By Curt Evans

Agatha Christie‘s 1934 detective novel Three Act Tragedy, which recently appeared as a new television adaptation in Great Britain and will likely be broadcast in the United States some time this year, is a fascinating example of creative revision. And that’s a mixed blessing.

Recent TV adaptations of Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries have evoked from some viewers complaints about liberties taken with the plots, pointing out that in some cases adapters evidently eager to make Christie “relevant” to modern audiences have substantively changed characters, even going so far as to alter murderer motivations.

Yet with Three Act Tragedy it is a bit more challenging to determine what being “true to the source” means, as the novel was originally published in significantly different version in the United States and Great Britain. The British film is on the whole loyal to the British version of the novel, though the murderer is made more sympathetic, reflecting the more ambiguous moral tone of modern crime novels and films.

[SPOILERS ahead]

In the American edition of the book, which remains in print today in the United States, the murderer, a wealthy, retired actor named Sir Charles Cartwright, is motivated to kill in order to prevent himself from possibly being certified insane by his “nerve specialist” friend, Dr. Bartholomew Strange.

In the British edition, the murderer kills to eliminate Strange because Strange knows of his previous marriage. The middle-aged Cartwright wants to marry a charming young girl, Hermione Lytton Gore, nicknamed “Egg,” but he is already married to an insane, institutionalized woman he cannot divorce. He is afraid that Dr. Strange, who knows about his long-ago, youthful marriage, would object to him inveigling a nice young girl into a bigamous relationship.

Thus the makers of the 2010 British film version of Three Act Tragedy (TAT) had to decide which version of the novel to adapt. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they adopted the motive of the British edition, except that they made Cartwright’s wife the third murder victim (in the book Cartwright’s mad wife remains an offstage character). This is a fairly minor change, apparently motivated by a desire to streamline the plot.

But did the adpaters make the right decision in choosing the British version?

Like most “Golden Age” Christie detective novels, TAT was praised in its day (the influential crime fiction critic known as Torquemada commended the tale’s “charming and sophisticated” prose, which might come as a surprise to modern-day Christie detractors). However, the book is not seen as top-tier Christie.

One reason for this view is the striking absence of Hercule Poirot for most of the narrative—for about 60 percent of the book he appears only intermittently. Even later, when Poirot assumes a greater role, he functions only as an armchair detective, rather in the manner of Christie’s 1963 novel The Clocks, published when the author was greatly tiring of her most famous creation. The detective legwork is left to the trio of Sir Charles Cartwright (the murderer), Egg (his lovely motive in the British edition and 2010 film version), and the elderly Mr. Satterthwaite, best known for his appearances in the Christie’s Harley Quin short stories.

Like so much of Christie from this time, TAT is cleverly plotted and brightly written, with some nice dialogue. Readers who assume Christie is always a prim, Edwardian-era lady will be surprised by some of the discussions in the tale. Egg, one of Christie’s classic modern bright young things, for example, shocks Mr. Satterthwaite with her declaration that she hopes Sir Charles has had love affairs, because she likes men in whom she is interested to have had affairs: “It shows they’re not queer or anything.”

Likewise the declaration of a cook on whether the manor has a secret passage, a cliche of the mystery genre: “Secret passages are all very well, but they’re not things to be encouraged in the servants’ hall. It gives girls ideas.”

And Poirot’s mordant observation on husbands and wives, made after Egg protests that kind Mrs. Babbington would not have killed her husband, Reverend Babbington, who figures as the novel’s first murder victim: “They were devoted to each other,” Egg insists. Poirot, more knowing than the determinedly modern Egg, deumrs: “Mademoiselle–in the course of my experience I have known five cases of wives murdered by devoted husbands and twenty-two of husbands murdered by devoted wives. Les femmes, they obviously keep up appearances better.”

Such writing still delights after seventy-five years. On the other hand, Christie’s prose remains as descriptively flat as ever, as instanced by this passage:

Mr. Satterthwaite’s house was on Chelsea embankment. It was a large house, and contained many beautiful works of art. There were pictures, sculpture, Chinese porcelain, prehistoric pottery, ivories, miniatures and much genuine Chippendale furniture. It had an atmosphere about it of mellowness and understanding.

This is more a grocer’s list than anything else. How it conveys that Satterthwaite’s house has “an atmosphere of . . . understanding” I’m not sure. No doubt this is the kind of thing that people mean when they say that Christie was a bad writer, but the previous paragraph shows, I hope, that her writing had some good points too.

