Geeking a li’l on Agatha Christie!

Bollywood actor Ali Fazal (4th from right) showing up as Uncle Edward in Death On The Nile is the most heartwarming moment for desi Christie fans

The one time I've felt terrible about an Agatha Christie novel is when I actually didn't read it. Having picked up a copy from college library, I was walking towards my room, when a sadistic moron passing me by, read the title on the cover, said, "Oh, the narrator is the murderer!" Damn!

So I sent that book right back to the library. Which isn't saying much, given that Christie (1890-1976) wrote frickin' 66 murder mysteries, besides 14 short stories' collections, at a pace that presumably involved a book between breakfast and bed.

She, of course, dominated bookshelves much after she died - outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare, apparently. And among English-speaking Indian kids of the 1980s and '90s, in particular, rivalled at best by Enid Blyton, and the syndicate that wrote Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series.

The desi phenomenon had a lot to do with an Indian bookstore chain, founded in Allahabad in the late 1800s, called AH Wheeler.

Stationed in every Indian railway platform, it singularly encouraged kids to pick up a book with just the size and depth to last a long-distance train ride.

Ideally a Christie to go, and another for the way back. So what if it concerned crimes in posh, polite societies quite far away from where the train was chugging through?

Closer home, with Hindi, the older lot probably picked up racier novels by the likes of Surendra Mohan Pathak, with snazzy titles in cheap paperback. The influences of which we continue to observe in popular entertainment still.

For, what are the latest films and series like Haseen Dilruba and Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhein, if not an ode to the AH Wheeler paisa-vasool pulp! Not that Christie has been left alone.

The film Gumnaam (1965) was a thriller loosely based on which Christie novel that, in a worldwide poll on the author's 125th anniversary in 2015, got rated her best ever? And Then There Were None.

Only if you watch the stale chewing gum - Gumnaam (as I just did on Amazon Prime Video), all you ever hope for is a ‘Skip Song' button to get to the bloody end. Not that the rest of it makes much sense.

To be fair to composers Shankar-Jaikishen, they ended up delivering a relatively obscure song in Gumnaam, ‘Jaan pehchan lo'. I've come across at least two firangis in my life, who claimed it's the only desi track they'd ever heard! ‘Jaan pehchan lo' developed a life of its own in the West, appearing first in an LA TV station in the '90s.

Featuring thereafter in opening credits of the Scarlett Johansson black comedy, Ghost World (2001), a Heineken commercial, a video game Far Cry 4, an Australian cover… Either way, Gumnaan was no Agatha Christie.

I'll tell you what is. In the most heartwarming moment for desi Christie fans, Bollywood actor Ali Fazal showing up as Uncle Edward, personal lawyer of Linnet (Gal Gadot), while the egg-head, Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) investigates, in Branagh's own directorial, Death On The Nile (2022), playing at a theatre near you!

How Ali, best known as Guddu Bhaiya from Mirzapur, qualifies as the pucca, British upper-crust, stiff upper-lipped Edward, is only matched by the full-on Urdu-speaking desi Tom Alter, who played a Brit almost all his life. Nobody's complaining. You viscerally root for him soon as he shows up at the cinemas in Bombay.

The period film itself remains faithful to the original text from 1937. Hardly a re-dux/re-mastering here - as has happened with Sherlock Holmes, chiefly.

There is a sort of adult serenity and cinematic scale that you inevitably find reserved for Poirot, over what's really a children's series.

Can tell you this from experience: the kind of pastoral beauty and enchanting landscapes - never mind the classiness of the Nile cruise itself - is hardly what you encounter visiting Cairo anymore. But that's immaterial, of course.

To give you a sense of how filmmakers have taken Christie seriously - consider reading Sidney Lumet's Making Movies, arguably the best book on filmmaking, by a filmmaker.

The peerlessly eclectic Lumet made about 75 movies, many of them masterpieces (Network, Dog Day Afternoon, 12 Angry Men, etc). He devotes perhaps the longest passage in his book on how he pulled off Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1974).

Which Branagh revisited as well in 2017 - that you watch on Hostar+Disney, only to be stunned by the quality of the cast - Penelope Cruz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Johnny Depp, Judy Dench onwards - for what are obviously walk-on parts. But these actors are fans. Branagh wants a chance to examine the symmetry of boiled egg in Orient, and eat only dessert in the Nile. He wants to play Poirot.

How can some audiences not watch still? It's nostalgia. Nile and Orient are quite similar as well, besides all suspects sequestered in the scene of crime. Brought onboard first to protect his client, as if he was Hercules, it also reveals Poirot's past love life, and why he feels romance never goes unpunished.

Say, what if I told you all the suspects are murderers? Doesn't change a thing. Everyone knows the stories. Also, I didn't tell you that, and that's not Death On The Nile, anyway.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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