The Secret Adversary: A Web Series

Recently on facebook, I was alerted to the existence of a new web series when a friend commented on a post. (Really, isn't social media the best?) By and large, the web series I've seen haven't been super interesting to me. I love the idea of the form, but most of what I've seen hasn't excited me much content-wise. This all changes with Kevin Townley and Hanna Cheek's new series "Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary".

I mean, come on. This was clearly made for me.

Anyone who knows anything about me or my blog knows that I am pretty obsessed with classic mystery fiction in general, and Agatha Christie in particular. A while ago, I wrote a blog post in which I sung the praises of what I termed Christie's "Adventurous Flapper" books. Of which, The Secret Adversary is the first. Published initially in 1922, set in 1919 right at the end of the war, it's a completely preposterous adventure starring Tommy Beresford and Prudence "Tuppence" Cowley. Christie went on to write a number of books starring Tommy and Tuppence, taking them into old age in the later entries in the series.

Lots of people consider them among her weaker books, but I've always enjoyed them. One of the main criticisms is that many, many (MANY) people find Tuppence to be a bit insufferable. I watched the BBC versions and thought they were dreadful, they went with the notion that the audience would find Tuppence as entertaining as she finds herself, which is pretty much a recipe for annoyance. One of the wonderful things the current webseries does is embrace Tuppence's self-aggrandizing self enchantment and use it for comedy, and Hanna Cheek is completely hilarious.

Agatha Christie unfortunately edited this scene out of the published version of her novel

The thing that really makes the series is one simple stroke of genius: the actors all dress in 1920s costumes, but it is filmed in and around modern day New York City. It's brilliant. At first it seems like a stunt, but as I've watched further (I've seen the first four episodes), I realize this has freed them utterly from the strictures of doing a period piece without essentially betraying the material. The dialogue is straight out of Christie, and they intend to film the whole, entire thing. I for one, am thrilled. Co-creator Townley has this to say about the production process:

"My idea was that we'd do an unabridged adaptation of the book (there are 28 chapters in it, so we would be set for content for a while) and that our motto would be "GET IT DONE". Any hiccup that would ruin a normal shoot (tourists walking into frame, "losing the light", bad continuity) would just be incorporated into ours. We'd try to get costumes that are as close to period as possible (whatever we could drum up from our own wardrobes or borrow) and shoot as much "on location" as possible; since we can't get to London, Times Square stands in for Picadilly and so forth. We've been kicked out of quite a few places, but we've gotten away with a lot, too! On some days we have access to super whiz-bang camera equipment, other days we shoot on our iPhones. Whatever happens is fine, so long as we really try our best and get it done! Right now we're trying to air a new episode every other week. If we stick to that schedule we should be done in about six months!  It's totally terrifying shooting guerrilla-style because Hanna and I are both terminally polite, but it's also liberating, not being so precious about one's "creative process". Plus, I've always wanted to be in a mystery story, and if I waited for someone else to cast me I'd be waiting till about Two-thousand-never."

One of the things I love about the early Christie mysteries are their breathless energy and their artless good humor, qualities this series embraces whole heartedly. Watch the first episode here, and if you can spare it, give them money! And (ahem), Townley is not the only one who has harbored dreams of being in a mystery story.

Agatha Christie's original dedication in "The Secret Adversary"

Dame Agatha at 120

Dame Agatha Christie was born 120 years ago yesterday, and I just wanted to remind everyone about the blog tour that has been arranged to commemorate this event. My entries (if you missed them!) were posted on September 7th.

