You will have also been disappointed with some of the other decisions Phelps took with the structure and the plot details.

If you wanted to watch an escapist, feel-good whodunit, you will have been disappointed. This is the world that The ABC Murders inhabits, and a grimy, soot-stained world we are plunged into straight away. There was a yawning, cavernous class and wealth divide, a society riven with persecution and explicit, emboldened racism, extreme poverty, alcoholism, destitution, drug abuse, and a sense that the world was edging towards another end-of-days cataclysm.

In these adaptations, they are.Ĭhristie wrote her immense canon largely during the so-called Golden Age of crime, but let’s look at that period in more detail: the 1920s and, especially, the 1930s were as far removed from a so-called Golden Age as you could possibly imagine. If I’ve ever had a criticism of Christie’s work – and it’s not really a criticism, it’s more of a slight bugbear, because who can really have a go at such a totemic, skilled writer? – it’s that the murders or the victims of murder aren’t given the same kind of weight as the whodunit puzzle itself (feel free to me on this one if you disagree). Ally Phelps’s nuance with Christie’s supreme plot structure and addictive whodunit elements, and the three stories before The ABC Murders – And Then There Were None, Witness For The Prosecution and Ordeal By Innocence – have been real crime drama treats, and exactly the kind of crime drama I want to watch.Įach one has been different – in tone, structure and feel – but one common denominator has linked them all: these stories have a greater sense of socio-economic background and place, and there are believable reasons given for why people committed murder in those times. Phelps has always been a skilled writer of human drama, but these Christie reworkings have more social context and emotional depth than even Christie’s originals. To me, Sarah Phelps’ now-annual Agatha Christie adaptations have been nothing short of revelatory.

The abc murders series