This spring feels like Agatha Christie season, with a new book that pays tribute to the queen of mystery and a high-profile BritBox series that takes a liberal approach to her 1944 novel Towards Zero with uneven results.
I had hoped for better. Unlike some of her other books, where shallow characters can take second place to the plot, Towards Zero is a promising candidate for adaptation. Its characters are well developed and singular, the dialogue is sharp, and the plot is especially devious. A cast that includes Anjelica Huston and Matthew Rhys seems poised to bring it to life. The show appears appropriately expensive, with stylized 30s costumes and sweeping seaside scenery, and the imposing home of the ailing Lady Tressilian (Huston) looks grim enough to put off the young people invited there for a house party.
Unfortunately, the series fails to deliver. One of the most compelling characters is gone halfway through, and another has little to do until the second of three episodes. Lady Tressilian never leaves her bed yet commands attention with every utterance, while the exertions of the bright young things, including her late husband’s ward, a tennis star, and his current and former wife, go for nothing. Their love triangle drives the plot, but whether they’re trading smoldering glances at dinner, dancing at a club, or having artfully posed sex, it’s kind of a yawn.
When one of the characters is murdered, Rhys becomes more of a presence as Inspector Leach, psychologically damaged by the war and a mess when we first meet him. Towards Zero was one of several books featuring Superintendent Battle, who is dispensed with here and folded into Rhys’s character. So Rhys has to embody in one man what Christie originally assigned to three: a suicidal local man, Battle’s nephew Leach, and Battle himself. Though Rhys is always riveting, the mash-up doesn’t quite coalesce.
This is only one of many changes this series makes to the book, few of them for the better. Towards Zero presents as a prestige project, and whenever Huston or Rhys is on-screen it snaps to life, but the rest is a handsome disappointment.
I’m not sure what hopes its creators had for Until I Kill You, which was first produced for New Zealand TV and eventually found its way to BritBox. But despite its tabloid-y provenance and lurid title, it turns out to be an unusually fine series based on the memoir of Delia Balmer, a nurse who lived in London with a carpenter named John Sweeney for a number of years in the 90s. He turned out to be a psychopath who murdered young women, which Delia suspected but couldn’t prove to the police.
Far from a gore-fest, Until I Kill You is an absorbing, well-crafted exploration of how a free-spirited but solitary middle-aged woman found herself in such a nightmarish situation and how she dealt with its aftermath. Anna Maxwell Martin (delightful as the sister-in-law in Ludwig) gives a fearless and detailed performance as Delia, a rootless odd duck who can be unfiltered and chilly. She makes no apology for her difficult personality and is consistently, defiantly herself. Even fighting for her life in an ambulance, she bosses the E.M.T.’s around.
She’s not exactly a dude magnet, so the fact that Sweeney is played by a bearded Shaun Evans (Endeavor) with an edgy mix of inarticulate charm and occasional bursts of menace makes her attraction to him more understandable.
For a while they’re two oddballs against the world, but after he ties her to the bed for days and rapes her repeatedly (handled off-screen), she goes to the police and changes the locks, enraging him to the point where he later beats her almost to death outside her building. He’s arrested for the attack but escapes, eluding the police for years.
Julia Ford directs with sensitivity and intelligence, upending any voyeuristic expectations with her steady focus on Delia, who is no one’s idea of a victim ennobled by suffering. In fact, she is perpetually outraged about it, which Ford and Maxwell Martin don’t flinch from.
To be fair, Delia suffers from PTSD and the lingering physical effects of the attack. The Sweeney cases were dealt with ineptly by the police, and the gears of justice clogged for way too long, so her frustration is understandable, if not her petulance about giving important testimony when the killer finally was tried for the murders.
“May you live until I kill you,” wrote Sweeney on a sketch he made of a boot about to crush a cockroach with Delia’s face. But the boot ended up on Delia’s foot, and through luck, bravery, and sheer contrariness, she lived to see him get what he deserved.
Let’s get back to Agatha Christie, who I think would have loved Delia. Anthony Horowitz has added a new book to his Christie-esque series about book editor Susan Ryeland, and it’s his most satisfying yet.
Like its two predecessors, Marble Hall Murders follows a meta formula in which a mystery novel featuring private detective Atticus Pünd contains the clues to a “real” murder. This book improves on Moonflower Murders by weaving the manuscript in and out of Susan’s contemporary narration, rather than plopping a substantial book-within-a-book into the middle of the modern story, making for a more digestible reading experience.
Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the Pünd series after the death of its author, a publisher has commissioned a continuation novel (which Horowitz himself has done with books about Sherlock Holmes and James Bond) from Eliot Crace, the erratic but talented son of a hugely successful children’s-book author, Miriam Crace. The publisher engages Susan to guide Eliot through the process, which proves to be fraught.
Eliot seeks to settle scores with his family through the book, a lightly disguised version of events from his childhood that reveals ugly secrets about his saintly mother and siblings that Susan works to decode.
In Crace’s story, Pünd, whose health is failing, travels to the South of France, where his friend Lady Margaret Chalfont has summoned him to sort out an upsetting revelation. He arrives too late; his friend has just died of a heart attack—or is it poisoning? Assisted by a detective from the Paris Sûreté, Pünd investigates her uncooperative second husband and adult children, who were staying with her at Château Belmar. (Attention, anagram people.)
Who knew book editing could be so dangerous? As she learns more about them, Susan runs afoul of the Crace family and is pursued by an old enemy who is more dangerous than she could have imagined.
Reading the book now, I found the voice of Lesley Manville, who stars in the TV adaptations of Horowitz’s previous two books, in my head as Susan. It makes sense that the idea for this clever and entirely pleasurable book came when the actress expressed interest in doing a third series—and it will probably pop up on PBS sooner than we have any right to expect, thanks to the amazingly prolific Mr. Horowitz.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books at Air Mail. She lives in New York City
