How Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero has been reimagined for screen

How about a honeymoon with your new husband’s ex-wife? That’s the scenario facing Kay, the seductress of the sizzling new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1944 novel Towards Zero, landing on BBC iPlayer today. The three-part drama is one of several reimaginings drawn from the Queen of Crime’s oeuvre to land on the small screen in recent years. For this edition, I talk to the show’s writer, Rachel Bennette, about how she approached the project, and the enduring appeal of Christie. Plus, Gabriel Weston, surgeon and author of new book Alive (which you can read an extract from here) recommends what she’s been reading lately.

It’s the summer of 1936, and three is very much a crowd in the grand home of Lady Tressilian, overlooking the roaring Devon coastline. Her nephew, tennis star Nevile Strange, has just been through a very public divorce from his first wife, the poker-faced Audrey, after having an affair, and marries his lover, Kay. But it’s far from a clean slate, and with his feelings muddled, he is struck by the brilliant idea to invite both women to his aunt’s estate at the same time. What could go wrong?

Murder, obviously. The resulting whodunnit, Towards Zero, is the eighth Christie adaptation the BBC has put out since 2015. Five of these were written by Sarah Phelps; now, the mantle has been passed to Rachel Bennette, who is also behind the acclaimed adaptation of Zadie Smith’s NW.

Reading Towards Zero, Bennette was drawn in by its “unstable, unsettling” world, and found Christie’s psychological portraits “irresistible”. “The bonds between people are both too strong and too weak, and the characters are all somehow, at their core, ravenous and driven and wild. It felt powerfully and thrillingly cinematic.”

Indeed, there is much at stake for these characters, and much to play for: Lady Tressilian’s will is up in the air, bankruptcy threatens, there are buried family secrets, reputations to uphold, lovers to be won over.

Bennette sees Towards Zero as one of Christie’s “most consciously modern” books, with modernity itself as the novel’s broad subject. Christie “is really marking the brutal death throes of the old ways,” Bennette says. “More than simply the rift between generations, she’s concerned with the breakdown of the ancient chains of obligation, duty and responsibility that went with inheritance and title and land.

“It’s really interesting to see how younger generations have discovered her in the past few years,” notes Bennette. Christie’s younger characters are often “incredibly compelling”, and Towards Zero is no exception, where “hugely charismatic” young characters take centre stage.

However, the series’ standout performance was, for me, the brilliant Anjelica Huston as Lady Tressilian, who dishes out, in a stately English accent, corkers (“Why have a husband when you can have a lawyer?”) and home truths (“A woman can’t be her own person”) in equal measure.

Christie’s works continue to appeal across the generations, and for many reasons: “They’re brilliant page-turners, set in a peerlessly glamorous time, full of the delights of her ingenuity”, says Bennette. Her stories “can act as a vessel holding the concerns of the day, or a lens through which we can look at ourselves”, too.

Writing her adaptation, Bennette “had to make quite significant changes” to the original: for one, she amalgamates several characters into Inspector Leach, the suicidal policeman who is landed with figuring out the culprit (who delivers some of the series’ best lines: at one point he tells Lady Tressilian that there is, unfortunately, “no law against stupidity”). Despite the plot and character changes, “I’ve always sought to remain faithful to the effect Christie is seeking to create, the unsettling, electric atmosphere of the book,” Bennette says.

I’ve been on sabbatical in Melbourne since December and have been doing my best to go Aussie with my reading. I’ve always loved Christos Tsiolkas’s fiction and his latest, The In-Between, a glorious romantic novel about two middle-aged men who meet on the internet, gripped me completely. I was also moved by The Burrow, a slim but tender novel, written by Australian doctor Melanie Cheng, about a family trying to come to terms with unbearable loss.

Stan Grant’s Talking to My Country, a pithy and poetic book about the plight of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, has helped me fill in some of the vast gaps in my knowledge about the country I’ve been visiting. And for sheer delight, American writer Catherine Newman’s The Sandwich, a hilarious but poignant book about a menopausal mother on summer holiday with her family had me laughing out loud, while wiping the tears from my eyes.