Chibnall does Christie – and it could have been worse

"From the creator of Broadchurch", an ad boasted, and my heart sank. When I nominated Seven Dials on Netflix as one of the 2026 shows I was looking forward to, I had no idea that the script-writer would be none other than Chris Chibnall, the inventor of The Timeless Child and the bane of Gallifrey.

I had a lot of problems with Chibnall's run as Doctor Who showrunner, which wasn't unexpected, as I didn't care for the Who episodes he penned during the reigns of his predecessors Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat either. Now, however, after RTD has botched his return to the show so badly, I've started wondering whether I judged Chibs too harshly. There were parts of his Doctor Who run I liked, such as the Flux series and The Power of the Doctor. Consequently, I was prepared to give his version of The Mystery of the Seven Dials (simply called Seven Dials on Netflix) a fair chance – or fairish at any rate.

In the end, Seven Dials turned out to be a solid good watch. Chibnall proved to be a better Christie adapter than Sarah Phelps, just as his Doctor Who run (with hindsight) can be said to be better than the RTD 2/Disney Plus era. The problem is, that's not saying an awful lot. I was grateful Chibnall didn't mess around more with the source material than he did, but there were still lots of moments when I had reason to recall why his Who scripts irritated me in the first place.

The basic plot is more or less the same as in Christie's novel, and her twists are intact. Chibnall has added one twist of his own, but I didn't think it detracted from the original story. Other tweaks of the plot were pardonable too. I don't quite understand why Bundle had to be in love with the first murder victim – it causes her to mooch around a great deal during the whole first episode – but I didn't mind it much. Gender-swapping Lord Caterham to an almost equally unlikeable Lady Caterham worked quite well, especially as she's played by Helena Bonham Carter. Mandatory diversity is built into the plot by making Ronnie Devereux of Indian descent and the brilliant researcher from Cameroon rather than Germany, but if we have to play the diversity game I much prefer these kinds of changes to "colour-blind" casting.

What is less easy to bear are the outbreaks of clumsy commentary, as if Chibnall just had to leave his 21th-century fingerprints everywhere. Sir Oswald Coote lunges into a Brash Capitalist rant about how class can be bought at one time, for no good reason that I can see. A whole scene is dedicated to showing how harsh Lady Coote has been to a maid. Lady Coote in the book was a good-natured creature who was bullied by the Caterhams' gardener, but I accept that making her sharper adds her to the roster of likely suspects, which is no bad thing. However, she doesn't have to turn into a servant terroriser. Lady Caterham's snobbishness is very on the nose, and the Cameroonian scientist makes a whole little speech about how he and others on the African continent had to fight at the behest of "European white men" which sounds a great deal more 2020s rather than 1920s.

It's not as if Chibnall has that good a grasp of the period he apparently feels superior to. When George Lomax laments the lack of political interest of young women, Bundle replies sweetly "gives us the vote and we just might [take an interest]", whereupon Lomax guffaws patronisingly. It's true that Bundle wouldn't have had the vote in 1925, but married women of 30 and over already had the right to vote since 1918, so the idea of extending this right further wouldn't have felt far-fetched even for Lomax. Lady Caterham tells Bundle that Bundle's brother died because of the mistakes of a "drunken old general". The High Command during World War One hasn't had the best press, but that is surely an oversimplified view of what went down. Officers trained in traditional warfare were ill-equipped to make tactical decisions in the first truly modern war; I would argue that their age and state of inebriation didn't have much to do with it.

But enough complaining. Chibnall may not be able to refrain completely from Chibnallisms, but compared to some of the pontificating we've had from other script-writers, and the right-out distortions of the source material we got from Phelps, they are simply mild annoyances. The best thing about this adaptation is not the script but the stellar casting. Mia McKenna-Bruce is spot-on as Bundle (though Chibnall should have given her a better grasp of grammar). Helena Bonham Carter is fun, as always. Martin Freeman makes a surprisingly convincing Battle, and his first confrontation with McKenna-Bruce's Bundle adds a welcome sparkle to the proceedings. Edward Bluemel is excellent as Jimmy Thesiger, and Alexander Macqueen is genuinely funny as Lomax. You wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of Mark Lewis Jones's Sir Oswald Coote, especially not if he was carrying his rifle and you were an aristo.

