Two Faces of Evil: Evil under the Sun by Agatha Christie, the 1941 Novel and the 1982 Film Adaptation, Part One

"The sun shines.  The sea is blue.  But you forget...that there is evil everywhere under the sun."

--Hercule Poirot in Evil under the Sun (1941)

"The sky is blue, the sun is shining, and yet you forget that everywhere there is evil under the sun."

Hercule Poirot in Evil under the Sun (1982)

Agatha Christie's single greatest period as a mystery writer, in most people's estimation I would imagine, extended from 1932, with the publication of Peril at End House, the Crime Queen's first Hercule Poirot mystery in four years, and 1944, with the sinister Superintendent Battle mystery Towards Zero, one of my personal Christie favorites.  

Let's list the crime novels she published in these years:

Peril at End House 1932 (Poirot and Hastings)

Lord Edgware Dies 1933 (P and H)

Murder on the Orient Express 1934 (P)

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? 1934 (non-series)

Three Act Tragedy 1935 (P)

Death in the Clouds 1935 (P)

The ABC Murders 1936 (P and H)

Murder in Mesopotamia 1936 (P)

Cards on the Table (1937) (P with Ariadne Oliver, Superintendent Battle, Colonel Race)

Dumb Witness 1937 (P and H)

Death on the Nile 1937 (P with Race)

Appointment with Death 1938 (P)

Hercule Poirot's Christmas 1938 (P)

Murder Is Easy 1939 (non-series)

And Then There Were None 1939 (non-series)

Sad Cypress 1940 (P)

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe 1940 (P)

Sleeping Murder (1940?) (Marple)

Evil under the Sun 1941 (P)

Curtain (1941?) (P and H)

N or M? 1941 (Tommy and Tuppence)

The Body in the Library 1942 (M)

Five Little Pigs 1942 (P)

The Moving Finger 1943 (M)

Towards Zero 1944 (Battle)

25 novels, assuming Christie's later published Curtain and Sleeping Murder were written around 1940/41, in 13 years--an impressive feat indeed, especially considering the high level of technical craft the author evinces in these books.  Of these works fully 17, about two-thirds, are Hercule Poirot mysteries, while three are Marples, one a Superintendent Battle, one a Tommy and Tuppence and three non-series, including possibly the greatest crime novel ever published, And Then There Were None, and the singularly ingenious Poirot mysteries Murder on the Orient Express and The ABC Murders.  

You'll notice that towards the end of this period, Christie moved pretty significantly away from writing about Poirot.  From 1932 to 1938, there were 13 crime novels, all but one of these with Poirot.  The twelve works between 1939 and 1944 are much more evenly divided, with five Poirots, three Marples, a Battle, a Tommy and Tuppence and two non-series.  This indicates the author was indeed getting restive with her greatest detective, having her fiction mystery writing alter ego, Ariadne Oliver, complain about him (or her Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson) in Cards on the Table and actually killing Poirot off in 1940/41 with her later published Curtain.  

In 1942 Christie decidedly altered the style of her Poirot mysteries with one of her most serious crime novels, Five Little Pigs, one of the key modern-leaning "crime novels" of the period with greater emphasis on character, in which Poirot plays something of a subsidiary role as retrospective interrogator.  This change was anticipated in Curtain, one of the Crime Queen's bleakest books, although the general public would not have access to that one until 1975.  (The earlier Death on the Nile and Sad Cypress are definitely have more serious, genuinely tragic elements as well.)

What was the last Poirot mystery before Curtain and Five Little Pigs?  Evidently Evil under the Sun.  This novel definitely feels like a throwback to Christie's lighter Thirties books--and to me it feels a bit tired in some ways.  Yet in modern-day polls, I must admit, it ranks as one of the ten favorite Christies.  

In its day the novel received the Crime Queen's usual good reviews, though one ornery detection purist newspaper critic in Australia accused her of being more a mystery monger masquerading as a true detective writer:

modernistic American first ed. 
by Dodd, Mead

In Evil under the Sun, which unfolds one of the most enterprising foolproof alibis for murder in my recollection, eggheaded, moustached Hercule Poirot solves the mystery of the strangled sunbather only by the exercise of Flemish "intuition."  He wouldn't have been in the race...if had been compelled to rely on crude clues and sordid facts.  

