It’s been fifty years since Agatha Christie died (of natural causes) at the age of 85 but the passage of time has only increased the public’s appetite for the Queen of Crime. She is officially the best-selling fiction author in the world, having sold around 2 billion copies of her books, and continues to inspire endless screen adaptations, biographies, biopics, podcasts and of course homages (“Murder, She Wrote,” “Only Murders in the Building” and “Knives Out” all invoke Christie to varying degrees.) The author is also the subject of a major new exhibition at the British Library in London, which opens this month. Starring Mia McKenna-Bruce, the three-part series dropped in January, joining an extensive library of Christie content on the streamer, which includes six seasons of Geraldine McEwan’s “Marple” show, which debuted in 2004, 13 seasons of 1990s series “Poirot” starring David Suchet as the iconic Belgian detective and Kenneth Branagh’s most recent Christie adaptation, 2022 feature “Death on the Nile,” featuring Tom Bateman and Gal Gadot.
Branagh, who has also made feature film adaptations of “Murder on the Orient Express” and “A Haunting in Venice,” recently confirmed he’d be open to doing more Christie, saying, “Any chance to go back would be great.” And despite hanging up Poirot’s trademark Homborg hat 13 years ago, Suchet is equally reluctant to let the author go. Last year he published a non-fiction book, “Travels with Agatha Christie,” in which he retraced the author’s journeys across the globe, having made a docu-series of the same in 2024. With the work still in copyright, Christie’s literary estate is managed by her great-grandson, James Prichard, CEO of Agatha Christie Limited.
While the company oversees all Christie adaptations, it is not prescriptive in its approach. The Netflix series gently deviates from the source material at times, including swapping the book’s Lord Caterham for Lady Caterham, played by Helena Bonham Carter. The highly-anticipated upcoming Poirot adaptation “Hercule,” from the BBC and BritBox, is taking an equally big swing by casting 33-year-old Edward Bluemel as the 60-something-year-old moustachioed private detective.
Speaking at an Agatha Christie panel at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August, Prichard explained the six-episode show deliberately portrays Poirot “in the 1920s as a younger man, not as the fully-formed detective” – a change his great-grandmother would have made if she’d had a do-over, he said. Over the past few years the niche U.K.-focused streamer has commissioned numerous adaptations of her work, including 2022’s “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” featuring Will Poulter and Hugh Laurie, and last year’s “Towards Zero,” starring Anjelica Huston. BritBox’s latest Christie series, the modernized “Tommy & Tuppence,” launched last month.
For Prichard, it’s clear why his great-grandmother’s work — with its enduring themes of vanity, selfishness, status and revenge — remains popular: “What she was saying about us as humanity is as relevant, if not more so, at this moment in time than it was a hundred years ago.”
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