adoptive) mother stereotype! And what about Gwenda, the secretary? In the book she’s a complex, compassionate woman in her late 30s. In the screenplay she’s a walking, or rather tottering, youthful cliche who, with her high heels and low-cut dresses, bitchy remarks and gold-digging instincts, fulfils yet more misogynistic stereotypes.
These representations of women are, like the whole screenplay, far more old-fashioned than Agatha Christie ever was. This kind of writing hides its own dark secrets of misplaced nostalgia and misogyny. Agatha Christie may not be everyone’s favourite. But her varied representations of women have provided me with many more role models than these “dark” TV screenplays.
Emily Richards
Salisbury, Wiltshire
Christie did produce varied women – spinsters with fulfilled lives, a Lesbian menage viewed sympathetically, plucky, heroic girls. As Emily Richards says, it’s infuriating to see her (woman) adaptor fall back onto lazy old-fashioned views of women.