Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Marple: The comfort of the British murder-mystery

The Binge — Jessica Zafra

MISS JANE MARPLE is a menace to society. Whenever she turns up with that handbag of hers, sniffing around in other people’s business, murder follows. Corpses turn up, poisoned, stabbed, bludgeoned, strangled, shot. Suspicions mount, terrible secrets are uncovered, threats are uttered. People are revealed at their very worst. What fun!

Julia McKenzie is the elderly spinster Miss Jane Marple.

On gloomy days, in filthy weather, I prescribe making a pot of tea (not coffee), cutting a slab of cake, and then sitting down with the cats (and/or dogs) to a season or two of the British ITV series Agatha Christie’s Marple or Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Each episode is a full adaptation of a book or story by the longtime queen of detective fiction, the best-selling novelist of all time. When Agatha Christie’s Poirot, starring David Suchet, ended its 24-year run last year, it had adapted every single Agatha Christie novel and story featuring the Belgian detective with the curly moustache.

Agatha Christie’s Marple, which started airing in 2004, expanded its source material by including Agatha Christie stories that did not feature the character and simply working her into the plot. However, the BBC acquired the rights to the Agatha Christie library last year, effectively ending the ITV series. I wonder what the Beeb plans to do with the material. They’ve had great global success with their contemporary reworking of Arthur Conan Doyle in the Cumberbatch-Freeman Sherlock, so a 21st-century update is possible (like “The Speckled Band” becoming “The Speckled Blonde”). Then again, as the interminable Downton Abbey has shown, there is a huge hankering for British nostalgia (and Downton has had its share of dead bodies).

Of the two Agatha Christie series, Poirot is the more ambitious simply because it has more character to work with, and a cosmopolitan worldview. The writers have fun at the expense of Monsieur Poirot, who apart from having that accent is a fussy, tubby, self-important, pompous snob. Christie herself is said to have found her own creation “insufferable.” In episode after episode the puffed-up sleuth is brought down to earth, but since he solves every mystery in brilliant fashion, it all evens out. In one episode there’s even an unseemly conversation with Chief Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard (Philip Jackson) over faggots (a roll of chopped liver) and spotted dick (pudding).

It’s somewhat harder to make jokes about a sweet old spinster from a quiet village in the country. In Marple, the idyllic English countryside is the draw: the rolling hills, bubbling brooks and imposing manor houses which conceal foul doings. In the first episode “The Body in the Library,” an unidentified blonde is discovered among the books in a vast country house. The same country house turns up in “The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side” in the fifth season, sold to the Hollywood actress Marina Gregg, who gives a party that quickly produces a corpse. (Yes, the same novel that was filmed with Elizabeth Taylor and Kim Novak.) Two sets of murders in the same house, but different Marples — the original star, Geraldine McEwen, retired after three seasons and was replaced by Julia McKenzie. Of the two I prefer McEwen, with her subtle ironies and her steeliness.

Naturally Agatha Christie purists protest over changes to the stories, that’s what purists are for. Sometimes subplots are added, characters deleted, the identity of the murderer changed. On both shows the storytelling is brisk and efficient, the style old-school and conventional. They do not have auteurs the way The Knick has Steven Soderbergh or Mad Men has Matthew Weiner; the only auteur here is Agatha Christie.

David Suchet plays the Belgian detective with the curly moustache, Hercule Poirot.

Why are British murder-mysteries so comforting? Several reasons occur to me. They happen in nice houses with servants in crisp uniforms, so you know there’s always someone to clean up the gore. The characters have middle- to upper-class British accents, which lull us into thinking that nothing really bad can happen, or if it did, everyone would be polite about it. A friend noted that when he heard Matthew Goode’s voice in “A Murder Is Announced” he relaxed immediately, and this was before the murder even happened. In the fourth season, the voice turns up — Benedict Cumberbatch plays Luke Fitzwilliam in “Murder Is Easy.” In the short story Fitzwilliam was the sleuth, but in the series he has to share the detecting with Miss Marple.

Then there are the guest stars, familiar from movies and other TV shows. Joanna Lumley, who can do no wrong because she starred in Sapphire and Steele and Absolutely Fabulous, appears in two episodes as Miss Marple’s school friend; Timothy Dalton, Cary Mulligan, and Dan Stevens also show up. Jessica Chastain, young Damian Lewis and Aiden Gillen guest on Poirot, whose episodes include adaptations of previously filmed Christie novels Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and Evil Under the Sun. David Suchet — pernickety, huffy, but warm — is a more fully realized Poirot than Albert Finney or Peter Ustinov, but he did have a quarter-century to work on his interpretation.

The main reason the classic British murder-mystery is so comforting is that no matter how convoluted the case, it is solved in the end and all loose ends are tied up. It’s really over, none of that lingering unease and existential dread, thank you, not everything has to be exactly like life. (The recent detective series The Fall with Gillian Anderson as the icy investigator and Jamie Dornan as the improbably gorgeous serial killer had an excellent first season, but could not bring itself to end while it was ahead. It went from eliciting dread to being just dreadful.

Agatha Christie, the Internet tells me, married a famous archaeologist and spent a lot of time on expeditions in the Middle East. These experiences provided the setting for some of my favorite episodes: “The Sittaford Mystery,” in which Marple looks into the curse on archaeologist Timothy Dalton; “Death on the Nile,” “Murder in Mesopotamia,” and “Appointment with Death,” in which Poirot solves murders on digs in Egypt and Iraq. You could start your Agatha Christie binge with these episodes, or just watch the series from the beginning. Of course they are formulaic, and the perp is always the one who looks innocent. When it’s done well, there is comfort in sameness.

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