Tuesday, June 25, 2024

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.  

9 comments:

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    1. I rendered you speechless, a tough feat. I checked your blog and saw how highly you rated it. I remembered it quite favorably, but all I can say now is it left me flat on the third read. Clever plot, to be sure, though it's not exactly original for her by this time. Maybe I'm getting jaded.

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  2. I’m one of those who think Evil Under the Sun is one of Christie’s best books. It’s never struck me as a tired work, although I acknowledge that the middle is a series of ‘who-was-where-when’ interviews, like Orient Express, and it is one of those detective stories where one needs to chart character's movements. But it’s one of her most adroitly constructed works: the time manipulation is brilliant; moreover, each of the suspects have an alibi, and a plausible means to break that alibi.

    True, it’s not one of her most psychologically oriented works, and as such, I grant that it could be seen as marking time, but it’s arguably the last of her great classical puzzles where plot is foremost. (Body in the Library is humdrum, and the murderer is arbitrary, as the ITV adaptation showed. Later works like Towards Zero or the early 1950s works have a higher proportion of characterisation, and take place in grimmer post-war Britain. The casual wealth and sunniness of Evil disappear.) That said, Linda Marshall always impressed me as a convincing portrayal of adolescent awkwardness and resentment, and the rest of the characters are sufficiently drawn; Arlena might lack the depth of Linnet Doyle, to name another beautiful victim, but surely the point is that we /don’t/ know her; we only see her from outside, and make assumptions about her character. Barry and Blatt and Brewster might be 'types', but, as in the best Christies, they're shrewdly and energetically drawn.

    I don’t think the solution is intuitive or guesswork; Christie’s clueing is rarely as watertight as Carr’s: she seldom has a ‘clincher’ clue, and in some books her reasoning is supposition rather than evidence. But Evil is not one of those books; in fact, it has a scene where Poirot sits on a clifftop and mulls over the clues. She dangles baths and bottles and sunbathing bodies, wristwatches and people watchers, candles and calendars before us, and even describes several murders in the past; if we were acute enough to recognise the pattern, we would identify the murderer. But we don’t. (Or at least I didn’t.)

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    1. SPOILERS!

      This is a book I wish I could read for the first time again. You make a very good defense of it, unsurprisingly. I know I rated it more highly on the first reading (and the second, actually). Maybe it's me that has changed. But I felt myself bored with a lot of the characters. Mrs. Gardener may be a good garrulous American matron type, but goodness I got tired of her. This was on top of having reread Murder on the Orient Express with Mrs. Hubbard so maybe it was a surfeit of that type. Or maybe it was after having watched the film (for the first time) and having liked better what was done with the characters in the film. I'm fine with Christie "types," but I felt like Christie didn't do much with them here. And the whole Kenneth and Rosamund story, those nice "country" characters with their happy ending, was just a yawner, for me anyway. For all the talk these days about Christie's depth, it's an awfully conventional resolution.

      On the plotting, I admit in the review it's very clever. Indeed, that for me is where the book picks up, with the investigation commencing. The bottle clue is clever and the bath and the whole basic idea built around sunbathing bodies, you can imagine her mind wickedly at work while at a resort. The arrangement of the alibi (the watch) is good. But Poirot just knowing that Patrick really loves his wife or that Arlena is dumb and lets men take advantage of her, I don't know, it seemed obviously intuitive. You know how Poirot says, I do not need the cigarette ash, with me it is the psychology! The bottle and bathing clues are neat but could there not be other explanations for them? Christie does mention as I recollect that the bottle must have been thrown from the hotel at least. But suppose it was a maid with a drinking problem she wanted to conceal, lol.

      You know, thinking about these filmed Christie novels lately I was thinking about her use of objects. In this one it was the bottle, but there was also another bottle in Death on the Nile, the one with the ink. Why didn't they throw that overboard? Does the book explain better? And then in Orient Express, the book and film, there's one thing I don't get. Why did they burn the Daisy Armstrong letter in the grate rather than tear it to pieces and throw it out a window? Just carelessness, I guess. But of course it's an absolutely essential clue. And sending it surely was an indulgence. But I guess they wanted Ratchett to have fear.

      Anyway, back to Sun, I also thought the motive was off. In the film I actually liked how they changed it to the stolen diamond that they didn't want to give back. It felt like a nod to the Regatta Mystery and I liked how they were able to work the pipe from the book in there somehow. (There's also those pipe cleaners in Orient Express.) Of course they had to give Horace Blatt a reason for being in the book once they excised the drug plot, which honestly I did not miss one bit.

      Anyway, thanks for the riposte, your comments are always illuminating and just remember you likely have the world on your side on this one! Then there's me and that ornery Australian reviewer. ;)

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    2. Christie does provide Poirot with that letter from a previous "victim" of Arlena's, who thanks her for the check (which the film doesn't do) but to go from that to Arlena having handed off 35,000 pounds to the murderer is a big leap. Also that Patrick had strangled before. Why? Why would that necessarily be the case? That's so much money too. The Redferns just should have fled the country with their ill got booty, it was easier back then.

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    3. Well, I guess the Redferns could simply run away with the money. But in that case Arlena would have alerted the police. So there is a risk for Patrick that while starting from investigating him as a suspected fraudster they might eventually uncover his role in a previous murder and insurance fraud. Thus Arlena's murder looks like a necessity for the Redferns. The trouble with this idea is that, as you pointed out elsewhere, the murder doesn't really help them that much, only somewhat shifts the timeframe and focus of an inevitable investigation. Police could stumble upon irregularities in Arlena's finances while investigating her death and bring the heat to Patrick anyway.

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  3. Good to see you getting your teeth into a classic mystery! I have a soft spot for this one - I like the range of characters, and I love the setting (I have visited Burgh Island, and this reminds me that I would like to go back there).
    Of course it comes under the heading of 'no-one in their right mind would plan a murder this way' - even if with all that history. (And wasn't anybody starting to make a connection with the person involved?) But I stubbornly cannot resist enjoying it! I love all the ridiculous details (bath bottle beach pajamas) and of course the great clothes...
    Look forward to reading your comments on the film.

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    1. Oh, it's a book that absolutely depends on clothes, which was a gorgeous gift to the filmmakers.

      Just remember Sun is considered one of the top ten Christies, so you have the people on your side, lol. Not that I hated it by any means but it's seeing how it stood up to a third reading. Reading your comment I got to wondering whether Christie was thinking of the Brides in the bath murderer, who just couldn't help repeating himself. When you think about it, the two culprits would have had to have been sociopaths, really, which to be fair to Christie I think she indicates. (They certainly so in the film.) Surely there would have been pictures connected to the prior murder in the papers. Highly dangerous to them.

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  4. Interestingly (perhaps) I recently reread Murder on the Orient Express and liked it better than the last time I read it. You see, I saw the film back in 74 when I was a child and I was blown away by it. When I read the book I found the characters so bland by comparison and I already knew the solution of course. (How can one forget it?) I was particularly disappointed with the Swedish missionary compared to the film and the servants in general, except the British manservant, which of course Christie did well. But when I reread it recently I much better appreciated the whole bravura conception. The book really is a strict problem novel, but brilliantly handled. I think the train atmosphere helps too. It's very knowingly done. The woman rode a lot of trains.

    Now I read Death on the Nile for the first time years after seeing the film in 78 and that one really held up for me. For me it's the perfect balance of character and bravura plot and the writing is really quite good. I felt it was one of her very best. Will have to reread someday soon!

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