When Agatha Christie ‘Ripped from the Headlines’
by Chris_Chan
(WARNING: SPOILERS FOR VARIOUS CHRISTIE NOVELS FOLLOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.)
The Law & Order television franchise is famous for “ripping from the headlines,” that is to say, taking real-life crimes and other news stories and then fictionalizing them and incorporating them into the plots of episodes. Although Law & Order is probably the most famous example of this practice, many other crime shows borrow actual events. In another prominent instance, the television show The Fugitive is thought to be based on the true case of Dr. Samuel Sheppard (no relation to the character from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd!), who was convicted of murdering his wife but insisted that a man with distinctive features really did it. Roy Huggins, the creator of the show, denied borrowing the premise, despite the many parallels.
Agatha Christie had a creative and original mind, but on occasion she dipped into real-life events for her books. Many little details came from life.
It should be noted that she insisted that most of her characters were not based on anyone real, although she admitted that the killers in The Man in the Brown Suit and The Pale Horse were based on acquaintances of hers. In the former case, the individual in question begged to be inserted into one of her books, then took umbrage at being the victim and insisted on being made the murderer, since “the murderer is always the most interesting character!” Some fictional locations are based on real places. The fictional mysterious island of And Then There Were None and the vacation getaway in Evil Under the Sun are thought to be based on Burgh Island. The titular Bertram’s Hotel is commonly believed to be based on Brown’s Hotel, an establishment Christie often frequented in London. These are just a handful of instances where little details had a foundation in fact.
Though the bulk of Christie’s plots were original, a handful of true crimes, carefully restructured, found their way into murders solved by Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. Importantly, Christie tended to only borrow the basic facts of the case, altering details as needed, and almost never utilizing the real-life solution. Indeed, as this essay will illustrate, many unsolved true crimes were given neat solutions by Christie. (more…)