Tangled Web UK Review November 2000
Spider's Web by
Agatha Christie
hbk out September 00
Published by HarperCollins
at £15.99
Spider's Web is the third Christie stage play to have been adapted as a
novel by Charles Osborne, an expert on her life and work. It is, overall, a
more entertaining novel than its two predecessors, Black Coffee and The
Unexpected Guest, because the source play is a light and enjoyable
confection, with plenty of humorous dialogue as well as the requisite
plethora of plot twists. The novelisation does, however, suffer from the
same faults as Osborne's earlier efforts. He is, it seems to me, still too
much in awe of Christie's original work. A play and a novel are very
different things and Christie herself recognised that. She adapted several
of her own novels for the stage and on several occasions ruthlessly
eliminated Hercule Poirot altogether from the story. Yet in undertaking the
reverse process of novelising the theatrical work, Osborne tiptoes around
the original and because of this, no one could fail to realise that the
result is simply a play turned into prose. There is little added value in
the process. One has merely to re-read the latest volumes in the Christie
Collection to see the difference between the Queen of Crime's work and
Osborne's adaptations. This one, for instance, is rather thin and has thus
been padded out with plentiful pictures of spider's web and notes on
Christie's work for the stage and about the two authors. If Christie had
sought to adapt the novel, one feels sure that she would have enhanced, and
complicated the story line of the play rather than simply, in effect,
repeating it. There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of adapting
Christie's plays into novels, but if the task is to be undertaken, surely
it would be desirable to seize the opportunity to create a book which the
original author would have been content to call her own.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the Harry Delvin Mysteries)