It's a shame that a few things are dragged out or added unnecessarily, while other aspects of the plot which were important in the book – Bill Eversleigh's feeling for Bundle, the efficiency of Pongo – get very little room. But all in all, this isn't a bad Seven Dials version. If Chibnall chooses to do a sequel of some kind (maybe adapting The Secret of Chimneys, though that would be reversing the original chronological order of the novels), I'm here for it. 

Things to look forward to in 2026

Happy Boxing Day! Which is often a reasonably good time to blog, so here goes. There are quite a few projects cultural-consumption-wise that I'm at least moderately excited about, so I'll stick with a roundup of films/TV/the occasional book I'm looking forward to rather than a wish list of what I would like to happen (those are always a bit trickier to write anyway). As in 2025, I'm not expecting to get too carried away and develop a new villain crush or anything, but you never know.

Seven Dials Mystery: Agatha Christie adaptations are a mixed bag, but this one, premiering on Netflix early this year, could be a fun one. The book it's based on is a romp, with some tongue-in-cheek references to the world of P.G. Wodehouse (though you don't have to pick up on them to enjoy it), and an almost guaranteed mood-lifter. The only thing I'm not too keen on in the book is a certain snobbishness – the heroine Lady Eileen aka Bundle is part of the aristocracy, and sometimes a faint contempt for New Money shines through. But Bundle is mostly likeable, unlike her ghastly dad.

I'm relying on Netflix to prune the snobbishness, but I'm a bit nervous about what else they'll change. Bundle seems well-cast, though.

A Tale of Two Cities: Apparently, BBC in collaboration with MGM+ is working on a new adaptation, and it has been a while since the last one. Two Cities isn't one of my favourite Dickens novels (Barsad is fun, but otherwise it's lacking in the male villain department). However, I do like it, and a French Revolution setting is always interesting. 

Moreover, this will give a good indication of whether the Beeb can still do Dickens or if they are too mired in cultural politics to get a classic adaptation right (I could only make it through two episodes of the latest "gritty" Great Expectations). Kit Harington aka Jon Snow in Game of Thrones plays Sydney Carton – no objections from me – but another actor plays his accidental double Charles Darnay. Well, OK then.

One Piece season two: I haven't blogged about this hard-to-define Netflix show – fantasy and pirate adventure mashup is how I'd describe the genre – but I had a great time with the first season of this live-action adaptation of an anime. The fictional world is quite insane, and the premise more than a little strange. The charismatic young protagonist Monkey D. Luffy is dead set from an early age on finding a fabled pirate treasure (the One Piece of the title) and becoming "King of the Pirates". His wild ambition becomes increasingly likely as he gathers a motley crew of talented misfits, acquires a ship and finds (well, steals) a rare map.

What makes the premise strange is that Luffy doesn't actually want to rob anyone, and doesn't seem to realise that this is what pirates do most of the time, rather than just hunt for treasure and go on adventures. Also, no-one points this out to him (his pal Koby, who ends up with the Marines, has a try, but is told that "there are good and bad pirates"). Encountering increasingly sinister pirate captains in the forms of a short-tempered female pirate with a skull-crushing club; a psychotic clown; a creepy con man masquerading as a butler; and finally a fishman with an anti-human bias does not serve as a wake-up call to Luffy. However, the sheer charm of the progatonists and lots of exciting derring-do carry the series through all absurdities (which are entertaining in themselves), so here's hoping they keep it up in the next season.

The Mandalorian and Grogu: As someone who enjoyed all seasons of The Mandalorian, even the third one, I have to include this on my list, though I'm not sure where next Din Djarin's and Grogu's story could go. But I like to spend time in this part of the Star Wars universe, so I'm happy to catch this at the cinema. Let's hope that, if Thrawn makes an appearance, he'll be more impressive than in Ahsoka, and that they don't waste too much time on Grogu-being-cute scenes.

Dark Reading Matter by Jasper Fforde: Finally, a Thursday Next novel! It's apparently the last one, but I understand that; it might be time to wrap up Thursday's story.  

I wasn't as fond of the latest Thursday Next novel, The Woman Who Died A Lot, as the other ones in the series, and I did not care for the last instalment of Fforde's The Last Dragonslayer series (which was never a great favourite of mine) or the stand-alone novel Early Riser. Consequently, I've been a bit worried about Fforde's fictional output lately. What with that obvious immigrants-as-rabbits allegory he wrote (to be fair, I haven't read it, but honestly – I hate this trope), I was afraid that he was suffering from the modern ailment of politicitis which has had a baleful influence on cultural output. But I was pleasantly surprised by the follow-up to Shades of Grey, Red Side Story, which though by no means unpolitical had the old Ffordian verve and inventiveness. So I'm cautiously optimistic. If I like Dark Reading Matter, it might be time for another full-length Jasper Fforde post.

