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Agatha Christie Adaptations with Teresa Peschel
286 Plays1 year ago
Agatha Christie's work has long been a source of screen adaptations. In this week's episode, Brook and Sarah discuss some recent adaptations, and some they should check out with guest Teresa Peschel from Peschel Press. Teresa, along with her husband Bill, watched and reviewed 201 Agatha Christie adaptations for Agatha Christie, She Watched: One Woman's Plot to Watch 201 Agatha Christie Movies Without Murdering the Director, Screenwriter, Cast, or Her Husband.
Discussed
Murder on the Orient Express (2017 film)
Crooked House (2017 film)
The Secret of Chimneys (1925) Agatha Christie
Miss Marple: The Secret of Chimneys (2010) ITV
Whose Body (1923) Dorothy L. Sayers
Clouds of Witness (1926) Dorothy L. Sayers
Father Brown (2013-2023) BBC
Partners in Crime (1929) Agatha Christie
Peril at End House(1923) Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None (1939) Agatha Christie
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) Agatha Christie
Endless Night (1967) Agatha Christie
Murder on the Orient Express (1934) Agatha Christie
Halloween Party (1969) Agatha Christie
A Haunting in Venice (2023 film)
Murder on the Orient Express (2017 film)
Death on the Nile (2022 film)
Nemesis (1971) Agatha Christie
Poirot: Appointment with Death (2008)
Appointment with Death (2021, Japan)
Miss Marple: 4:50 From Paddington (2004)
Murders, She Said (1961 film)
Why Didn't They Ask Evans (1980 television adaptation)
The Secret Adversary (1983 television adaptation)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (2002, Russia)
Agatha Christie's Hjerson (2021, Sweden)
Ms. Ma, Nemesis (2018, Korea)
More about Teresa
Foreign adaptations list (what Teresa and Bill have and what they're missing)
Instagram @peschel_press
For more information
Instagram: @cluedinmystery
Contact us: hello@cluedinmystery.com
Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers – www.silvermansound.com
Transcript
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Transcript
Introduction & Halloween Plans
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke. And we both love mystery. Hi, Brooke. Hi, Sarah. So today is Halloween. How will you be celebrating? Oh, I think I have a little pumpkin that I need to take, gather some candy after school today.
00:00:32
Speaker
That sounds fun. I remember those days fondly. But we have another extra special Halloween treat. And that is an interview with Teresa Peschel. Hello. Welcome Teresa. Hello. I'm so glad to be here with you all. We're so glad that you could join us. So I will briefly introduce you and then we can get started.
Meet Teresa Peschel
00:00:57
Speaker
Teresa Peschel never planned to become a writer, nor did she plan to become an expert on film versions of Agatha Christie stories. At various times, she has been a sales clerk, a naval officer, a housewife, and a mother. She gardens, sews, reads, and is interested in sustainability, science fiction, and fantasy, and the history behind the mystery.
00:01:18
Speaker
Like Agatha Christie, she reinvented herself as a writer when she and her husband Bill co-founded Petchel Press in 2010. She currently lives with Bill, two of their kids, and four cats in Hershey. And yes, it really is the sweetest place on earth, and the air really does smell like chocolate. Welcome, Teresa. Oh, I always, always enjoy doing, doing a podcast like this. And it's great to actually see you all in person because I have listened to some of your podcasts. And so this is a very, this is a lovely treat.
00:01:49
Speaker
Well, thank you. We're so happy to have you. So before we begin, we just want to remind listeners that there may be a few spoilers today. We'll do our best to avoid them, but it may be impossible given that Teresa is going to be talking about Agatha Christie adaptations.
201 Agatha Christie Movies Project
00:02:08
Speaker
Yes, so Teresa, you are the author of the highly detailed guidebook Agatha Christie She Watched. One woman's plot to watch 201 Agatha Christie movies without murdering the director, screenwriter, cast, or her husband.
