'And Then There Were None'. The BBC Sexes up Agatha Christie
Warning: Multiple plot spoilers:
I see the BBC (having introduced explicit incest into Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, the staid old boy having carelessly omitted to describe it in the book) are also planning to sex up a 1939 Agatha Christie story for Christmas TV, the interestingly entitled novel ‘And The There Were None’.
It will, we are told, feature on-screen gore, the f-word and cocaine, not the sort of thing you’d normally associate with this tweedy author, who liked to leave violence undescribed and would (I have no doubt at all) been greatly shocked by the use of the F-word in mixed company, let alone on the BBC.
As for cocaine, it’s not as anachronistic as I at first thought. I can’t find any mention of it in the Christie story. But it is at the centre of the plot in Dorothy Sayers’s 1933 Peter Wimsey novel ‘Murder Must Advertise’ . And at least one of the characters in the Christie book might well be the sort of person who would take this drug.
There’s less excuse for gore and swearing. But should we care? Is Agatha Christie’s work sacrosanct? I’d say not. In fact, if it were, the whole thing couldn’t be screened (see below) or even mentioned. I’m just afraid that it will (as so often) fail to sustain the illusion of being set in the late 1930s. And if it does, then the whole plot, based as it is on a morality and a society now vanished, won’t work.
I thought Agatha Christie was a thing of the past until I went to live in Moscow in the early 1990s. There I saw the station bookstalls heaped with the works of ‘Agata Kristi’, probably illicitly translated in defiance of copyright, often a problem in Soviet days. Russians love English crime fiction, and Russian TV did a rather fine ‘Sherlock Holmes’, in which a foggy, cobbled Vilnius impersonated Victorian London, and almost every scene contained a huge picture of Queen Victoria, much as all Soviet scenes would contain a bust or portrait of Lenin.
This glimpse of her popularity with Russians didn’t persuade me to read her. On a long Soviet train journey, I needed something longer, denser and more credible. I recall being read some of her stories at school (one in which a telephone call for help is cunningly disguised, by means of depressing a key during the conversation and only allowing some of the words to get through). And I also remember a black-and-white TV version of ‘And Then There Were None’, though I think it was under a different title, which I enjoyed, but not so enthusiastically as to want more of the same.
By my twenties I had come to see Agatha Christie (with some justice) as stuffy, prejudiced and pedestrian, but also rather given to daft confected fantasies – such as ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, a great disappointment. Somehow I had her mixed up in my mind with another suburban grey-haired female author, Enid Blyton, as a sort of book factory. How could anyone who wrote so many books possibly be any good? Compared with Dorothy Sayers, who consciously flatters her vain readers with literary and cultural references (I’ve often wondered if her occasional heroine, ‘Harriet Vane’ is accidentally named) , or with the incomparable Josephine Tey (whose detective novels are icy spring water for the mind, and lovely bits of social history and commentary into the bargain) she was dull.
My late brother had actually met her, at her house near Cholsey between Oxford and the Chilterns, in the late 1960,(I cannot recall how this came about). He formed the impression from the conversation that she was an old-fashioned pre-war English anti-Semite. No doubt she disapproved greatly of Hitler and his mass murders. But an author who can refer to the ‘thick, Semitic lips’ of a Jewish character (and a character who is by no means pleasant), as Christie does in ‘And Then there Were None’ can fairly be accused of not liking Jews very much. I shall be interested to see the BBC’s treatment of this character. I expect they will evade the issue.
This unlovely phrase about thick lips occurs in the very opening scenes of ‘And Then There Were None’, and is still included in a very recent paperback of the book, under a reputable imprint. It adds nothing to the plot and if, as some might argue, it is of historical interest that such things could still be written in 1939, then why has the word ‘N*****’ been removed , not only from the title of the book (formerly ‘Ten Little ‘N*****s’, now wholly rewritten) but also from the doggerel verse (‘Ten little N*****-boys, which has become ‘Ten little Soldier boys’) on which the plot is based. Even the name of the island on which most of the action takes place, originally ‘N***** Island’ , is changed to ‘Soldier Island’. And the little figurines, which disappear one by one as the characters are done away with, are likewise transformed into ‘Soldiers’. Guess what they were in the original. At one stage, I think for the American market, the word ‘Indians’ was substituted for the N-word, but that, too, has now been deemed unacceptable. Yet the ‘thick, Semitic lips’ of Mr Isaac Morris remain.
Oddly enough, what I think is the only open objection to racial prejudice in the book is made by one of the least attractive characters, Emily Brent. She is a tiresome and overly pious and rigid Christian hypocrite whose self-righteousness has caused havoc to the lives of others, though she refuses to take any responsibility for this. She is, quite possibly, the least sympathetic and most dislikeable character in a book entirely lacking in heroes or heroines, which makes me wonder what Miss Christie’s attitude towards Christianity was.
She discusses the allegations made against all the guests with another character Vera Claythorne. One is an army officer accused of abandoning his men to their deaths in Africa.
"Ah, I understand you now. Well, there is that Mr. Lombard. He admits to having abandoned twenty men to their deaths." Vera said: "They were only natives..."
Emily Brent said sharply: "Black or white, they are our brothers."
Vera thought: "Our black brothers - our black brothers. Oh, I'm going to laugh. I'm hysterical. I'm not myself..."’
I wonder if that bit will survive the BBC adaptation.