Towards Zero

Where Agatha meets Ruth Rendell

The next BBC Agatha Christie adaptation will be her 1944 novel Towards Zero. Images of the show have just been released, which prompted me to liberate this piece from behind The Paywall - I have also edited and lengthened it - as a little weekend bonus. The images look good (Matthew Rhys as an inspector strikes me as extremely de luxe casting) although one has to say generic: good tailoring and carmine lipstick very much present and correct. I love lipstick, myself, but sometimes I long to see an unpainted mouth in one of these shows, rather as I long to hear a sentence spoken in Peaky Blinders that does not contain the word fuck.

As for the novel… I often say this (although never about Murder on the Links or The Clocks) but Towards Zero really is one of Agatha’s best.

It falls within what I identify as her personal ‘Golden Age’, which - in my subjective judgment; very much open to debate - spans from Orient Express (1934) to Crooked House (1949), a period in which Agatha was also writing under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott (there were two Westmacotts after 1949, but by then her identity had been publicly revealed and, in her own words, it was ‘really all washed up’). It makes literary sense to me that having the Westmacott outlet - those six novels are autobiographical, free-ranging, full of unanswered questions about the human condition - would enable Agatha Christie, queen of the distilled and the apparently detached, to write at her best.

Within that fifteen-year span, in which she hit almost every ball for six, there was (again to my mind) a hyper-peak during World War Two. This should be surprising, but somehow is not: the war was energizing for some people. ‘I’m afraid to say I really loved the war’, as Nancy Mitford once said (my grandmother felt the same way), which culminated for her in the writing of The Pursuit of Love. For Agatha, meanwhile…. she was mostly living in London - her second husband Max Mallowan was in north Africa, working and probably misbehaving (‘are there any other dogs, darling?’; but this never touched in the way that it did with her first husband) - also doing her war bit as a dispenser at University College Hospital. Alone, semi-exhausted but not at all unhappy, living with the febrile threat of imminent possible death, she entered a zone of heightened, almost frenzied creativity: of which Towards Zero is a supreme example.

The plot is quite alarmingly contingent, solved by a series of guesses and coincidences and with the help of a random visit to a dry cleaner. Neither Poirot nor Marple feature, although Miss Marple was crowbarred into a (bad) 2008 television adaptation. Implausibility abounds. And yet: Agatha sweeps the reader along, in her most grandly casual manner, because what is really being solved is the human dynamic, which grips like a fist.

Claude Chabrol was attracted to the book, and I can only mourn that lost production, surely one of the great phantom films; I haven’t seen the 2007 French movie, L’Heure zèro, whose character list includes a Commissaire Bataille, ie Agatha’s police detective Battle. Which suggests an admirable, and dare one say rare, fidelity to the original.

Not that one expects absolute replication. That would be absurd. But with Agatha, who really did know what she was doing, and whose books progress in an innately scenic way (demonstrations of character-in-action), one does crave a grasp of the essence of what is being adapted. For me, the best recent example of this was the And Then There Were None that I saw on stage last year, directed by the brilliant Lucy Bailey, which had the expressionist nightmare quality of the book yet preserved the Christiean formalities: how simple it seems when it is done so well, yet how rarely that happens!

And so. Towards Zero. What does one want from it? Above all, a sense of darkness. The real thing, not a stylized confection. Not posh people striding about and quoting Oswald Mosley in those drawly voices that makes you long for the entrée of a Millwall fan, which tends to be the tone of contemporary adaptations (ie last year’s BBC Murder is Easy) and which - by making everybody frightful from the first - completely misses the point of the exercise: the tension between the civilized, respectable, often pleasing facade, and what potentially lies beneath.

It should not be necessary to say that smiling and smiling and being a villain is so much more interesting than just being a villain, but apparently it does need saying, and never more than with Towards Zero. Therein lies its essence.

Agatha dealt in murder, therefore darkness is always logically present, but in Towards Zero she directly acknowledged the bleak hell that lives inside certain humans. The ones who are born, as another of her novels has it, to endless night. Endless Night - that late masterpiece - has a claim to being the darkest book that Agatha ever wrote, yet to my mind Towards Zero takes that particular prize; not least because it has a perverted quality… also lurking in Endless Night but otherwise, I think, absent from her work. (Not that you would know it from the more recent adaptations, which for some reason seem fairly to revel in perversion. If only they were to read this, from the underrated A Caribbean Mystery (and now I’m quoting from the intro to the 2020 edition of my Agatha biog). ‘which opens with a passage in which Miss Marple compares her own, apparently limited experience with that of her nephew, Raymond West, a successful novelist smugly cocooned in his own broadmindedness.

‘“People like Raymond were so ignorant. In the course of her duties in a country parish, Jane Marple had acquired quite a comprehensive knowledge of the facts of rural life. She had no urge to talk about them, far less to write about them – but she knew them. Plenty of sex, natural and unnatural. Rape, incest, perversion of all kinds. (Some kinds, indeed, that even the clever young men from Oxford who wrote books didn’t seem to have heard about.)’”

