This is the third in a fun conceit - that
Agatha Christie on occasion solved murders. The first was Agatha and the
Truth of Murder and then Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar. They are not great
but for a Christie fan they are enjoyable as they merge facts and fiction.
They are all produced by Darlow Smithson Productions and they all have a
different actress playing Christie. That is I expect because they seem to
be going in chronological order. The first took place during her famous disappearance,
the second when she went out to the Middle East and met her future archeologist
husband and this takes place during the London blitz in 1940.
This one throws in some true aspects about Christie such as she was a teetotaler
but the main one that the premise is based on seems questionable to me -
but the scriptwriters no doubt came across it somewhere. It is all a bit
ludicrous with a number of murders and a few shown very graphically - not
for children. I had thought that they were leading up to the theory that
this is where Christie came up with the idea for perhaps her most famous
non-Poirot-non Marple book, Ten Little Indians aka And Then There Were None
- but that was actually written in 1939.
Christie is broke - even though in reality she and her husband had just bought
an estate two years previously - perhaps high taxes which she brings up in
a few of her novels - because America has stopped paying her proceeds from
her book sales. So she has written another book and is selling it to a Chinese
obsessed fan for 20,000 pounds. When the name of Arthur Conan Doyle is mentioned
he spits on the floor. They are meeting in the lobby of a nice hotel to make
the transaction and she has brought along a bodyguard to protect the manuscript
and the money once she receives it. Just as they are about to conclude the
deal, a siren goes off that German planes are on a bombing run and they along
with a number of other guests are forcefully encouraged by a passing
policewoman to go into the basement. The usual assortment of suspects in
a Christie novel are present. Once down the murders begin and the manuscript
is stolen. One of them is a killer. But why.
The manuscript that she has written is the death of Poirot. Curtain. A book
that she wrote in the 1940's but had initially not planned to publish until
after her death - but it was in fact published in 1975 just before she died.
Another factoid thrown in as a subplot is that a book she wrote N or M? about
spies was held up by MI5 because one of her characters is named Major Bletchley
- Bletchley of course being the name of where the code breakers were working
out of. They thought someone must have leaked this to Christie. She explained
it was just a coincidence and it was published in 1941.