Avengers: Doomsday: It's make-or-break-time for the MCU, and I will be there cheering the Avengers on, or possibly Doctor Doom. And Loki will definitely be in it!

What's with the slow costume dramas?

What's wrong with the BBC nowadays? It's been ages since I've watched a decent costume drama from them. This is by no means the first costume drama slump - I spent a good part of 2010 pining after the good old days of Dickens adaptations by Andrew Davies and other delights. Then ITV launched Downton Abbey, and eventually the BBC rose to the challenge, after unsuccessfully having tried to catch the public's interest with "anti-Downton" projects. (Well, all right, I admit the public do seem to like Peaky Blinders.) But now here we are again. With the exception of Poldark, which I may have given up on after two series but was at least pacy, costume-drama efforts by the Beeb are tending towards the dark, slow and sententious. It's almost funny how they've managed to put even me off buying the latest War of the Worlds adaptation, though I'll dutifully watch it if a TV channel or streaming service obliges, for the sake of Carlyle. Gay astronomer? Fine, it's Edwardian England after all, and I'm used to fancying gay characters (could have done without the funny glasses, though). Strong female protagonist who isn't in the book? Bit weird, but I haven't read the book, and she's played by Eleanor Tomlinson, so. Anti-imperialist waffling? Ugh, if you must, H.G. Wells would probably have loved it. Humankind going to pot even though they defeat the Martians? OK, now you've lost me.

What's brought my present anti-BBC sentiments on, except their hiring Sarah Phelps to butcher Christie again and again? (I regret being gracious about her  And Then There Were None now - if you don't get the main premise of the victims being indirectly guilty of murder, then you don't get the genius of Christie's plotting, and I should have realised that.) It's mostly down to The Luminaries, which has been snapped up by HBO Nordic and which I consequently have been able to watch practically at the same time as the UK. Now The Luminaries is by no means the worst costume drama the BBC has produced - it doesn't offend me the way, say, The Pale Horse travesty did. It's helped by the fact that it's an adaptation of a novel by a modern author, albeit set in the 19th century, so we don't get the painful spectacle of a script writer trying to "fix" the story by bringing in more "modern relevance". In fact Eleanor Catton - who wrote the novel - is herself responsible for the script, which means it must at least be respectful (I haven't read the original novel). At the same time, depressingly, letting authors adapt their own book seldom works well. You need someone with a bit of knowledge as to how the TV medium (as opposed to the written word) works. The Luminaries has some things going for it, but it's very, very slow.

Some positives first. As per usual with British drama, it's well-acted, and the settings look fine. The story takes place in New Zealand in the 1860s, and there's a gold rush going on, so there's a rag-tag, Wild West feel about the larger town the heroine reaches at the beginning of the story (um... not sure which town it's supposed to be now) and the smaller village she later ends up in. An early scene where the purity of a digger's gold is tested on the open street feels just exotic enough to catch one's interest. The Beeb can indulge in hiring a multi-ethnic cast without it looking out of place for the setting: in fact the plot demands it, which the execs must have loved. The characters are connected in intriguing and intricate ways. Though some of the characterisation seems clichéd - the prejudiced sheriff, the well-meaning but weak clergyman, the spineless politician etc. - there are some surprises along the way. The main villain, or villainess, is Lydia Wells (played by Eva Green, having fun), and she's worse news than the sheriff, the unscrupulous pimp and the ex-convict (her lover) combined. At this stage, not even a tragic back-story could make anyone believe that her actions are all the fault of the patriarchy. Her husband, Crosbie Wells, first looks like he's some drunken lout she got stuck with, but he turns out to be an intelligent man with a knack of befriending people.

But oh, the slowness. Eve Hewson, who plays the story's heroine Anna Wetherell, is lovely to look at: however, seeing her mooching around miserably in scene after scene with melancholy music in the background just gets too much. I watched the first three episodes available on HBO in the middle of the day two days in a row (my summer holiday has started, blissfully) and did not expect to be overly stimulated, but I was still frustrated by the snail's pace of the plot progression. Whenever Lydia and her ex-con squeeze were hatching some scheme (what's he doing in New Zealand, incidentally? Convicts were never sent there) things picked up, but none of the other story lines are that engaging. I liked Crosbie Wells, but I don''t much care who eventually shot him. Emery Staines, Anna's love interest and potential soul mate, is charming (Himesh Patel gets to show that the wetness of Jack Malik in Yesterday wasn't his fault) and his Maori pal Te Rau is sweet, but their adventures are hardly gripping either, and Anna just seems to be set up to be the perpetual victim.