‘How much more effective, and flattering to the reader, is this calm acceptance of human frailty! But modern interpreters of Christie tend to favour the Raymond West stance; dragging in sex ‘natural and unnatural’, as well as quasi-­pornographic reminders that the endgame of old­-style detective fiction is a gallows. As I wrote in this biography, ‘it is hangings and couplings that the modern world feels it must bring to Agatha Christie: the realities of death and forbidden passion, the things she left out of her books.’ If this was the case in 2007, it is ten times more so today. The new BBC adaptations – first broadcast in 2015 – are fairly slathered in deviancy, as if it were peculiarly exciting to import coke-­snorters and sado-­masochists into an authorial world famed for its structured restraint. In the same nose-­thumbing spirit the plots are yanked and twanged and abused: a different ending (and title) for The Witness for the Prosecution, an entirely different solution for Ordeal by Innocence. But it is the cause dearest to the BBC – identity politics – that is scrawled all over the productions, as if Christie’s anti-­ideological mindset has been mistaken for an invitingly blank canvas. In fact that mindset was a choice, and a considered one. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe contains a tight little debate on the relative virtues of conservatism and radicalism, which the former wins on points. Cold War-­era novels such as Destination Unknown and They Came to Baghdad are, in their deceptive way, fierce rebuttals of the entrenched positions that then prevailed; and indeed do so again.

‘Contemporary politics were heftily referenced in the 2018 The ABC Murders, in which Poirot became a symbolic European rejected by an insular island nation. Interesting? Yes, in theory. In practice, as dull as when he was trapped in a toytown land of spats and square crumpets. Christie never dealt in the kind of reality that is now forced upon her – indeed she was frequently unreal – but she never wrote a word that was untrue. That is the principle guiding the best adaptations of her work.

‘The new way, however, is to have it both ways. Agatha Christie is fair game, a plaything, yet at the same time she is essential to the enterprise, and not just because her name is box office. She is a safety net. Those who make use of her know that she will always save them from falling, and deep down they respect her for it. The new audiences who go to the recent staging of Witness in London’s County Hall chambers, or to the remake of Orient Express – they know the same thing. Beneath the siren lure of fashion, something simpler is calling: the yearning for a story well told.’

Back to Towards Zero… The fact that Chabrol took such an interest is significant, not just because he was fascinated by the facade-management of murderers (as in the stunning 1970 Le Boucher), but because one of his later films, La Cérémonie (1995), is a true-to-the-essence adaptation of the novel A Judgment in Stone, by Ruth Rendell. And Towards Zero always reminds me of a Ruth Rendell novel; although in her hands it would have been very differently written.

In 1992, in a Channel 4 documentary entitled j’Accuse (which I suppose gives fair warning), a twelve-round assault upon Agatha’s reputation, Ruth Rendell had said:

When I read one of her books, I don’t feel as though I have a piece of fiction worthy of the name in front of me. With death, I do feel there should be an element of shock and horror and pain – but pain and passion aren’t there in Agatha Christie novels.

I am a great admirer of Ruth Rendell, but this reading of Agatha does now seem extraordinarily vieux jeu; even rather 6th-former, as if the only way to portray a situation or a character is ‘in depth’, ‘in the round’…. Fifty years earlier, Raymond Chandler had offered a similar view, in a letter written after reading And Then There Were None:

I’m very glad I’ve read the book because it finally and for all time settled a question in my mind that had at least some lingering doubt attached to it. Whether it is possible to write a strictly honest mystery of the classic type. It isn’t… To get the surprise murderer you fake character, which hits me hardest of all, because I have a sense of character.

This notion of ‘faking character’ seems frankly bizarre; surely this is a wilful misinterpretation of the function of the facade? Which, in Towards Zero, is deployed to an effect that might even be called radical, exploring as it does the notion of the English Gentleman (whom Agatha might be thought to admire, but she was more complicated than that; in fact her sympathies, such as she has them, linger in the novel with the young man forced by class prejudice to play the gigolo).

But really Chandler’s complain is a misinterpretation of Agatha herself: of her quick, flighty, scenic, impressionistic, mysteriously atmospheric style, which is now far better appreciated, and which conveys ‘a sense of character’ without analysing it.

Or, as I put it in my biography, with regard to Towards Zero and the ‘powerful, violent, sick idea’ that propels it: she did not describe the idea as such, ‘because Agatha did not do that; she simply let the idea become the plot.’

That said, I would undoubtedly have relished Towards Zero as written by Ruth Rendell. It would have been a study in psychopathy, with all those dodgy malfunctioning synapses exposed to lurid view; a novel like Thirteen Steps Down, whose protagonist is a young man obsessed with the 10 Rillington Place serial killer, John Reginald Halliday Christie*; or indeed like A Judgment in Stone (La Cérémonie), which is a morbid scrutiny of two women, separately potentially dangerous, together forging a murderous folie à deux. And which is - no question - disturbing, unnerving, in a way that even Towards Zero can never quite be; the facade offers a shield to the reader also, to the point where the darkness need scarcely be affecting when one is actually reading the book.

In that respect, Ruth Rendell was right to have noted an absence of pain and passion. Yet this is part of what I love so much about Agatha Christie, the way she draws no attention to these things, which nonetheless remain oddly vivid as they churn around the imagination. For Agatha, the mysteries of character are a given; and she assumes that we, too, know the ways of the world. Indeed, like Miss Marple, she is a true sophisticate. So much so that by comparison even Ruth Rendell seems an innocent, whose desire to comprehend evil is also a shield of a kind; a means to control what Agatha knew was a simple fact of life, something that could never be expunged, except in detective fiction.

• Do read Peepshow, Kate Summerscale’s brilliant new book on the Rillington Place crimes, published this week by Bloomsbury. I may write about it a bit more but for now, suffice it to say, it is just as superbly readable and insightful as one would expect from the Queen of true crime.