Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ep. 17: Agatha Christie, All Hail the Queen of Crime
13 Plays6 months ago
In this special episode of Adaptation: The Book to Movie Podcast, Nate and Chris take a look at the literary titan Agatha Christie, known best for writing murder mystery novels and plays like "Murder on the Orient Express," "And Then There Were None" and "Witness for the Prosecution" that have become staples in Hollywood over the last 100 years.
They also discuss why readers and cinephiles love mystery, why Agatha's legacy is important despite some problematic language, her own mysterious disappearance and what it really means to create strong female characters.
SHOW NOTE: In the episode, Chris mentions a book about sleep. This book is "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dream" by Matthew Walker.
Follow us on social media:
Nate's Letterboxd (@professor_n8)
Chris's Letterboxd (@cjanderson878)
Hosts: Nate Day, Chris Anderson
Producer: Nate Day
"Adaptation Theme"
- Written by: Chris Anderson, Jem Zornow
- Performed by: Chris Anderson, Jem Zornow, Nate Day
Recommended
Transcript
Sadie's Mochi Health Experience
00:00:00
Speaker
A Mochi Moment from Sadie, who writes, I'm not crying, you're crying.
00:00:05
Speaker
This is what I said during my first appointment with my physician at Mochi, because I didn't have to convince him I needed a GLP-1.
00:00:13
Speaker
He understood, and I felt supported, not judged.
00:00:16
Speaker
I came for the weight loss and stayed for the empathy.
00:00:19
Speaker
Thanks, Sadie.
00:00:20
Speaker
I'm Myra Ameth, founder of Mochi Health.
00:00:23
Speaker
To find your Mochi Moment, visit joinmochi.com.
00:00:27
Speaker
Sadie is a Mochi member compensated for her story.
Introduction to Agatha Christie Special
00:00:37
Speaker
Welcome to Adaptation, the Book to Movie podcast.
00:00:39
Speaker
I'm Nate.
00:00:41
Speaker
And I'm Chris.
00:00:42
Speaker
And today we have a very special episode.
00:00:44
Speaker
We're breaking form a little bit to talk about a favorite figure in both literature and film for Chris and I. Today we're discussing Agatha Christie and her massive body of work.
00:00:58
Speaker
But before we do that, Chris, how are you?
00:01:02
Speaker
I am doing good.
00:01:02
Speaker
I'm doing very... You know what?
00:01:04
Speaker
I...
00:01:05
Speaker
Not being at the school for the first time in some time, I didn't realize till I woke up this morning that it was Labor Day.
00:01:12
Speaker
Oh, really?
00:01:14
Speaker
I know.
00:01:16
Speaker
It's not very fall-ish here in Denver.
00:01:20
Speaker
It's like 85 degrees out, so it doesn't really feel like Labor Day either.
00:01:24
Speaker
But hey, I'll take it.
00:01:25
Speaker
It's a day off at work.
00:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:01:29
Speaker
No, I don't blame you.
00:01:30
Speaker
What you been up to?
00:01:31
Speaker
You been reading some books, I assume?
00:01:33
Speaker
You know what?
00:01:34
Speaker
I've been watching a lot of movies, but I have a couple of.
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:38
Speaker
Watch the A Million Ways to Die in the West last night.
00:01:42
Speaker
OK.
00:01:43
Speaker
How did you how'd you like that?
00:01:45
Speaker
I wish every movie was like that.
00:01:48
Speaker
Just slapstick nonsense.
00:01:51
Speaker
Everybody I love is in it.
00:01:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:54
Speaker
But I have read a couple of books.
00:01:56
Speaker
I actually tracked down, man, this New York City public library system.
00:02:00
Speaker
I think we talked about it last time.
00:02:02
Speaker
It has just changed the game for finding lost books for me.
00:02:07
Speaker
Really?
00:02:07
Speaker
And so the book I told you I had read last time, Fragile Threads of Power by V.E.
Chris's Library Adventures & Book Club Insights
00:02:13
Speaker
Schwab.
00:02:14
Speaker
Uh, I've been looking for a, I think they call it a graphic novel, probably more along the lines of a comic book of hers.
00:02:23
Speaker
Um, basically one of the characters that's in this much larger universe that spans a couple of her series, including the one I had just finished last time.
00:02:32
Speaker
Uh, she wanted a way to flesh out some of the characters' stories without a full book.
00:02:37
Speaker
And so she found some illustrators and made a comic about them.
00:02:41
Speaker
Wow.
00:02:42
Speaker
Simply delightful.
00:02:43
Speaker
Found that one at the library five blocks away from me.
00:02:48
Speaker
Sweet.
00:02:49
Speaker
Prince of Steel, I think.
00:02:51
Speaker
So very cool.
00:02:52
Speaker
If anyone enjoyed the recommendation from last time, that series continues to be bangers.
00:02:57
Speaker
And then my book club just did one called Everything is Tuberculosis.
00:03:02
Speaker
Have you heard of this?
00:03:03
Speaker
No, that sounds awful.
00:03:05
Speaker
No.
00:03:07
Speaker
Not far off.
00:03:08
Speaker
It's a bit of a downer.
00:03:09
Speaker
It's the gentleman who wrote, I didn't know this going into it, the author is the gentleman who wrote The Fault in Our Stars.
00:03:18
Speaker
Oh, John Green?
00:03:19
Speaker
Yep.
00:03:20
Speaker
Cool.
00:03:21
Speaker
And he just got super interested in learning about tuberculosis.
00:03:26
Speaker
So that's not a metaphor?
00:03:28
Speaker
That's really the book is about tuberculosis?
00:03:31
Speaker
Truly the whole book.
00:03:32
Speaker
Yep.
00:03:32
Speaker
Wow.
00:03:33
Speaker
Fun.
00:03:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:34
Speaker
Yes, it's an odd one.
00:03:36
Speaker
He writes in a unique and interesting way.
00:03:40
Speaker
I certainly did not dislike it.
00:03:43
Speaker
But I, you know, obviously, as far as we talk about who we would recommend stuff to a lot.
00:03:48
Speaker
How many people would I recommend go read this book about tuberculosis?
00:03:51
Speaker
I don't know.
00:03:52
Speaker
But it was interesting.
00:03:53
Speaker
And the book club hasn't discussed yet.
00:03:55
Speaker
So I'm thinking maybe the discussion will make it more interesting.
00:03:59
Speaker
I don't know.
00:04:00
Speaker
I don't know.
00:04:01
Speaker
But that's what's been on the bookshelf.
00:04:02
Speaker
What have you been watching?
Nate on Horror Films & "Thursday Murder Club" Adaptation
00:04:04
Speaker
I was finally able to catch up and watch Weapons, which is probably kind of one of the movies of the summer for a lot of people.
00:04:10
Speaker
It's a horror movie directed by Zach Kregger, written and directed by Zach Kregger.
00:04:15
Speaker
And it was pretty good.
00:04:16
Speaker
It wasn't quite as good as I was hoping for, but still mostly enjoyed it.
00:04:22
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:04:24
Speaker
Spooky and good and weird and all that stuff.
00:04:27
Speaker
I don't peg you as a big horror cat.
00:04:29
Speaker
I don't love it.
00:04:31
Speaker
I'm pretty picky about the horror stuff that I watch.
00:04:33
Speaker
But this just got such good word of mouth that I was like, well, I think I have to go see it.
00:04:39
Speaker
And then an adaptation actually just hit Netflix.
00:04:43
Speaker
I believe an adaptation of Thursday Murder Club.
00:04:46
Speaker
I was going to ask you about that.
00:04:47
Speaker
Which is actually a pretty apt movie to talk about today because it's sort of the direct descendant of Agatha Christie and they make one or two jokes about Agatha Christie in it.
00:04:58
Speaker
And yeah, it's cute.
00:04:59
Speaker
It's like four old people at an old folks home solving a murder.
00:05:03
Speaker
It's like four people.
00:05:05
Speaker
No, the four old people.
00:05:07
Speaker
Mirren and Pierce Brosnan.
00:05:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:10
Speaker
What a cat.
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:12
Speaker
We watched that three nights ago also.
00:05:14
Speaker
Oh, did you?
00:05:16
Speaker
And I just saw when I was looking up, I don't know why I was spelling something on Goodreads this morning for our chat today.
00:05:22
Speaker
And that popped up in Goodreads.
00:05:24
Speaker
And I was like, no way, this is a book.
00:05:25
Speaker
Okay, so we're gonna have to get to that.
00:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't realize it was a book either.
00:05:29
Speaker
I listened to a podcast that is co hosted, I guess, by the author.
00:05:33
Speaker
They talk about the entertainment industry.
00:05:35
Speaker
And I'm blanking his name now that the podcast is called The Rest is Entertainment.
00:05:41
Speaker
And he started talking about like how generous Netflix was to give it a tiny theatrical run in the UK because I guess it's a really popular book over there.
00:05:51
Speaker
Okay.
00:05:52
Speaker
And I was like, why are you talking like this?
00:05:54
Speaker
Like, what do you mean generous?
00:05:55
Speaker
And I looked it up and sure enough, he's the author.
00:05:59
Speaker
So I was like, oh, okay.
00:06:00
Speaker
So I'll give it a watch.
00:06:02
Speaker
They were truly generous to him.
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:06:05
Speaker
He got richer is why they're generous.
00:06:07
Speaker
Yeah, it was cute.
00:06:08
Speaker
I mean, it's not like a five-star banger or anything, but it was cute.
00:06:13
Speaker
Did you dig the movie?
00:06:14
Speaker
Was it like, is that a rewatch for you?
00:06:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:18
Speaker
I don't think I would ever watch it again of my own, like, unless we were to cover it here on the pod.
