It’s more fun to see Phelps’ stabs at Christie in the same vein as modern restagings of Shakespeare - sure, dance around to punk rock on-stage and in costume at the intermission of Midsummer Night’s Dream, who’s going to stop you?
It’s easier to say that the BBC’s The Pale Horse probably sent Christie’s devoted subreddit into a furor and then leave it at that. One can spend hours deconstructing Phelps’ miniseries and expounding on its many departures from the source material, as I’m sure many avid Christie fans have already done. It’s clear which scenes are about Mark’s troubled history and which concern the possibly murderous witches. Sewell’s character is central to both stories, but the two braids of plot aren’t neatly intertwined. He’s all rough edges, nary a soft spot in sight.Īnd as The Pale Horse peels away the layers of its mystery of the dead woman and the names in her shoe, so too does it explore Mark. It’s nothing to do with a lead needing to be handsome, or even simplistically decent - Phelps changes Mark into someone wholly unsympathetic, beginning with him as an adulterer and only piling more sins on his shoulders as the story goes. He’s not of the Hercule Poirot caliber, holds neither amateur sleuthing skills nor hawkshaw instincts, and is neutered by his bunglesome interrogation method, by which he hurls facts at someone in rapid succession until they tell him he’s wrong. Easterbrook decides to poke around after sensing something wicked this way comes, but he’s neither much of a hero nor a detective. And it’s not Lejeune, the good inspector - it’s Mark Easterbrook, the eroteme-punctuated name on the list, played by Rufus Sewell. Notably out of step with Christie canon, the detective assigned to the case, Inspector Stanley Lejeune ( Sean Pertwee), can make neither head nor tail of what’s happening and why.Īs it has been adapted for the BBC, The Pale Horse is barely a detective story, insofar as it features a man who runs about England doing some light detecting. The other names on the list start mysteriously dying, peacefully, usually in their sleep, and the dead woman’s employer, Osborne ( Bertie Carvel), suspects it’s the work of witches. She’s had plenty of practice with adapting Christie, and her two-hour miniseries rendition of The Pale Horse sets up its central mystery like a finely tuned clock.Ī list of names is discovered in a dead woman’s shoe - and of all the names, Mark Easterbrook’s is the only one with a question mark after it. This is the fifth heavily revised Christie adaptation produced by the BBC and written by Sarah Phelps, the screenwriter who recently engineered Dublin Murders and who’s been reliably churning out one to two miniseries a year since 2014. Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse, though not quite a detective story, seems designed to test the genre’s rules, and also my patience.
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