In general, Dame Agatha was pretty poorly served by the movie adaptations of her books. The great exception was, of course, the Sidney Lumet directed Murder on the Orient Express with Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot. I've never been able to stand any of the Peter Ustinov or Margaret Rutherford adaptations, though, admittedly Death on the Nile has it's charms. One of my favorite recent(ish) Agatha Christie homages was a David Greenwalt/Joss Whedon penned Season 2 episode of Angel. There is a long, classic, drawing room denouement delivered by Wesley Wyndham-Price (the excellent Alexis Denisof) full of suspects, misleading clues and startling revelations. Please note that nothing else is shown of this particular Angel Investigations case except for the long, complicated reveal of the killer. It's very funny. Sadly, the intellectual property gods have ensured I cannot show it to you.

But have a Whedon fest and watch away. And read some mysteries. And raise a glass to mystery writers everywhere.

Dame Agatha's Harlequinade

One of the projects I mean to complete before I die is my book titled "Everything I Ever Learned, I Learned From Reading Mystery Novels". Because, mostly, I did.

As I mentioned earlier today, Agatha Christie liked her literary allusions, and when I was first reading her oeuvre, a dropped reference from her would send me scurrying to another section of the library. She loved mythology and Shakespeare and music. But she had a particular fascination with Commedia dell'Arte. It comes up again and again in her books, the apotheosis being the short story collection The Mysterious Mr Quin. The stories all feature Mr. Satterthwaite, an elderly, comfort loving dilettante. He wants nothing more than to stay in nice houses and hotels, eat good food, collect interesting people, and look at art. In each chapter, Mr. Satterthwaite encounters a mystery of some sort, and a shadowy man called Harley Quin appears and helps him solve the problem by assisting him in looking at whatever the situation is, from a different direction. There are many intimations of the supernatural in the character of Mr. Quin, but little is ever explained. In some of the stories, Mr. Satterthwaite doesn't exactly meet or speak with Mr. Quin, but his presence is felt.

The book is an odd departure for Dame Agatha, but an awfully interesting one. The stories tend to be a little darker in tone, they're full of love turned to madness and jealousy. People's identities are mutable in nearly all the stories. nearly everyone is wearing some sort of mask, not just the eponymous Mr. Quin. There's also an arc throughout the book in which we see Mr. Satterthwaite being shaken from his complacency, and instead of watching events transpire in front of him as if he was an audience member, he becomes an active participant in his life.

I had never heard of Commedia pre-Dame Agatha. But looking at the publication date of my copy of The Mysterious Mr Quin, I was only 12 or 13 when I first read it. Acting school, my brief time as Columbine and my happy associations with various red noses was still years away.

Note: this post is a participant in the Agatha Christie Blog Tour commemorating her 120th birthday.

Dame Agatha's Labours

Like nearly every other genre writer of her era, Agatha Christie wrote piles of short stories of varying quality and subject matter. Genre short stories seem to be having something of a resurgence (go internet!), for which I am really, really happy. I mean, I like Raymond Carver as much as the next person, but Alice Munroe aside, doesn't the traditional New Yorker-style short story seem kind of, like, over?

When I was young and living in my parents' house, my favorite reading spot was a decrepit arm-chair in a corner of the dining room. It was conveniently situated next to a large floor to ceiling bookcase. Coincidentally or not, the books within reaching distance of my chair were art books and mysteries. I'll surely write about art books another time, but back to mysteries. One of the earliest Agatha Christie books I remember reaching over, grabbing and devouring was the short story anthology The Labours of Hercules (which I just discovered, is out of print in the US. For shame! But you can get a digital version. Is this where we are heading? Where is my Luddite sledgehammer?). In it, Hercule Poirot decides to accept only cases that conform to the famous labors of his mythical namesake.

Agatha Christie loved literary allusions and played with them often. In this collection, her versions of Hercules' labors are particularly clever. Cerberus lives in a fashionable London nightclub called Hell (what else would they name their dog?), the Nemean Lion concerns a pekingese, The Stymphalean Birds are pure red herring (FYI - I love this story), the Arcadian Deer is about a Russian ballet dancer, The Lernean Hydra is about a vicious rumor. They are all completely enjoyable. Maybe it's Agatha Christie's consistency that I admire almost more than anything. In this collection, and in the bulk of her career, she managed to very, very rarely turn out a bad book. I think some of this is attributable to her complete understanding of the sort of writer she was and didn't feel the need to "prove she could write serious fiction". Something that has been the downfall of several splendid genre writers - frequent Christie detractor P.D. James jumps immediately to mind.

