See Mark Aldridge, Agatha Christie on Screen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2016), 29–30.Ģ Agatha Christie lived until January 1976.ģ Initially serialised from March 1852, but first collected as a novel in 1853.Ĥ Janet Morgan, Agatha Christie: A Biography (London: Collins, 1984, 1997), 331–332 Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery (London: Headline, 2007), 432–433.ĥ Mark Aldridge, Agatha Christie on Screen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 99.Ħ For example, it is presented as a brief bullet point on the official Agatha Christie website’s page 100 Facts about Agatha Christie: (accessed December 12, 2021).ħ The paperwork is frustratingly contradictory when it comes to exactly when each script or treatment is completed. This article looks at the context of the film project, Christie’s screenplay writing process, and finally the contents of the scripts.ġ Particularly regarding whether they could rework detective Hercule Poirot to make him more of a romantic hero, and even create mysteries of their own featuring Christie’s characters. Therefore, this material gives an indication of how Christie felt adaptations should operate. This is of particular interest because Christie did not write for the screen at any other point in her career, and was also sharply critical of most adaptations of her work. The previously unexplored surviving material includes correspondence and the film’s draft screenplays and film treatments, which all offer an insight into how Agatha Christie considered that a novel could be adapted for cinema screens. This article looks at the surviving material related to the unrealised project and considers what it tells us about Agatha Christie and film adaptations.

The intention was that the film would be produced by MGM, which at the time was adapting Christie’s own works for the screen. In May 1962 Agatha Christie completed a rough draft of a screenplay that adapted Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House.

Dickens novel bleak