From what I can see on IMDB, the series is only six episodes long all in all, so I'll probably watch all of it, being half-way in. However, I'm still waiting for a real return to form on part of the BBC. As costume drama is not the only thing they've handled less than competently lately - for instance, they've arrogantly dismissed well-founded criticism of Chris Chibnall's era of Doctor Who - maybe a more far-reaching rethink of the corporation's priorities is needed. Still, what do I know: it's not my tax money that's at stake here, after all.

Hercule returns, but did he need to?

We're back to the theme of character-pinching. Sophie Hannah - an acclaimed crime writer in her own right - has to this date penned two new Hercule Poirot mysteries, with the approval of the Christie estate. I'm ashamed to admit I have no idea who the Christie estate are, but they needn't feel they've sold out: Hannah's crime stories are high-quality page turners and suitably whodunnity. I was left wondering, though, if the link to Agatha Christie and specifically Poirot was strictly necessary. One thing is clear: if these books - The Monogram Murders and Closed Casket - hadn't been marketed as Poirot mysteries, I probably wouldn't have read them. Hannah's other novels appear to belong to a scarier crime tradition - the psychological thriller - than Christie, and I would not have thought of looking for old-style whodunnits among her work.

Something of a psychological thriller feel does seep into these new Poirot novels, but not so much as to keep one awake at night. They're not quite classic Christie crimes, being more focused on making the crime or crimes themselves bewildering conundrums. In the first book, the detectives have to figure out how the murders could have been committed at all; in the second, the big poser is who would kill a dying man. I must admit I found the solution to the murders, with regard to motive especially, less satisfying than in Christie. Christie is often underestimated when it comes to characterisation: her characters have a believability which makes the reader swallow one surprising reveal after the other without feeling hoodwinked (there are exceptions: I do think the solution of Sparkling Cyanide was a cheat both psychologically and regarding how the murder was done). In Hannah's Poirot novels, the murder motives are a little strange and twisted. Christie's murderers have a moral blindness in common, and the motive is often something prosaic like downright greed, but the murders tend to make sense in their callous way: there's seldom anything weird about them. Though there are exceptions here as well. You can say that Hannah's mysteries have more in common with A Tragedy in Three Acts than, for instance, Five Little Pigs. However much or little they resemble Christie, they're certainly a good read.

What of Hercule, then? Hannah's treatment of the iconic Poirot is pleasingly subtle. The egg-shaped head, green eyes, little grey cells and French-isms are given an airing (yes, I know, Poirot is Belgian, but he speaks French) but take a back seat compared to his detective skills. As in Christie, when it comes to explaining the crime at the end, Poirot is suddenly capable of flawless English. His deductions are convincingly brilliant. But as his mannerisms don't play much of a part anyway, I was left wondering why these particular crimes had to be solved by this particular detective.

The question why Poirot is really needed is highlighted by the fact that the sidekick Hannah has invented for him - Scotland Yard Inspector Edward Catchpool - is both likeable and competent. Christie herself favoured the idea of a decicedly dense sidekick for her detective, based on her rather ungenerous interpretation of Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Hence poor Hastings, who is never allowed to be right about anything. I prefer Hannah's approach here. It's easier to identify with a character who isn't supposed to be a complete dunce, and as the narrator of the novels Catchpool becomes the reader's point of reference. He is a little Eeyoreish - the fact that he is firmly in the closet, which is why a well-intentioned attempt on Poirot's part to fix him up with a girl falls flat, doesn't exactly help in that regard. But the hang-dogginess suits him, and you trust his psychological insight and common sense (for the most part, anyway).

Why, then, couldn't Catchpool solve these crimes singlehandedly? Why bring Poirot into the story at all? I would say that if Poirot adds anything, it's that little extra dose of brilliance. Catchpool is intelligent, but a bit of a plodder, maybe because he doesn't have the self-confidence to trust his grey matter the way Poirot does. Then, as I've mentioned, the presence of Poirot labels the mysteries as the kind of crime novels a Christie fan will like, and that is admittedly helpful. I like Hannah's understated Poirot, and if she writes any more Poirot-Catchpool mysteries I will certainly read them. If, in time, she lets Catchpool solve a crime all by himself, I'll read that novel too.                    

