Monday, June 17, 2019

Pale Horse, “Pale” Writer

An intriguing item from B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder:
BBC One, Victoria outfit Mammoth Screen and Agatha Christie Limited are teaming up on The Pale Horse, a TV drama adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel first published in 1961. Sarah Phelps (The Witness for the Prosecution) has scripted the two-part drama which has Amazon Prime Video on board as U.S. co-production partner. In the novel, a mysterious list of names is found in the shoe of a dead woman, and one of those named, Mark Easterbrook, begins an investigation into how and why his name came to be there. He is drawn to The Pale Horse, the home of a trio of rumored witches in the small village of Much Deeping. Word has it that the witches can do away with wealthy relatives using dark arts, but as the bodies mount up, Easterbrook is certain there has to be a rational explanation.
I am cautiously optimistic that this will go well. I quite enjoyed screenwriter Phelps’ mini-series adaptations of Christie’s The Witness for the Prosecution and Ordeal by Innocence, but had to practically force myself to sit through all three parts of The A.B.C. Murders, her peculiar take on that 1936 Hercule Poirot mystery.

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