Death does not become them: Arise the new James Bond, Jane Austen and Sherlock Holmes

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 9 years ago

Death does not become them: Arise the new James Bond, Jane Austen and Sherlock Holmes

By Linda Morris

Agatha Christie detested her fictional detective Hercule Poirot. In her words, Poirot was "a bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep", and so in the 1940s she bumped the fussy Belgian off, writing Curtain, Poirot's final case.

Christie was eventually overruled by an adoring public and her publishers and the novel was kept in a bank vault, where it remained unpublished until shortly before her death in 1976.

Literary revivals. Illustrations: John Shakespeare

Literary revivals. Illustrations: John ShakespeareCredit: none

Except that Christie's canny literary estate, chaired by her only grandchild, Mathew Prichard, has assented to Poirot's exhumation in a new mystery authored by the British crime writer and poet, Sophie Hannah.

The Monogram Murders adds another title to the ample Christie legacy of 33 Poirot novels, one play and more than 50 stories. In accepting the commission, Hannah walks in the eminent footsteps of Sebastian Faulks (Devil May CareJeeves and the Wedding Bells)Northanger AbbeyEmmaSoloCarte BlancheThe Black-Eyed Blonde

It is an easy sell, the pairing of international writers to literary classics.

There's flattery, thrill and quicksand for the author in reimagining an influential literary darling.

Terrifying was how the crime writer Val McDermid described taking on an author of Jane Austen's stature. "She's a genius and I'm not a genius but I hope I can still bring something to it."

In all, six authors have attempted to write Bond books since Ian Fleming's death in 1964.

Kingsley Amis was the first to write a new Bond, much to the consternation of Fleming's widow Ann who warned Amis would slip Lucky Jim into Bond clothing to "create a petit bourgeois red-brick Bond, he will resent the authority of M, then the discipline of the Secret Service and end as Philby Bond selling his country to SPECTRE".

Advertisement

Amis confounded the widow's low expectations, and Colonel Sun, described by Malcolm Bradbury as "neither vintage Fleming nor vintage Amis", is regarded as one of the better post-Fleming novels, and an improvement on the original pot boilers.

Bond's most recent adaptors, Deaver and Boyd, have kept to the masculine essentials and gadgetry of the superspy and made him credible in different settings and times. In Carte Blanche, Bond keeps the Walther PPS, the Rolex Oyster Perpetual, a Bentley Continental and the sexual conquests. He is a veteran of Afghanistan, and operating independently to protect the Realm by "any means necessary".

In Boyd's version Bond is an introspective veteran agent of 45. It is 1969 and 007 must resort to Cold War espionage to halt a bitter civil war in the fictional oil-rich West African state of Zanzarim. Unlike Amis, Boyd and Deaver's versions benefit from Bond's variable on-screen transformations. The state-sponsored assassin has undergone so many changes since the publication of Fleming'sThe Man with the Golden Gun, it is doubtful he can be considered the property of a single era or, indeed, of Fleming himself.

Among the catwalk of celluloid creations, who is the true Bond? The action heroes of Sean Connery and Roger Moore or the tormented loner that is Daniel Craig? Anyone is plausible.

Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle's cunning detective, has also been stretched and buffed to suit the sensibilities of modern television and film audiences but it is the Victorian model of Holmes that continues to dominate popular consciousness.

British writer, Anthony Horowitz, realised as much when he was anointed by the Conan Doyle estate to write a new Sherlock Holmes case in 2012. To bring Holmes to life, the writer of the Alex Rider series, a Bond for teenage boys, Horowitz reread all of Arthur Conan Doyle's 56 books and four novellas, visited Holmes' haunts, and made meticulous notes of Doyle's turns-of-phrase and stylistic tricks.

He imagined himself writing in Doyle's immaculately tailored clothes. He observed that Holmes would often break off mid-sentence to address someone who has just entered the room, and found hundreds of key words. Charging his pipe is somehow more Doyle than filling it.

"These tropes were like the lights you get along the floor of an aircraft, guiding you to the door," says Horowtiz. "It was comforting to have them."

Still, Horowitz reminded himself that he was writing an original piece of work and not a reproduction. The scandal at the heart of House of Silk is subject matter Doyle would never have touched.

The story begins with Holmes dead and Watson elderly, alone and melancholic, recounting an early adventure. House of Silk manages to be a new Sherlock Holmes novel without resorting to pastiche.

Hannah borrows the same neat narrative solution for The Monogram Murders. Staying true to the rules of the whodunit with its various twists, turns, double-backs and red herrings, Hannah side-steps inevitable comparisons with Christie's distinctive flat prose by introducing a new narrator, the flat-footed Edward Catchpool, Poirot's policeman friend in Scotland Yard.

With more than two billion copies of Christie's books sold already, it is inconceivable that the new book will not be an international bestseller, and a Miss Marple continuation is in the works.

Greater is the sacrilege in the infinite refashionings of Jane Austen's six novels, among the silliest, Pride and Prejudice Meets Zombies, a cynical mashing of the living-dead craze with Austen's beloved book.

The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennett is as metafictional as a narrative can get. A spin-off of a spin-off, it is based on the Emmy-award winning web series The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, which chronicles the life of a 24-year old graduate student from California with her own video blog.

Among the more seriously intentioned modern retellings is HarperCollins' The Austen Project which pairs McDermid with Northanger Abbey, Joanna Trollope with Sense and Sensibility, Alexander McCall Smith with Emma, and Curtis Sittenfeld with Pride and Prejudice.

McDermid shifts Catherine Morland from Bath to the Edinburgh Festival, the abbey of Northanger to the Scottish borders and Catherine's romantic fantasies to a vampire fetish.

Trollope pitches the Dashwood girls out of Norland Park because their careless mother Belle fails to legalise her de facto relationship with their father. Stoic Elinor studies architecture; mopey Edward Ferrars is an Eton drop-out, Marianne a classic guitarist and Colonel Brandon a retired army commander devoted to the rehabilitation of drug addicts.

Susannah Fullerton, president of the Australian Jane Austen Society, prefers McDermid's reworking to Trollope's but who would want to be in either woman's shoes?

Austen is that rare literary figure who is both a canonical novelist and global brand. Her face is on mugs and tea towels, her life squeezed for made-for-television dramas, her work the subject of academic conferences. Her legions of devoted readers hold her in such intimate regard they call themselves Janeites.

Austen's heroines are fully developed, smart, privileged and trapped. They aren't ciphers like Holmes or Poirot or a film caricature like Bond.

There's room for improvement in Fleming's paperback hero but Austen is a flytrap for any adaptor. No matter how well intentioned.

The Monogram Murders is published by HarperCollins.

Most Viewed in Culture

Loading