2014 audio adaptation by Joy Wilkinson of Christie's 1958 mystery, in
three 30-minute episodes. Dr Arthur Calgary has been in the
Antarctic – during which the man to whom he gave a lift one rainy
night, for whom Calgary might have given an alibi, has been convicted
of the murder of his mother and died in prison. But the family is
oddly ungrateful for the news…
This is much more psychological than most of Christie's work, and
while it's one of the several books that she claimed at various times
were her favourite, it's not at all typical. Interesting, then, to
give it to Joy Wilkinson (after she'd done quite loose adaptations of
Towards Zero and Murder Is Easy), who feels free to change things
around in order to improve the radio story. (There's none of the
business about Calgary forgetting about the maybe-murderer Jacko until
he's reminded by a photograph; but replacing it means giving him a
year and more of coma. After that he's visited by the lawyer when he
wakes up so that he, and the reader, are briefed on the situation
before he goes to the house.)
Also of course using Tina's "half-caste" heritage as the explanation
for why she's so wild and immature doesn't really stand up very well
now. In fact there's quite a bit in the book about how if only Dead
Rachel had had her own children rather than adopting orphans then
none of this horribleness would have happened… "Everything that
environment could do was done for them. It could do a great deal, but
it could not do everything. There had been those seeds of weakness
which had brought them to the nursery in the first place, and under
stress those seeds might bear flower." Yes, all right, it's somewhat
subverted even in the book, but it's a style of biology-is-destiny
which was creaking even as a distraction in the 1950s. The problem is
that taking it out for the adaptation and not replacing it with
anything else leaves a bunch of people who are just randomly nasty,
and that's not much more satisfying.
The cast do their jobs; nobody particularly stands out, except alas
for Wanda Opalinska as Kirsten, whose accent is partly Polish and
partly something else but not even slightly Swedish. ("Her English was
excellent but a faint foreign intonation remained", in the book, so
there was no need to do much.)
The ending is tweaked, to make an almost farcical scene with Calgary
and the murderer on their own in a car, and an appropriate death for
the killer. It's rather a shift towards the conventional from a book
that had more sympathy for the murderer and a probable off-stage
capture by the police – but this is a mystery book more than it's
about the mechanics of justice being done.
As with the other Wilkinson adaptations I've heard this starts to get
away from being just a plain translation and approaches being
interesting in its own right.
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