Curses? Creepy masks? It’s enough to turn Poirot pale!
Fans braced as BBC takes on Christie’s spookiest whodunnit
WITH witches, curses, pagan ritual and paranoia, this is an Agatha Christie like you’ve never seen before: more of a wooo-dunit than a whodunnit.
The Pale Horse is the author’s ‘scariest’ book, her great-grandson James Prichard said yesterday, as a gripping TV adaptation of the tale heads to our screens.
One of Christie’s later and least known works, the book is set in 1961, the year it was written.
The two-part TV series, directed by Leonora Lonsdale, features a seedy London and a spooky village, breaking with the charm of Christie’s golden era novels in the Thirties such as Murder on the Orient Express.
Unease underscores the plot – there is no Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple to reassure us that the murders will actually be solved.
Mr Prichard, 49, the show’s executive producer, said: ‘It’s a different kind of book, it’s absolutely not a classic whodunnit. There are witches and magic – but are they frauds and is it delusion? That gives it an undertone of eeriness. But at its heart is what my greatgrandmother felt – that none of us are that far away from being capable of murder.’
The script of the BBC1 show, which begins on February 9, is by Sarah Phelps – the screenwriter whose changes to other Christie novels have horrified some purist fans. Viewers will find that The Pale Horse’s main character, Mark Easterbrook, a widowed antique dealer played by Rufus Sewell, is no longer the hero of the tale. He’s now a liar and a womaniser who has an affair with a showgirl.
Easterbrook turns detective as he tries to uncover the mystery behind a list of names – including his own – found in the shoe of a dead woman. His investigations lead him to the fictional village of Much Deeping, where he encounters three witches.
In a scene that cuts to the heart of the tale, a witch named Bella, played by Rita Tushingham, challenges him over his claim to be rational, saying: ‘We’re all rational when the sun’s shining ... different when it goes dark.’ Despite the eeriness of the story, joy arrived to the village of Bisley in Gloucestershire, where a scene was filmed featuring a spooky Lammas harvest parade with masked marchers.
Among those who came out to watch was author Jilly Cooper, who said: ‘It was extraordinary and so exciting. The crew were so nice to us all – we don’t have any witches round here.’