make under

[dustthouart]

I started writing a blog post last night after a long day where Pippa had gotten up two hours early and not napped well and I was a wreck and so the blog post was pretty wreck-a-riffic as well, and I realized it was making me more depressed to keep writing it, so I gave up on it and went to sleep

Comments

[fpb]

You are, of course, exactly right, but that is part of a bigger problem with Christie adaptations. It's called: "I'm cleverer than Agatha Christie", and I think you can see the fallacy there. I absolutely loved the scene you describe in the original - even though there are overtones to the larger love story that I don't like, and that you will also find in the contemporaneous Evil under the Sun, and in Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds (1938). It seems that the approach of war triggered some sort of atavistic shrinking reflex among women writers, "I'm just a little girl under Big Daddy's protection and control", which is particularly absurd and demeaning when we are talking about successful, middle-aged women worth millions in sales and rights. But getting back to the point: I have never seen a single Miss Marple adaptation, from the fifties to the present day, that did not show the most utter contempt for Madame Christie, and suffer considerably as a result. I can hardly watch them, and I think the clever vengeance that she took in Mrs. McGinty's Dead is more than deserved. Look, guys'n'gals, with almost every AC story you are given a perfect little narrative device that only needs to unfold itself to magnetize your public. Why mess with it? Stick as close to dialogue, incident and characterization as the TV or film media allow, and you will be riding on the back of guaranteed success. Is that so hard to do?