Favorite Things: Agatha Christie Books
Agatha Christie wrote 80 detective novels. I have read most (possibly all) of them. Between Miss Marple and Poirot I am particularly fond of Miss Marple. This may be partly because I have always been a nosy old lady myself and once ensconced in my own garden watching neighbors pass by with their curious snatches of conversation and talking over my fence...well, it became clear that I was turning into Marple, but without all the famous crime solving stints.
I read most of the Christies in the mid to late 1990's. After reading them all I started watching the Joan Hickson Televised versions of Miss Marple and David Suchet's Televised versions of Poirot with great enjoyment. These productions brought to life christie's great mysteries with all the period veracity one can usually expect from the BBC.
Recently the BBC has been redoing all the Miss Marple's with Geraldine McEwan playing Miss Marple. My library has many of these episodes available and watching them has been like watching a terrible perversion of something good into something strange and crappy.
The only thing good about this new series is the fresher soundtrack and higher quality filming.
McEwan's Marple is all frizzy haired grimacing and seems almost unimportant to the stories whereas the real Marple was very keen, sharp-witted, and wasn't always smiling that frozen tight smile I've come to dread in the new Miss Marple. It's almost as though everyone involved in making the new series hasn't read a single Marple mystery all the way through. Or, if they have, they hated them and decided to change them according to whim.
Some of the mysteries in the new series seem almost respectful* of the original stories but none of them are faithful and if there's one thing anyone can say of Christie is that she worked her mysteries out cleanly and decidedly in such a way that you can't remove a character from the story without taking something purposeful away from it. Yet the writers of the series have done just that, seemingly adding and subtracting characters as they like. Adding characters that were never in the original, characters that Christie would never have written into her stories.
The feeling I get is that the people making the new series find Christie dated and boring and not spicy enough. The thing is, they're dated because they were written in the first half of the 20th century! Duh. If one wants a modern mystery one should produce modern mysteries. Don't take a beloved author and pervert her work.
I want to talk about that scabby creepy hat person** in the new series' version of "At Bertram's Hotel" but I can't because I'm even more busy seething in anger over the horrible makeover they gave to one of my very favorite (and Christie's last Marple) mystery "Sleeping Murder". I loved the story of Gwenda and her husband Giles uncovering an old murder in the first house they buy together. One of the things l like is how young and eager the two of them are and how their curiosity leads them inexorably towards danger and there's Miss Marple doing everything she can to help them uncover the mystery without also letting them be killed doing it. It is the developing friendship between Gwenda and Giles and Miss Marple that makes this story particularly charming for me.
The writers of the new version apparently hate boring old happy young couples and so they did away with Giles completely, a major character in the book just "Pfoof!"...gone! Instead (because weird relationships are much more appealing to young people today) Gwenda isn't yet married but is planning to marry some old fogey who we never see in the film at all but whom Gwenda calls periodically to be "poo-pooed" by and dismissed. Meanwhile she has been assigned her fiance's young assistant to help her settle into her new house. This person was completely made up by the perverters of literature just for the fun of it. Because obviously this brand new character will fall for Gwenda creating a little frisson of "Oh no! But she's already engaged to a horrid old man! What will they do?"
In addition to this extremely bold deviation from the original story, the writers actually changed the PLOT to include a whole group of people that never existed in the original. A group of actors (vaudvillian, if you must know the dreadful truth) who are supposedly all tangled up in this now completely nonsensical murder mystery that bears so little resemblance to the original that I'm surprised they were allowed to call it a "Miss Marple" mystery and put Agatha Christie's name on it.
My advice is that if you hate Agatha Christie then you shouldn't take jobs writing screenplays of her works. You shouldn't, if you dislike the style of mystery Christie specialized in, be allowed to produce travesties of the original works.
Books are sacred. Excellent books are the most solid medium we have to record our paltry species' existence on this planet.*** Movies that are made from screenplays intended specifically for the medium of film can be art and if done well will live in people's imaginations forever. Movies that are made based on books take even more care because if the book is popular (and no smart producer will base a movie production on an unpopular book) you have an obligation, as a representation of something that is already whole and realized and loved, to generate a faithful facsimile. The point of making a movie out of a book is to add a new dimension of enjoyment of the work.
You cannot hope to do well with a movie based on a beloved book in which you have decided that the original author was a total crock and needs complete rewriting and who clearly didn't understand a perfect moment in the story for a very distressing hat "person" to interject something meaningless (but entertaining to young audience members hungry for wacky modern humor).