00:06:22
Speaker
But, yeah, I mean, it was fine.
00:06:24
Speaker
It was cute.
00:06:24
Speaker
It was a TV movie.
00:06:26
Speaker
It was good.
00:06:28
Speaker
I would watch that movie once a week.
00:06:30
Speaker
That was everything I want in a movie.
00:06:34
Speaker
I did think of you several times watching it.
00:06:36
Speaker
I know you're a Pierce Brosnan fan.
00:06:38
Speaker
Big Pierce Brosnan fan.
00:06:40
Speaker
As we're about to talk about, we are big fans of Whodunits and Murder Mysteries, so you did come to mind.
00:06:46
Speaker
Both you and Blair actually came to mind while I was watching that movie.
00:06:50
Speaker
Yes, apt timing.
00:06:51
Speaker
Love it.
00:06:53
Speaker
And on that note, let's talk a little bit about Murder Mysteries.
Agatha Christie's Life & Influence
00:06:58
Speaker
Indeed.
00:06:59
Speaker
So, like I said, Agatha Christie is the subject of this episode.
00:07:03
Speaker
Both her impacts on literature and film.
00:07:06
Speaker
But as usual, Chris, kick us off.
00:07:09
Speaker
Yeah, let's talk about the queen of crime.
00:07:12
Speaker
Queen of crime.
00:07:13
Speaker
Yeah, we I thought this was just incredible.
00:07:16
Speaker
So we're going to start with this because especially the authors we talk about for something to be good enough to be turned into a movie, Forrest Gump aside.
00:07:26
Speaker
Most of the authors that end up coming across our list for consideration are fairly awarded, lauded authors.
00:07:35
Speaker
So I go to look up what awards do we think Agatha Christie has won.
00:07:40
Speaker
All.
00:07:41
Speaker
Well, it was surprising because...
00:07:44
Speaker
At first, I was a little appalled at the shortness of the list.
00:07:47
Speaker
It's primarily because the awards that we've discussed for other authors didn't exist when she was writing.
00:07:53
Speaker
Sure.
00:07:54
Speaker
Right.
00:07:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:55
Speaker
She was the very first winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Masters Award.
00:08:03
Speaker
So that was 1955.
00:08:03
Speaker
Okay.
00:08:03
Speaker
And then beginning in 1988, the Agatha Awards were created.
00:08:12
Speaker
named after her.
00:08:14
Speaker
They had a series.
00:08:15
Speaker
I didn't want to go into details.
00:08:16
Speaker
They've got a few categories, some newer, some started in 88 for mystery writers for this genre.
00:08:25
Speaker
She wrote the book on mystery novels.
00:08:30
Speaker
She was not the first.
00:08:32
Speaker
I did a little bit of digging about that.
00:08:34
Speaker
A lot of people considered a...
00:08:38
Speaker
Ah, who's that ugly poet?
00:08:39
Speaker
Edgar Allan Poe.
00:08:41
Speaker
Was he ugly?
00:08:43
Speaker
Have you seen pictures?
00:08:44
Speaker
No, I'll Google it right now.
00:08:46
Speaker
He's not cute.
00:08:46
Speaker
He's a little chopped.
00:08:47
Speaker
He's a little busted.
00:08:48
Speaker
Crazy looking.
00:08:49
Speaker
Crazy looking.
00:08:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:53
Speaker
One of his is kind of considered the first earlier in the 19th century.
00:08:59
Speaker
Even there was reference to some of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works, which we have not gotten to yet.
00:09:05
Speaker
Sherlock Holmes as...
00:09:09
Speaker
inspiration for her.
00:09:11
Speaker
She had other stuff to draw upon.
00:09:13
Speaker
She was not to the genre what Ursula Le Guin was to sci-fi, right?
00:09:18
Speaker
But she in many ways... What is the right word?
00:09:22
Speaker
I don't want to say perfected, but...
00:09:27
Speaker
She made it her own, I feel comfortable saying, as a genre.
00:09:31
Speaker
Cool.
00:09:32
Speaker
She is considered the world's, and obviously lots of contention.
00:09:36
Speaker
I checked many sources, different facts from different places.
00:09:40
Speaker
She is considered the world's best-selling fiction author or novelist.
00:09:46
Speaker
Wow.
00:09:47
Speaker
With an estimated between two and four billion copies sold.
00:09:50
Speaker
Gosh.
00:09:53
Speaker
So as an author right behind Shakespeare for individual authors, and also, again, tough to, you know, confirm this definitively, but also believed to be the most translated individual author.
00:10:10
Speaker
Wow.
00:10:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely crazy, which is in part due to just the colossal number of things that she published.
00:10:17
Speaker
But we'll get to that later.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:19
Speaker
We're going to take a little bit of a departure from our usual one title, because how could you choose one of her titles to discuss?
00:10:26
Speaker
Right.
00:10:27
Speaker
But a little about her born in 1890 in Devon, England, which I think I counted correctly.
00:10:33
Speaker
That now means one third of the authors we've discussed are Brits.
00:10:38
Speaker
Does that sound correct?
00:10:41
Speaker
Crazy.
00:10:41
Speaker
I don't know how that's happened.
00:10:43
Speaker
Dame Agatha Christie.
00:10:45
Speaker
She what do they call it?
00:10:47
Speaker
A CBE.
00:10:48
Speaker
I think it's not a knighthood.
00:10:49
Speaker
Whatever.
00:10:51
Speaker
She got she got the she got the prefix from Victoria.
00:10:54
Speaker
The first, I believe, came from a fairly wealthy, you know, upper middle class
Christie's Mystery Genre Contributions
00:11:01
Speaker
home at the time was homeschooled.
00:11:04
Speaker
They were planning on moving to the U.S. And just before they left, her mother, Clara, found Ashfield, the residence that she just declared were buying this.
00:11:16
Speaker
We're purchasing this villa and moving in.
00:11:19
Speaker
And I think this is an important detail because, you know, this time, turn of the 20th century, probably 1900, right before or after, legally, a woman could not purchase property.
00:11:32
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:11:33
Speaker
At all, which obviously we don't need to discuss how crazy that is.
00:11:38
Speaker
But it shows the force, I think, the willpower of this mother that she had, Clara, right?
00:11:46
Speaker
And the role model.
00:11:47
Speaker
And she had two older siblings of a previous relationship of her father's.
00:11:53
Speaker
They were actually step-siblings, and they met and married, if I understood the crazy timeline correctly.
00:11:59
Speaker
Okay.
00:11:59
Speaker
Okay.
00:12:00
Speaker
But her father passed when she was 11.
00:12:03
Speaker
Both siblings were much older.
00:12:05
Speaker
Older brother was like in South Africa for a while.
00:12:08
Speaker
So basically spent a lot of time alone with her own imagination growing up.
00:12:12
Speaker
Sure.
00:12:13
Speaker
Okay.
00:12:14
Speaker
Um, we've, this is just a essentially context to a series of how, what, what created this beloved author, uh, as we know her.
00:12:23
Speaker
Right.
00:12:23
Speaker
Right.
00:12:24
Speaker
Right.
00:12:25
Speaker
Uh, wrote a number of stories that were continuously rejected.
00:12:29
Speaker
Uh, her mother, I didn't write his name down, but they had a neighbor who was a published author.
00:12:33
Speaker
She suggested going and showing him some of her work kind of told her, everyone kept kind of telling her, keep writing.
00:12:41
Speaker
This was very curious.
00:12:42
Speaker
She even tried writing a few under different pen names to submit, which I believe she did still have a few published later that are kind of reallocated to her posthumously.
00:12:55
Speaker
One of her pseudonames was Mac Miller.
00:12:58
Speaker
What?
00:12:59
Speaker
What the hell?
00:13:00
Speaker
Is that his real name?
00:13:01
Speaker
No, his name is like something McCormick.
00:13:04
Speaker
Oh.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yeah, I was really going down the rabbit hole trying to figure out if he had any inkling.
00:13:09
Speaker
Because that wasn't... Mac Miller isn't even the name he released his first mixed tape under.
00:13:14
Speaker
So as far as I could find, no connection.
00:13:16
Speaker
That's funny.
00:13:17
Speaker
That's like Anne Hathaway.
00:13:18
Speaker
Shakespeare's wife was named Anne Hathaway.
00:13:20
Speaker
Is she named after Shakespeare's wife?
00:13:23
Speaker
I don't believe so, no.
00:13:24
Speaker
Man, we've got some mysteries to unravel.
00:13:26
Speaker
Okay.
00:13:27
Speaker
Well, I just kept running into stuff like this.
00:13:30
Speaker
It's great.
00:13:31
Speaker
The moral of the story, TLDR, if everyone only listens to this one clip, this woman led a fascinating life.
00:13:37
Speaker
Cool.
00:13:38
Speaker
And much of her writing truly reflects it.
00:13:42
Speaker
A lot of her true experiences, I mean, obviously didn't witness, you know, however many murders, a hundred plus murder plots require.
00:13:51
Speaker
But crazy life.
00:13:53
Speaker
Her and her mother went and lived.
00:13:54
Speaker
That would be a bad thing.
00:13:56
Speaker
As I said it, I was like, well, maybe she did.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yet another rabbit hole we won't pursue just yet.
00:14:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:03
Speaker
Her and her mother lived in Cairo for a number of months, obviously.
00:14:07
Speaker
What is it?
00:14:07
Speaker
Death on the Nile was one of the recent ones.
00:14:14
Speaker
This is so crazy.
00:14:16
Speaker
So she met her first husband.
00:14:18
Speaker
They were together for some amount of time.
00:14:20
Speaker
He told her he was leaving her.
00:14:21
Speaker
He had fallen in love with another woman.
