Death on the Nile and addressing racism in Agatha Christie

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the most part, Christie was not being racist herself in her novels, but rather reflecting the racist attitudes of her time and leaving them open to critique. “It made the [censored] novels less socially critical as documents of their time because I do think Christie’s novels criticize racism rather than perpetuating [it],” she says. “The racism depicted in the books draws attention to the fact that it was very dominant in the culture in which Christie was living. The 1930s [when her career as a crime writer hit its peak] saw the rise of the far right in Europe, leading to the Spanish Civil War and to World War Two, and [racism and] xenophobia were obviously rife.” She believes this aspect of the books gives them a particular resonance again in 2022. “I’m not saying we’re in the same situation right now but far-right sentiments are on the rise again.”

Christie on TV

If there is more to Christie novels than meets the eye when it comes to racism and xenophobia, however, then this has never really been reflected in screen takes on her work. Previous adaptations of Poirot – from the films starring Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov to the UK TV version memorably starring David Suchet – have been very white, and often merely used “exotic” locations as eye-pleasing backdrops rather than truly depicted them as real- world places, suffering from the effects of colonial rule.

“There was a conscious erasure of diversity in the TV adaptations of the 1980s and 1990s,” says Dr Jamie Bernthal-Hooker, author of Queering Agatha Christie. “Black characters in the books were replaced with white characters and similarly those who we can read as LGBT [were removed].” One example Bernthal-Hooker gives is of Christie’s 1955 Poirot novel Hickory Dickory Dock, which was originally set in a 1950s student hostel and featured an array of international characters, including Egyptian student Ahmed Ali and his flatmate Akibombo, who was of West African However, when the book was adapted for the small screen in 1995, the action – as was often the case in the long-running TV series – was transplanted to the inter-war years and it featured an all-white cast.

“It was perhaps understandable in terms of avoiding the problematic stereotypes,” Bernthal-Hooker says – the characters were sympathetically but stereotypically drawn by Christie, with the latter speaking in “comical” broken English – “but also there was clearly no attempt to develop or update these characters for the screen, as happens to other characters in the adaptations.”

“I find [the 1990s TV] adaptations a little too white, too conservative, too Middle-England-y,” continues Bernthal-Hooker. “You can get these readings from the books but you can also get a much more worldly reading from them.”

However when it comes to approaches to adapting Christie, times are changing. Branagh aside, the other major interpreter of Christie’s work recently has been writer Sarah Phelps, who has been behind a number of recent Christie adaptations for TV, including And Then There Were None, The Pale Horse, and the Poirot story The ABC Murders. The latter miniseries, in particular, offered an interesting exploration of xenophobia by showing Poirot being targeted by members of the British Union of Fascists for being un-English – in one scene a train conductor throws his ticket to the ground in disdain. This plot point was an amplification of the dismissive attitude expressed towards Poirot in many of the novels by other characters because of his foreignness. Some commentators also saw it as an indirect critique of Britain in the wake of Brexit, for better or worse: one newspaper called it “excruciating liberal-Left drivel.”

However Bernthal-Hooker, who was an extra in The ABC Murders, counters that the interpretation made sense within the context of Christie’s original novels. “People forget he was a Belgian refugee during World War One,” he argues. “He comes to England homeless and lives on charity. Poirot is always an outsider and comes from the world outside the one he’s.”

Similarly Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express also added historical context by flagging up the threat of far-right bigotry via the aforementioned character Gerhard Hardman: “The producers obviously put a lot of thought into the character,” Plock says. “It cleverly brings the past and present together. They took an element of the 1930s, recalling Nazi ideology, but also brought in a contemporary perspective. [Willem] Dafoe’s character is performing the role of the white supremacist that we would recognize today.”

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