00:02:23
Speaker
What made you decide to embark on this monumental project? It wasn't my idea, it's my husband. What actually happened is that I saw my very first Agatha Christie film in 2017 and that was Sir Kenny's version of Murder on the Orient Express and we were wowed.
00:02:44
Speaker
And over the last couple of years, no, it's going on 10 years now, I think. Bill has been slowly annotating classic Agatha Christie mysteries. And there's an amazing amount of stuff you can say about her first six books. And in, we also have a website, Pechel Press. And so in around about July of 2020, I was able to go to the library. The COVID pandemic had lifted up enough that I could go to the library in person.
00:03:11
Speaker
And there on the rack of DVDs was Crooked House. It's a novel that's really very good. It's really a remarkable novel and a really great example of the fact that in Agatha Land, anybody can be the murderer and anybody can be the victim. Leave your preconceived notions at the door. You do not know who did it. You really don't.
00:03:35
Speaker
So I brought Crooked House home and we watched it and we really enjoyed it and because the website needed fodder I wrote a review.
00:03:44
Speaker
And then a short time later, Bill was in the throes of working on The Secret of Chimneys, which is actually a romantic thriller. It is a mystery, but it's actually more of a romantic thriller. And I thought, wow, maybe there's a movie connected with this and we should watch the movie. Well, as it turns out, there is a movie connected with The Secret of Chimneys and it stars Miss Marble and it is a terrible movie.
00:04:10
Speaker
Absolutely awful, but we watched it and I wrote a review for the website and Bill wrote a review for the annotated edition. And on the library DVD, there were several other Miss Marple ITV episodes.
Adaptation Challenges & Importance
00:04:25
Speaker
So we watched them and I wrote reviews for the website. And by the time I had done the fourth or fifth one, Bill said, you know, you could keep doing this and eventually we'll make a book into it.
00:04:38
Speaker
And we had no idea that there were as many Agatha adaptations as there were. We didn't know how far back in time it went. We had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for. It took us two and a half years just to get to the finished book. So it was not my fault. It was my husband. It was my husband's idea. I didn't do this. But it worked out great.
00:05:08
Speaker
That's wonderful. I love the way that that came about. And I just adore the subtitle of your book. It's just so fun and really gives readers, I think, an idea of what they're in for. You're going to have a lot of your own flavor in this guidebook. It's really great. Oh, very much so. And I learned a huge amount about the film industry by doing the reviews because I started out as a purist.
00:05:34
Speaker
It should absolutely follow the text. It should absolutely be in the same time setting. You shouldn't change the location. You shouldn't change the dates. You shouldn't change the detective. You shouldn't do any of this stuff. And that's not the way the film industry works.
00:05:49
Speaker
And so you end up having to kind of really understand that films and books are very, very different mediums. And what you can do in a book, especially those internal monologues and soliloquies, they don't work.
00:06:05
Speaker
in a movie. First person narration, that really doesn't necessarily work in a movie as well as as third person because you know you're watching from from behind the eye of the camera and that's not the same as being in someone's head. They're so different and you so you do have to make changes and I had to get over that idea that it needed to be exact.
00:06:29
Speaker
I think that's such a great point because it can be disappointing for some when they have read a book and then they watch the adaptation and there's such a disconnect. And it's actually only through having conversations like this that I've come to realize why that disconnect happens, right? Because as you say, the story needs to be told from a different perspective. Or you're looking at Poirot.
00:06:50
Speaker
who started detecting in 1920 when he was about 60 ish. And he finished detecting in 1972 when he was about 60 ish. And you cannot do a TV series in which Poirot does not age. Well, the world around him ages 52 years.
00:07:08
Speaker
It does not work. And so that's why all of the series, they end up condensing all of the episodes, the stories into a single time period. It lets you avoid that aging, not aging issue. And it also lets the production companies save simply buckets of money.