00:14:23
Speaker
And she straight up disappeared for about 10 days.
00:14:26
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:14:29
Speaker
And it has never been confirmed exactly what happened.
00:14:33
Speaker
What?
00:14:34
Speaker
They had airplanes out searching.
00:14:37
Speaker
I think I think I was finding numbers like 15000 volunteers looking for her.
00:14:42
Speaker
She was already this beloved public figure and crops up at this hotel like 180 miles north of where they lived.
00:14:50
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:14:52
Speaker
And she went on vacation.
00:14:53
Speaker
I have no idea what happened.
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:55
Speaker
For 10 days.
00:14:56
Speaker
She doesn't know.
00:14:57
Speaker
Or she said she doesn't know.
00:14:58
Speaker
Well, that's what she said.
00:14:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:00
Speaker
And some people have suggested it was like a fugue state and emotional break from being told she was being divorced.
00:15:07
Speaker
Some suggested it was a PR stunt.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:10
Speaker
Some even have gone as far as to say she was framing her husband for her murder.
00:15:15
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:15:15
Speaker
Like Gone Girl.
00:15:17
Speaker
Right?
00:15:17
Speaker
But this doesn't just happen to people.
00:15:19
Speaker
You don't just disappear for 10 days as a beloved author and then 100 years after people still don't know.
00:15:26
Speaker
Right?
00:15:26
Speaker
That's pretty cool.
00:15:27
Speaker
Like, of course, this is the queen of murder mysteries.
00:15:30
Speaker
Right.
00:15:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:33
Speaker
Yeah, nobody knows.
00:15:35
Speaker
After, so she was a volunteer nurse in World War I and after went on a tour, which such a crazy name, 1922, went on a tour of the world, essentially promoting the British Empire as like...
00:15:48
Speaker
Hey, we're not that bad.
00:15:52
Speaker
Interesting.
00:15:53
Speaker
And went and did, what did they call it?
00:15:56
Speaker
It was like kneeling surfing in South Africa.
00:15:59
Speaker
And then when they get to Hawaii, went and did full standing up surfing.
00:16:04
Speaker
And she's believed to be in a group of the first Brits ever to surf standing up.
00:16:10
Speaker
What?
00:16:11
Speaker
Are you talking about actual surfing?
00:16:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:13
Speaker
Like in the ocean?
00:16:15
Speaker
In 1922 in Hawaii, Agatha Christie, right?
00:16:18
Speaker
Hell yeah.
00:16:19
Speaker
What a life!
00:16:20
Speaker
I want to read that murder mystery.
00:16:23
Speaker
And it's got to be in one of them, right?
00:16:25
Speaker
She has so many stories.
00:16:26
Speaker
I just, it makes me want to read one once a week for the next three years and get caught up.
00:16:30
Speaker
Yeah, do it.
00:16:32
Speaker
But let's talk about her writing.
00:16:33
Speaker
Absolutely incredible.
00:16:35
Speaker
Again, we'll look into, I certainly do not want to spoil any because I think that's the cool part of these books, right?
00:16:42
Speaker
The big reveal uncovering at the end.
00:16:46
Speaker
Um, the core of her work, which she is most known for, again, we had to give a few qualifiers to be bestselling ever as a fiction individual novelist, right?
00:16:58
Speaker
The core of her work is 66 detective, well, not all detective novels, 66 novels and 14 more collections of short stories.
00:17:09
Speaker
Okay.
00:17:10
Speaker
I've actually read what was her 80th book, which was published in 1970 for her 80th birthday, Passenger to Frankfurt.
00:17:21
Speaker
Not a detective story.
00:17:23
Speaker
It's like a spy thriller.
00:17:25
Speaker
Okay, cool.
00:17:27
Speaker
and has not necessarily been received super well, but she wanted to publish her 80th book on her 80th birthday.
00:17:33
Speaker
This also includes, or this does not include other things she wrote, such as plays, one of the most famous being The Mousetrap.
00:17:42
Speaker
Are you familiar?
00:17:43
Speaker
Have you heard of this?
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:45
Speaker
I had not heard, I mean, you know I'm not super familiar with theater.
00:17:48
Speaker
It's like the longest running, yeah, sorry, go ahead.
00:17:50
Speaker
That's what you're going to say.
00:17:50
Speaker
Yes, no, that's exactly it.
00:17:52
Speaker
No, that's exactly it.
00:17:53
Speaker
And so you knew that before.
00:17:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:17:55
Speaker
And I feel like I've heard that.
00:17:57
Speaker
I think I had it in the back of my head or something.
00:17:58
Speaker
I believe they've started it up again since COVID.
00:18:01
Speaker
COVID did stop it in 2020.
00:18:03
Speaker
But up to that point, it had run continuously from 1952 until 2020.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:10
Speaker
And this is actually, I called her the Queen of Crime.
00:18:13
Speaker
That is a moniker that was given her and her estate has since trademarked.
00:18:18
Speaker
Oh, cool.
00:18:18
Speaker
Good.
00:18:19
Speaker
A little bit about the writing, and this is something I want to save for a discussion later, but she's been accused essentially of having a bit of a formulaic approach.
00:18:29
Speaker
Sure.
00:18:30
Speaker
The suggestion being essentially you can read an Agatha Christie novel, get through the, you know, presentation of red herrings and smoking guns abounding, and think to yourself, who was the least likely to commit the murder?
00:18:46
Speaker
Okay, that's going to turn out that's who did it.
00:18:49
Speaker
Obviously, this was not always the case.
00:18:51
Speaker
Famously, it seems that she essentially approached and then there were none.
00:18:58
Speaker
Probably her most famous individual piece.
00:19:01
Speaker
Probably.
00:19:02
Speaker
As a challenge to herself to not do that.
00:19:06
Speaker
But there was another British author.
00:19:08
Speaker
I didn't write his name down.
00:19:09
Speaker
Who in an interview said that Christie told him she writes the entire book up to the last chapter.
00:19:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:18
Speaker
decides herself who the least likely killer would be and then goes back and makes the necessary changes to the timeline and to the structure to frame that character for the murder essentially that makes sense because they're so bread crummy you know well and i think that's the brilliance right totally yeah like even if this was 100 every single book was like this i'm not mad at it yeah no
00:19:45
Speaker
Because it's so fun.
00:19:46
Speaker
The whole.
00:19:47
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:19:47
Speaker
Exactly.
00:19:48
Speaker
And the whole time you're thinking to yourself like, I don't know.
00:19:51
Speaker
Right.
00:19:52
Speaker
Right.
00:19:53
Speaker
The bulk of this work is focused almost entirely around her two most famous characters, Hercule Perot and Miss Marple.
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:03
Speaker
She did have a number.
00:20:05
Speaker
OK.
00:20:05
Speaker
Another mystery for us to solve.
00:20:07
Speaker
OK.
00:20:08
Speaker
She had a number of investigators in her short stories, including a Harley Quinn.
00:20:16
Speaker
Oh, like the superhero or whatever?
00:20:20
Speaker
Uh-huh.
00:20:21
Speaker
Uh-huh.
00:20:22
Speaker
I don't.
00:20:22
Speaker
Well, I wasn't a Batman guy, so I had to do some digging on this.
00:20:25
Speaker
So Agatha Christie's Harley Quinn was included in a series of short stories published in 1920.
00:20:32
Speaker
I could not find any evidence that Paul Dini, Paul Dini, are you very familiar with the 90s Batman cartoon?
00:20:41
Speaker
No.
00:20:42
Speaker
Okay, this was the writer of that who wrote in their Harley Quinn character for the first time in an episode in 1992.
00:20:50
Speaker
Okay.
00:20:54
Speaker
And I could find no suggestion that he was ripping off this character, taking any, had any, even inkling that one existed 60, nope, 20, 90, 72 years earlier.
00:21:08
Speaker
Wow.
00:21:08
Speaker
Weird.
00:21:09
Speaker
What is this lady's deal?
00:21:11
Speaker
Is she like a time traveler and- Right?
00:21:14
Speaker
Like is still alive somewhere?
00:21:16
Speaker
This is like nearly Simpsons-esque, right?
00:21:19
Speaker
Yeah, it kind of is.
00:21:19
Speaker
In the lore of predictions.
00:21:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:24
Speaker
Now, we have discussed this numerous times.
00:21:27
Speaker
I laughed out loud when I read one of her quotes about it.
00:21:30
Speaker
So 33 of the novels, again, a tremendous amount of writing.
00:21:35
Speaker
That's so many.
00:21:37
Speaker
It's so many.
00:21:38
Speaker
And it's less than half of her total.
00:21:40
Speaker
But 33 involve Perot, based on the Belgian soldiers that she helped care for in the hospital during World War I. Loosely, of course.
00:21:51
Speaker
Interesting.
00:21:52
Speaker
Okay.
00:21:52
Speaker
Interesting.
00:21:53
Speaker
But she got sick of him.
00:21:55
Speaker
That's why she moved on and started writing Miss Marple and other characters.
00:22:00
Speaker
Going as far as talking about what essentially what a prick he was and that she was sick of talking about him.
00:22:09
Speaker
And I'm like, you created him.
00:22:11
Speaker
I am so tired of authors talking about these characters like they have this free will that they could not control.
00:22:19
Speaker
Right, right.
00:22:21
Speaker
So just so funny that that once again popped up.
00:22:25
Speaker
I'll give you a brief, brief description.
00:22:29
Speaker
Honestly, we're not even going to talk about plot.
00:22:30
Speaker
You need people need to go read them for themselves.
00:22:33
Speaker
Her books that I've read, The Mysterious Affair at Stiles, once again, mirroring her own life.
00:22:39
Speaker
Stiles is what the name her and her first husband gave the first home they lived in.
