Alibis in the Archive

Rolling lawns, borders full of lupins, peonies and foxgloves, the background of a stately Victorian building, good friends, good conversation, good wine and three days of glorious sunshine in an otherwise miserably wet summer – my weekend in Wales at Alibis in the Archive was positively idyllic.

The place: Gladstone's Library in Hawarden, (www.gladstoneslibrary.org) was built by the family of William Ewart Gladstone – four times prime minister of Great Britain – around his own collection of about 30,000 volumes to provide accommodation so that serious students could study them. The library is greatly expanded now and the accommodation offers the sort of luxury those Victorian students couldn't have dreamed of, but it still operates on the same basis, though it is the venue for many conferences and events like this one too.

It also houses the archive of the Crime Writers' Association and the Detection Club and this weekend's event, Alibis in the Archive, was set up by the indefatigable Martin Edwards (author of The Golden Age of Murder) three years ago with a programme mainly highlighting the history of crime writing with particular emphasis on the novels of the twenties and thirties It's been sold out well ahead of time each year.

The speakers included Peter Robinson, Frances Fyfield, Michael Ridpath, Alison Joseph, Janet Laurence, David Whittle, Martin Edwards and me. The topics ranged from my own, The DNA of Tartan Noir, to Frances Fyfield's memoir of her friendship with PD James, by way of items about classic crime, travelling for research, and finding the real Agatha Christie through her romances, not to mention the Carry On! theme music composed by Edmund Crispin in his other life. The audience discussions were lively and thoughtful, and the pub quiz night revealed how much more readers know about crime than the authors themselves!

And we all talked books, books, books as old friendships were renewed and new ones made. As an author, it's such a comfort to discover that even people like the wonderful Peter Robinson sometimes gets stuck too and is haunted by that awful thought, 'Am I just wasting my time on this?' When he comes in with That Look on his face, his wife Sheila says, 'Page 184, right?'

It was such a happy way to celebrate the summer solstice. I'll never forget us all lingering on chatting around the table with our glasses of wine, reluctant to leave the lingering warmth of the evening until the sun set around 11.30.

Heavenly!

Sad to say, normal service has resumed today. Flash floods and thunderstorms in the south, damp and miserable here. Sigh.

Changing Agatha

I’m heading to Malice Domestic next week so my thoughts turned to Agatha Christie and the new version of “The ABC Murders” available on Amazon. I usually jump at the chance to watch every new screen version of an Agatha Christie story, but I wasn’t too sure about this one. I’d heard things.

I finally decided I needed to check it out myself and come to my own conclusions. I liked it much better than I thought I would.

From the beginning it seems un-Christie-like. Everything’s darker, everything seems more extreme from the portrayal of English society to Poirot and some of the other characters. Then there’s the scenes with sexual overtones that don’t exist in the books and add nothing to the story, at least as far as I’m concerned.

In the book (you know I reread the book right after I saw the screen version, right?), Poirot is at the top of his game, enjoying his “retirement”, still working cases and working with Scotland Yard. Hastings is there and so is Japp, though the main Scotland Yard detective on the case is a younger man, Crome, who isn’t all that enamored with Poirot.

In this new version, Poirot has been disgraced. Japp is no longer at Scotland Yard. Hastings is nowhere to be found. The Yard no longer considers Poirot an asset and the public basically hates him. Crome is there, but his character is more amped up. He’s very very anti-Poirot.

Both stories are set in the 1930s, though in slightly different years. In the screen version, England is definitely anti-immigration. People protest about immigrants, there are posters on the wall denouncing them and people wear pins indicating they dislike foreigners. In none of Dame Agatha’s books, as least as far as I can remember, was anti-foreigner sentiment so much in the foreground. Someone might comment on Poirot being a foreigner, but it’s so slight it’s nothing.

And then there’s the portrayal of Poirot himself. John Malkovich does a fine job, but it's not the Poirot I'm used to. He’s taller, more melancholy and less fussy. He also seems a little lost and friendless. One of the subplots delves into Poirot’s background before he came to England in 1914, something which I don’t remember Christie talking about much. What’s revealed in the story is quite different than anything I expected. At least they didn’t change whodunit. The basic story line is also similar though some characters have been changed and scenes both added and deleted.