00:07:30
Speaker
on set design and wardrobe and cars and makeup and everything else that's connected with the film, you can just keep reusing the same things. It just doesn't work any other way. And the other thing I would like to say about the great advantage about film and movies is it keeps an author in the public eye. Every time that no matter what you can say about the quality of some of the Agatha Christie adaptations, and I've seen them all and some of them are truly awful,
00:08:00
Speaker
but each one introduces Agatha to an entirely new audience who may not have heard of her. And there are fans for every single film that I have seen, including the ones that I thought were just excretiable. There are people who like them. And
00:08:16
Speaker
The Christie estate is really on the ball where this is concerned because they keep licensing the short stories, they license the novels. And so Agatha is not buried under the tsunami of swill that comes out every single day. And I know that you all are familiar with Dorothy Sayers.
00:08:35
Speaker
Wonderful, wonderful author, a contemporary of Agatha. They knew each other. Lord Peter Whimsy is a fun detective.
Impact of Film Adaptations
00:08:43
Speaker
We're annotating, we've annotated who's body and we've got clouds of witness up next. She really needs annotating. But Dorothy Sayers, you're familiar also with Downton Abbey? Okay, now think about this concept. Lord Peter.
00:09:00
Speaker
murder at Downton Abbey. Why isn't the Sayers estate licensing Lord Peter? And the answer is because the literary agency that owns it doesn't care. And so Dorothy Sayers is disappearing.
00:09:16
Speaker
Because she is not on TV and whatever else you could say about, you know having Lord Peter run around Great English country houses solving murders that had nothing to do with the books. It would have kept her books alive and The Christie estate doesn't want to see that happen. And so they are making every effort to keep Agatha out there and it and it works you figure for every single person who reads a book
00:09:45
Speaker
A hundred people go to the movies and a thousand people watch TV. So you have to do this. It has to be done.
00:09:55
Speaker
Christy and perhaps the Doyle estate would be the other one that I can think of that does that. But I can't think of many others that remain in our collective consciousness. Oh, yes, absolutely. Eventually, everybody falls into the public domain. But Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe. Bill, correct me if I'm wrong. There was a TV series, I think, or a series of movies with Rex Stout. But there weren't very many
00:10:23
Speaker
They don't do it over and over and they could. It's a great pairing, but they're not there. And so they disappear. Rexed Out is the first one that comes to mind. Ellery Queen. Ellery Queen is another one. Where are the Ellery Queen movies? Where are the Ellery Queen TV shows? And you have to keep doing it. You have to keep re-releasing a new series because otherwise, again, you disappear into underneath the tsunami of constant media that's coming out and coming out and coming out and coming out.
00:10:54
Speaker
Yeah, maybe I would add Chesterton, because there's the Father Brown series that is on NBC. Oh, there's a perfect example of this. When Agatha Christie wrote Partners in Crime, that's the cycle of stories that she did with Tommy and Tuppence. And I didn't know this when we started the project. I was barely aware of Partners in Crime, even though I like Tommy and Tuppence.
00:11:16
Speaker
Every single Partners in Crime story, and there were between 15 and 17 of them, was a parody of a famous writer of the time, a contemporary of Christie. And when you go back and read them today, because we watched the episodes of Partners in Crime, I would say that the only three detectives she parodied, whose names you would recognize, would be herself, Conan Doyle,
00:11:46
Speaker
and possibly either G.K. Chesterton or Baroness Orksey. Everyone else is gone, completely lost to time, and yet they were such big names in the 1920s when she wrote these that she assumed her audience would recognize them. Gone. They are gone. Even Edgar Wallace, who was a writing machine and came up with the idea for the Green Arrow and King Kong, gone.
00:12:15
Speaker
That's fascinating, Teresa. I'm overwhelmed with your knowledge, and I'm so glad that you're sharing all of this with us today. So a little bit about your process of doing the book.
