Mrs McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christie [12]
The character of Bentley is especially well drawn. He is so unsympathetic that you almost cease to care whether or not he is innocent of Mrs McGinty’s murder. Poirot, fortunately, does care, and devotes his attention to discovering why the old lady was killed: it was not for the thirty pounds she had saved and hidden in her cottage. The fact that, unless Poirot discovers the real murderer, James Bentley will soon be hanged does, of course, add an element of tension to the story, for this is 1952 when murder in England could still be punished by sentence of death. No one is executed in England nowadays, which is for the most part a sign of progress. It does, however, make life rather more difficult for the writer of murder mysteries. When murderers are given sentences so light as virtually to encourage the committing of the act, a particular frisson is removed from the literary genre of the crime novel. If James Bentley had been facing not the rope but a suspended two-year sentence, Poirot might still have devoted his energy to proving Bentley innocent, but would the reader have cared? The puzzle element becomes more important as the punishment of the criminal becomes more and more negligible.
The crime novelist Ariadne Oliver is present in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, making her first appearance since Cards on the Table sixteen years earlier (see p. 139). She is now more than ever like her creator, expressing her dislike of the Finnish detective she has created:
How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got?…Fond of him? If I met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than any I’ve ever invented.
But she makes it clear that she enjoys the fame and fortune Sven Hjerson has brought her. When Robin Upward, a talented young playwright who is adapting one of Mrs Oliver’s crime novels for the stage, suggests that she write a novel to be published posthumously, in which she, Ariadne Oliver, murders the detective, Mrs Oliver replies: ‘No fear! What about the money? Any money to be made out of murders I want now.’ You can almost hear Mrs Christie’s gleeful chuckle as she types that sentence. She probably also took one or two ideas about Robin Upward from Hubert Gregg, who directed her play, The Hollow, in 1951, who certainly made suggestions to her for changes in the dialogue, and some of whose conversations with Mrs Christie may well have been similar to those of Robin Upward with Mrs Oliver.
This picture of life and death among the rural proletariat and bourgeoisie is a lively and entertaining one, and the solution is vintage Christie. As the New York Herald Tribune said, ‘We have gone up the garden path, led by the most delicate misdirection in English prose.’
In the early 1960s, a series of four rather poorly made British films featuring Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple was released, with the popular English comedy actress Margaret Rutherford as Jane Marple. The first and the best of them, Murder, She Said, was based on 4.50 From Paddington (see pp. 283–7), a Miss Marple adventure. The second, Murder at the Gallop, however, was based on a Poirot novel, After the Funeral, with Poirot transformed into Miss Marple for the film (see p. 266). And the third, Murder Most Foul (1964), is based, very loosely and distantly, on Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and again turns Hercule Poirot into Jane Marple! Apart from Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple, who finds herself on a jury and in disagreement with her fellow jurors who think the accused guilty, the cast includes Ron Moody, Charles Tingwell, Megs Jenkins and Margaret Rutherford’s husband, Stringer Davis, a mediocre actor who, at his wife’s insistence, had a role written into the series for him. The murdered woman is no longer an old charlady but a blackmailing actress. The limp screenplay is by David Pursall and Jack Seddon, who wrote three of the four Miss