Christie's Terrorised Ten (or nine)

I approached BBC's new adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None with a certain wariness. The screen writer, Sarah Phelps, has been known to mess around with fundamental elements in the works she's adapted in the past (turning Oliver Twist into a thug in the making, for instance, or Miss Havisham's manner into that of a - poisonous - little girl lost). What would she do to Christie, who is apt to be underrated, when she sometimes gives the impression of wanting to improve on Dickens himself? However, I needn't have worried: The Beeb's And Then There Were None is a success. Some plot elements have been tampered with, yes, but not to any disastrous effect. There is only one change I take serious issue with.

The plot of And Then There Were None concerns ten people who are lured to an island and stranded there, while being picked off one by one by a ruthless killer. The motive is clear from the off: all of the ten are accused, in a gramophone recording, of having caused one or several deaths. The murders are a form of insane retribution: at the same time, the killer seems to be enjoying himself (I will call the murderer "he" out of convenience, but it may of course be a she). The victims are killed following the pattern of a nursery rhyme (called "Ten Little Soldier Boys" in the adaptation, completely understandably considering the original title). After a while, it dawns on the prospective victims that the murderer is not some lunatic hiding on the island, but must in matter of fact be one of them.

Christie's novel is rather an unpleasant one, but it is extremely cleverly constructed. One of the clever touches is that the killings of which the victims are accused are of the kind that they would never be convicted of in a court of law. They are indirect murders, with the odd accidental death thrown in. This gives the reader something to ponder while trying to figure out which of the ten is the one who wants to do the rest of them in. Are the actions the luckless island visitors are accused of really the equivalent of murder? How responsible are they for the deaths they are charged with, and would we put them in the same order depending on their "degree of guilt" as the murderer (the guiltier he thinks they are, the longer they have to wait before they're killed off)? Is there a clue somewhere hidden in the more vague or unsatisfactory accusations? After all, the murderer clearly feels himself to be morally superior to the rest of the crew - does this mean that he considers himself innocent, for some reason, of the charge against him? The fact that the ten suspects/victims are not hands-on murderers who've actually stuck a knife in someone is one of the main points of the novel.

Unfortunately, it is lost in the adaptation. Here, several of the indirect killings have been changed to actual murders. This is a real pity, especially as some beautiful indirect murder scenarios are done away with as a consequence. In the novel, the servant couple Mr and Mrs Rogers failed to give their former employer her medicine at the right time, resulting in her death and a nice legacy for them. In the adaptation, Rogers (considerably more Gothic than in the book) simply smothers the old lady with a pillow. On screen, General Macarthur is seen putting a bullet in his wife's lover's head; in the novel, he ingeniously sent the young man on a suicidal mission, with no-one - except a suspicious fellow officer, who of course had no proof - any the wiser about the fact that it wasn't an honest mistake. With several bona fide murderers among the ten, who would look more at home in Cards on The Table's Mr Shaitana's collection than U.N. Owen's (the murderer's alias), the plot loses an interesting dimension and the question of "degrees of guilt" doesn't really become an issue.

Having said that, the TV adaptation works very well as a thriller rather than as a clever conundrum. The focus is, as it should be, on the victims, and how they cope with the nightmare situation they've landed in. Mercifully, there is no "they had it coming" gleefulness over the proceedings. In spite of the fact that the story is divided into three whole hour-long episodes when the novel is only 220-odd pages long, the tension is kept up. The casting is absolutely spot-on, from the smaller parts (or are they...?) of Douglas Booth as reckless but eye-poppingly gorgeous Anthony Marston and Anna Maxwell Martin as the cowed Mrs Rogers to the more substantial ones. My personal favourite was Burn Gorman (Guppy in Bleak House) as the shifty copper Blore, sometimes funny when trying to salvage his dignity in trying circumstances ("I was in the lavvy if you must know"), sometimes clearly a man dangerously easy to underestimate. It's a shame that his role in the death of Stephen Landor is not only changed but also poorly motivated, but Gorman makes the best of it, and I doubt many could have grieved for the fate of Blore's allotment as convincingly. Casting Aidan Turner aka Ross Poldark as Philip Lombard is no audience-ingratiating move on the part of the BBC - well, not wholly; he's precisely the right type for this part, and as a bonus, he's allowed to shave as Lombard. I hadn't come across Maeve Dermody before, but she's exactly as I imagine Vera Claythorne: deceptively demure, but when it comes down to it a right calculating little minx. Ooh, and did I mention Charles Dance as the wintry judge? I could go on and on.

