by Lorie Lewis Ham
Details at the end of this post on how to enter to win a copy of the book and a link to purchase the book from Amazon.
Agatha Christie, She Watched by Teresa Peschel
Review by Lorie Lewis Ham
We don’t review a lot of non-fiction here at KRL, but when author Teresa Peschel reached out to me about her new book Agatha Christie, She Watched, it not only sounded like a lot of fun, but also something that KRL’s readers would be interested in, so here we are! I had the pleasure of also interviewing Teresa about the book and I don’t want to give too much away from the interview, so this will be a bit of a different review.
Excerpt from the Amazon Description:
Care to match wits with Hercule Poirot? Take tea and gossip with Miss Marple? Chase spies with Tommy and Tuppence? Agatha Christie, She Watched will introduce you to must-see movies (and must-avoid dogs) that depict the hopeful and dark sides of human nature. These movies will tantalize you, mystify you, and make you laugh at the folly of humanity.
For more than a century, Agatha Christie has been thrilling readers with her classic mystery stories as well as dark thrillers that explore the heart of evil such as And Then There Were None and Endless Night. Christie has also been a huge part of the world’s movie and television culture with more than 200 adaptations made from her stories.
Teresa Peschel watched and reviewed 201 adaptations, from the German silent movie Adventures, Inc. (1929) to See How They Run and Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (2022). Each one was rated for fidelity to the original material and its overall quality. Each review takes up two pages and is accompanied by a banner image, six cast photos, a list of the major actors, the locations where they were filmed.
Foreign movies with English subtitles from India, France, Russia, China, Japan, and Germany are also represented.
Finally, there are eight movies in which the fictional Agatha Christie appears. Watch her debate Hercule Poirot about killing him in Curtain, battle a space wasp with Doctor Who, and plot to kill her husband’s mistress.
This is a fabulous book and a must have for any Agatha Christie fan. Whether you are looking to see if your favorite adaption is true to the original story, want to check if an adaption is worth watching, or hope to discover something new to try out, this book has it all! I look forward to checking out some of the adaptions I have never tried, and to rewatching ones I love and being able to reference the book for more information. I don’t know how Teresa managed to watch all of these, but I sure am glad that she did. And I must not be alone, as the book was nominated for Bouchercon’s Anthony award for Best Critical/Non-Fiction!
Interview With Teresa Peschel:
KRL: What inspired you to write this book, and to start watching so much Agatha Christie?
Teresa: I’d always read Agatha Christie but until we saw Murder on the Orient Express (2017), I’d never seen a film of her work. What got us started was Bill was annotating her novels, out-of-copyright within the U.S. By the time we reached The Complete, Annotated Secret of Chimneys, it occurred to me to see if there was a film, so we could review it for the book’s appendices. Bill had already done some of this on his own but didn’t include me.
A few months earlier, I’d brought home Crooked House (2017) from the library in July of 2020. We watched it and I reviewed it for the website (peschelpress.com) because the site always needed new material. With Chimneys, Bill wrote his review for the book, and I wrote my review for the website. The library DVD – it was a Marple – episode contained several other films so we watched them and I wrote reviews. At that point, Bill said, “If we keep watching Agatha films, you can review them, and I can put together a quickie book of reviews.” We had no idea how many films there were, or how big the project would become.
Teresa Peschel
KRL: What is your background in the world of mystery?
Teresa: My mystery background is like most people’s. I read mysteries when they’re around but not obsessively. If an Agatha was around, I read it, but I didn’t seek them out. I normally read sci-fi, fantasy, or romance, but mysteries were good too. My parents had numerous mystery collections from the Book-of-the-Month Club, and I read those as a teenager. Now I’m 64! I can still remember a Leslie Charteris Saint novella where the victim was killed on the beach. A beach umbrella was driven through the chest to disguise the bullet wound.
KRL: Who other than Agatha, are some of your favorite mystery authors?
Teresa: A mystery writer other than Agatha? That’s a toughie. There isn’t anyone I can single out besides Donald Westlake, although I’ve read plenty of mysteries. Now, science fiction, fantasy, or romance I can talk about!
KRL: Have you written anything else?
