“I like a good detective story, but, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that—years before sometimes—with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day. The point zero, if you will. All converging towards a given spot…And then, when the time comes—over the top! Zero Hour. Yes, all of them converging towards zero….”
That’s Clarke Peters as Frederick Treves at the beginning of Rachel Bennette’s three part adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1944 whodunit Towards Zero. That speech is about the only thing Bennette’s adaptation has in common with Christie’s novel. Well, that and character names.
It’s as if Bennette put all of Christie’s characters and relationships into a hat and drew them out one at a time and then devised her own story. What remains is a bunch of similarly named characters and the basic whodunit plot, but lots of seemingly unmotivated threads that have little or nothing to do with main plot. Unlike with Christie’s original tightly plotted novel where everything fits in neatly together.
Don’t get me wrong. If you watch Bennette’s TV adaptation you’ll find it to be a pleasant and occasionally engrossing whodunit, though you’ll probably feel it could have been done in two episodes rather than three, and you’ll wonder what that failed suicide attempt has to do with the main plot as well as several other dangling threads. And it’s engrossing primarily due to the cast which includes not only a veteran like Peters but also Anjelica Huston as well as many fine younger actors.
The lesson, as always, is don’t tinker with Christie’s plots. She usually knew what she was doing.
Especially in Towards Zero, which is one of her better whodunits.
It features Superintendent Battle rather than Poirot or Miss Marple, and as usual I’m not going to say too much about the plot other than to point out that the murders (there is more than one) don’t occur until nearly the halfway point in the novel, and that made some of the early reviewers rather restless. But the novel is extremely intricately plotted with a series of seemingly unconnected events following one another, but there is a purpose for everything, as the discriminating reader will discover.
I think Christie’s romantic imagination does get carried away at the end as she tacks on what I see as a not properly motivated “happy ending” for a couple of her characters, but then it’s the kind of unmotivated ending that Shakespeare was wont to do, so we can’t really blame her too much, can we?
By the way, this is the book that Christie dedicated to that ungrateful bastard Robert Graves, adding this additional note:
Dear Robert,
Since you are kind enough to say you like my stories, I venture to dedicate this book to you. All I ask is that you should sternly restrain your critical faculties (doubtless sharpened by your recent excesses in that line!) when reading it.
This is a story for your pleasure and not a candidate for Mr. Graves’ literary pillory!
Your friend,
Christie’s fellow crime novelist Robert Barnard called the novel “superb”; no jealousy there. Opera critic Charles Osborne, who wrote The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie similarly calls the novel “superb” and adds that it’s “somewhat sinister”, referring to the dysfunctional family that figures prominently in the plot.
Christie reworked the novel into a play a decade later, but it only had a run of about six months, perhaps because one of the London newspaper reviewers revealed the identity of the killer in his review. What an asshole!
In 1995 the film Innocent Lives was released. It had begun many years previously as an adaptation of Towards Zero, but as often happens in the world of cinema, even apparently in French cinema, directors and script writers lose interest and new ones take over and by the time the film reached the screen Christie’s estate insisted that the following disclaimer be added:
The producers gratefully acknowledge the inspiration provided by Agatha Christie for the making of this film, which does not purport to be a faithful adaptation of any of her work.
So there!
Another Frenchman, Pascal Thomas, undertook the task of adapting the novel in 2007, and according to Mark Aldridge in his Agatha Christie on Screen, the film L’heure zéro is “set in the present day, but with old-fashioned sensibilities and tone, it tackles the mystery with a detached air that is difficult for the audience to engage with, making this one of the less entertaining French adaptations of Christie’s works, even if it is one of the more faithful.”
Finally(!) the novel was adapted for the third season (ahem, series) of the 2004 Agatha Christie’s Marple programme, even though Miss Marple did not appear in the original source material. Says Aldridge: “The adaptation itself, from Kevin Elyot, has a charming opening with Tom Baker and Eileen Atkins chatting like old friends so that Baker’s character of Frederick Treves can outline the premise of the novel and the significance of its title. The addition of Miss Marple to the story is reasonably well integrated, as she effectively stays in the background and pipes up only when she has something to say about the investigation or events—this is not unlike her characterisation and role in several of the novels in which she stars.”
That will bring us back to do—I mean to Rachel Bennette’s screwing around with Christie’s material. Clearly she wasn’t the first one to mess things up and she probably won’t be the last, but if you want my recommendation, here it is.
If you aren’t the literary kind and reading ain’t your thing, then go ahead and watch Rachel Bennette’s three part adaptation of Towards Zero. It’s on BritBox and it can be found on some other services for a limited time. It isn’t awful, it just isn’t really Christie. I gave it seven stars out of ten.
Otherwise, stick with the original Towards Zero. Dame Agatha nearly always knows best.
Quote of the day:
In my experience, people who go about looking for trouble usually find it.
—Agatha Christie
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