Guidebook Writing Process
00:12:27
Speaker
Did you set deadlines for yourself? Did you have a certain order to watch the shows in? Or did you and Bill just kind of take it as it came?
00:12:37
Speaker
Largely, we kind of took it as it came because we had to start with what our libraries had, both Dauphin County and Hershey. So we kind of started with the Marples, ITV's Marples, and as I wrote the reviews, we started changing what I needed to focus on and working out the length of the reviews. For a long time, once we realized how many films there were,
00:13:04
Speaker
And we realized we wanted to get this done in our lifetime. We were doing only one a week and then we had to go to two a week, but I couldn't do more than two a week. So we would end up watching a full length movie on Friday and I would write the review on Saturday and we would watch an hour long episode of something on Wednesday so that I could write the review on
00:13:26
Speaker
Thursday. So we would intersperse, and we would kind of go in order, starting with the oldest and working through the newest, and that's how we did the Margaret Rutherford's. And then when we got to the David Suchets, we realized, oh, we've got the Peter Houstonoff ones. So sometimes you have a Houstonoff film that David Suchets remade, and you want to see them one after the other so you can do comparisons. And so we kind of moved back and forth.
00:13:51
Speaker
And as we neared the end of the project, we realized that, oh, Malice Domestic is coming up in April of 2023. And would we really like to have this book ready for Malice Domestic? And then Bill at the same time, he's working out the layout.
00:14:07
Speaker
and I can't show your audience this, but we knew that we wanted two pages for each film because that way you've got plenty of space for banner art and mug shots and cast lists and locations. Locations were important to me because that way, if you know where the location of a film shoot is, you can go look at it. When you're on vacation in England, you can go visit all of these sites. The rating systems, and it took a while to
00:14:36
Speaker
for him to work out the layout to how it would actually look on the page. And then we would have to edit. He edited me and I would change his edits and we would go back and forth. Sometimes we would go over a review four or five times because it had to fit within a certain size. And again, we had to learn that as we went along.
00:14:55
Speaker
And as we were putting the book together, we're realizing that there were reviews that I wrote early on that I hadn't said enough for the space limitation. And we have to go back and rewatch it and rewrite the review to
Misconceptions About Christie
00:15:09
Speaker
fill it out. And there were other things when I first started, I didn't know that it was going to be a book at the time. And so we had to do a lot of rewriting and reworking. But as we got further along, we got better at it.
00:15:22
Speaker
In the book, Agatha, she watched one of the fun things we do. It's got over a thousand pictures and we really had fun with the ratings. There are so many different ways that Agatha kills people. Ville is opening the page for me. So, candlesticks and chairs and couches and clubs and windy cantors and fireplace tongs and millstone corns.
00:15:49
Speaker
and statuettes and sugar hat sugar hammers and wrenches and axes and razor blades and stiletto knives and butcher knives and being pushed over cliffs and pushed downstairs and garats and strangleings and mummies curses and we have symbols for them all and it was
00:16:10
Speaker
It's amazing how many ways she comes up with killing people. And one of the things that I also got from the project, because I had to read everything, is Agatha Christie does not write cozies.
00:16:24
Speaker
And you should never, ever, ever think that she writes cozies. She does not. Anybody can be the murderer. Anybody can be the victim. And that's the one thing I would say that when you go in to read any of the novels, she does not write cozies. You do not really know what's going to happen. And she is so good that some of her books can only be read once.
00:16:47
Speaker
because the second time you read them, you were reading a different book, because the ending is so dramatic, you will not forget. A lot of this, the standard mysteries as you read them, even with Agatha, you'll forget. You won't remember exactly how peril at End House ended, you know, 15 years later. But you will never forget, and then there were none. Roger Ackroyd, Endless Night, or Murder on the Orient Express. You will not forget
Review of Branagh's Adaptation
00:17:14
Speaker
that.