00:22:47
Speaker
Because British people love naming mansions.
00:22:50
Speaker
I don't know what the deal is there.
00:22:52
Speaker
I think rich people love naming mansions.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, that actually makes more sense.
00:22:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:22:56
Speaker
Okay.
00:22:57
Speaker
So that was published in 1920.
00:22:59
Speaker
Very early work.
00:23:01
Speaker
Murder on the Orient Express, published in 34.
00:23:03
Speaker
Again...
00:23:06
Speaker
At least somewhat, we are led to believe, inspired by a trip she took on the Orient Express.
00:23:12
Speaker
Went and spent a long time out in fairly exotic places for early 20th century Brits.
00:23:18
Speaker
Sure.
00:23:19
Speaker
Passenger from Frankfurt.
00:23:21
Speaker
I'm missing one here.
00:23:22
Speaker
Murder on the... Oh, and then there were none.
00:23:24
Speaker
Published in 1939.
00:23:26
Speaker
Massive, massive.
00:23:28
Speaker
It is in the top seven selling individual books ever.
00:23:34
Speaker
Wow, that's crazy.
00:23:35
Speaker
Right next to The Hobbit, which we've already discussed.
00:23:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:40
Speaker
Was also in that top list.
00:23:42
Speaker
Strange number of Brits in that list.
00:23:44
Speaker
Well, we're talking fiction novels.
00:23:47
Speaker
Okay, got it.
00:23:47
Speaker
But again, all of these numbers are such estimates, right?
00:23:51
Speaker
Every single list has asterisks everywhere going.
00:23:53
Speaker
We don't really know.
00:23:55
Speaker
But pretty, pretty undisputed as her bestseller.
00:24:01
Speaker
And that one had a different title when it was published first, correct?
00:24:06
Speaker
Yes.
00:24:06
Speaker
Did we want to get into that?
00:24:08
Speaker
I mean, I think if we're going to look at her cultural impact, it's important just to note that it was changed.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yes.
00:24:17
Speaker
So and then there were none are the last five words.
00:24:22
Speaker
I think it's the last five words of the book entirely when first published in 39.
00:24:27
Speaker
And actually, disturbingly, the name was left as is in England until like 84.
00:24:34
Speaker
It was still being sold under the name Ten Little N Words.
00:24:39
Speaker
Not the crazy, absolutely insane racial slur that it sounds like it is.
00:24:45
Speaker
It was the name of a song that is referenced throughout the book.
00:24:50
Speaker
And was a folk, a 19th century folk tune of the time.
00:24:54
Speaker
Still obviously abhorrent.
00:24:56
Speaker
It was changed...
00:24:58
Speaker
I think it was initially for being published in the U.S. changed to 10 Little Indians.
00:25:05
Speaker
And then I believe it is uniformly sold now under the name we know it as.
00:25:10
Speaker
And then there were none.
00:25:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:11
Speaker
Right.
00:25:14
Speaker
Yes, problems, problems abounding along those lines within her writing.
00:25:19
Speaker
And I this one especially I have trouble with because we're talking about a woman who was born 135 years ago.
00:25:27
Speaker
Right.
00:25:30
Speaker
And so there's like on one hand, they had to make a series of edits for books to be okay in other countries due to racial stereotyping that she indulged in.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:45
Speaker
I don't know which books in particular or to what extent.
00:25:49
Speaker
But yes, I think that's probably the most egregious one I saw.
00:25:54
Speaker
But you're correct.
00:25:55
Speaker
A lot of her books, especially it was interesting because to my understanding,
00:26:01
Speaker
Early to mid 20th century, America was in no way less racist.
00:26:08
Speaker
Right.
00:26:09
Speaker
Than England, you know.
00:26:11
Speaker
And so I was surprised to see a lot of these changes came about in order for already published works in England to be sold in the U.S. Yeah.
00:26:21
Speaker
That is kind of weird.
00:26:23
Speaker
Right.
00:26:23
Speaker
I was like, I don't know.
00:26:25
Speaker
It seemed like you guys were cool with that then, too.
00:26:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:29
Speaker
But I don't, trying to appeal to a broader audience, something along those lines.
00:26:33
Speaker
I guess.
00:26:34
Speaker
But yeah, you're correct.
00:26:36
Speaker
A big social impact was...
00:26:40
Speaker
Okay, so you're going to change our paradigm by discussing these heroines, these strong female characters, but also be exactly as racist and stereotyping as every male author of your time.
00:26:59
Speaker
Yep.
00:26:59
Speaker
So that's what I've got about the books.
00:27:01
Speaker
You want to tell me about, first of all, do you have a clear number of how many of these have been adapted?
00:27:07
Speaker
Sort of.
00:27:09
Speaker
Let's take a quick break and hopefully our hosting server will actually put our ad in here and we'll be right back to talk about the movie side.
Film & TV Adaptations of Christie's Work
00:27:22
Speaker
All right, welcome back to Adaptation, the Book to Movie podcast.
00:27:25
Speaker
We're talking Agatha Christie.
00:27:27
Speaker
We're moving on to the movies.
00:27:29
Speaker
She is, as far as I can tell, one of the most adapted authors in Hollywood history.
00:27:35
Speaker
I believe she is the second most Shakespeare being the only one to beat her out.
00:27:41
Speaker
There are 191 film and television adaptations of her work so far.
00:27:47
Speaker
Goodness gracious.
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:49
Speaker
And that includes television shows.
00:27:52
Speaker
There was a pretty famous show in the UK that adapted every Poirot book.
00:27:56
Speaker
So things like that, like that contributes to that 191 adaptations.
00:28:01
Speaker
But beyond film and television, her work has been adapted to the stage many times, like The Mousetrap.
00:28:07
Speaker
Radio dramas and podcast series have been a big deal.
00:28:10
Speaker
There's a Poirot video game, I guess.
00:28:14
Speaker
Heck yeah.
00:28:15
Speaker
And like you said, there was a lot of translation of her work.
00:28:18
Speaker
A lot of these 191 movies are in other languages and were made in countries that are not the US or the UK.
00:28:26
Speaker
Very cool.
00:28:27
Speaker
Yeah, very cool.
00:28:28
Speaker
So she's just beloved everywhere.
00:28:29
Speaker
Her movies are known for sort of their range, being able to net...
00:28:34
Speaker
family friendly audiences.
00:28:36
Speaker
Some of them are darker and a little bit more intense adult dramas.
00:28:40
Speaker
And those are the ones that tend to also get awards and award nominations.
00:28:45
Speaker
And then obviously the reason that these are so popular as books and movies is because they're really great examples, I guess, of escapism, right?
00:28:54
Speaker
She can create these lavish worlds in a different period that transports you somewhere else.
00:28:58
Speaker
And because they're formulaic to some degree, there's a lot of room for reinterpretation and people like to sort of take a crack at it and put their own spin on it when they adapt it like throughout history.
00:29:10
Speaker
Interesting.
00:29:11
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:11
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:12
Speaker
So like the, this is the, which one does which the directors kind of getting to put their fingerprints on it?
00:29:19
Speaker
Directors and writers.
00:29:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:21
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:22
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:23
Speaker
For example, the most recent sort of major adaptations have been the Kenneth Branagh trilogy.
00:29:29
Speaker
And the third film in that trilogy, A Haunting in Venice is very, very loosely based on one of the novels called Halloween Party.
00:29:36
Speaker
And he takes a lot of creative liberties with it and makes it a story that's
00:29:39
Speaker
Very different than one that's presented in the book.
00:29:42
Speaker
But he uses it as sort of the skeleton to tell this really interesting story.
00:29:46
Speaker
Okay, okay.
00:29:47
Speaker
That's still Perot, yeah?
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:49
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:29:50
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:50
Speaker
These are very popular movies and shows to produce as well.
00:29:53
Speaker
They're usually fairly cheap to make because a lot of them are about people stuck in one location.
00:29:58
Speaker
Like Murder on the Orient Express, they only had to create a handful of train cars.
00:30:03
Speaker
And that's a lot cheaper than...
00:30:05
Speaker
Or, you know, Death on the Nile, the new one is shot on a boat in front of a green screen for the most part.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah, so they're pretty cheap to make.
00:30:12
Speaker
And a classic whodunit is just a marketing slam dunk.
00:30:15
Speaker
Everybody wants, like, just that question, whodunit, everybody wants to know whodunit.
00:30:21
Speaker
So usually they make money too at the box office.
00:30:24
Speaker
So very popular fare in Hollywood.
00:30:27
Speaker
I want to go through the highlight reel of her adaptations because I simply can't go through every one that's been adapted.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yep, seems fair.
00:30:34
Speaker
The first adaptation came in 1928.
00:30:36
Speaker
It was a silent film called The Passing of Mr. Quinn based on a short story.
00:30:40
Speaker
I believe the name of the story is similar.
00:30:44
Speaker
Directed and written by Leslie S. Hiscott?
00:30:47
Speaker
Hiscott?
00:30:48
Speaker
I think is how you say it.
00:30:50
Speaker
I don't know.
00:30:51
Speaker
1931 Alibi, also helmed by Hiscott, which I think is kind of interesting that there sort of immediately was a go to interpreter for this work.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:59
Speaker
And it was the first film to feature Poirot.
00:31:02
Speaker
And it is an adaptation of the murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is an extremely famous book because of its use of unreliable narrators.
00:31:10
Speaker
Yeah, I saw a lot of commentary about the murder of Roger Ackroyd.
00:31:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's probably within her top
00:31:16
Speaker
five or so most famous novels because of the unreliable narrator.
00:31:20
Speaker
It sort of, from what I can tell, it sort of rocked people's shit a little bit.
