How Agatha Christie inspired thrillers in cultures around the world
Agatha Christie’s fair-play puzzle architecture has allowed her stories to travel across cultural boundaries.
1929 saw the first German adaptation of a Christie novel: Die Abenteurer GmbH, based on The Secret Adversary (1922).
In India, Premendra Mitra’s 1960 Bengali murder mystery film Chupi Chupi Aashey transplanted Christie’s famous play, The Mousetrap, from a snowbound house in England to a hotel in Bengal cut off by floods. BR Chopra’s Dhund channelled Christie’s 1958 play, The Unexpected Guest. In 2003, Rituparno Ghosh adapted The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962), with a heavyweight cast that included Rakhee and Sharmila Tagore. In the south, Mohanlal starred in a Malayalam retelling of The ABC Murders (1936), titled Grandmaster (2012).
In the Soviet Union, the 1987 adaptation Desyat Negrityat (The 10 Negroes) became a landmark for being the first major film to use the bleak, original ending of And Then There Were None (1939), a move that Western filmmakers had long avoided in favour of more palatable stage-play conclusions. In this dark, World War 2-era Christie work, strangers on an island are being picked off one by one.
In France, the long-running series Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie (2009-24) found success by transplanting her plots into mid-century French settings, replacing her detectives with local figures while keeping the structural “revelations” intact.
Similarly, Japan has embraced Christie through high-budget Shin-Honkaku (New Orthodox) homages, such as the series Kuroido Goroshi (The Murder of Koroido; 2018-), proving that the dynamics of a Christie village mystery are as resonant in rural Japan as they are in the English countryside.
(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and, occasionally, technology)
