According to Variety, Amazon and the BBC are moving forward with a two-part adaptation of Agatha Christie’s mystery novel The Pale Horse, with Leonora Lonsdale directing and award-winning Christie adaptor Sarah Phelps (And Then There Were None) writing. The Pale Horse is one of Christie’s later books, having originally been published in 1961 in the UK, and it concerns a man discovering a list of names on a dead body, with some of the names belonging to people who have recently died under mysterious circumstances. The list eventually leads him to an inn called—get this—The Pale Horse, where three supposed witches work to arrange the deaths of wealthy people… or at least that’s how it appears. This is Agatha Christie, not Stephen King, so there may be something else afoot.
In a statement, Phelps said that The Pale Horse is a “shivery, paranoid story about superstition, love gone wrong, guilt, and grief,” adding that it’s also about “what we’re capable of when we’re desperate and what we believe when all the lights go out and we’re alone in the dark.” Spooky stuff! No casting details or a premiere date were announced.
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It would be cool if there was just this one Agatha Christie novel and at the end the twist is, nope it wasn’t that person the detective deduced was the logical killer. A witch did it.
Agatha Christie saved lives. . . .Christie worked as a dispenser during WW I, which is where/when she gained a lot of the knowledge about poisons that would serve her well as a mystery writer. The poison used in The Pale Horse has a very dramatic side effect, which Christie describes in the novel, and there are two documented cases where people in real life were suffering the (undiagnosed) effects of this poison, and people close to them were reading the novel, read about this side effect, and were able to identify the poison and save the people involved.
She also once briefly disappears under mysterious circumstances.
I don’t have high hopes for this. All recent Agatha Christie adaptations that I’m aware of have been working overtime to seem bleak and edgy, forgetting that her books, although about murders, are also typically fun. And I have yet to meet a single person who made it through Amazon’s last attempt: The ABC Murders, with a badly miscast John Malkovich.