The new series has made me angry. What a bunch of disrespectful bad writing. Agatha Christies they are not. I hate the new series so much that I have been driven back to the books. I haven't read them in many years but I was desperate to read the originals to see if it was me going mad or the people making the new perverted versions.
Apparently I'm not the only loud objector. I found some reviews of the new "Sleeping Murder" which wonderfully sum up my own feelings.
The benefit of having been so offended by these new "versions" is that I ran posthaste to my public library and discovered that they have a huge collection of leather-bound Christies, possibly even all of them. Checking out "Sleeping Murder" and reading it this week has been wonderful. I also have checked out a copy of "By the Pricking of My Thumbs" to discover if Tuppence really was a drunk and I just forgot...and to see if Tommy was really an asshole and I glossed over it when I read it years ago...?
I had gotten so used to seeing filmed versions of her books that I had forgotten what pleasure I had in reading them all.
And now I begin again.
I want to collect old hardback copies of her works for myself because her books are definitely one of my favorite things.
*And by "almost respectful" I really mean "not at all respectful but not quite an abomination".
**Supposedly a German milliner. Which I'm pretty sure wasn't in the original and furthermore this milliner was created as a whole exciting Nazi-hunting subplot...but that's just because people obviously find it too too boring for a race-car driver to merely be a gigolo to both a mother and her daughter at the same time. Yawn yawn, everyone knows a race car driver would obviously also be a super-hero-like Nazi hunter. Enter interesting hat person.
***All writers naturally think this. It is completely arguable that art holds the same place and if really pressed hard by something scary like a nail-gun, I would have to say they are both equally important.
Can I please personally fire every single person involved in the new series?
I read most of the Christies in the mid to late 1990's. After reading them all I started watching the Joan Hickson Televised versions of Miss Marple and David Suchet's Televised versions of Poirot with great enjoyment. These productions brought to life christie's great mysteries with all the period veracity one can usually expect from the BBC.
Recently the BBC has been redoing all the Miss Marple's with Geraldine McEwan playing Miss Marple. My library has many of these episodes available and watching them has been like watching a terrible perversion of something good into something strange and crappy.
The only thing good about this new series is the fresher soundtrack and higher quality filming.
McEwan's Marple is all frizzy haired grimacing and seems almost unimportant to the stories whereas the real Marple was very keen, sharp-witted, and wasn't always smiling that frozen tight smile I've come to dread in the new Miss Marple. It's almost as though everyone involved in making the new series hasn't read a single Marple mystery all the way through. Or, if they have, they hated them and decided to change them according to whim.
Some of the mysteries in the new series seem almost respectful* of the original stories but none of them are faithful and if there's one thing anyone can say of Christie is that she worked her mysteries out cleanly and decidedly in such a way that you can't remove a character from the story without taking something purposeful away from it. Yet the writers of the series have done just that, seemingly adding and subtracting characters as they like. Adding characters that were never in the original, characters that Christie would never have written into her stories.
The feeling I get is that the people making the new series find Christie dated and boring and not spicy enough. The thing is, they're dated because they were written in the first half of the 20th century! Duh. If one wants a modern mystery one should produce modern mysteries. Don't take a beloved author and pervert her work.
I want to talk about that scabby creepy hat person** in the new series' version of "At Bertram's Hotel" but I can't because I'm even more busy seething in anger over the horrible makeover they gave to one of my very favorite (and Christie's last Marple) mystery "Sleeping Murder". I loved the story of Gwenda and her husband Giles uncovering an old murder in the first house they buy together. One of the things l like is how young and eager the two of them are and how their curiosity leads them inexorably towards danger and there's Miss Marple doing everything she can to help them uncover the mystery without also letting them be killed doing it. It is the developing friendship between Gwenda and Giles and Miss Marple that makes this story particularly charming for me.
The writers of the new version apparently hate boring old happy young couples and so they did away with Giles completely, a major character in the book just "Pfoof!"...gone! Instead (because weird relationships are much more appealing to young people today) Gwenda isn't yet married but is planning to marry some old fogey who we never see in the film at all but whom Gwenda calls periodically to be "poo-pooed" by and dismissed. Meanwhile she has been assigned her fiance's young assistant to help her settle into her new house. This person was completely made up by the perverters of literature just for the fun of it. Because obviously this brand new character will fall for Gwenda creating a little frisson of "Oh no! But she's already engaged to a horrid old man! What will they do?"