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:31:25
Speaker
And then we had, in 1945, we got And Then There Were None, which was considered now to be an essential mystery film.
00:31:33
Speaker
They changed the ending of the film to make it a little bit more commercial and palatable.
00:31:37
Speaker
What the heck?
00:31:39
Speaker
And it is pretty disappointing.
00:31:41
Speaker
And I've read the Wikipedia synopsis of the book, and the ending of the book is better.
00:31:46
Speaker
And it really takes the wind out of the sails of the movie at the end.
00:31:49
Speaker
But otherwise, it's still a really great, interesting film, kind of an interesting, it's not a detective story, right?
00:31:55
Speaker
But it is still kind of ruden.
00:31:56
Speaker
Right, right.
00:31:57
Speaker
That's why a lot of people considered it her response to, oh, you write formulaic investigator novels.
00:32:03
Speaker
And she said, hold my beer.
00:32:05
Speaker
No, I don't.
00:32:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:06
Speaker
Hold my beer.
00:32:08
Speaker
Next major adaptation was Witness for the Prosecution, which was released in 1957.
00:32:14
Speaker
That one is also a departure from the investigator for the most part.
00:32:19
Speaker
It's a courtroom drama, and it's a legal thriller that's really known for having all of these big twists.
00:32:26
Speaker
Really great movie, directed by Billy Wilder, nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture.
00:32:31
Speaker
I believe it's the first Christie adaptation to receive Oscar nominations.
00:32:35
Speaker
Oh my goodness, straight from zero to six, huh?
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah, I guess so.
00:32:38
Speaker
But Witness for the Prosecution is also known as like a sort of essential film.
00:32:43
Speaker
If you're a cinephile, you've seen and probably loved this movie.
00:32:48
Speaker
Next in 1961, we got a Miss Marple quadrilogy.
00:32:51
Speaker
Well, we didn't get all four movies in 61.
00:32:55
Speaker
the first movie, Murder, She Said, came in 61, and that was starring Margaret Rutherford.
00:33:01
Speaker
There's only been a handful of stories about Miss Marple adapted to the screen,
00:33:05
Speaker
It's mostly Poirot stuff.
00:33:07
Speaker
And most of the Marple stuff, unfortunately, isn't all that great.
00:33:11
Speaker
Okay.
00:33:12
Speaker
So it's interesting from my perspective when you mentioned strong female characters because most of the adaptations have focused on men.
00:33:21
Speaker
1989 was when that television show that I mentioned started, adapted every Poirot novel and short, and it ran for 70 episodes and
00:33:30
Speaker
And ran from 89 until 2014.
00:33:32
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:33:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:35
Speaker
So big deal and super popular in the UK.
00:33:40
Speaker
1974, which is actually before 89.
00:33:42
Speaker
So my timeline is messed up here.
00:33:47
Speaker
But we get Murder on the Orient Express, considered one of the preeminent murder mystery films probably ever.
00:33:54
Speaker
And that also launched a six film franchise that started theatrical, dipped into television movies, and then I think came back with a theatrical film, but it was pretty bad and that killed that franchise.
00:34:07
Speaker
Wait, all based on just the one book?
00:34:10
Speaker
No, no, no, no, no.
00:34:11
Speaker
That was the beginning of a franchise following Perot.
00:34:15
Speaker
So it was Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, Murder Under the Sun, and then they became TV movies.
00:34:21
Speaker
And then
00:34:22
Speaker
appointment with death came back to theaters, I believe.
00:34:25
Speaker
Then starting in 2017, we got the Branagh trilogy.
00:34:28
Speaker
Kenneth Branagh writes, directs, and stars as Hercule Poirot.
00:34:32
Speaker
He does Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and Haunting in Venice.
00:34:36
Speaker
Did you say he's the one that plays Poirot?
00:34:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:39
Speaker
Oh my gosh, I had no idea.
00:34:40
Speaker
And he wrote and directed them?
00:34:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:43
Speaker
He is so brilliant.
00:34:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:45
Speaker
And I think it's an interesting project for him, too, because he's done a lot of Shakespeare adaptations.
00:34:51
Speaker
So it's just very interesting that he's such a strong interpreter of these historic... Brits.
00:34:57
Speaker
Writers.
00:34:57
Speaker
Yeah, Brits.
00:34:58
Speaker
And then, of course, there's been a lot of television adaptations recently, mostly on British streaming services.
00:35:03
Speaker
The most recent one in 2023 was a miniseries based on the novel Towards Zero.
00:35:08
Speaker
Okay.
00:35:08
Speaker
And they're really small.
00:35:09
Speaker
They're like two or three episodes of pop.
00:35:11
Speaker
But they're super popular over there right now.
00:35:14
Speaker
So it's almost like, did you ever watch the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes series?
00:35:20
Speaker
I don't think I have seen it yet.
00:35:22
Speaker
No.
00:35:23
Speaker
First of all, watch it.
00:35:24
Speaker
They're fantastic.
00:35:25
Speaker
Really, really cool.
00:35:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:26
Speaker
But each season is like three episodes.
00:35:30
Speaker
It's like nine episodes total.
00:35:32
Speaker
And each episode is essentially an entire story.
00:35:35
Speaker
Oh, cool.
00:35:35
Speaker
Okay.
00:35:36
Speaker
When we were preparing for this episode, you asked if I would create two lists, one being an exhaustive list of everything that has been adapted.
00:35:45
Speaker
It's too many.
00:35:45
Speaker
So I did not do that.
00:35:48
Speaker
What I will give you is I believe that there are only four stories that have not been adapted in some form, film or television, in some language somewhere.
00:35:58
Speaker
Those four that have not been adapted are Destination Unknown, Passenger to Frankfurt, Post-Turn of Fate, and Death Comes as the End.
00:36:07
Speaker
Really interesting to me that she wrote all these books and every single one has been in some form adapted.
00:36:13
Speaker
That's crazy.
00:36:14
Speaker
Yeah, the second list that you asked me to make was ones that were easily accessible on streaming.
00:36:20
Speaker
Also didn't do that because there's too many.
00:36:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:23
Speaker
I just got lost.
00:36:24
Speaker
I was like on my computer and on my phone and on my other phone and I just couldn't fucking do it.
00:36:31
Speaker
So sorry.
00:36:32
Speaker
But most of the titles that I listed above or earlier in the highlight reel of her cinematic career are streamable for little or no money.
00:36:42
Speaker
I believe that illustrates the exact same point.
00:36:45
Speaker
You did your part.
00:36:46
Speaker
Yeah, I did want to shout out, there's a streaming service called Canopy that is totally free.
00:36:51
Speaker
You can access it with a library card.
00:36:53
Speaker
That's Canopy with a K. And totally free, not even ad supported or anything.
00:36:59
Speaker
And they had a lot of these movies on there.
00:37:01
Speaker
So if you're not using Canopy, you should be.
00:37:04
Speaker
And also you support your local library.
00:37:07
Speaker
So we love the local libraries.
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:10
Speaker
And these movies, rewatchability is just off the charts.
00:37:13
Speaker
That's the other thing.
00:37:14
Speaker
Like these movies are very popular on streaming as well.
00:37:17
Speaker
Like people, a lot of people love to throw these on all the time.
00:37:20
Speaker
And it,
00:37:20
Speaker
I don't know exactly why.
00:37:21
Speaker
I don't know if it's because we like it when the good guy wins or because most of them are ensemble dramas, which gives us a lot to sort of chew on.
00:37:32
Speaker
Like I said earlier, they're bread crummy.
00:37:34
Speaker
So we like to go back and try and catch all these little things that we may have missed or pick up on other things.
00:37:40
Speaker
And I think truthfully, these movies are popular because we have this
00:37:45
Speaker
As humans, we have this morbid interest in the unknowable.
00:37:48
Speaker
And so a lot of times we're living, it doesn't feel quite as campy and fun, but we are living through mysteries a lot of the time.
00:37:55
Speaker
And I think that these are satisfying stories because they end with justice, you know?
00:38:01
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:38:03
Speaker
Kind of interesting.
00:38:04
Speaker
Huh.
00:38:05
Speaker
Why do we love mystery?
00:38:06
Speaker
What's your take on that?
00:38:08
Speaker
Yeah, why are they everywhere?
00:38:10
Speaker
I think the breadcrummy part that you said, you know, that sticks out to me.
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:16
Speaker
Every single one of these I find myself, any detail introduced, I'm just going, huh, why?
00:38:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:23
Speaker
Why is that there?
00:38:24
Speaker
Just Chekhov's guns abounding, right?
00:38:26
Speaker
Yeah, really.
00:38:27
Speaker
I think there is, especially watching movies with, well, you and Blair and I have watched many movies together.
00:38:33
Speaker
You know she's not a sit silently and watch.
00:38:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:36
Speaker
So the discussability mid-movie.
00:38:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:41
Speaker
Who do you who do you think, you know, get your guesses in now?
00:38:44
Speaker
Yeah, I do think the you just said something that I had not thought about before.
00:38:50
Speaker
It's a way to access something that's truly macabre and morbid and, you know, quite devastating on a real life basis.
00:39:00
Speaker
I mean, a human death.
00:39:01
Speaker
Right.
00:39:02
Speaker
But a harmless mystery novel.
00:39:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:05
Speaker
We can, you know, explore without, you know, a real person didn't get hurt.
00:39:10
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:39:11
Speaker
This isn't the story of who killed JFK.
00:39:13
Speaker
Right.
00:39:14
Speaker
You know?
00:39:15
Speaker
Well, we watched The Residence.
00:39:17
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:39:18
Speaker
So we watched The Residence.
00:39:20
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:39:20
Speaker
Actually, the first reference I ever heard to Miss Marple, which is insane.
