Agatha Christie describes her collection of short stories, The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960), as ‘The Chef’s Selection,’ in the foreword. She goes on to call The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and The Mystery of the Spanish Chest the main course, Greenshaw’s Folly , The Dream and The Under Dog the entrées, and Four and Twenty Blackbirds the sorbet. Christie describes with great affection the Christmases she spent as a child in Abney Hall, the “gargantuan feasts,” stockings, the tree and the hymns.
In The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding , Poirot gets to experience a similar old-fashioned Christmas at an old country house, Kings Lacey. He also gets to find the royal ruby that a young man had the misfortune of losing and shows a young heiress how unsuitable her young man is. There is a richness and old-world charm to the stories, even in the macabre The Mystery of the Spanish Chest . The astute Miss Marple makes a guest appearance in the last story, Greenshaw’s Folly .
Diamonds and dust
The other Christmas-themed Christie is Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, where a nasty old tyrant, Simeon Lee, has his throat slit. Each and every one of his children or their wives could have killed him. There is also the prodigal son and a beautiful stranger from Spain, Pilar Estravados in the mix. Don’t ask what Pilar in the guise of Penélope Cruz was doing in the magnificently-moustachioed Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express .
Christie dedicates the novel to her brother-in-law, who complained that her novels “were getting too refined”. No one will accuse this novel of not being bloody enough. In fact, there is so much blood, with an unearthly shriek thrown in, that one of the characters quotes Macbeth , “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.” A classic locked-room mystery, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas was first published in 1939 as Murder for Christmas. The title was changed in 1947 to A Holiday for Murder .
Holiday tradition
BBC One continues its Christmas tradition of airing a Christie adaptation for the holidays with The A.B.C. Murders , following And Then There Were None and The Witness for the Prosecution . Ordeal by Innocence , which was originally part of Christmas programming, was aired in April 2018 following cast member Ed Westwick being accused of assault and being replaced by Christian Cooke.
Sarah Phelps, who adapted the other three, also does the honours for The A.B.C. Murders, about an alphabet and railway guide-obsessed serial killer. The first of the adaptations to feature Christie’s famous Belgian sleuth, the three-part adaptation will have John Malkovich playing Hercule Poirot. His faithful friend and chronicler, Arthur Hastings, will not be seen, though Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter movies) plays cruel Inspector Crome, who seems hell-bent on crushing an already broken Poirot.
Final countdown
The grim and brutal And Then There Were None , which was first aired from December 26 to December 28, 2015, set the tone for the adaptations — nothing quite like vicious murder to jolly us along the festivities! Based on Christie’s 1939 novel, And Then There Were None told the story of 10 strangers stranded on an island getting picked off by a cunning killer. The ensemble cast, including Douglas Booth, Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson and Toby Stephens, featured Charles Dance as Justice Wargrave. While following the story, the BBC version is darker and starker; for instance, the butler Rogers is literally split in two and there is a wild drug and alcohol-fuelled party which is not there in the book.
The new television adaptation of The A.B.C. Murders, unlike the David Suchet version, is also dark and is supposed to echo concerns of the present day, including Brexit and the rise of fascism. While the novel was published in 1936, the show is set in 1933.
Next up for adaptation is Death Comes as the End , Christie’s 1944 novel, set in ancient Egypt with all manner of murder and mayhem. While we wait to see what the telly makes of the travails of the young widow Renisenb and the death of the beautiful Nofret, one can indulge in some lavish Christmas pudding or find out where the spiteful Simeon hid the diamonds.