Sometimes, I believe, people think writing entertainment is somehow easy. There's a very tiresome part of my brain that will forever believe writing a well planned out, clearly written, funny mystery novel is one of the most difficult tasks one can set oneself. The short story versions aren't so easy either. The fact that Dame Agatha managed to achieve this something like 50 times is just gobsmacking.

Note: this post is a participant in the Agatha Christie Blog Tour commemorating her 120th birthday.

Dame Agatha, My Cup Runneth Over!

I love Agatha Christie. I might love Agatha Christie more than any other author. I've read every novel, every short story and her autobiography (which is excellent). I re-read her books more frequently than I care to admit - I read them whenever I am sick or sad or distracted or have insomnia. I would happily defend her oeuvre with my dying breath. Look, are her books great literature? Of course not. She knew that herself and had no shame about it. But she wrote clearly and well, she was often very funny and was almost never dull. Her mysteries are remarkably consistent.

I've brought this up here and there on facebook and elsewhere and many people admit to reading and admiring her Poirot books. A smaller group of readers admit to enjoying her Miss Marple books. The one subset of her mystery oeuvre that gets no love whatsoever are what I refer to as her madcap flapper books. They include* early books such as The Secret Adversary, The Man in the Brown Suit, Partners in Crime, The Secret of Chimneys, The Mystery of the Blue Train, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, and later books such as They Came to Baghdad and Destination Unknown.

The Tommy and Tuppence books seem to be held in particular disdain. They were introduced in Dame Agatha's second novel, The Secret Adversary, in 1922. Childhood friends Thomas Beresford and Prudence "Tuppence" Cowley run into each other in London, where they are both broke, unemployed and at loose ends after the Great War. They decide to advertise as adventurers and get embroiled in an admittedly ludicrous narrative that involves secret plans, the sinking of the Lusitania, amnesia, a millionaire from Texas, Bolsheviks, poorly understood politics (on Mrs. Christie's part), labor riots, kidnapping and (of course!) a wicked criminal mastermind who is behind it all. Sigh. I know. I first read it when I was about eleven, and I ate it up. I liked all of the subsequent books that follow them into adulthood and then even old age.

Look. I know what all the considerable problems are with many of the books listed above. The plots are preposterous, the politics are simultaneously simple minded, right wing and often times racist. Off setting that are her gallery of high-spirited, intelligent, adventurous and fearless young women who are full of self determination and blithely travel across the globe solving crimes. And if such a young women appears in one of the Poirot books of the twenties or early thirties, she may even wind up being a murderer.

I think the First World War effected the greatest social change of the Twentieth Century. Suddenly, women were working and earning their own money, they were unchaperoned, they drove, they lived outside of the home, they drank cocktails, they were freed from the tyranny of the corset. Agatha Christie didn't invent the detective novel or the female detective. Wilkie Collins (the remarkably feminist inventor of the mystery novel) wrote The Law and the Lady in 1875 in which Valeria Woodville solves the murder of her husband's first wife (and there is a mad, legless genius named Miserrimus Dexter, and if this isn't enough to make you want to read this book, you are clearly reading the wrong blog), and Baroness Orczy wrote Lady Molly of Scotland Yard in 1910. But though the mystery writers of the 20s and 30s may not have invented the genre, Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and others made them modern. The Secret Adversary was published just twelve years after Lady Molly, but they clearly inhabit different universes. There's a giddy excitement in Christie's flapper adventures that has always appealed to me, maybe because they smell of a new found freedom.


*in my head - as this is a category I've pretty much invented, er, identified rather, myself.