In addition to this extremely bold deviation from the original story, the writers actually changed the PLOT to include a whole group of people that never existed in the original. A group of actors (vaudvillian, if you must know the dreadful truth) who are supposedly all tangled up in this now completely nonsensical murder mystery that bears so little resemblance to the original that I'm surprised they were allowed to call it a "Miss Marple" mystery and put Agatha Christie's name on it.
My advice is that if you hate Agatha Christie then you shouldn't take jobs writing screenplays of her works. You shouldn't, if you dislike the style of mystery Christie specialized in, be allowed to produce travesties of the original works.
Books are sacred. Excellent books are the most solid medium we have to record our paltry species' existence on this planet.*** Movies that are made from screenplays intended specifically for the medium of film can be art and if done well will live in people's imaginations forever. Movies that are made based on books take even more care because if the book is popular (and no smart producer will base a movie production on an unpopular book) you have an obligation, as a representation of something that is already whole and realized and loved, to generate a faithful facsimile. The point of making a movie out of a book is to add a new dimension of enjoyment of the work.
You cannot hope to do well with a movie based on a beloved book in which you have decided that the original author was a total crock and needs complete rewriting and who clearly didn't understand a perfect moment in the story for a very distressing hat "person" to interject something meaningless (but entertaining to young audience members hungry for wacky modern humor).
The new series has made me angry. What a bunch of disrespectful bad writing. Agatha Christies they are not. I hate the new series so much that I have been driven back to the books. I haven't read them in many years but I was desperate to read the originals to see if it was me going mad or the people making the new perverted versions.
Apparently I'm not the only loud objector. I found some reviews of the new "Sleeping Murder" which wonderfully sum up my own feelings.
The benefit of having been so offended by these new "versions" is that I ran posthaste to my public library and discovered that they have a huge collection of leather-bound Christies, possibly even all of them. Checking out "Sleeping Murder" and reading it this week has been wonderful. I also have checked out a copy of "By the Pricking of My Thumbs" to discover if Tuppence really was a drunk and I just forgot...and to see if Tommy was really an asshole and I glossed over it when I read it years ago...?
I had gotten so used to seeing filmed versions of her books that I had forgotten what pleasure I had in reading them all.
And now I begin again.
I want to collect old hardback copies of her works for myself because her books are definitely one of my favorite things.
*And by "almost respectful" I really mean "not at all respectful but not quite an abomination".
**Supposedly a German milliner. Which I'm pretty sure wasn't in the original and furthermore this milliner was created as a whole exciting Nazi-hunting subplot...but that's just because people obviously find it too too boring for a race-car driver to merely be a gigolo to both a mother and her daughter at the same time. Yawn yawn, everyone knows a race car driver would obviously also be a super-hero-like Nazi hunter. Enter interesting hat person.
***All writers naturally think this. It is completely arguable that art holds the same place and if really pressed hard by something scary like a nail-gun, I would have to say they are both equally important.
Can I please personally fire every single person involved in the new series?
Comments (5)
You've written the post I've been thinking of writing ever since I saw the 2006 version of Jane Eyre with Toby Stephens. I was even more angry when I saw some of the behind the scenes footage with director, Susanna White, who claimed that Jane wasn't really plain--she was just made to feel plain like so many girls with low self-esteem. Woman! Have you actually read Jane Eyre?
The first adaptation of Jane Eyre I ever saw was the 1970s version with George C. Scott. However dated it may seem now, at least it was faithful to the book. Obviously film adaptation often has to cut scenes or characters to compress the story enough to fit in a shorter format. However, what I've always loved about the best adaptations is that you can then go into the book and get all the richness, detail, and explanation that had been glossed over in the film. The film was like a preview.
Not only was Toby Stephens way too young and good looking to be Mr. Rochester but scenes and dialog were completely invented and modernized. Having first seen Jane Eyre when I was 14, I can't believe that young people today are such morons that they need to be talked down to and fed pap like this. Charlotte Bronte wrote brilliant characters--they really can't be improved on.
Then North and South came along. I loved the movie and immediately afterward read the book. What a disappointment. Every single scene I loved was invented for the movie. The book really did seem dry old stuff by comparison. For the most part I think it wrong to update a classic. If something's classic, it stands the test of time. Maybe North and South just wasn't as classic as Jane Eyre or Miss Marple.