Teresa: Yes, I’ve written quite a bit considering I never wrote anything until 2013, when I turned 53. As Odessa Moon, I write science-fiction romance but not in the “I was the alien’s love slave” subgenre. Think Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon! I do not write that, although I’d make more money if I did. My sci-fi romance series, The Steppes of Mars, are far more along the lines of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens on a terraformed Mars. Huge, sprawling family sagas driven by romance.
As Teresa Peschel, I wrote a book on production sewing of cloth grocery bags- Sew Cloth Grocery Bags – and a book on sustainability and resilience, titled Fed, Safe, and Sheltered. My next book, which we should publish in August is International Agatha Christie, She Watched. It will contain about 100 reviews looking at all the foreign films we could find that had English subtitles, country by country, plus a slew of documentaries, and appendices devoted to master lists of Agatha’s intellectual property on film, stage, and radio. When International is done, we’ll take a breather and then tackle the films of Jane Austen.
KRL: How fun! Can you tell me about Peschel Press?
Teresa: Peschel Press is our small publishing business – no submissions, please! Bill always wanted to become a writer. He’s got numerous stories and novels in the trunk. Penguin published Writers Gone Wild and then dropped him. So, he self-published The Complete, Annotated Whose Body by Dorothy Sayers, also out of copyright within the U.S. He’s a major Dorothy Sayers fan and publishes the Wimsey Annotations on our website. When he annotated and published The Complete, Annotated Mysterious Affair at Styles, he realized we needed a name for tax purposes. Thus, Peschel Press was born. He collected, researched, annotated, and wrote various passion projects, publishes my books, and our daughter’s dictionary of flowers. We’re up to about 34 titles now.
Our goal is to make our books as good or better than anything you’d get from a traditional publisher. Having a name like Peschel Press helps remind us – and the IRS! – we are a business. We keep records, we have meetings, we have an accountant, we do our own editing, design and layout trade paperbacks, design and produce eBook versions, make or buy covers, market, do signings and events, and everything else a publisher would do. We’re an amoeba in the publishing world. Every writer should remember they are in business and if they’re indie, they need to do or arrange for every service a publisher performs to get a book to a reader.
KRL: What are some of the craziest things you did to find some of these Agatha Christie stories you have watched?
Teresa: Finding the movies ranged from easy to challenging. Start with your library! Most of Agatha’s films have been put on DVD and some library, somewhere, still has a copy in their stacks. We got to know Denise, our local interlibrary loan librarian, very, very well. Some came from YouTube, some from Amazon, some from Daily Motion, some from eBay. We bought a region-free DVD player so we could buy from overseas sellers. The Peter Ustinov Appointment with Death (1988) was never released in the U.S. Our copy came from a seller in Spain. Without the region-free DVD player, we couldn’t have watched it.
KRL: What was the biggest surprise?
Teresa: My biggest surprise was discovering how good a writer Agatha is. I had to read *everything* for the project because otherwise, I couldn’t judge fidelity to text. She’s underrated. People see pictures of an old lady in a print dress and sensible shoes and think boring, cardboard, and cozy. Or they resent her sales, especially since she writes in a genre rather than ‘literary’ which is a genre. She can be surprisingly funny, with a dry, sly wit. She writes astonishingly widely, something you won’t know if you only think of Miss Marple or Poirot. When we watched the Partners in Crime episodes, I learned that in each story in that collection, she was parodying a famous mystery writer of the time. Other than Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, and maybe Baroness Orczy, they’re all forgotten. She wrote mashups like The Seven Dials Mystery which is really a Bulldog Drummond-type thriller mixed up with P.G. Wodehouse. Her stories are so strong that no matter how awful the adaptation is, you can still see what she was trying to achieve.
KRL: What was the worst one you found?
Teresa: Several films were truly dreadful. Agatha (1979), The Alphabet Murders (1965), The Secret Adversary (2015), and The Secret of Chimneys (2010) were the worst. They exemplify hack screenwriters thinking they can do better than her, but you can still see her story underneath, struggling to get free.
KRL: What is your favorite?
Teresa: A favorite film… Oh, that’s another toughie. There were some superb ones. The Russian version of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (2002) was perfect; faithful to the text yet enthralling. The Poirot film Five Little Pigs (2003) was perfect. So was the Japanese version of Appointment with Death (2021), the only good version of one of Agatha’s greatest villains.