I don’t expect screen versions to always adhere to every detail of a story. Sometimes, what works for a book doesn’t work for a movie/TV show and vice versa. I’ve even liked some screen versions better. But, when it comes to Christie, I really prefer them to stay as close as possible to her story.

That’s why I prefer the David Suchet version, which is pretty close to the book, though not in every detail. Still, I think this new version is worth watching.

That brings me to today’s question: What do you think about screen versions that change characters and storylines from the original book? Yay? Nay? Depends? I’m in the depends camp.

Playing Fair

I did enjoy Charlotte's post about her dislike of 'fuzzy endings' – where the author hasn't really told you what happened and you have to make up your own mind – as well as the comments about it afterwards.

They seemed to echo something I'd been thinking of writing today – the question of what a detective story ought to be. Perhaps Oscar Wilde's Miss Prism summed it up in her defense of the three-volume novel: 'The good ended happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.'

It was Monsignor Ronald Knox who made the first attempt in his tongue-in-cheek '10 Commandments for Detective Fiction.' They included prohibitions like, 'Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable,' 'No undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end,' and 'No Chinaman must figure in the story,' – possibly a dig at the Chinese opium dens that featured in Sherlock Holmes' cases and then became a feature much imitated in the 'penny-dreadful.'

The great thing about having rules is the effect when someone breaks them. When Agatha Christie, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, transgressed by breaking the first commandment, 'The criminal must be someone mentioned in the first part of the story but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to share,' the shock propelled the book to the top of the best-seller list.

Now, of course, rules have been long superseded. As Butch Cassidy was told, 'There are no rules in a knife fight' and in crime fiction today anything goes. In some of the very best crime novels we know right at the start 'whodunit,' and the suspense is about the why or how.

But I still have an affection for the classic type, and I was wondering how other writers and readers today feel about Knox's commandment no 8: 'The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.'

I've always felt when I was writing a book that I have the intelligent reader at my shoulder. I want to conceal the villain from them so that they don't guess who it is too early and I will do my very best to mislead them, but I like to think that the clues to the answer are there if they want to follow them. I try to play fair but I can go to elaborate lengths with red herrings - I remember rewriting one scene half-a-dozen times so that the clue I ought to give them remained unnoticed. But I couldn't get any satisfaction from the reader who says, 'I didn't guess' if I had actually cheated.

Is this an idea whose time has passed? What do you think?

Poirot: From Page to Screen

I love, love, love Agatha Christie. I’ve read all her books at least twice, and I enjoy the TV and movie adaptations. The version of A Caribbean Mystery featuring Helen Hayes as Miss Marple never fails to cheer me up. Yep, you know you’re a mystery writer at heart when a murder mystery makes you feel better!

Even though I’ve read them all, I’m not as familiar with her short stories. I recently decided to rewatch the first season of the Poirot TV series featuring David Suchet as Poirot.

The first season is 10 episodes, each 48-51 minutes long, all adaptations of Poirot short stories. After watching each episode, I read the story it was based on to see what changes had been made.

Here’s what I noticed:

Captain Hastings and Miss Lemon are often inserted into the TV version of a story where they weren’t in the original. When this happens, there’s usually some scene at the beginning that reveals the relationship between Poirot and the two of them. I have to say, these scenes are the ones I remember the most, probably because they are great fun. And whenever a policeman was needed, Inspector Japp was always the man they called, which wasn’t necessarily true in the original story.

In a couple of the stories, The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly and The Incredible Theft, Poirot is brought in before the crime occurs in the TV version. In the original stories, he’s brought in after the kidnapping and theft, respectively.

In a few of the TV versions, when the culprit is revealed, they added a pursuit scene that wasn’t in the short story. Makes for a better visual and I have to admit is quite fun.

There’s only one story where I noticed the TV adaptation changed a clue slightly, Murder in the Mews. I think it worked out a little better.

A few of the stories collapsed a couple characters, but occasionally new characters were added.

In Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, there were quite a few changes. Miss Lemon and Captain Hastings were added, the dinner companion was his dentist, someone’s profession was changed, the contents of a letter was changed and a visit to Scotland Yard’s new forensics lab was added.

In The King of Clubs, a famous dancer became a famous actress and the murdered man the head of a movie studio. That gave Poirot the chance to visit a film set.

Overall, they’re quite faithful to the story, keeping the solution and the murderer generally the same. I think these adaptations are great and I have no problems with the changes made. And, dare I say, they made the stories more fun to watch.