00:39:25
Speaker
But watched The Residence, story about a murder.
00:39:28
Speaker
Watched Thursday Murder Club yesterday, obviously all about murders.
00:39:33
Speaker
In the middle, watch the documentary about a real life serial killer and his wife in England.
00:39:40
Speaker
Totally different vibe.
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:42
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:39:42
Speaker
One is grim and horrible and terrifying.
00:39:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:47
Speaker
But people love true crime and crime in general have always just been popular.
00:39:52
Speaker
And especially now with
00:39:53
Speaker
the internet and social media and streaming true crime is just like that's the name of the game that's always netflix's strongest content uh-huh and um i think that ties in to this really well because i think we're accessing the same curiosities when we're consuming these whodunits and and these true crime fill in the blank tv shows documentaries podcasts true crime podcasts were really big for a long time maybe modern mystery is the true successor to the roman empire
00:40:23
Speaker
Maybe.
00:40:24
Speaker
They had their gladiatorial games and public executions because no one had BritBox yet.
00:40:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:32
Speaker
Now we can just watch Helen Mirren talk about they had their gladiatorial games and public executions because no one had BritBox yet.
00:40:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:43
Speaker
Now we can just watch Helen Mirren talk about
00:40:47
Speaker
A fake murder.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:49
Speaker
Scratch that same itch, but no one's actually dead.
00:40:53
Speaker
Right.
00:40:54
Speaker
Man, interesting.
00:40:55
Speaker
It feels, it feels, um, it feels macabre even to talk about.
00:40:58
Speaker
Why do we like hearing about murder so much?
00:41:01
Speaker
I know.
00:41:02
Speaker
Kind of weird.
00:41:02
Speaker
There was this excellent book.
00:41:05
Speaker
Remind me and I'll find it in Goodreads.
00:41:06
Speaker
We'll put it in the show notes about sleep.
00:41:09
Speaker
You know, the constant question, why do we sleep?
00:41:10
Speaker
Um,
00:41:11
Speaker
And it's been posited by researchers that your dreams or perhaps nightmares are a safe place for your psyche to process situations that you could not handle, could not delve into while you were conscious, while you were awake, without it doing serious harm.
00:41:36
Speaker
So while you're asleep is a time when you are...
00:41:40
Speaker
ostensibly in a safe place, you are sleeping somewhere, and your brain can finally process those things.
00:41:46
Speaker
This feels like the same thing.
00:41:49
Speaker
Again, as you said, yes, star-studded cast, all these beautiful people in cool, beautiful places.
00:41:55
Speaker
Now let's talk about this...
00:41:58
Speaker
If it were a daily occurrence, horrendous, well, it is a daily occurrence, but this horrendous thing that hopefully none of us are genuinely witnessing and dealing with in person.
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah, especially, too, I think the other thing that's fascinating is that, you know, at least here in America, most murders are done by somebody you know.
00:42:15
Speaker
Like, there is no whodunit element, you know, usually, like, there's not, like, an investment, like, who killed him?
00:42:21
Speaker
Nobody knows.
00:42:22
Speaker
And there's clues pointing at six different people.
00:42:24
Speaker
It's usually, like, the husband.
00:42:26
Speaker
You know, yeah.
00:42:29
Speaker
So it's almost even more morbid to have this like long and drawn out investigation and not have answers.
00:42:37
Speaker
But also more fanciful in Orient Express.
00:42:40
Speaker
And well, no, still not spoilers.
00:42:42
Speaker
But the oh, my gosh, one brilliant clue after another that makes you think.
00:42:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:48
Speaker
Well, look at the initials that are monogrammed.
00:42:51
Speaker
Oh, wait, that duchess is Russian.
00:42:54
Speaker
Her initials in Cyrillic would also match because the H in the Roman alphabet is pronounced eh.
00:43:01
Speaker
Brilliant.
00:43:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:02
Speaker
So tell me a little bit about, you've mentioned strong female characters and I know obviously we've mentioned Miss Marple.
00:43:10
Speaker
I just, I want to get a little more information on that because that just, it surprises me as somebody who's really only, I think I've read Orient Express, but as somebody who's really only watched Agatha Christie movies, that's not something that I would attribute to her.
Christie's Female Characters & Feminist Perspective
00:43:24
Speaker
So that's actually very interesting.
00:43:27
Speaker
It was a sort of commentary that I read and thought, what?
00:43:32
Speaker
I never got that vibe.
00:43:33
Speaker
Her what she's arguably most famous for is this silly Belgian police officer that takes 45 minutes to do his mustache.
00:43:45
Speaker
Yeah, a male.
00:43:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:47
Speaker
And then I went back and I think and this also surprised me.
00:43:51
Speaker
And who knows, I could be wrong.
00:43:53
Speaker
I think I actually do have a satisfying answer for you on this.
00:43:56
Speaker
Okay.
00:44:18
Speaker
And succeeded brilliantly.
00:44:21
Speaker
And I think her paradigm with growing up with this strong figure as a mother, being left by her first husband, having a lot of people close in age, being young and having to, you know, really entertain herself.
00:44:39
Speaker
persevere in her writing as all of these initial works are not being published and then that turns rapidly very rapidly I mean 24 they they turned that first adaptation into a movie four years after she published it as you said a hundred years ago she was being continuously turned into movies as she wrote and published books for another five decades yeah
00:45:08
Speaker
I think her paradigm was this is just how women are.
00:45:15
Speaker
I don't think she was trying to be this feminist icon.
00:45:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:19
Speaker
I think she saw the world as it really is, which is who who cares what their gender is.
00:45:25
Speaker
Are they doing cool things?
00:45:27
Speaker
Right.
00:45:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:28
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:45:29
Speaker
Because I could find no evidence that her goal was fill this void, which was clearly there.
00:45:34
Speaker
Right.
00:45:35
Speaker
All of the mystery novels, all of these investigators, Sherlock Holmes, all of these protagonists were male.
00:45:42
Speaker
I don't think she looked at her wildly successful, as we've demonstrated, Hercule Poirot series and said, we need more women and decided to write Miss Marple.
00:45:51
Speaker
She was genuinely sick of the character she had created and moved on.
00:45:56
Speaker
But in each of these stories, the... All right, there are enough stories.
00:46:01
Speaker
We can spoil some.
00:46:02
Speaker
So Orient Express.
00:46:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:05
Speaker
crazy turn is that everyone's guilty, right?
00:46:07
Speaker
Yep.
00:46:08
Speaker
Except one character in the book.
00:46:11
Speaker
And she is still lying through her teeth and standing up to Perot, this world famous.
00:46:18
Speaker
I don't think she viewed this as, oh, I want a strong female character in here.
00:46:22
Speaker
She viewed this as, this is how women are.
00:46:26
Speaker
This is what it takes.
00:46:28
Speaker
My brother's going to stay in South Africa and not even come back for our dad's funeral?
00:46:33
Speaker
Fuck him.
00:46:35
Speaker
I'm going to keep living my life.
00:46:36
Speaker
My family doesn't want me to go to boarding school like my sister.
00:46:40
Speaker
They're going to homeschool me and then introduce me to New York society, go kiss Miss Astor's hand and be accepted and find a marriage.
00:46:48
Speaker
No, my husband left me.
00:46:50
Speaker
I'm going to go to Baghdad on a train and go study some archaeology.
00:46:56
Speaker
I think this perception is in today's light of viewing people who do something different as trying to stand for a purpose.
00:47:07
Speaker
I do not think that's what she would say she was doing.
00:47:09
Speaker
She was writing cool, kick-ass characters as she saw them.
00:47:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:16
Speaker
And I think that makes it more brilliant.
00:47:18
Speaker
Yeah, I like what you're saying, because I think when we say the term strong female characters, which of course, for the last probably two decades now has been like, this zeitgeisty buzz term, right when it comes to art and entertainment.
00:47:32
Speaker
I think we sort of attach that term to characters like Katniss Everdeen, or Captain Marvel, somebody that's at the center of the story, first of all, and is is
00:47:43
Speaker
sort of a strong character because they're going through tough shit.
00:47:46
Speaker
Right.
00:47:47
Speaker
But as you were talking, I was thinking about some of the women in, in some of the movies and like Michelle Pfeiffer is in Orient Express and she's the orchestrator of that crime, you know,
00:47:59
Speaker
That's actually kind of like that's a strong female character, even even though she's not the center of the story.
00:48:05
Speaker
Right.
00:48:06
Speaker
Exactly.
00:48:06
Speaker
Exactly.
00:48:06
Speaker
Yes, that's my point.
00:48:07
Speaker
Exactly.
00:48:09
Speaker
The the investigator that finds some guy to tag along in passenger to Frankfurt is a female investigator.
00:48:18
Speaker
I do not remember her name.
00:48:19
Speaker
But yeah, I think I think it I think if you had asked her, she would have said, what do you mean?
00:48:24
Speaker
Strong female characters.
00:48:25
Speaker
I'm just writing dope shit.
00:48:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:28
Speaker
Which is what she did.
00:48:29
Speaker
Because I struggled with this question a lot because I had seen it from critics.
00:48:33
Speaker
Oh, the champion of strong female characters.
00:48:35
Speaker
And then I'm not seeing a sniff of it from her.
00:48:38
Speaker
And I go, oh, no, two things can be true.
00:48:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:41
Speaker
She is writing strong characters.
00:48:45
Speaker
And it was just unheard of at the time because in the same light.
00:48:50
Speaker
I wouldn't be surprised to find out Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought an investigator of the caliber of Sherlock Holmes would have to be a man, you know, because that's the crazy way people thought that.
