When Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre first read Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Easy, she did not reach for a highlighter or a reference library. She reached for the phone. “I think this is a furious little feminist, culturally challenging, experimental novel,” she told GBH in March 2024. The screenwriter had consumed the entire book in a single sitting, and what she found inside it was not the genteel country-house puzzle Christie is usually remembered for. She found rage.
The BBC’s two-part adaptation, which premiered on 27 December 2023, represents something genuinely unusual in the long history of Christie on screen: a version that does not apologise for the source material’s anger, but amplifies it. With David Jonsson as a Nigerian immigrant Luke Fitzwilliam, Penelope Wilton as the doomed Miss Pinkerton, and Morfydd Clark as the fiercely independent Bridget Conway, the drama did not simply update Christie for modern sensibilities. It exposed a radicalism that was always there, buried beneath the Agatha Christie brand.
The Novel Christie Never Meant to Be Quiet
Murder Is Easy, published in 1938, has never enjoyed the fame of Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None. It is not a Poirot or a Marple. The protagonist, Luke Fitzwilliam, is not even a detective – he is a retired police officer from a fictional territory of the British Empire, travelling on a train to London when he encounters an elderly woman named Miss Pinkerton who tells him a serial killer is loose in the village of Wychwood-under-Ashe. When she turns up dead the next day, Fitzwilliam feels compelled to investigate.
What makes the novel unusual, and what drew Ejiwunmi-Le Berre to it, is its fury. “All of which, by the way, Christie packs into this strange novel,” she wrote in The Guardian on 26 December 2023. “A police officer from a fictional territory of empire returns to an England he longs for but barely knows, only to find the perfect village ruled over by a religious fundamentalist newspaper tycoon, as intelligent women howl with nihilistic despair, and the lower classes and dissident voices are picked off by an unknown killer. Cosy Little England this is not.”
Christie scholars have long noted that the novel experiments with form in ways her other works do not. The screwball dynamic between Fitzwilliam and Bridget owes more to Hollywood comedy than to the drawing-room tradition. The village of Wychwood-under-Ashe functions less as a setting and more as a crucible – a microcosm of English society in which class, gender, and imperial identity collide with lethal consequences. As Ejiwunmi-Le Berre observed: “If you only read this novel, you’d take Christie for a revolutionary feminist.”
Ejiwunmi-Le Berre: Adaptation Is Not Translation
The decision to reimagine Fitzwilliam as a Nigerian immigrant was not a cosmetic gesture. It was the key that unlocked the novel’s latent politics. As a wealthy, educated African man arriving in postwar England – a country still grappling with the aftermath of empire, the dawn of the NHS, and rationing – Fitzwilliam’s outsider perspective exposes the hypocrisy of the English village with a clarity that a white British detective never could.
“Making Fitzwilliam a Black man wasn’t an attempt to fix diversity in casting, it was how to make his character work,” Ejiwunmi-Le Berre explained in The Guardian. “As a wealthy, educated Nigerian, his limitations as a detective are external obstacles imposed by his immigrant status, not his weakness as a protagonist.”
Ejiwunmi-Le Berre, who read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, before building a career spanning screenwriting, acting, and theatre direction, was the first Black screenwriter to adapt a Christie novel for television – a fact that underscores both how far the industry has come and how far it still has to go.
Her approach was deliberately conversational. “I’ve come to think of adaptation as a conversation between two writers, colliding at a specific moment in time like strangers at a dinner party,” she wrote in The Guardian. “I’m a 21st-century woman of colour and inevitably there will be parts of The Book that don’t speak to me.” This honesty about the adaptor’s position – neither slavish servant nor vandal, but interlocutor – represents a refreshing counterpoint to the usual debates about fidelity.
David Jonsson: The Weight of Being the First
For David Jonsson, the role carried a particular gravity. “It’s the first time they’ve had a black lead in the entire history of Agatha Christie,” he told The Telegraph in December 2023. “I love Agatha Christie, and my mum does in particular. It’s a British institution. But it was scary.”
Jonsson, who had already broken through with the BBC and HBO banking drama Industry and the BAFTA-nominated romantic comedy Rye Lane, initially turned down the role multiple times. “I’ll be honest with you – at first, I wasn’t so sure about it, just because I’m not a big fan of colour blind casting and I didn’t know what this was,” he told Radio Times. “To be blind to anything is not a good thing, so I think I said no and they were quite persistent.”
