Murder Is Easy is not one of Agatha Christie’s best-known novels – or even, in some eyes – one of her better ones. The 1933 murder-in-the-village book is not really part of a series, and the mystery is not solved by one of her marque detectives.
But how many times can Poirot or Miss Marple be usefully redone? That’s the question that has led the BBC to commission adaptations of several of Christie’s less-known novels: The Pale Horse, Witness for the Prosecution and now, Murder Is Easy as a stand-alone two-parter.
One good reason to take on these novels is that they offer some room to move for the screenwriters, and series writer Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre has availed herself of that room, most notably by creating the first black protagonist in a Christie story.
In the original book, Luke Fitzwilliam is a retired police officer back from imperial duties in India. Here, he is Nigerian. His smooth, gentlemanly manner is plausibly explained by his former job, working as the attaché of a colonial official – who he is now following back to Britain for a job at Whitehall. It’s 1954.
Ejiwunmi-Le Berre describes the new Fitzwilliam (played by David Jonsson, best known for the romcom feature Rye Lane) as “a direct homage to my father and grandfather. Highly privileged Nigerians, they came to England to work and study, navigating a place they’d been taught to revere and think of as home.”
He spends his first night in England at the West African Education Centre, an analogue for the real-life West African Students’ Union, which was frequented by the likes of Marcus Garvey and Fela Kuti.
It’s an intriguing setting, but Fitzwilliam has already been diverted by a chance meeting on a train with Miss Pinkerton, who babbles out a plot (in more than one sense of the word) in which a powerful figure in her home village of Wychwood is progressively killing people.
Events occur, which set him on a course to Wychwood to try to solve the murders.
There, he meets Bridget Conway (Morfydd Clark), a clever, enterprising woman bound by the gender constrictions of the 1950s and her engagement to Lord Whitfield (Tom Riley), who’s a bit of a dick. Are they a crime-solving team, is there romantic tension? Probably both, but the tone of the new Murder Is Easy wobbles around enough that it can be hard to know what we’re watching.
Jonsson himself also has a connection to the story – his grandfather migrated to London from Nigeria – and he does a decent job with a script and direction that appears to require him to adopt a quizzical smile for much of his time on screen.
How well the production as a whole works has been a matter of debate. Do the new elements of social history sandbag the core element of a Christmas Christie – the murder mystery itself? Some reviewers thought so, and the Evening Standard in particular scorned “this silly, self-aggrandising, preposterous adaptation”.
Yet Murder Is Easy, with its sturdy cast of character actors, is more watchable than that. It may simply be that Ejiwunmi-Le Berre has created a de facto detective – or is it a crime-solving duo? – who would fare better somewhere else.
For the writer, it’s all in the book. “Christie’s wicked eye for class and hypocrisy has given us this funny, but devastatingly furious little book about injustice. I have a feeling she was experimenting, trying something different, and if we’ve done the same, I can only put my hands up and say we had licence to do so, from the Queen of Crime herself.”
Murder Is Easy screens on BBC First, Tuesday, December 10, 8.30pm and streams on Neon from December 18.