00:17:14
Speaker
And the second time around, it's not the same book. You talked a little bit earlier, Teresa, about fidelity to text. So let's talk a little bit about the new Kenneth Branagh film, A Haunting in Venice, which was billed as being based on a Halloween party. What did you think of that connection? There is a Halloween party in there.
00:17:39
Speaker
You can see certain aspects of the novel. As I've thought about it, I'm very happy actually that he changed the title and changed the setting because it does distinguish it from the novel. And David Suchet and Mark Gaddis made a really excellent version of Halloween Party. And my God, that film should have been longer because you want to know exactly what Rowena Drake's children thought of her relationship with the gardener.
00:18:08
Speaker
But a lot of it came over into Haunting in Venice. We were pleased. We were surprised and pleased that we enjoyed it as much as we did, because I was dreading it. Murder on the Orient Express, when we saw it in the theater, it looked incredible. The second time we saw it, we weren't quite as wowed, looking at Poirot's mustache like a piece of wool roving fresh from the sheep. And then the third time, when we watched it again for the book,
00:18:38
Speaker
was not wowed at all when he turns Poirot into a gun-waving action hero, which he is not. And then Death on the Nile was, oh my God, he didn't want Gal Gadot to be the villain, and so he radically changed her character from what Lynette Ridgway is, and all of the dirty dancing and dry humping on the sides of pyramids, and oh my God, and they didn't film it on boats either.
00:19:04
Speaker
which I thought was simply appalling. This is death on the Nile. It is supposed to be on a ship, and they were not anywhere on a ship, whereas the other two death on the Niles, they filmed on real ships, the Memnon and the Karnak. No, not the Karnak, the Sudan, I think. So I was thinking, oh, God, this is going to be awful. And it wasn't. It was Gothic, and it was creepy, and it was scary, and it was very tightly written.
00:19:33
Speaker
And it wasn't exactly Halloween party, but it worked. It really worked. And what really worked the best, because they still managed to involve a creepy garden, just like in Halloween party, is that then he pulled out the motive from Nemesis, and perfect explanation for why Rowena Drake did what she did.
00:19:58
Speaker
just absolutely, I was really pleased. And I would say if you are on the fence about going to see this movie, you should see this movie because this sends a message to Hollywood that you want to see this kind of movie and not movies involving men in tights and capes. There were things I didn't like about it.
00:20:16
Speaker
I did not like how Tina Fey as Ariadne Oliver was fine, but I did not like her motivation and that she couldn't come up with ideas on her own and that she was using Poirot and it was all a big fake setup because she couldn't come up with an idea. And I absolutely couldn't buy that. And I couldn't accept Poirot as an atheist, but oh my God, the rest of the movie really liked it, really enjoyed it. And I'm looking forward to seeing it again when it comes on DVD so I can actually write a review.
00:20:47
Speaker
Yeah, I share your frustration with Aria and the Oliver. I thought they played off of each other really well, and it was great until that last bit when she kind of revealed what her motivation was.
00:21:04
Speaker
It really ruined the opportunity of bringing her back in another film. I know. I can't imagine what he was thinking. I really can't. Even more than Poirot, you know, losing his faith in becoming an atheist, which I simply cannot accept. I can't accept that Ariadne Oliver, who was a very successful mystery writer long before she ran into Poirot, you see her in the Parker Pine stories.
00:21:31
Speaker
And no, she wouldn't have that problem. Her problem was kicking ideas out of the way so she could focus on one and get it done. And she didn't need to do this elaborate plot. Now she wanted to do this elaborate plot to bring Poirot back out of his shell. I could have accepted that.
00:21:53
Speaker
But not, I have writer's block and I need to steal an idea from you. No, that just did not work, did not work.
Future of Christie Adaptations
00:22:00
Speaker
But so much of the rest of the movie, it worked beautifully. And being in that Venetian, I think palazzo is the right word, the building that is, you know, multiple stories with water in the basement and surrounded by water and in the storm. And so you're in a locked house, you're in a locked building, you can't get out.