After having watched this atmospheric nail-biter, which does not belittle Christie's story or her characters, I feel more positive in view of Phelps's rumoured involvement in one or several episodes of Dickensian. I wonder if original TV drama would not suit her better than adaptations, though. And I still would not trust her or anyone else than Andrew Davies with adapting Dombey and Son - a question which remains sadly academic.                         

The continuing problems with Christie adaptations

I've previously mentioned that Agatha Christie's books are hard to film. I still hold to that, but at the same time I must admit to having seen enough good adaptations of Christie novels by now to know that it is doable. For years, I've avoided buying Poirot box sets (with David Suchet as the detective), because I've seen some of these films on TV and found them boring. I don't even think I managed to get through Murder in Mesopotamia. However, after stumbling across quite watchable adaptations of Five Little Pigs and The Hollow (the latter on a long plane journey), and as I was curious about how the last Poirot adventure Curtain would be handled, I resolved to give the series another try. I bought the last box set in the series which included Curtain, and was satisfied by the latest films. After that, I've carefully worked my way backwards, assuming that the really sleep-inducing adaptations are among the early Poirots. There are several good films here, but I haven't been convinced by all of them. Whether early or late, the Poirot series remains a mixed bag.

David Suchet is of course as good a Poirot as one could wish for - that the character seems a little shallow sometimes is hardly his fault. But these adaptations have to walk the same tightrope as the latest Miss Marple adaptations: if you stay too close to the books, a plot that works well in a novel can become staid and static on screen; if you depart too much from the book, Christie fans (like me) will ask in disgust why you didn't just pen an episode of Midsomer Murders instead of foisting your own plot and characters unto a Christie story.

I can take rather a lot of tinkering with Christie's plots nowadays as I've seen how inert some faithful adaptations are. So where to draw the line? If the inspiration is a short story or a series of short stories (As in the Marple mystery Greenshaw's Folly and the Poirot film The Labours of Hercules), I'm inclined to be very magnanimous and see the film as something inspired by rather than based on Christie's work. I didn't mind the added twist in The Big Four either, as it was so very Christie-like. The problem starts when there is a perfectly serviceable coherent plot in one of her novels, and the adapter chooses to completely ignore it in favour of some lurid tale of his/her own.

There are some big offenders of this kind in the Miss Marple series. I've mentioned The Secret of Chimney's before; apart from that, Murder is Easy and Why Didn't They Ask Evans are the most glaring examples. The three novels have one thing in common: they're not Miss Marple novels. The insertion of Miss Marple isn't the problem in any of these cases, though. In Murder is Easy, it is perfectly credible that a worried old lady on a train should talk to Miss Marple (rather than a young ex-copper), and there's fun to be hand in Evans when Frankie's dismay at Miss Marple's meddling in her an Bobby's detective game becomes all too clear. No, the problem with Murder is Easy and Why Didn't They Ask Evans is that the films veer spectacularly off course plot-wise.

Admittedly, Murder is Easy is a book which has aged badly. The solid-oak hero and his gold-digging love interest aren't a very attractive couple; I gave a bit of a gasp when it was hinted that Superintendent Battle was actually going to book the entertainingly affected antique dealer Ellsworthy (and not for the silly black masses, I bet); last but not least, I can't be the only one who finds the bare-faced snobbery in the treatment of self-made man Lord Whitfield objectionable. But for all that, the main storyline is neat. There was no reason at all to change it in favour of a melodramatic incest story. Moreover, many of the characters were unrecognisable and some weren't included at all. There was no Ellsworthy, and, even more serious, no Lord Whitfield, though some of his characteristics had been given to Major Horton. Talk about Hamlet without the Prince. As for Why Didn't They Ask Evans, the book's a charming caper, which could very well have been adapted as it was without muddying the waters with a new outlandish back-story for the villains. It's a strange piece: up until Frankie arrives at the Bassington-ffrenches' place, the adaptation is straight-forward enough, then everything changes. A shame, and a good cast wasted.         