KRL: Who is your favorite Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot?
Teresa: I admit to a fondness for Helen Hayes’ performance as Miss Marple. She only made two films and I wish there had been more. Joan Hickson, naturally. If you want Miss Marple as Action-Girl, go with Margaret Rutherford. For Poirot, I admit to a fondness for Peter Ustinov’s portrayal despite him not resembling Poirot. David Suchet embodies Poirot,, but he didn’t have quite as much of a light touch as Ustinov.
KRL: What is your favorite Agatha Christie book?
Teresa: My favorite Agatha? Probably And Then, There Were None. It’s a tour de force. You can only read it once. She wrote it at the height of her powers. Chief Justice Wargrave was the finest of puppet-masters and at no time did any of his victims suspect him until it’s too late, if at all. It demonstrates that anyone can be the murderer, and anyone can be the victim. Here, everyone is both!
KRL: To your knowledge, is there any other book out there that comes close to having as many different TV and movie adaptions as your book?
Teresa: No. I am the only person to watch and review everything that’s available. There’s one book by Scott Palmer published in 1996 but it’s clear he didn’t watch everything, reprinting what he found in Hollywood trade publications. Dr. Mark Aldridge wrote Agatha Christie on Screen (2016) but it’s a scholarly work dealing with Agatha and Agatha Christie, Ltd, coping with the film industry. He doesn’t review the films like I did. It’s a good book but it’s not light, fun reading.
KRL: Are there any left for you to still watch?
Teresa: Sadly, there are loads of great films but they don’t have English subtitles! Or they’re unavailable or lost altogether. Bill and Denise, our interlibrary loan goddess did their best, but we’ll probably never see the other Japanese films, the German Miss Marple, and so on.
KRL: Where can people find you online?
Teresa: We are very easy to find! Visit peschelpress.com to learn more about us, our books, and sign up for our newsletter.
Our Instagram is instagram.com/peschel_press. We post every day, mainly author quotes, kitty and gardening pix, book-love, and so forth. Our Facebook is facebook.com/PeschelPress. Our YouTube channel for our Agatha film podcasts is youtube.com/channel/UCLAiTgWYthJzogN2f0nQ9-g
KRL: Anything you would like to add?
Teresa: I’d add that watching the movies of Agatha Christie has given me a tremendous film education. When we began the project, I was a purist. I understand much better now how very different text and film are. The film industry makes a lot of compromises to get a movie made that we at home don’t realize. I got to see Sue Grafton in A Caribbean Mystery (1983) rewrite Mr. Rafiel’s secretary and the subsequent films copied her approach.
Watching seven versions of Murder on the Orient Express was amazing: what does each director, writer, and cast emphasize? Change? Omit? There’s always something to enjoy in an Agatha film. Even the awful ones have great set design or cinematography or something. Some films fixed problems in Agatha’s story like Dumb Witness (1996). Both versions of Evil Under the Sun showed that what she wrote couldn’t possibly have happened but when you read the novel, you don’t realize it. On film, you can’t avoid noticing that the murderess is a better than Olympic-level athlete.
KRL: Anything else you would like to say?
Teresa: First is that watching and reviewing over 200 Agatha films got me invited to the International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay, England as a speaker! I’ll do a presentation about international films of Agatha’s novels and be on a panel with Dr. Mark Aldridge, Dr. John Curran, and Victoria Dowd discussing her films. The moderator is Kemper Donovan. See https://www.iacf-uk.org/2024/literary-festival/agatha-christie-she-watched and iacf-uk.org/2024/literary-festival/all-about-agatha-live for more details.
Secondly, to our great shock, I was nominated by Bouchercon for an Anthony Award for Agatha Christie, She Watched in the critical/nonfiction category! We have no idea how anyone at Bouchercon heard of us and we sure don’t expect to win. But they nominated me. Wow! Here’s the link: bouchercon2024.com/anthony-awards You’ll have to scroll down to the critical/nonfiction square but there I am.
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A bit of change, but change is good!
Intriguing take! Positive.ideas.4youATgmail or BonneVivante on X
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