Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie

I read Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie and loved it, before watching the BBC abomination of 2018 ecranisation of the book. If you read the book skip the movie, if you haven’t read the book… skip the movie. It’s embarrassingly bad on so many levels. I’m not alone in my harsh remarks, as others have described the movie as: “an insult”, “an outrage”, “poor adaptation with an absurd ending”, “atrocious”, “The real crime here is what they’ve done to poor Ms. Christie”, and, the best one: “It Certainly Was an Ordeal!”
They changed the ending for some reason, as they also changed the hour of death, the murder weapon, added nukes (!!!), changed the way the characters were, making them a caricature of the ones in the book. It should have had another name and not linked to Agatha Christie and it would have had better ratings. The ones that rate it high were, mostly, the ones that didn’t read the book. Of course, reading the book would have pointed out how much of an abomination the ecranisation was…

Going back to the book. It was great and the ending was fantastic. I loved how the characters were created. Jacko Argyle killed his mother with a poker and was found guilty in the courts. He received life imprisonment, but died soon after getting imprisoned, suffering from pneumonia. Dr. Arthur Calgary arrives after Jacko’s death to confirm that what Jacko said was true, that he had an alibi. This is a problem, as the real killer is unknown.

I liked the victim, but she was not perfect. Her husband had his faults, the children (all adopted) had very different issues of their own. It showed a complex and interesting family dynamics. I assumed someone else was the killer, which is nice to discover that I was wrong and also the motive for the killing was very interesting too.

Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie

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My rating: 5/5 Stars
Would I recommend it: Yes!
Published by: William Morrow Paperbacks
Year it was published: 2011 (first published in 1958)
Format: Paperback
Genre(s): Mystery
Pages: 269

About the author: Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, as the youngest of three. Before marrying and starting a family in London, she had served in a Devon hospital during the First World War, tending to troops coming back from the trenches. During the First World War, she worked at a hospital as a nurse; later working at a hospital pharmacy, a job that influenced her work, as many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison. During the Second World War, she worked as a pharmacy assistant at University College Hospital, London, acquiring a good knowledge of poisons which feature in many of her novels.
Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, came out in 1920. During her first marriage, Agatha published six novels, a collection of short stories, and a number of short stories in magazines. In 1930, Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan (Sir Max from 1968) after joining him in an archaeological dig. Their marriage was especially happy in the early years and remained so until Christie’s death in 1976.
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