Towards Effing Zero

The BBC does Agatha: again.

‘Agatha Christie with sex and swearing: why Towards Zero is the best in years.’

This, from The Times last Saturday, was the headline for a feature about a new BBC drama: an adaptation of the 1944 novel Towards Zero, which starts on 2nd March.

Clearly it was meant to seize the attention of potential viewers. Those who do not know that the book is detective-free might even start to imagine a recklessly cavorting Poirot, a Miss Marple making merry with the eff word. Yet I confess that I am not very enticed by the prospect of this sexy sweary adaptation. Even if it really is the ‘best in years’. Even though Matthew Rhys is in it. As are Anjelica Huston, Jack Farthing, Clarke Peters… as usual, the cast is high-end (I recently found myself trying to list major actors who haven’t been in a Christie adaptation at some point, and didn’t get much beyond Laurence Olivier). And of course it looks good. The portentous trailer shows that the usual suspects are on display: carmine lipstick, impeccable tailoring and shiny vintage cars.

But back to that headline…. is this really what passes for an innovative take on the indestructible Christie oeuvre? To hell with the arsenical crumpets, vicar, let’s fucking well get it on?

The fact is that sex and swearing, those revolutionary concepts, have been crowbarred into Agatha adaptations for some twenty years now; they are entirely predictable features. I have been writing about this stuff since a 2005 West End stage version of And Then There Were None, which contained a joyless copulation scene (between people who each fear that the other might be a killer: so here’s an idea, let’s sleep together!) and a still more pornographic hanging scene. And a vomiting scene. I must be fair and say that I don’t recall any eff words, but equally I cannot be sure that I was awake throughout (you know how it is in theatres, they can be remarkably conducive to short sleeps). It was, yes, very boring. More than that, it was excruciatingly pleased with itself, for having - as it thought - dragged Agatha Christie into the twenty-first century, by inserting all the elements that an upper-middle-class lady born in 1890 would never have known about.

As if.

Since then, there has been a succession of such adaptations: it has become the norm to patronize the source material in this would-be iconoclastic way. The recent BBC screen versions - which began with And Then There Were None in 2015 - have all channelled a spirit of Stephen Knight Goes to St Mary Mead. Of course one understands the desire to tear up the crumpets-at-the-vicarage Christie image, which is equally reductive. But who, having grimly endured - for instance - the shoe fetishism scenes in the 2018 The ABC Murders, could possibly think that there is anything headline-worthy about sex and swearing in Agatha?

The irony is that if ever a novel did not need this kind of treatment - these explications of what is left unsaid - it is Towards Zero. It is sophisticated, worldly in its bones, in a way that has nothing to do with trying to shock but is, nonetheless, shocking. Those who have read it will know exactly what I mean. The motive is the most unnerving that Agatha Christie ever conceived, and the layers of concealment within the book merely make it more so. The class code of ‘good behaviour’, which is so prevalent in Agatha and which adaptations take such delight in attacking, is already under interrogation throughout. ‘You’re happy and superior in your little roped off enclosure shut off from the common herd’, says a young man obliged to live off his looks, unable to penetrate the inner circle of the privileged. The woman to whom he is speaking - penniless, but what Agatha would have unashamedly called a lady - hears him out with sympathy. ‘I myself am conventional and, superficially, I dare say, what you call smug. But really, you know, I’m quite human inside.’

Well: perhaps the adaptation will contain such nuances. In an earlier Substack about Towards Zero, I wrote about the projected BBC drama, thus:

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, 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.

In other words: the book itself does the work. As does its creator. One simply needs to listen to her.

What follows behind the paywall (free trial available) is an edited extract from my Agatha biog, from a chapter entitled ‘English Murder’: it is an attempt to analyse the duality that is central to her fascination, and that adaptations so rarely achieve.

In 1966, Francis Wyndham wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘Agatha Christie epitomises the “cosy” school of crime fiction.’

All classic detective fiction is ‘cosy’, up to a point, but there is no doubt that she came to symbolize the genre. She acknowledged as much when she wrote The Body in the Library, a title that comes close to being ironic. She was also, of course, a mystery in her own right. The 1926 disappearance had fixed her in the public mind as a woman whose smiling façade concealed impenetrable depths.