From: A Berkeley Reader [Email her]

My watching of videos on YouTube has been all too frequently interrupted by two different ads, and I don’t know which is the more annoying: Joe Biden’s reelection campaign message or the remake of Agatha Christie’s 1939  “Murder Is Easy” streaming on BritBox, which stars David Jonsson as the amateur sleuth Luke Fitzwilliam—from the Fitzwilliams of Lagos, presumably

Other non-white cast members include Gloria Obianyo as “Ngozi Ude” and Demmy Lapido as “Jimmy Amaike” (two characters that I don’t remember from the book), and Nimra Bucha from Pakistan as “Mrs. Humbleby,” with the mixed-race Phoebe Licorish playing her daughter Rose. This version is supposedly set in an English village in 1954.

When Agatha Christie’s daughter Rosalind was alive, she probably would not have allowed this adaptation to be made. The grandson obviously had other ideas.

My correspondent who actually watched the film tells me that the main character was indeed changed to be from Nigeria, to whose colonization there were many references made throughout the story. (The 1939 version was a—white of course—British colonial police officer returning from Malaysia or thereabouts.)

She adds: ”He still meets a woman in a train and she tells him about murders in her village, nd after she is murdered he goes to her village to try to find out what’s going on.”

But not to his village, where no murders ever take place, I guess.

See earlier letters from the same reader.