My rule of thumb to Christie adapters would be: don't change the who, don't change the why and don't change the how. Otherwise, I can allow for quite a lot of jiggering with the plot and adding of characters. Sometimes, when I know a book well, a new twist can even be welcome. I accepted the many changes in the Poirot mystery Cards on The Table like a lamb, though I doubt Christie would have approved of some of them. On the other hand, I thought they went too far in Appointment With Death, where the murder motive is changed, the murderer is unrecognisable and where there is suddenly an accomplice as well, which ruins one of the novel's happy endings.

Much hinges on the quality of the scriptwriting, of course. Nick Dear, who wrote the screenplay to the Amanda Root adaptation of Persuasion and whose play Power I once saw in London and still bore my acquaintances by praising, is a safe bet where Poirot adaptations are concerned, as is Sherlock and Doctor Who veteran Mark "Mycroft" Gatiss. Otherwise, Christie adaptations remain a bit of a gamble. I'll probably be buying more Poirot, though: I can't help wondering how Hickory Dickory Dock turned out.

The crime novel isn't getting better all the time

I recently read two articles on the history and status of the crime genre which followed an all-too-familiar pattern. You could call it "the whig history of the crime novel". The supposition is that the crime novel has constantly moved on, evolved and left the time of dusty whodunnits behind in favour of new, better and braver ideas. It's hard to deny that crime novels in general have changed, though there are still whodunnits to be found, and some of the "exciting new ideas" may have been around for longer than fans of modern crime writing realise. The concept of serial killers wasn't unknown to Christie, for instance, and she used it - though in a typical, twisty way - in "The ABC Murders". But yes, the focus seems to have shifted from the human drama with a puzzle element to other kinds of crime stories. It doesn't follow, though, that they are superior to the old whodunnits.

What then, according to the admirers of modern crime fiction, are these great new influences that have revolutionised the genre?

1) The psychological crime story. It gets almost ridiculous when the writer of the articles I mentioned names P.D. James as an example of a new, "psychological" sort of crime story. It is not new. P.D. James writes squarely in the tradition of Dorothy L. Sayers. Yes, there is a crime that needs to be solved, but the characters involved in the mystery and their feelings and reactions are at least as important as the mystery itself. I have a lot of time for Sayers, as long as his lordship Peter Wimsey isn't too flippin' annoying with his supposedly engagin' aristocratic manner. (You feel that if he had been born in the Regency period, he would have been of those who judge people by the manner they tie their cravats.) I have just finished re-reading "Gaudy Night", which is surely the psychological crime story at its finest: it's got interesting characters, a touching, complicated love story and a cracking good mystery all rolled into one book. This kind of crime writing has its pitfalls, however: in the case of P.D. James, she handles the psychological part beautifully, but the crime story tends to disappoint in contrast. I would be interested to read a "straight" novel without a crime element by her.

2) The serial killer plot Is it actually possible to see the random motivelessness of the serial killer in a murder mystery as a good thing? Figuring out the motive is one of the most enjoyable things with reading crime stories. You may of course be aware of it, or elements of it, from the start, but then you ask yourself: what was the trigger of the crime? What made the murderer go from, say, mere dislike of the victim to actually killing him/her? I don't pretend to be any more moral than fans of the serial killer yarn, as I have a weakness for the "themed" murder mystery: a string of murders where clues are left at the scene of the crime. The clues should point to a motive which explains why the killer wanted the victims - the victims personally, not something they represented - dead. The difference between the "themed" murder mystery, which I realise is rather cheap and best kept to TV mysteries like "Midsomer Murders", and the serial killer plot is that the serial killer targets strangers. He/She may have something against blondes/businessmen/horrid people who have escaped justice generally, but there's no interesting history of personal grievances, which makes the murderer's motive, frankly, boring.

3) The gore-fest If you like your mysteries bloody you like'em bloody. But since when did a talent for turning the reader's stomach amount to a flare for High Quality Literature? Gory, sadistic murders are not necessarily more realistic than the one-hit-with-a-blunt-instrument-kind. If the writers really wanted to make a point about the nastiness of murder in real life, they could write about the sense of loss experienced by the victim's nearest and dearest. Too bleak? I should think so.

4) The forensic crime story Great if you've always wondered what a drowned corpse's entrails look like. Less great if you haven't.

