Even Poirot can’t evade grip of Brexit
BBC’S new Agatha Christie series highlights backdrop of national divisions and the rise of xenophobia
VIEWERS of the BBC’S latest Agatha Christie drama will find many familiar elements: a killer on the loose, a mystery to solve and Hercule Poirot piecing together the clues.
But the adaptation of The ABC Murders will also bring Brexit into the mix, drawing parallels between the rise of fascism in Thirties Britain and the state of the nation today. Sarah Phelps, who wrote the three-part drama, which runs over three consecutive nights, beginning on Boxing Day, has added historical context to the original story.
Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists is on the rise and a poster seen on a wall in the opening scene warns: “We must stem this alien tide”.
Poirot is a target for xenophobia, a theme touched upon in the book and which Phelps has amplified.
She said finding contemporary resonance in Christie’s novels is easy: “You don’t try to make them resonate – they just do, because we go around in cycles and the things we think we’ve left behind us historically are there … just waiting to erupt into our consciousness all over again.
“Hercule wasn’t born in Britain but made Britain his home during the First World War. In the Thirties, things were very much like they are now. The fascists started to gain real traction in a really shocking way that people perhaps don’t know about.
“The language of it is exactly the language of Brexit and Trump. It’s all the same. Having been this celebrated Belgian detective, suddenly, being from another country is not a good thing to be. It taps into now. It’s genuinely chilling how similar it is.”
The drama, starring John Malkovich, illuminates a dark period in Britain’s history. Phelps said: “I think it’s something we have forgotten about when we look back at our own history. [People say] ‘we fought a just war’, but actually there were some really ugly times in the lead-up to it and it’s a good thing to examine ourselves with clear eyes.”
Christie’s book opens in 1935 but Phelps has moved the story to 1933, when the fascists were on the rise.
A killer is claiming victims in alphabetical order, leaving a copy of the ABC train guide at the scene of the crimes and taunting Poirot in a series of letters.
In the novel, Christie notes that the letters carry hints of “anti-foreign bias”. A witness questioned by Poirot complains of being interrogated by “blarsted [sic] foreigners”, and a supercilious English detective dismisses Poirot in a manner that said: “Really – these foreigners? All the same.”
James Prichard, Christie’s greatgrandson and custodian of the author’s estate, said he approved of Phelps’s decision to develop the fascist undertones of the story.
“Sarah takes small things and expands them, makes them fascinating. I’ve learnt a lot about my great-grandmother’s work from Sarah. I now read it differently. She explores the time they are written in,” Prichard said.
Phelps, who also adapted And Then There Were None, The Witness for the Prosecution and Ordeal by Innocence, said the image of Christie as a writer of “cosy” crime novels was false.
“She might not have written loads of sex and swearing and drug-taking, but I’m sure she would have if she could. She was a dispensing chemist, who knew the difference to life and death that a grain of morphine can make.”
‘The language of it is exactly the language of Brexit and Trump … It’s genuinely chilling how similar it is’