00:49:02
Speaker
And I'm sure some people still think now, you know, so I don't think it was this deliberate, socially conscious thing on her part.
00:49:09
Speaker
I think it was just an experience of this is how my world is.
00:49:14
Speaker
And that's what she reflected.
00:49:16
Speaker
Right.
00:49:16
Speaker
Her and her mom went to Cairo, you know.
00:49:20
Speaker
Their fledgling genteel society status was absolutely thrown away by her father's inability to manage the business and not dump cash.
00:49:34
Speaker
And then he died.
00:49:35
Speaker
They still lived comfortably for that time.
00:49:39
Speaker
But her role model was...
00:49:42
Speaker
You want to do cool shit, you do cool shit.
00:49:45
Speaker
And so anyway, I'm just repeating myself at this point.
00:49:48
Speaker
But yeah, I thought when when that clicked in my head, I was like, I could be off base here.
00:49:52
Speaker
But this is this is what I believe we are seeing.
00:49:55
Speaker
And again, I think that's part of the brilliance.
00:49:58
Speaker
It is not ham fisted.
00:49:59
Speaker
It is not manufactured for a purpose.
00:50:02
Speaker
It's just brilliant writing.
00:50:05
Speaker
Yeah, you'll see that again, too, in witness for the prosecution.
00:50:09
Speaker
Really only one woman in that story to speak of, and she does really kick ass.
00:50:15
Speaker
I wrote some sort of smaller scale discussion questions.
00:50:19
Speaker
We just talked about three or four really big ideas that are fueled by Agatha Christie.
00:50:25
Speaker
I'd like to dial it back a little bit for these.
00:50:30
Speaker
I am curious, having read what you've read, do you have a favorite character or franchise?
00:50:36
Speaker
Are you a Perot guy?
00:50:37
Speaker
Are you a Marple guy?
00:50:38
Speaker
Interesting.
00:50:40
Speaker
Or does a different lead character stand out to you more than those two?
00:50:45
Speaker
I've not I've not read any Marple yet.
00:50:48
Speaker
Honestly, of the four, Orient Express was my favorite.
00:50:54
Speaker
I I'm here for the story more than for Perot, if that makes sense.
00:50:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:00
Speaker
I mean, even Agatha Christie stopped liking him.
00:51:03
Speaker
I mean, he's supposed to be kind of unlikable.
00:51:06
Speaker
He's like kind of a dick and it's like excusable because he's Belgian or whatever.
00:51:12
Speaker
Right.
00:51:12
Speaker
So, yeah, I do know what you mean.
00:51:14
Speaker
But he's so good at his job.
00:51:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:16
Speaker
And that's...
00:51:17
Speaker
you know, we need some spurring factor, right?
00:51:21
Speaker
It's a little bit of plot armor just happened to find himself on the train and take the spot that they had purchased for someone else, you know, whatever world-class investigator.
00:51:30
Speaker
And that's not even what he's here for.
00:51:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:33
Speaker
No, I, there is not a single thing she has written that I would not read were it to be handed to me.
00:51:40
Speaker
No questions asked.
00:51:42
Speaker
I don't,
00:51:44
Speaker
I think the characters were a means to an end.
00:51:48
Speaker
Right.
00:51:49
Speaker
Because the names the names could be swapped, but the backstory and the dialogue are so flawless that it doesn't matter.
00:51:59
Speaker
Each one of these could have been an individual.
00:52:00
Speaker
So, I mean, I was curious about this, if you found anything about the not to answer your question with another question, but I was curious if you saw anything about how these decisions are made, what's being pulled out, because the.
00:52:15
Speaker
Where's my list?
00:52:17
Speaker
Whatever happened at Stiles is technically the first Perot.
00:52:21
Speaker
Orient Express is number 10, I think.
00:52:25
Speaker
Wow.
00:52:26
Speaker
They're wildly out of order.
00:52:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:28
Speaker
But it also doesn't matter, right, due to this episodic nature.
00:52:32
Speaker
So each one...
00:52:34
Speaker
You know, I never found myself endeared to Perot.
00:52:37
Speaker
Sure.
00:52:37
Speaker
I don't know that when I continue on to other works of hers, I'm going to even notice the change in protagonists.
00:52:47
Speaker
I mean, there's no protagonist in, and then there were none.
00:52:50
Speaker
And it sold 200 million copies.
00:52:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:54
Speaker
Right?
00:52:57
Speaker
The character and the franchise that I'm here for is Agatha Christie.
00:53:04
Speaker
Yeah, I agree.
00:53:05
Speaker
And that's actually why I put the question here is because I wanted to know if there was something as a reader that stuck out to you.
00:53:13
Speaker
Oh, it's a great question.
00:53:14
Speaker
And I don't I think I'm sure there are people who absolutely love Perot.
00:53:19
Speaker
I, again, alluding to her response and the reason she moved on from him, I very much think she would agree with me, perhaps arrogant on my part, but I stand by it.
00:53:30
Speaker
Perot himself was a means to an end.
00:53:32
Speaker
Yeah, I agree.
00:53:34
Speaker
Okay, the other thing I wrote, I'm curious, this is kind of just a linguistics question, is every murder mystery, in your opinion, a whodunit, or is there a difference between the terms murder mystery and whodunit?
Murder Mysteries vs. Whodunits Debate
00:53:49
Speaker
I want to say that these are two sides of the same coin.
00:53:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:53:55
Speaker
Because I think uniformly what draws you in is you're trying to solve the crime.
00:54:00
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:54:02
Speaker
Before all is revealed, right?
00:54:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:06
Speaker
And whether and both of them are interchangeable in my mind, whether it's a murder mystery or something else mystery, almost always murder, obviously, but, you know, bank robbery.
00:54:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:18
Speaker
Some other crime.
00:54:21
Speaker
And then a whodunit, you know, whether it's actually you're curious who did it or how did.
00:54:28
Speaker
done it or when done it or where all of those parts are interchangeable i think the part that it comes down to is is there a compelling question that the author did a good enough job of hiding that one it's not immediately clear right mm-hmm
00:54:49
Speaker
I've got, you know what, I'm gonna have to send this to my buddy Caleb.
00:54:52
Speaker
He and his mom were impossible to watch these with when we were in high school, because somehow they both, they just figured it out immediately.
00:55:00
Speaker
Wow.
00:55:01
Speaker
And so a litmus to me, I want to like send him a couple and see if he can figure it out.
00:55:06
Speaker
Because the brilliance, the reason Christy wrote so many and was so celebrated, no matter how formulaic, I think there's always at least a little part of your brain, even if you say, okay, this is the least likely, follow the formula.
00:55:19
Speaker
She writes it in such a way that you are not 100% certain until she reveals it.
00:55:24
Speaker
Right.
00:55:25
Speaker
So I don't think that these are different things.
00:55:27
Speaker
I think that part of the question is hitting the nail on the head.
00:55:31
Speaker
There is not a difference per se.
00:55:34
Speaker
It is, you know, is there a compelling question to answer?
00:55:38
Speaker
Because like psychological thrillers, I would consider distinctly different.
00:55:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:42
Speaker
Right.
00:55:43
Speaker
You don't you don't even know there's a mystery you're trying to solve.
00:55:46
Speaker
Right.
00:55:47
Speaker
Totally.
00:55:48
Speaker
And so those hinge on the same plot point.
00:55:50
Speaker
The brilliance of murder on the Orient Express is the entire time you, the reader, you, the watcher.
00:55:59
Speaker
are whether you want to or not if you tell me you are just watching and hanging out i'm gonna call you a liar yeah because you cannot help but think i bet i bet you i can figure it out yeah i have to check it's all this you know yeah and that's the brilliance yeah it is i think
00:56:20
Speaker
That's a personal opinion.
00:56:22
Speaker
Could be wrong.
00:56:23
Speaker
I tend to agree.
00:56:24
Speaker
I think that there is a difference between the terms murder mystery and whodunit.
00:56:28
Speaker
A lot of people use them interchangeably, but I think that there are a lot of murder mysteries, like you said, that aren't framed that way.
00:56:35
Speaker
So you don't know that you're trying to...
00:56:37
Speaker
solve the crime, you know?
00:56:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:56:40
Speaker
The other day I googled whodunit movies and what one that kept popping up is the movie Zodiac, which is based on the investigation of the Zodiac killer, famously, still in a cold case, they never figured out who the guy was.
00:56:53
Speaker
And I was like, well, I guess it is a murder mystery.
00:56:58
Speaker
Because it's literally following a murder investigation and we don't know who did it.
00:57:02
Speaker
But to me, that's not a whodunit.
00:57:04
Speaker
I think that you have to be presented for it to be a whodunit.
00:57:07
Speaker
I'm talking Agatha Christie, Knives Out, See How They Run, The Killer's In The Room.
00:57:13
Speaker
You know the killer, you just don't know who it is.
00:57:16
Speaker
Yes.
00:57:19
Speaker
To me, that's what a whodunit means.
00:57:22
Speaker
And that's what I really love a good, like classic whodunit.
00:57:25
Speaker
I mean, Clue.
00:57:26
Speaker
I made you guys watch Clue.
00:57:28
Speaker
Oh, phenomenal.
00:57:28
Speaker
I love that one.
00:57:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:30
Speaker
I see.
00:57:30
Speaker
No, I see exactly what you mean.
00:57:32
Speaker
No, I, I changed my answer.
00:57:34
Speaker
I was wrong.
00:57:34
Speaker
Because I agree with you.
00:57:37
Speaker
That's, that's an excellent distinction.
00:57:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:40
Speaker
And I just have to put it out there.
00:57:41
Speaker
You know, I've got all kinds of weird opinions on genre and how things are different.