00:22:19
Speaker
And I thought that really upped the atmosphere because you could not escape what was going to happen. Yeah, I share your feelings very similarly, Teresa, about dreading it. Like, I was worried going into it. I think everyone was.
00:22:40
Speaker
And I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how this was going to tie in with Halloween party. Like, how in the world is this going to be connected? But as you say, it was, and it was really clever. You know, like when you'd hear a name, it would like spark the memory of the novel in your mind. And I felt like it was almost like a fun little game in and of itself.
00:23:05
Speaker
Overall, I think it was well done. Bill's passed me a note that I should say why I refer to Sir Kenneth Branagh as Sir Kenny. And this actually kind of came from Bill. And it is because when we were watching, I guess it was for the second time or the third time, Orient Express, and he's got the camera flying around
00:23:27
Speaker
the train as it stopped on the Trestle Bridge, and you see Sir Kenny running across the top of the train, hundreds of feet above the chasm where he is going to plummet to his death if he slips. And Bill said that he remembered what Orson Welles said, and I'm going to misquote, there is the best toy in the world you can give a boy as a movie set.
00:23:53
Speaker
because he can do whatever he wants with that movie set. And Sir Kenneth Brown all became Sir Kenny in our house, old, because of that. And he has great fun with his sets.
00:24:08
Speaker
You know, you can recognize Kenneth Branagh film when you see one because it is so beautifully composed. Every single shot is beautifully composed to the point where even the birds are doing what they're supposed to do because that's what he wants them to do. It's his set and it's his toy and you are going to and you are his little action figures and you're going to do what he wants.
00:24:28
Speaker
But that's Sir Kenny. And yeah, he did really well with A Haunting in Venice. And I hope he makes another film with Poirot. There are so many to choose from. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I would definitely watch another.
00:24:44
Speaker
Do you anticipate Theresa, and I know we're just making a guess here, but do you anticipate his future films will be more like this where he takes the components and kind of mixes them together and create something new? Or do you think he'll go back to doing more of the verbatim storytelling?
00:25:02
Speaker
I have no idea because he changes things to suit himself. And I'll tell you, I was really surprised that he chose a Halloween party. It's not one of the big novels. It's one of the last ones that Agatha wrote. And if I were to suggest a film, I would say one of the great Poirot novels that are
00:25:25
Speaker
There is no good English language film at all. And that would be appointment with death. David Suchet made it and it had white slaving nuns in the desert and was absolutely atrocious. But it's a wonderful novel. Mrs. Boynton is one of the great Christie villains.
00:25:46
Speaker
or there is a film version of Appointment with Death that is totally worth seeing and it is of course Japanese with Mansi Nomura and it is a wonderful film. Absolutely wonderful. They took something very English set in outside of Petra I think it was and it's translated to 1950s Japan and it works. It is amazing.
00:26:12
Speaker
And then the other one is the murder of Roger Ackroyd, which again David Suchet made, and it was terrible. God, what a mess that was. And there are actually, so there's actually three versions of it that I've seen. And the English language one is terrible.
00:26:30
Speaker
The Japanese one is almost perfect, except they slightly changed Roger Ackroyd's motivation, which I couldn't buy, and the Russian one was sublime. But you can't get them easily. You can't get them easily. I don't know how Bill managed. He got lucky one day at Daily Motion, and there they were.
00:26:51
Speaker
Daily motion? Yeah, he got lucky at daily motion and there they were because things come and go on daily motion. And those would be perfect for Sir Kenny to remake. They would be absolutely perfect films because you don't have an English language version that's any good. That's fine. I just wanted to add, I really wanted to say off camera here, but he was talking about a Christie cinematic universe with Miss Marple and Poirot.
00:27:17
Speaker
which has been sort of done. That has been sort of done, because there is a Japanese anime series called The Great Detective's Marple and Poirot. And you have a teenage girl named Maybelle, and she is the daughter of Raymond West, which makes her Miss Marple's great-grand-niece. And she wants to be a detective, so she is apprenticed with her cute Poirot.
