Why Didn't They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie

His partner in crime-solving, Lady Frances “Frankie” Derwent (Lucy Boynton), whose comfortable place in the world was always assured, hasn’t changed much from Christie’s pages, though Laurie ensures she doesn’t get her own way framing conversations - TV Bobby rebuffs her attempt to blame her own snobbishness on his perceived (if actually non-existent) chippiness.īobby (Will Poulter) is caddying on a cliff top golf course with his friend Dr Thomas (Conleth Hill) in the Welsh village of Marchmont when he spots a body at the bottom of a cliff. While this isn’t a book / TV compare and contrast, it’s striking that Bobby Jones, in the book a sweet but dim Vicar’s son still looking for his place in the world, is in Hugh Laurie’s enjoyable and tellingly sharp adaptation a thoughtful if diffident young man, held back only by his class. Also men don’t sleep in vests any more and the UK’s more progressive attitude to murder means we must remind ourselves that Christie’s unmasked killers will face the gallows, if they don’t do a runner first. Christie set her story in that period - see also Jane Austen - when if one was of a certain class (impoverished gentility and up) one could suffer an injury or sudden illness and be taken to the local “big house” to recover, attended by posh strangers - presumably because posh people are never strangers. Agatha Christie’s 1934 whodunnit takes place only five years before WW2 (between the wars, but then aren’t we always) and is peppered with reminders that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I started re-reading the novel when I heard this was coming out, because I wanted an escape from the world’s current problems, though it didn’t quite pan out like that. Childhood friends in a small Welsh village investigate the unexplained death of a man found at the bottom of a cliff.

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie