And then there were more: The long arc of Agatha Christie remakes

There’s The Hollow Man (1935) by John Dickson Carr; Dorothy L Sayers’s Whose Body? (1923) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). The only author with two entries on the list is Agatha Christie: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which celebrates its centenary this year, and The Murder at the Vicarage, the first Miss Marple novel.

Rian Johnson, who has written and directed all three Knives Out films, has said they are directly inspired by Christie, and acknowledged her influence in multiple interviews.

There have been several other such films, and filmmakers.

M Night Shyamalan has described consciously modelling ensemble “introduction scenes” in Old (2021) on what he calls the “Agatha Christie restaurant scene”, designed to efficiently set up every character at once.

Scream creator Kevin Williamson has credited Christie with teaching him to work backwards from revelations, rather than obsess over mystery mechanics, a process he says helped him find the franchise’s distinctive rhythm of layered reveals.

Shane Black has cited And Then There Were None (1939) as a formative influence on his violent, intricately plotted mysteries. And James Vanderbilt, screenwriter of the comedy Murder Mystery (2019), summed up his approach as “an American couple (crashing) into an Agatha Christie story”.

Her clarity of structure and economy of revelation have made Christie’s novels irresistible to adapters and imitators.

The first such film adaptation did not really retell her tale. Instead, its central figure was her most explicitly supernatural character, Harley Quin. Titled The Passing of Mr Quin, the lost 1928 silent film changed everything about her original short story, except the names of certain characters. Of course, it used Christie’s name for the attendant publicity; she had already been a bestselling author for nearly a decade.

Early theatre adaptations came next. Playwright Frank Vosper dramatised Christie’s short story Philomel Cottage as Love from a Stranger in 1936. This too wasn’t as true to the original as she would have liked, but the play and subsequent film (starring Ann Harding and Basil Rathbone) was popular. A contemporary reviewer noted that “a woman in front of me let out a scream like a steamship siren at (a particular point) in the first performance”.

Truer adaptations were already becoming popular by this point.

Playwright Michael Morton adapted The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as Alibi, in 1928, two years after the book’s release. It was a success, making the transition to film successfully as well in 1931, with Austin Trevor playing Hercule Poirot.

The famously clean-shaven Trevor played him in three films: Alibi, Black Coffee (1931) and Lord Edgware Dies (1934). The last is in the public domain, and can be viewed on YouTube.

While Miss Marple has remained reasonably consistent across adaptations, as an elderly village woman with a keen eye for human folly, representations of Poirot have changed over generations, evolving from a clean-shaven Trevor into a variety of archetypes.

Charles Laughton, in early theatrical stagings of Alibi in the 1920s, first emphasised the detective’s psychological gravity. Peter Ustinov popularised a more jovial “grand tourist” version in the 1970s and ’80s. His Poirot was a witty, slightly eccentric boulevardier, a stark contrast to the definitive reclamation by David Suchet from the 1980s onwards. Across decades, Suchet painstakingly reconstructed Christie’s original vision, reinstating the “rapid, mincing gait” and fastidious, obsessive-compulsive traits that defined her “little Belgian”.

More recently, in remakes since 2017 (Murder on the Orient Express; Death on the Nile), Kenneth Branagh has transformed the character into a more physical, emotionally haunted figure, proving that, even a century later, the silhouette of the detective remains a fertile ground for reinvention. (Click herefor parallel cultural adaptations around the world.)

This year alone, on Netflix, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, an adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), adapted by former Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall and starring Mia McKenna-Bruce, Helena Bonham Carter and Martin Freeman, premiered on January 15. A contemporary version of her Tommy & Tuppence, starring Antonia Thomas, Josh Dylan and Imelda Staunton, is being filmed by BBC. And a BBC-BritBox remake of one of her later classics, Endless Night (1967), is underway.

Among writers, only a handful approach this kind of adaptation saturation. Shakespeare’s complete canon has been adapted, as has Jane Austen’s, for different reasons: Shakespeare’s works function as endlessly malleable cultural myths, while Austen’s primary body of work consists of six novels. Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories have all been adapted, but largely as a result of a successful film franchises feeding off themselves.

Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, HG Wells and Stephen King have all inspired dozens of adaptations, yet these cluster around a limited subset of famous titles, leaving large portions of their work untouched (or heavily transformed).

Christie stands apart as a modern prose novelist with a large, finite body of work, 66 novels, of which all but four have been adapted, often repeatedly, across nearly a century, and usually with close fidelity to the original texts. This makes her adaptation record not merely prolific and worldwide, but structurally and historically unique.

(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)