00:27:40
Speaker
and there are 39 episodes, but as far as I know, because we did not sit through all 39 episodes, we did one Poirot novel and we did one Marple novel, Poirot and Miss Marple never meet, that they know about each other through Maybelle.
00:27:59
Speaker
But I can't imagine Poirot and Ms. Marple meeting and solving crimes. I just can't. I just don't want to go there. So I don't know. Maybe if Sir Kenny is really serious about a Christie cinematic universe, then maybe he will remake a...
Story Elements & Quality
00:28:23
Speaker
He'll take a Ms. Marple novel and substitute Poirot as the detective.
00:28:30
Speaker
Depending on how you write the script that could work because one of the films that we saw it's not in this book it will be in the future one is Tommy and Tuppence
00:28:42
Speaker
a French Tommy and Tuppence in the 450 from Paddington. And it works. It works. And the reason why it works is they didn't really remake the 450 from Paddington that you've seen with Miss Marple, with Joan Hickson, and I think it was Julia McKendricks. It might be Julia McKendricks, but I'm not 100% sure. It could have been Geraldine. What they really remade was the 450 from Paddington
00:29:10
Speaker
Paddington called murder, she said, by with Margaret Rutherford and Mr. Stringer. And so you substitute Margaret Rutherford for Tuppence and Mr. Stringer for Tommy, and you get the French 450 from Paddington. So you can do this, but you have to be careful with your script.
00:29:38
Speaker
Mm hmm. And that's why fidelity to text is not necessarily important. It depends on how well they made the movie. Right. And we've talked about on previous episodes, the value in even if you're a purist and you really like those exact retellings, so to speak.
00:30:05
Speaker
You can see the value in some of these more creative adaptations because it brings new readers. It brings a new audience. It's what you said at the beginning, Teresa. It keeps Agatha Christie alive. I imagine after seeing Haunting in Venice, people are going to go out and buy a Halloween party to see what it's based on. And so there's a lot of value, even if that's not your cup of tea when things get changed up.
00:30:32
Speaker
Well, and sometimes when they change something substantially, ITV's Marple was really a risk-taking TV show. And sometimes it worked fabulously well. Miss Marple in Toward Zero actually worked surprisingly well. And Miss Marple in Ordeal by Innocence was outstanding. I really enjoyed it. It made that into even more of a Shakespearean tragedy than it already was. Gwenda got changed quite a bit in order to become Miss Marple's former
00:31:02
Speaker
housemaid and it was it was heartbreaking. There's a scene there where you see Gwenda looking at herself in her wedding veil and this is right after they've discovered that Jaco didn't do it and she's just
00:31:20
Speaker
the family turns on her, the family that she thought was welcoming her turned on her, including Leo, and it's just heartbreaking. And of the other versions I've seen of Ordeal by Innocence, you see different forms of Gwenda, but not this one.
00:31:37
Speaker
And that's why fidelity to text doesn't necessarily matter because I've also seen the Francesca Annis, James Warwick, they did, why didn't they ask Evans? And they did the secret adversary. And in both cases, they were so faithful to the text that they became stodgy and kind of dull. And you
00:32:01
Speaker
That's difficult because the Russian Roger Ackroyd was extremely faithful to the text, and yet they managed to be fascinating. It's hard. It's really hard. In the end, it matters. Did the movie work? Did it tell a good mystery? That matters more than was it perfectly faithful to the text.
00:32:25
Speaker
Teresa, you mentioned a second book. So does that mean that you are continuing in this project?