What changed his mind was the production team’s insistence that the casting was not colour-blind but historically specific. In the 1950s, when decolonisation of Nigeria was beginning in earnest, many wealthy Nigerian families sent their children to Britain for education and employment – a journey that directly mirrors Fitzwilliam’s own. The adaptation, set in 1954 rather than the novel’s 1930s, even includes scenes in which Jonsson’s character encounters overt racism: a pub that falls silent when he enters, a local doctor in possession of a tract entitled Race Hygiene: A Campaign to Create a Master Race.
“I think it’s wonderfully done,” Jonsson said. “I don’t think it’s heavy handed, I don’t think it’s going to make people throw up their Christmas dinner.” The BBC reported that episode one drew 6.82 million viewers, with episode two attracting 5.68 million – a strong showing for a two-part adaptation aired over the Christmas period.
The Folk Horror Quietly Stepping Into the Drawing Room
One of the more intriguing elements of Ejiwunmi-Le Berre’s adaptation was its incorporation of folk horror – what she described in The Guardian as “Wicker-Man style folk horror in a darkly romantic comedy with as much seduction as deduction.” This was not a superficial overlay. The novel’s rural setting, its atmosphere of concealed ritual, and the way the village community closes ranks against outsiders all lend themselves to the folk horror register.
The choice was prescient. British folk horror has experienced a significant resurgence in recent years, moving from cult curiosity to mainstream prestige. Films such as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013), Rose Glass’s Saint Maud (2019), and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022) helped establish the genre’s credentials. By 2026, as Lifestyle Reviewer noted, “British folk horror is no longer a Halloween curiosity or a critic’s niche. It is becoming the most interesting thing happening to UK drama.”
Television has embraced the form with enthusiasm. The BBC commissioned The Witch Farm, a paranormal drama starring Gabrielle Creevy and Michael Socha, based on Danny Robins’s hit podcast. Channel 4’s The Red King (2024) delivered an island-set cult thriller. The trend reflects a broader cultural interest in the uncanny, the rural, and the unexplained – an appetite that Christie’s English villages, with their manicured surfaces and concealed darkness, are perfectly positioned to satisfy.
The Murder Is Easy adaptation exploits this resonance effectively. The village of Wychwood-under-Ashe is presented not merely as a quaint English locale but as a place where ancient social hierarchies function as a kind of ritual – unspoken, enforced, and ultimately violent. The folk horror dimension adds a layer of unease that elevates the drama beyond a conventional whodunit.
Beyond the Village: A New Wave of Christie
The BBC’s Murder Is Easy arrived amid a broader wave of Christie adaptations interrogating the author’s work with fresh eyes. Netflix’s Seven Dials, which premiered in January 2026, reimagined The Seven Dials Mystery as a lavish thriller written by Chris Chibnall, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Martin Freeman. The series embedded Christie’s narrative within the political context of the interwar period, confronting the imperial world her novels often left implicit.
As Catherine Wynne observed in The Conversation: “Christie avoided references to the first world war, writing in the decade after its ending. By contrast war is embedded into the Netflix series.” Helena Bonham Carter’s Lady Caterham describes the war as an “abattoir” with no “glory” – a line that chimes directly with the kind of feminist and anti-imperialist reading that Ejiwunmi-Le Berre brought to Murder Is Easy.
BritBox is also preparing Agatha Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence, the first contemporary English-language adaptation of Christie’s work. Christie’s great-grandson James Prichard gave his blessing: “Phoebe came to us with a brilliant take on the stories which put them in the modern day and because of the energy and vitality of these characters it felt completely natural to say yes.”
The Furious Little Book’s Lasting Echo
Martha Gill, writing in The Guardian on 31 December 2023, identified what makes the Murder Is Easy adaptation significant beyond its entertainment value: “Murder is Easy has done something fairly fresh: it has shown how period dramas can be both diverse and authentic.” She noted that Jonsson’s casting worked precisely because it was grounded in historical reality rather than ideological abstraction – a point the actor himself made when he told interviewers he was “not a fan of colour-blind casting.”
This distinction matters. The best Christie adaptations have always been interpretive acts, not reproductions. Joan Hickson’s Marple, David Suchet’s marathon Poirot, and Kenneth Branagh’s glossy films have each offered a different Christie – shaped by the concerns of their moment. What Ejiwunmi-Le Berre achieved was something rarer: a reading that reveals what the original text was trying to say all along.
“The first time I read it, I thought: ‘What a furious little book,'” she wrote. That fury – about class, gender, race, and the lethal politeness of English village life – was always Christie’s. It simply took a 21st-century screenwriter, a Nigerian-born actor, and a willingness to listen to the novel’s quietest complaints to bring it fully to the surface.
