These moments are, to be clear, not in Christie’s original text. In another scene, the actor Shirley Henderson’s character, lipstick smeared all over her face, berates the daughter she rents out to men for a shilling, screeching, “I wish I’d used a knitting needle on you.” The low point for me in The ABC Murders, Phelps’s newest three-part series to land on Amazon, was the focus on a yellow, pus-filled boil on the back of a man’s neck-so swollen, it seemed almost to vibrate on camera-as another man grimly spears open the yolk of his fried egg. Phelps has taken the grande dame of drawing-room detective fiction and made her stories so grotesque, so deranged, that they’re almost comical. With Sarah Phelps at the helm, it’s now clear that the BBC’s Agatha Christie adaptations are entering their Zack Snyder–DC–Universe era.
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