The noble literature of mystery and detection has been reared on the marble pillars of deduction and logic.  Those jerrybuilders who seek to deface the edifice with the scaffolding of guesswork and intuition should be scourged from the temple.  

This critic opined that "Mother Christie's genius is best expressed in such works as [And Then There Were None], when she does not attempt serious detection, but only entertaining mystery."

I think there's some truth in this criticism of Sun as a product of the overly intuitive school of mystery, which I will get into below.  This was an accusation occasionally leveled at Christie in the past.

First, however, let me discuss what I see as the book's deficiencies in characterization, at least by her own standard.  

Like And Then There Were None, Evil under the Sun is set on a resort island in southwestern England.  Would it not have been lovely had the book made mention of a certain ill-starred nearby island where a baffling mass murder of ten unfortunates had recently taken place?

"Had only I been there on Indian Island most assuredly the terrible crime it would not have remained unsolved!" exclaimed Poirot as he puffed out his chest and twirled his mustaches.  But alas, no.  

Christie does, however, have a character, the garrulous Mrs. Gardener, make mention of former spinster Cornelia Robson from Death on the Nile, who we learn married Dr. Carl Bessner from the same novel and moved to his clinic at Badenhof and, when meeting the Gardeners there, "told us all about that business in Egypt when Linnet Ridgeway was killed."  The author also quotes from a conversation which Poirot later has with Hastings about the subathing murder, again referencing the Nile case.  And she even gives a shout-out to John Dickson Carr's then recently published mystery, The Burning Court.  All this is cute stuff, as we Americans say.

strikingly photographed
21st century pb ed.
by HarperCollins

Sun concerns the occurrence of the strangling murder, while Poirot is staying on vac at the local Jolly Roger Hotel, of loosely-moralled, "man-eating" Arlena Marshall, a former musical revue actress, while sunbathing on a strip of beach on Smugglers Island.  Vivacious Arlena is staying at the Jolly Roger with her husband of four years, the once-widowed country gentleman Kenneth Marshall, and his sulky sixteen year old daughter, Linda.  

The actress is entertaining herself with her latest toyboy acquisition, handsome young Patrick Redfern, husband of the pale and enervated Christine, who is wanly unhappy about her husband's rather overt dalliance with Arlena.  Kenneth Marshall, for his part, professes not to take the thing seriously.  Arlena is just a bit flighty, don't you know.  

There are other characters, of course.  There is Rosamund Darnley, a fashionable London dressmaker, a creative genius who nevertheless is unhappy because she hasn't got a loving man in her life.  She was an old childhood friend of Ken, back when she was country too, and she wouldn't mind having Ken in particular around to tickle her tape measure.  

Conversely, there is Emily Brewster, an athletic, hardy spinster, who surely doesn't want a fella.  Then there are the Gardeners, an American couple, the garrulous Carrie and her quiet husband Odell.  

And, let's see, we also have Stephen Lane, an intense retired minister who abominates scarlet women (see Arlena), Major Barry, retired from the Indian army and an all round boor, and Horace Blatt, a self-made businessman of some sort and another boor.  And there's Mrs. Castle, the proprietor of the Jolly Roger, and Gladys Narracott, a maid at the hotel.  

It's a lot of characters, none of them that interesting in my opinion.  A lot of them are pure Christie stock: the mannish spinster, the boring Indian army major (very reminiscent of the more significant character in A Caribbean Mystery), the religious enthusiast who might be a maniac, the garrulous American matron (like Mrs. Hubbard in Murder on the Orient Express), the painfully genteel landlady/hotel owner who says words like "naice" and "quayettest" and "laycessing", and the maid inevitably named Gladys--though here we learn her last name, "Narracott." (I'd love to think Gladys is the bereft daughter of the late sailor Fred Narracott, from And Then There Were None.)

Linda Marshall, the angsty, humorless sixteen-year-old who passionately hates her stepmother Arlena, is somewhat better developed, but she's in perpetual sulk mode throughout most of the book and really not that engaging a character either in my view.  Christie's own daughter Rosalind had just left her teenage years when Sun was written and with these teenage girl characters I always have to wonder how much Christie's relationship with her daughter affected the portrayals.  

