Teresa with Kemper Donovan at the Agatha Christie Festival

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I’m really thrilled to see this. Kemper Donovan, the host of the All About Agatha podcast, hosted a panel in which Agatha movie and TV adaptations battled it out for the title of Best of All.

The event has been released as a podcast episode.

Kemper Donoval Agatha Christie Festival 2024 Victoria Dowd Mark Aldridge John Curren
From left, Victoria Dowd, Teresa, Dr. Mark Aldridge, Dr. John Curren, and Kemper Donovan
Admittedly, I was a bit worried about how Teresa would perform. She knows her onions (and Agatha adaptations). We spent the two weeks before the festival watching the nominated movies, and of course she wrote the reviews that appeared in “Agatha Christie, She Watched.”

But how would she perform under pressure, on stage with Agatha experts like Dr. Mark Aldridge and John Curren? I don’t know about author Victoria Dowd’s expertise with Agatha, but I loved her Smart Woman’s mystery series (and interviewed her for the Mechanicsburg Mystery Presents podcast)! She’s also a former criminal law barrister, so envisioning her as a female Rumpole issuing curt cutdowns and expert opinions didn’t ease my anxiety.

Of course, I shouldn’t have worried. Kemper expertly monitored the debate (he’d done this the last couple of years, so he’s good at this). He gave everyone a minute to state their case, and kept an eye on the clock for further discussion.

And Teresa did a FANTASTIC job. She was succinct, pithy, and full of Views. They were all interesting and entertaining, and 90 minutes passed by swiftly.

As for the nominees, I recall (with links to Teresa’s reviews):

* A Murder Is Announced (Joan Hickson, 1985)
* Ordeal by Innocence (Geraldine McEwan, 2007)
* Promise of Death (Japan, 2021)
* Witness for the Prosecution (Marlene Dietrich, 1957)
* Five Little Pigs (David Suchet, 2003)
* The ABC Murders (David Suchet, 1992)
* Death on the Nile (Peter Ustinov, 1978)
* Evil Under the Sun (Peter Ustinov, 1982)
* Murder on the Orient Express (Albert Finney, 1974)
* And Then There Were None (Sarah Phelps, 2015)

If you haven’t heard of All About Agatha, I strongly recommend you give it a try. And not just because Teresa talked to Kemper in March 2024 about adaptations. I especially recommend his conversations with Sophie Hannah in 2022 and the follow-up about “The Mystery of Mr. E” in 2023.