5) The "social criticism" crime story One shouldn't knock preaching to the converted. The converted need a sermon now and then to lift their spirits. But one should see the "social criticism" in crime stories for what it is: fictionalised rants by authors with decided opinions but no more political expertise than the reader (often less - writers are infamous for being political idiots). These crime stories are no more wholesome than reading your favourite political blogger just to get that lovely feeling you're not alone in the world. If you share the writer's opinions you will have a whale of a time. If not, probably not. The dominance of this kind of crime story in Sweden is the reason why I have read remarkably few Swedish crime writers. I would only touch a Mankell in extreme circumstances, like at gunpoint. I lived in the halcyon days of "The Swedish Model", sonny, and it wasn't as wonderful as all that.

The modern trends aren't all bad, though. I do like a sub-genre not mentioned in the whig-history articles: the historical murder mystery. Unsurprisingly, these mysteries are as often as not - whodunnits.

Summer reading

I recently finished my latest Ambitious Book Project - Haruki Murakami's "Kafka on The Shore" - and now there will not be any more ABPs for some time to come. Not that I didn't enjoy the book. It had a lot going for it. There were several engaging characters, such as Nakata, the sweet old man who can talk to cats, Hoshino, the down-to-earth lorry driver who helps him, and Oshima, the friendly librarian who seems to have a bit of a crush on the troubled hero. It also has passages of understated humour where the characters accept surrealist situations as given. "I wouldn't want Mickey Mouse to be my pimp", Hoshino says at one point, in a context where this comment makes perfect sense. A lot of the philosophical musings are way too deep for me, and the hero "Kafka" Tamura is rather too serious for my taste, but it is a quietly gripping book with occasional references to Western culture which make one feel at home (though I may never view Johnnie Walker or Colonel Sanders in quite the same way again).

So why no more ABPs for a while? Because it is summer, and my vacation. Each year, I get irritated by the recommendations for summer reading in the newspapers' culture/review sections. Critics and authors invariably come up with the most intellectually demanding or downright tedious stuff they can find and feel no shame in foisting their unhelpful recommendations on readers who just want a good read for the beach.

Lets get this straight once and for all. When you sit in the sun with an overheated brain, your concentration is not likely not be on top form. What you long for is an easy read, a page-turner preferably, or something funny in the Wodehouse vein. This is not the time to get to grips with modernist poetry, or with Proust (yes, believe it or not, two Swedish critics recommended him: one the whole "In Search Of Lost Time", one only what I have been given to understand is the most boring volume in it).

Here are my recommendations for the beach/hammock/anywhere comfortable in the sun or out of it:

Just about anything by Agatha Christie: Although she's a best-seller, Christie is very much underrated as an author. I have reread many Christie novels more than once, even though I knew perfectly well who the murderer was. The first time you read a Christie, you want to know who did it. The second time you want to pick up all the clues you missed. The third, fourth time etc. you just enjoy the succint prose and the human drama. You may not always agree with Christie's psychological statements - she is a bit too cynical for me at times - but the characters are no stereotypes either. A problem with Christie is that she doesn't film very well, which makes people who have only seen a creaky adaptation believe she is boring, which she definitely is not. (There are other dangers with adaptations: the latest miss Marple films are reasonably pacy, but approximately every second mystery has nothing whatsoever to do with the book it is supposedly based on. "The Secret of Chimneys", for instance, was pure invention from start to finish, including the identity of the murderer.) If you truly have little time for whodunnits, try her adventure yarns like "The Secret Adversary", "Destination Unknown", "They Came To Baghdad", "The Man In The Brown Suit" and "Why Didn't They As Evans?". Avoid her very last books where her prose starts to wander a bit and get repetitive and you'll be fine.

The Jeeves and Wooster books by P.G. Wodehouse: Yes, the Blandings novels are good too, but I prefer the Jeeves/Wooster novels because of Bertie Wooster's endearing narrative (and because efficient secretaries aren't pillorised). Invest in an omnibus, but alternate with a crime story or two so you don't get overfed on Wodehouse. What ho!

And if you have to read something ambitious: a really good 19th-century yarn: I once read "Crime And Punishment" in the sun and enjoyed it immensely. Fun cop. Colourful characters. Villains a-plenty and high drama. Or just settle for one of Dickens's best, like "Great Expectations" or "David Copperfield".

Ah, well back to my Georgette Heyer: another good holiday read, though her heroes are supremely irritating. I would like to shove their quizzing-glasses and snuff-boxes down their conceited throats. If I come across a novel where the hero does not get on my nerves, I will recommend it unreservedly.