Linda "is at the age when one is prone to be mentally unbalanced," declares Poirot. I wonder what Rosalind, then 20, thought of that passage if she read it!  Linda with her idea of dissipating rage against another person rather reminded me of the situation with Caroline Crayle and her younger sister in Five Little Pigs--a much better book in my view when it comes to characterization.  

Pocket ed, early Seventies
cover by Tom Adams

Even Rosamund Darnley is a Thirties "type," the successful career woman who wants to give it all up for a man.  Had Christie been reading Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds?  Allingham often gets railed for having her dress designer character thankfully give up her profession to take orders for life from a husband, in what has to be one of the most misogynistic passages in vintage crime fiction.  (Today's MAGA incels should love it.)  

Yet here in Christie's book, which followed Shrouds by but a few years, Christie similarly has her male character masterfully ordering Rosamund: "You're going to give up that damned dressmaking business of yours and we're going to live in the country," to which Rosamond meekly responds: "Oh, my dear, I've wanted to live in the country with you all my life.  Now, it's going to come true..." 

(The suspensive dots are not mine, by the by, but rather the author's, who had gotten quite--or should I say quayte-- attached to them around this time.)

Some people think Arlena is an interesting character.  She's certainly an interesting plot device, but an interesting character?  I would say not so much.  She's not around long to be anything more than a construct, though admittedly a clever one.  

Certainly Arlena is not as interesting a character as Linnet Ridgeway in Death on the Nile, a book which Evil under the Sun much resembles but is inferior to, I would say, both in its central characters and plotting mechanics.  At the heart of both books is what the late Robert Barnard called Christie's "triangle plot" (which we also see in the fine Thirties Poirot novella "Triangle at Rhodes"), which explores romantic conflicts among two women and one man.  

SPOILERS BELOW AS I DISCUSS THE MURDER PLOT IN SUN

another seventies Pocket ed.
Want to get your hands on it?

There is a lot of cleverness to the murder plot in Evil under the Sun--there's always cleverness in Christie in this period. The basic idea of the sun-browned bodies deception and the sleight of hand on the beach is brilliant stuff.  (Another Crime Queen many years later used a similar device in one of her books and it works again.)

Yet the charge that Poirot relies to much on intuition here has some merit, I think.  Poirot just knows exactly whom to look at among the suspects, based on his conclusion about their personalities  of the principles in the triangle. He has a hunch that the killer has strangled a woman before.  And of course he is right, this great man with the even greater mustaches!  

I would have liked it had Christie given Arlena some more time actually to reveal her true self.  It feels more like a postulate here: Let's accept that Arlena was really a dumb bunny rather than a man-eating tiger, then obviously Patrick was taking advantage of her and putting on an act with his wife.  

To be sure a lot of the suspects are not presented with much conviction in this book, so I am not surprised Mr. P. did not waste his time on suspecting them.  Is Miss Brewster ever given a real motive to kill Arlena, for example?  The spinster's only purpose in the book seems to be to get giddy when crossing running water and to be narrowly missed when paddling a boat by a thrown bottle. 

Then there's a drug plot dragged in late in the game which I found stank of rancid red herring.  I guess Horace Blatt was the drug runner, but never for a minute does it seem like anything having to do with this plot strand would really produce the solution of the mystery.  Christie does not even both to resolve it fully, unless I missed something.  Uncharacteristically for the author at this time, it felt like a loose end.  

Then there's the motive.  Patrick Redfern we learn had been getting money from Arlena (she had received an inheritance) to "invest" for her.  I guess the implication is that he simply took the money for his own use, which would would definitely be a financial crime, but how was Patrick to know that there would not be any record of this theft?  

35,000 pounds is a lot of money to vanish without a trace.  2.7 million pounds in today's value!  Maybe Arlena was stupid, but investigators after her death would not have been.  Might not dumb Arlena have let slip to someone that she had let Patrick invest money for her?  In short, while it's a most ingeniously concocted murder by our wicked pair of criminals, it seems at the same time like a dumb one to me.  Would taking the risk of killing her really have meant there would no exposure of his financial crime?  

In the real world, Arlena's murder most likely would have been, all too prosaically, the work of a hotel worker who tried to assault her, then panicked and strangled her to death.  But in the novel the servants are dismissed as suspects in one bare line.  That's why in classic mystery you just can't beat murders that take place on trains and boats--it really narrows the field!

A review of the 1982 film adaptation to follow.