In his web review of the British film adaptation of TAT, Nick Hay contends that the book has been much improved upon, thanks to an amplifying of the characters of Sir Charles and Poirot. I think Hay is largely right. To be sure, the denouement of the American edition, with a maniacal Cartwright practically foaming at the mouth, entirely without no sympathy for Egg, is pretty dire and would have been a challenge to film convincingly.

Even in the British edition, where the motive is altered, Cartwight is not given much nuance. When Poirot reveals all, Sir Charles’s face transforms into that of a “leering satyr.” Here Christie indicates that Sir Charles’ motive in wanting to marry Egg should be seen by her readers as that of lust, not love. Christie clearly wants to withhold reader sympathy from this man who caused three deaths, one of which was especially cruel (the murder of a much-beloved, benevolent clergyman, whose death merely served as a “dress rehearsal” for the main murder—truly an obscenity).

What sympathy Christie does have is reserved for Egg, who is really the ultimate victim of Sir Charles, wooed and won as she was by a despicable, duplicitous, multiple murderer. Though Christie’s modern critics dismiss her as a writer uninterested in character, she clearly put some thought into Egg, whose very nickname is symbolic. Late in the novel, Egg’s mother explains to Mr. Satterthwaite the reason for Egg’s odd nickname: “A regular little roly-poly” she was as a baby, Lady Lytton Gore explains, “trying to stand up and falling over—just like an egg.”

Later, when Egg learns the horrible truth about Sir Charles, she has to be helped out of the room, her legs “trembling so that she could hardly walk.” Yet at the threshhold she is able to take hold of herself, throw back her head, and announce, “I’m all right.” Egg will not wobble and break over this.

In the film, the adapters shift the viewer’s interest and sympathy away from Egg, the victim, to Sir Charles, the murderer. The splendid Martin Shaw (P. D. James Mysteries, Judge John Deed, George Gently), who portrays Cartwright, is given a magnificent speech about loneliness and love that is absent from the book, which makes Sir Charles a far more sympathetic and compelling figure than he is in either original version of the book.

Also, Poirot is given the chance to display horror and outrage, especially understandable with Sir Charles becoming in the film a great friend of Poirot’s. Poirot’s last line in the book, reflecting with horror that he (Poirot) could have been the victim of the first, random murder, is a witty, amusing line. In this TV-film version, by contrast, it is pathos. We get more of a genuine feeling of tragedy, more of a feeling that we are witnessing the stunning downfall of a great man.

In the book, Poirot’s response conveys more a feeling of the stage being cleared, as things return to normal. Egg will survive, we understand, and there’s even a nice, eligible young man waiting for her in the wings.

Which ending you prefer is a matter of individual temperament, but I can’t deny that I was more moved by the film than the book. However, I think it’s fair to note that Christie’s decision to portray Sir Charles less sympathetically is not necessarily a matter of artistic limitation. It seems a good deal more likely that she did not want to make a despicable murderer seem that sympathetic.

Empathy with murderers, after all, is more a characteristic of modern crime novels and films than of classical British mysteries, and there are good reasons for that difference. The classic mystery emphasized the restoration of order after a crisis provoked by an evil person (the murderer in the midst), whereas modern crime fiction tends to be less concerned with closure and more inclined to allow open wounds to continue bleeding, so to speak.

Moreover, it should be noted that the classic problem with developing a murderer’s character more fully in a detective novel—reconciling this more developed character with his or her murderous actions—is indeed present in the film. This new, more sympathetic Sir Charles committed a remarkably cruel first murder, as noted earlier. Not only did he kill a good and harmless man for a mad “dress rehearsal,” but he might well have killed Egg’s mother or his great friend Poirot. All for a dress rehearsal!

I think screenwriter Nick Dear tried to get around the unlikeliness of this by having Poirot shout “It was depraved!” or words to that effect at Sir Charles, implicitly resurrecting the insanity motif from the American edition. But I still had some trouble in my own mind seeing this sympathetic Sir Charles, who just wanted to love and be loved, as ever committing that first murder. In the eagerness of the adapters to make a murderer more sympahtetic, his actions were made less believable. Thus empathy arguably triumphs not only over traditional moral clarity but also over strict logic.

—Curt Evans