Posted by mss @ Words Into Bytes | March 20, 2010 7:31 AM
Posted on March 20, 2010 07:31
Oh wow- I wanted to watch the Toby Stephens version of Jane Eyre because I have so far watched every version (I feel sure I've seen the George C. Scott version too but I'm having trouble imagining him as Rochester so maybe I need to go rent it) but I was reluctant for the very reason you mentioned- he is far too young to play that role. I fail to understand why modern film makers and modern people in general can't respect the differences in culture and social structure that existed in the 19th century such as the far more frequent tendency for men to marry much younger brides.
They did that with the Paltrow version of Emma too. (Though that was hardly the worst thing they did in that version).
I think it's really horrible to try to "modern up" pieces like Jane Eyre because it rips the heart out of the work. The thought of making Jane Eyre like a modern young woman suffering from low self esteem rather than the strong quietly confident character she really was who was honest to a fault and a keen observer is stupid. And why can't a heroine be plain and find love?
I've mentioned before my very serious pet peeve with modern productions of 19th century works that use smoking as a device to indicate that a woman is independent and an early feminist. It's so ridiculous.
I'm sorry that reading North and South disappointed you but I can see what you mean. I really enjoyed it myself but it was definitely much drier. In spite of the two totally made up scenes in the movie that are my favorites, the rest of the film really doesn't mess much with the details of the books so in this instance I was able to enjoy the deviance.
My favorite Jane Eyre of all time remains the Timothy Dalton version from the late seventies or early eighties. I don't even really like Dalton in anything else but I think his Rochester is the best. I saw the one with William Hurt (cold and emotionless) and then saw the one with Ciaran Hinds (melodramatic in the extreme) and I think I should take a pass on the Toby Stephens version- I'm so happy you brought that up!
Posted by Angelina | March 20, 2010 10:57 AM
Posted on March 20, 2010 10:57
By all means watch the Toby Stephens version because I'd love to hear what you think. I agree the Timothy Dalton version is the most accurate adaptation. I never really liked Timothy Dalton either so I had to overcome that to accept him a Rochester. But I was very pleased with that version because both actors managed to say the long complicated sentences as if they were natural. And they weren't really. It's very literary dialog--perhaps better read in a book than spoken in a movie.
As for North and South, the book is okay. I don't hate it. I just surprised myself by preferring the film. I can't think of any other book I can say that about. Usually a book is filled with treasures that can't told in a movie.
I find it odd that Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte were such good friends. You can see what an unconventional character Jane Eyre really was. Margaret has all the perfect, blushing, genteel habits--even in her suddenly reduced circumstances--that Jane does not. I do love Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford". She can be very funny.
In the film version of North of South there is another made up scene at the very end between Margaret and Mrs. Thornton that I love. It is beautifully acted by both women. I really loved the depth that Sinead Cusack brought to the role of the proud mother...I probably identify more with her, in age and circumstances than with Margaret.
Posted by mss @ Words Into Bytes | March 20, 2010 5:07 PM
Posted on March 20, 2010 17:07
I can't believe I didn't know she wrote Cranford! I have got to read it. I've only seen the series, which I really enjoyed.
So true about the dialog in Jane Eyre being literary- but we are in total agreement about the Dalton version (why can't I remember the actresses name? I don't have time to look it up right now) and how they manage to make the dialog seem natural.
I thought Cusack was wonderful as the proud mother and if you're talking about the scene in the empty factory near the end- that's a really fantastic scene.
I didn't know that Bronte and Gaskell were friends. I have never read about either of their lives and have only gathered sparse facts about Charlotte's life. I should read more about both of them.
I might watch the Toby Stephens Jane Eyre just for the pleasure of discussing it with you afterwords.
Posted by angelina | March 20, 2010 5:17 PM
Posted on March 20, 2010 17:17
Elizabeth Gaskell wrote Charlotte Bronte's biography. In some ways she tried to spin Charlotte's character into something closer to one of her own fictional ones. For example, Gaskell writes, "The difference between Miss Bronte and me is that she puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness. I am sure she works off a great deal that is morbid into her writing and out of her life."
Posted by mss @ Words Into Bytes | March 21, 2010 7:17 AM
Posted on March 21, 2010 07:17