00:57:46
Speaker
broken up and organized and that's one of them i think that the term whodunit gets used incorrectly so they are considered synonymous and ought not be yes in my oh so humble opinion no no i think you're correct because as you as you described i've seen that the zodiac one and my first thought was well that's not a murder mystery what else could you call it right it totally there were murders there is mystery but in no way would i call that a whodunit right
00:58:16
Speaker
Not by any stretch of the imagination.
00:58:19
Speaker
Agatha Christie is the queen of the whodunit.
00:58:22
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:58:23
Speaker
The queen of crime.
00:58:25
Speaker
Queen of crime.
00:58:26
Speaker
Special shout-out if you're a big fan of these, the little investigator-led ones.
00:58:30
Speaker
I don't know why that reminded me of it.
00:58:32
Speaker
Under Brightback, maybe?
00:58:35
Speaker
There's been a recent series, well, recent in the last 10 years.
00:58:39
Speaker
J.K.
00:58:40
Speaker
Rowling, under a pen name, wrote a series of same style, one investigator,
00:58:46
Speaker
searching out searching out a murder real fun reads very much along the same lines not the same quality of writing obviously but fun reads i want to say like jacob brightback maybe i don't remember the exact pen name but for anyone listening who enjoys this genre i mean actually skip that read agatha christie what am i saying yeah don't tell people to read jk rowling what they're they're fun books they're fun books i'm yeah i'm sure they are fun books not fun author
00:59:15
Speaker
Yes, fair enough.
00:59:16
Speaker
Fair enough.
00:59:17
Speaker
Okay, how do you how do we approach this?
00:59:19
Speaker
We've got a lot to recommend.
00:59:21
Speaker
Yeah, we do.
00:59:25
Speaker
As far as recommendations go, I think, I mean, I'm looking at our document shared document here.
00:59:29
Speaker
We're both very high on Agatha Christie and recommend that you consume whatever you can.
00:59:34
Speaker
I'm not going to point you towards any one text or franchise.
00:59:38
Speaker
Besides Chris, I think you should read witness for the prosecution.
00:59:41
Speaker
Sweet.
00:59:42
Speaker
Or watch the movie.
00:59:43
Speaker
Because there's some... You can find a movie or a show that's aligned with what you're looking for.
00:59:49
Speaker
If you're looking for something silly or goofy, they have that.
00:59:52
Speaker
If you're looking for something...
00:59:54
Speaker
dark and heavy, they have that you just are going to have to kind of look it up.
00:59:59
Speaker
There's stories that are going to be more appealing to men and some that are going to be more appealing to women.
01:00:03
Speaker
There's some that are one offs and some that are parts of larger franchises.
01:00:07
Speaker
And so really just find what you like and like throw a dart at our Wikipedia page, like I said, in the last, last episode, and you'll, you'll find something great.
01:00:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:00:20
Speaker
Do you have anything to add?
01:00:23
Speaker
No, very much the same.
01:00:24
Speaker
I'm thinking about for I don't know why, but I just have this inkling.
01:00:28
Speaker
I really think there's going to be a modern and then there were none.
01:00:33
Speaker
That's like very dark.
01:00:34
Speaker
I don't know why I feel like that's got to be in the cards.
Recommendations for Christie's Works
01:00:38
Speaker
There is one, I believe, BritBox miniseries adaptation that was, I left it out at the highlight reel just because it hasn't really caught on here in America.
01:00:48
Speaker
But from what I've read about it, it was quite well received in the UK and kept the original ending as well.
01:00:57
Speaker
I was actually very intentional with my wording here.
01:01:00
Speaker
My recommendation is find and read every Agatha Christie you can.
01:01:05
Speaker
And I put it this way because sure.
01:01:09
Speaker
And then there were none.
01:01:11
Speaker
It is outlandishly high on Goodreads average of over four stars, which is pretty difficult with like over a million reviews.
01:01:23
Speaker
Wow.
01:01:24
Speaker
And six figures is pretty crazy for an individual title on that site.
01:01:28
Speaker
Like, this is high, high praise.
01:01:30
Speaker
And even with that being said, Passenger to Frankfurt, it was in a free bin at a thrift store.
01:01:38
Speaker
And I just thought, I like Agatha Christie.
01:01:40
Speaker
Based on the Goodreads reviews, I never would have picked that book up.
01:01:44
Speaker
But I really enjoyed it.
01:01:45
Speaker
And I'm glad that I did.
01:01:47
Speaker
And you've got a lot to find.
01:01:49
Speaker
I mean, you should never be paying...
01:01:52
Speaker
Barnes and Noble, $20 a book.
01:01:53
Speaker
She doesn't need the money.
01:01:54
Speaker
She's dead.
01:01:56
Speaker
She's long dead.
01:01:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:58
Speaker
Find what you can.
01:01:59
Speaker
Paperbacks everywhere for 25 cents, if not free.
01:02:03
Speaker
And they're just delightful.
01:02:05
Speaker
Little plane read, road trip, out on the beach.
01:02:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:09
Speaker
You can't beat them.
01:02:11
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:11
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:12
Speaker
So talk to me about ratings.
01:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, I went back through.
01:02:15
Speaker
I went to like make up ratings and then I was like, wait, no, this is why we have the apps that we do.
01:02:19
Speaker
So come find us on Letterboxd and Goodreads.
01:02:23
Speaker
OK, apparent.
01:02:24
Speaker
Why did I write?
01:02:25
Speaker
Apparently.
01:02:26
Speaker
So by date, Passenger to Frankfurt was her first book I read, gave it four stars in August 2018.
01:02:33
Speaker
And then there were none, four stars, November 2020.
01:02:37
Speaker
I do recall the content of that being especially poignant mid-COVID.
01:02:43
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:02:44
Speaker
Affair at Stiles, again, the first Perot book, if you want to read them in order, which is what I intended then, which was silly, I suppose.
01:02:53
Speaker
I gave that three stars, and I can't for the life of me remember why.
01:02:58
Speaker
That was, what, nearly three years ago now.
01:03:01
Speaker
Okay.
01:03:02
Speaker
And then Murder on the Orient Express, I finished this a week ago, and I gave this five stars.
01:03:07
Speaker
I intend to go back to that one.
01:03:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:11
Speaker
That one's great.
01:03:11
Speaker
Well, it's incredible to me.
01:03:14
Speaker
Usually, this is the litmus test to me for a murder.
01:03:16
Speaker
There can be a fun, fantastic murder story or movie, in my experience, that is only fun and fantastic that first time.
01:03:27
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:28
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:03:29
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:03:30
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:03:31
Speaker
You watch Minority Report or Shutter Island or Inception, there's a crazy twist, but it is not the same after that first take.
01:03:38
Speaker
That first time, yep.
01:03:40
Speaker
These are so brilliantly written, it does the exact opposite.
01:03:45
Speaker
You want to immediately read it again and see what else you missed.
01:03:50
Speaker
Yep, I agree.
01:03:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:51
Speaker
Okay, so tell me about your ratings.
01:03:54
Speaker
Well, what of hers have you watched?
01:03:56
Speaker
Okay, let me pull up.
01:03:57
Speaker
I didn't make as detailed a list.
01:03:58
Speaker
Let me pull up my letterbox here to see, because I've watched a lot.
01:04:03
Speaker
Okay, okay.
01:04:04
Speaker
Okay, I have watched, good Lord, so many, both versions of Murder on the Orient Express, the 74 in 2017, both versions of Death on the Nile, A Haunting in Venice, Witness for the Prosecution, Evil Under the Sun, which I think I misnamed earlier in this podcast now that I'm saying it out loud, and Then There Were None, Crooked House, The Mirror Cracked, Appointment with Death, I believe that's it,
01:04:30
Speaker
Wow.
01:04:30
Speaker
So quite a few.
01:04:31
Speaker
They're all high ratings for me, except Appointment with Death is really not very good.
01:04:36
Speaker
And The Mirror Cracked was not awesome either.
01:04:38
Speaker
But they're still fun mysteries.
01:04:39
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:04:41
Speaker
The fact is, because there are so many adaptations of her, you know, it's kind of like shooting fish in a barrel, like...
01:04:49
Speaker
you probably are not going to get the best fish, you know, like just chances are.
01:04:54
Speaker
But the ones that are so, so, so good, Orient Express, Witness for the Prosecution, those are probably my top two.
01:05:01
Speaker
They shine so brightly that it doesn't matter.
01:05:05
Speaker
If I watch a crappy Agatha Christie adaptation, I'm like, well, next one will get me, you know?
01:05:11
Speaker
And I'm excited.
01:05:12
Speaker
Anytime it's announced that a new adaptation is being made, I'm excited.
01:05:16
Speaker
about it regardless.
01:05:17
Speaker
I don't care if it's Perot or Marple or it could be a, you know, I mean, if they remade witness for the prosecution, that'd be pretty stupid.
01:05:23
Speaker
But I'd still be excited for it on some level because Agatha Christie is so great, you know.
01:05:30
Speaker
So I don't have like a hard rating.
01:05:33
Speaker
But I think to say that I'm excited regardless of what I see, I'm excited about it kind of speaks for itself.
01:05:40
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:05:41
Speaker
Especially with such a wealth available.
01:05:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:45
Speaker
So hopefully we get some new Agatha Christie stuff soon.
01:05:49
Speaker
And hopefully it's available here in the US.
01:05:51
Speaker
Because a lot of it's not.
01:05:52
Speaker
I'd love... Yeah, who do we petition to... Yeah, I don't know.
01:05:56
Speaker
Yeah, we love Agatha Christie.
01:05:57
Speaker
This is a pro-Agatha podcast.
01:06:00
Speaker
We love Agatha Christie.
01:06:02
Speaker
Thank you for joining us for our conversation today.