There's More Red Herrings in the Sea: Five Golden Age Adaptation Options Besides Agatha (and Fifteen More to Follow up on)

Say you've read all the mysteries of Agatha Christie, even the relatively undistinguished ones like Destination Unknown and Third Girl, and the outright disasters like Passenger to Frankfurt and Postern of Fate.  In fact say you've actually read them all, the good and great ones anyway, two or three times or more.  And you've read all those Sophie Hannah continuations.  And you've seen all the Christie films and series.  Don't you occasionally hanker for something more in the mystery line besides your beloved Agatha Christie? 

Here are some suggestions for producers of mystery films and series, all of them prolific accomplished authors from the Golden Age, who created popular series sleuths and, best of all, are actually in print today (in all or in part):

1. Margery Allingham (1904-1966)

Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham is one of the few mystery writers I know of who truly deserves the description "Dickensian."  Her well-mysteries are filled with colorful and quirky characters and situations.  If they are too posh for modern day filmmakers, with aristocratic amateur sleuth Albert Campion, there's always his gross, earthy sidekick, Lugg.  And some of Allingham's books, like the much-lauded The Tiger in the Smoke and the even better, in my view, Hide My Eyes, have genuinely psychotic villains, which should appeal to the Phelpses of the film and television world. 

Sarah Phelps wouldn't even need to invent grotesques for The Tiger in the Smoke, as she does with Agatha Christie.  Granted, eight Campion novels were filmed three decades ago for the two-season Campion television series, starring the superb Peter Davison, but it's time, I would say, for an update.

More in this vein: Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, Georgette Heyer (no posh sleuths but a lot of posh suspects)

2. Henry Wade (1887-1969)

Henry Wade in WW1

One of the forgotten masters of Golden Age mystery and a subject of my book The Spectrum of English Murder, Henry Wade has been brought back into print in the last few years.  If, like Sarah Phelps, you want to adapt searing mysteries dealing with the baneful impact of the First World War, Wade is your man!  Himself a privileged baronet and wealthy country landowner, Wade casts a commendably wide social net in his book, though there are, to be sure, a large number of manor houses for the Downton Abbey crowd.  But above all his books (like The Dying Alderman, for example) offer psychologically and socially realistic studies of life in England from the Twenties through the Fifites, which ostensibly is what interests Phelps.  Although there is sardonic humor in them, they often take a pessimistic, sometimes grim, view of the state of man and the world, which is also, most conveniently, the fashionable modern take. 

Of all Golden Age writers, Wade is one I find closet in spirit to PD James, far closer than Dorothy L. Sayers actually.  Only some of his books have series sleuth Inspector Poole, but Poole could be written into the standalones.

More in this vein: E. R. Punshon

3. Freeman Wills Crofts (1879-1957)

Freeman Wills Crofts

The Golden Age master of the unbreakable alibi, Freeman Wills Crofts produced one of the archetypal British police detectives, the ever-dutifully striving Inspector Joseph French. 

Admittedly modern day filmmakers would find French a rather dull dog: He's so upright and virtuous and happily married to his equally upright and virtuous wife Emily.  However, Em could be tragically and horribly killed off and "Soapy Joe," as French is known, could spiral into an abysmal alcoholic depression. 

Crofts was a fine plotter, so adapters could let the plots take care of themselves, one hopes, while they flesh out Crofts' rather cardboard characters.  The fervently religious author would not have liked explicit sex and language in adaptations of his books, but what do modern-day filmmakers care! 

One way in which Crofts was very modern was in his criticism of big business corruption, which fills his Thirties mysteries, like Mystery in the Channel.  Modern filmmakers should find that aspect of his detective novels a most congenial one.

More in this vein: R. Austin Freeman, John Rhode/Miles Burton (John Street), J. J. Connington, Christopher Bush, John Bude

4. Gladys Mitchell (1901-1983)

Gladys Mitchell

The "Great Gladys" was unique in Golden Age mystery, with her screeching, reptilian psychiatrist detective Mrs. Bradley.  Her books are filled with bizarre, often grotesque, situations and aberrant behavior.  The plots don't always make total sense, at least not readily, but there is great zest in the telling, especially in the Thirties and Forties.  About twenty years ago, British television tried to do a Mrs. Bradley series, casting as the formidable Dame the the beautiful and posh Diana Rigg.  With all due respect to the Great Diana, it didn't work, and it's time to try again.

More in this vein: John Dickson Carr (a much more disciplined plotter than Mitchell, but with a similar taste for the bizarre and for odd detectives with outsize personalities)

5. Moray Dalton (1882-1963)

Only now coming back into print, Moray Dalton (really Katherine Mary Dalton Renoir) resembles the Crime Queens in many ways, having a decided knack for narrative and characterization.

ordeal by arsenic
a superb crime novel about a
dysfunctional genteel family

Yet for me she is a bit less "posh" (there's that word again) of a writer than Sayers, Allingham and Marsh and explores sexual and class dynamics in Thirties and Forties Britain in more original ways.  See, for example, Death in the Cup and The Strange Case of Harriet Hall, which have some truly striking and refreshing situations. 

I think that Dalton, who seems to have lived life as something of a privileged outsider, may have been more of a forerunner of the modern crime novel than these other, more famous women, estimable as they are.  Her primary sleuth, Hugh Collier, is an appealing young police detective, but modern filmmakers I'm sure could find some grim and terrible qualities to impose on him.  so get cracking, you people!  Five titles by her are coming out in just a few days.

More in this vein: Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson), ECR Lorac/Carol Carnac (Edith Caroline Rivett), H. C. Bailey

Well, there you have it.  Would the Powers-That-Be but listen!  In the meantime, you can eagerly await Agatha Christie's gruesome satanic Sixties sex orgies, coming soon in Sarah Phelps' adaptation of The Pale Horse, a Christie novel already filmed back in 1997 (with Andy Serkis as a cop! Oh, cool!) and 2010 (with Miss Marple as the detective! Oh, *!#!^!).