In 1966, more than thirty years after the novel’s initial publication, a film version of The ABC Murders was made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at their English studio in Elstree, near London. It was released as The Alphabet Murders. The American director of the film, Frank Tashlin, had made his name with comedies such as The Paleface, starring BOb Hope, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and had also worked on Bugs Bunny cartoons. He turned the film into an exercise in visual comedy, aided and abetted by a cast which included Tony Randall as Poirot, Robert Morley as Hastings, Anita Ekberg, Maurice Denham, and Austin Trevor (who had played Poirot in films in the thirties), and by an adaptation by David Pursall and Jack Seddon which was a travesty of the novel. Guest appearances were made by Margaret Rutherford and Stringer Davis, who had appeared in MGM’s four Miss Marple movies earlier in the sixties, three of which had also been scripted by Pursall and Seddon.

The film was originally to have been directed by Seth Holt, a British director, with the American comedian Zero Mostel as Poirot, but this project came to grief on what should have been the first day of shooting when Agatha Christie took strong objection to the script, which included a bedroom scene for Poirot.

A television adaptation of The ABC Murders, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 5 January 1992.

About Charles Osborne

This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.

About Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.