International Adaptations Project
00:32:31
Speaker
Yes. And in fact, we hope that your listeners will be able to help us with this project because we are working on the international Agatha Christie she watched. As it turns out, we have a few foreign films in Agatha she watched, but there are many, many, many more. And as Bill is able to collect them with English subtitles, we are watching them. We have
00:32:53
Speaker
Lots and lots of French. We have one Italian. We would like more of the Russian, but it doesn't look like we're going to get them. We've got the Swedish series with Sven Heyderson. I hope I'm saying his name right. We have a lot of Indian films coming up, some more Japanese. But there are so many Agatha Christie adaptations that if any of your listeners have access to them with English subtitles,
00:33:22
Speaker
we would like to know. And I think Bill sent to you for your show notes, the list of foreign films, which ones we have and which ones we don't. And if you were able to provide a DVD or a lead to watching some of the other Japanese films, which are truly stellar or some of the other Russian ones, that's amazing. What a good job the Russians do. We'll put you in the acknowledgments and we'll give you a copy of the trade paperback to express our gratitude for giving us another Agatha Christie.
00:33:49
Speaker
But it's been really amazing seeing how different they are. It's a great project and it shows how universal Agatha Christie is and at the same time how she can adapt to suit whatever the local audience wants to see. So yes, that's the project that we're in the throes of right now is the International Agatha Christie she watched.
00:34:10
Speaker
I particularly would like, if somebody can send it to us, Ms. Ma Nimesis, which is Ms. Marple in Korea. It's like a 20 episode TV series. And we would really like to see it. Well, hopefully one of our listeners will have a lead for you. That would be great.
Connect with Peschel Press
00:34:32
Speaker
So Teresa, share how our listeners can get in touch with you. We're very easy to find. If you type in Peschel Press, and I will spell P as in Papa, E, S, C as in Charlie, H as in hotel, E, L, and then press. We pop up on Facebook. We have our own website, which we update faithfully with reviews. So the reviews that I'm posting reviews now as we watch the movies.
00:35:02
Speaker
We're on Instagram. Instagram is much more up to the minute of what we're doing. We have a Facebook page and our website and our Instagram also list our various events. So we do public appearances and book festivals and so forth in the Mid-Atlantic region so somebody can come and talk to us in person.
00:35:24
Speaker
And we also have a monthly newsletter if you want to know what we're doing. And in my newsletter, I am very slowly writing direct sales for authors. So I have one half of the newsletter is devoted to what we're doing, and then one half of my newsletter every month is devoted to how you should approach the public if you would like to sell your books. So a lot of different ways to find us.
00:35:53
Speaker
That's great. We do have a podcast of our own. We have podcasted a lot of the Agatha Christie's that the films that we watched probably just over 50 of them. I think we started doing it towards the end of the project. And and then when we finished
00:36:13
Speaker
Agatha, she watched, we stopped doing the podcast, although we will still do a couple more of the films because they connected the annotated. But yes, we have discussed in detail some of the films of Agatha Christie on our own podcast. And again, if you look for Peschel Press podcasts, you'll be able to find those Agatha Christie films.
00:36:32
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Teresa. I think it was really wonderful hearing your mere encyclopedic knowledge of Agatha Christie's adaptations and her works, and it's been such a pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you. It's really been a great fun for us. I have learned so much about Agatha Christie, and no one has ever really done this.
00:36:54
Speaker
The last book that is about her movies per se was published in 1996, and it was essentially a cribbed from, it looks like it was cribbed from Variety Magazine. And Dr. Mark Aldridge has a book about the films of Agatha Christie, but I don't know that he actually sat down and watched everything. It's a very scholarly book. So this is it. If you want to learn about her films, about her film adaptations, this is it. And it was, it's been really fun, really enjoyed it.
00:37:26
Speaker
And it's been so fun talking with you today. And thank you listeners for joining us today on Clued In Mystery. I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah. And we both love mystery.
Conclusion & Podcast Credits
00:37:39
Speaker
Clued In Mystery is produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen. Music is by Shane Ivers at Silvermansound.com. Visit us online at CluedInMystery.com or social media at CluedInMystery. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, or telling your friends.