Queering Christie on Television

Abstract

This chapter explores decisions made by dramatists bringing Agatha Christie’s texts to the screen in Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Agatha Christie’s Marple. Set in the 1930s and 1950s respectively, both series reflect modern attitudes to sexual minorities while nostalgically evoking the past. Examining adaptations in dialogue with the literary texts on which they are based, this chapter considers the “heterosexualization” of Hercule Poirot, and the manner in which Christie’s queer characters are definitely labelled as gay or lesbian on the screen. The result is a distinctly limited reading of queer characters, according to negatively weighted essentialist stereotypes, despite being in line with contemporary LGBT activism. There is more queer potential in the literary texts than in the apparently democratic twenty-first-century adaptations.