Why would PBS spice "Mystery?"

[question everything]

I was going to post on the Lounge, but since we have had posts here about the peril of PBS, decided to post here.

Also, if you have not watched "the body in the library" but intend to, do not read any further.

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I have read all of Agatha Christie's books as well as the others that have been made for "Mystery" and was surprised at the identity of the murderer in the above program.

There were two people with motive to murder the victim. A man and a woman. Plus, it was clear that the victim's female cousin, who identified the body (which was wrong) was an accomplice.

In the Mystery program, it was the woman who was the murderer, who was the lover of the female cousin. And Miss Marple and her friend had to explain to the stuffy detective that, yes, "things" like that do occur. I was really surprised as I know that Christie has never dealt with "deviant" behavior - as opposed to, say, Anne Perry.

So I found the book in my bookcase and... what do you know, in the book it was the man who was the murderer and who was secretly married to the female cousin.

I have seen many changes in the adaptation of these mystery books; often several characters are omitted and their dialogs are assigned to someone else. Again, in this program, whole conversations were assigned to other characters. But to change the identity of the murderer in such a way? Does PBS really need more reasons from the church people to shut it down?

[DavidDvorkin]

1. For a brief discussion of the changes

See this link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/mystery/library/notes.html

Or not a discussion, but at least a reference to them. See the end of the article, in which it mentions that Christie's grandson, among others, was consulted and agreed.

[question everything]

2. Thank you for the link

I found the message board quite informative and, it appears that most agreed with me.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. I don't know what the relative amounts of PBS and ITV money were

but ITV, in Britain, needed to have some reason to put on a new version of something that the BBC did 20 years ago. So a slight change to the plot seems reasonable. And mysteries are better if you don't actually know the whole plot.

[question everything]

4. This is true for new ones

Why not write new mysteries, even using the same characters? I think that something like that has been done with Sherlock Holmes.

But most of us, who tune to watch these ones do expect to see the words in a book turn into flesh and blood real people. As I said, I did not remember who the murderer was as it has been many years since I read the book, but I knew that Christie did not include such blatant homosexual relations in any of her books.

[Lisa]

5. I suppose it's an indicator of social change ...

More people these days are willing to acknowledge that same-sex relationships exist -- which opens up some more possibilities for plots and suspects, I guess!

I know that Agatha Christie probably did witness some major shifts in British culture during her lifetime, but her form of detective fiction didn't generally make a point of including this (unlike the work of later crime writers like Ruth Rendell).

I don't have enough knowledge about Christie herself to guess how she might have felt about these modifications -- but she'd been known to break a few genre conventions herself (e.g. having the criminal be a respected professional like a doctor, or even the story narrator). So if lesbian relationships are in the same category (a surprising revelation in a story, but no longer "unthinkable") -- I guess that's about par.


Thanks for bringing this up -- I've become involved in planning a mystery writing conference for next year, and this might be a really good topic to include.