Teresa Reviews “Murder by the Book” (1987)

Teresa reviews “Murder by the Book” (1987) and wishes the fantasy between Christie and Poirot was released in a clearer version.

Fidelity to text: 3 hatchet jobs

This is pure imagination, but solidly based on Agatha’s own writings and life.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 hatchet jobs

Our copy was terrible. Great acting and a clever script can’t overcome serious technical difficulties.

Watching Murder by the Book, something Christie said brought a variation of an online meme to mind:

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movies on her podcast.

Agatha (to Poirot): “I wouldn’t want you stranded in limbo, or worse still, a prey to writers who would exploit you — not look after you properly — like they did to poor James Bond. That would be so humiliating to you.”

Sophie Hannah: “Hold my tea.”

This is a very odd little film. It’s short (45 minutes), yet packed full of incident. If you can locate a decent copy — it was released on laser-disk and videotape decades ago and we found our copy on YouTube — the picture and sound should be good enough quality that you can actually tell what’s going on. I had to struggle. There were no subtitles, making me struggle harder.

This is a pity because the writing was sharp, full of sly references to Agatha Christie’s life and novels, and implied that she rewrote parts of Curtain as a result of speaking with Hercule Poirot.

Wait. What? Agatha, a human writer, spoke with Poirot, her fictional creation?

Well, yeah. As a writer, I can tell you that my characters speak to me on a regular basis. They resent being forced to do stupid things for the sake of the plot. They have lives and minds outside of my words on the page. It really does work that way for me and I’m not the only one.

Now it’s perfectly possible that Agatha wrote like Vladimir Nabokov. He famously said his characters were galley slaves and performed as they were told. They didn’t run off with the narrative. He didn’t allow them. Agatha wrote carefully constructed puzzle mysteries so she probably didn’t let her characters run amok either. But she knew them well.

She knew Hercule Poirot well enough that she became heartily sick of him. She couldn’t get rid of him; her publisher and agent would have had kittens and as a savvy businesswoman, she knew how much money he generated for all of them. She did get rid of Hastings. After The Murder on the Links (1923), he only showed up on an as-need basis and then afterwards got deported to Argentina.

Part of Agatha’s problem was that she never expected to write Poirot novels for decades. He started out as a sixty-something in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). Her last novel with Poirot was Elephants Can Remember (1972). Fifty-two years! He was 112 by then. Or older. She got tired of him. His mannerisms became increasingly irritating. She didn’t know much about Belgium. Her alter-ego, Ariadne Oliver, voices similar frustrations about her fictional, Finnish, vegetarian detective, Sven Hjerson.

It’s not a surprise that Agatha killed him off in Curtain (written in the early days of WWII but published in 1975). She purged herself and wrote a novel that would provide a nest egg for her family if she was killed during the war. Similarly, she wrote Sleeping Murder starring Miss Marple during the war, but it wasn’t published until 1976. Only Agatha liked her better, and Miss Marple doesn’t die.

Which brings us to Murder by the Book. Scriptwriter Nicholas Evans came up with an interesting conceit familiar to every writer: What if your creation takes on a life of their own? He ties together Agatha’s history, her intensely vivid dreams, and Poirot. The opening scenes establish that she’s elderly, in poor health, and living at Greenway with husband Max Mallowan. The lawn is infested with moles of the kind normally only seen in cartoons. The gardener is going to poison them which is why there’s a bottle of poison in the kitchen.

Agatha’s longtime agent, Edmond Cork, joins her, Max, and Bingo the dog for dinner. Assuming this dinner takes place in 1974, Postern of Fate (1973) was in print. That was the last novel she ever wrote. What should she do next? Edmond brings the manuscript of Curtain with him, the novel she wrote near the peak of her writing powers.

Maybe it’s time to publish it. Agatha wants to read it first. While she’s reading, the house empties out except for Bingo and that’s when Poirot arrives to remonstrate with his creator.

He doesn’t want to die. He especially doesn’t want to die of anything as mundane as a heart attack. Agatha tells him that she’s trying to protect him, so he’s not humiliated like James Bond.

For those of you who’ve forgotten, Ian Fleming (Bond’s creator) died in 1964. Two final novels and a collection of short stories were published posthumously. Kingsley Amis wrote a James Bond follow-on, Colonel Sun (1968). It was … okay. Agatha would have known about it, just as she knew about the dreadful 1967 Casino Royale film that parodied Bond. It starred David Niven and Woody Allen, both of whom played 007. It wasn’t any truer to James Bond than the Margaret Rutherford films were to Miss Marple.

She knew all about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and how heartily sick he was of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock and had to bring him back to life. He lost control of Sherlock early on. Agatha never had to read stories in which Poirot sold linoleum or told ham radio enthusiasts how to use their equipment, but Conan Doyle did.

She didn’t want that kind of fate for her creation. Good thing that Agatha didn’t live long enough to see the amazing revolution in online fanfiction. There’s loads of Poirot knockoffs (and Miss Marple too!) but I’ll let you discover them for yourself at Archive of Our Own.

She explains why she’s killing Poirot to him, but he’s not buying it. They play a cat and mouse game in the deserted, dark house. He steals part of the manuscript and locks himself into the one room where he won’t be disturbed while reading.

Agatha tries to serve him poisoned cocoa, but he’s suspicious. They stalk each other through the empty house. Poirot arms himself with Max’s service revolver whereas Agatha chooses a striking, Middle-eastern style curved dagger.

Then Agatha wakes up. It’s all been a vivid, detailed dream. But it’s a dream that gave her a great idea. The implication is that she’ll use the spinning table idea when she revises Curtain for publication.

She gets what she wants. Poirot dies of a heart attack, saved from some hack writer who’ll mistreat him. Poirot gets what he wants, going out with fireworks by doing something he’d never done in the previous 32 novels, two plays, or countless short stories.

Murder by the Book should be restored and released on DVD. It’s a fascinating glimpse into not just Agatha’s mind but the mind of every artist. What do you owe to your creation? What do they owe to their creator?