"Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly"

ChristieFanForLife

I just came across a lost Poirot story that has been discovered--actually it's been discovered for quite some time--but I never heard of it until I came across it on Amazon.com. The story is actually a novella and is a shortened version of Dead Man's Folly. Of course there are probably some differences between the two but Dead Man's Folly is an expansion from the novella. I'm quite surprised that the two Agatha Christie Notebook volumes does not contain this story, considering the fact that there are some newly discovered gems tucked away such as The Capture of Cerberus, The Incident of the Dog's Ball, the original courtroom ending to The Mysterious Affair At Styles, and the unseen Miss Marple story The Case of the Caretaker's Wife. Has anyone read "Hercule Poirot And The Greenshore Folly"? 

 

GKCfan

I have read it– I bought the ebook when it first came out a few years ago.  Did you know that "Greenshore Folly" was used for a bench for a "Books Around Town" promotion a while back, promoting works my famous authors?  http://www.booksabouttown.org.uk/?action=ViewBench&Id=14

Griselda

I really like the dust jacket illustration of this book.

I love Dead Man's Folly. I would like someone to do a really great new dramatisation. There is more to the characters than meets the eye, and the story elements are very well-integrated. SPOILER, you don't see the villain too often close-up, being villainous, but you sense his menace throughout the story. There is a real sense of threat, and ruthlessness in the treatment of Hattie which comes across very finely. It is subtle but complete, and really quite a tour do force of artistry. I'm afraid to say I find other twentieth century mystery writers quite clunking and childish by contrast.

 The sense of a retired person doing anything to hang on to something they value from the past - in Mrs Folliat - that is very real in its evocation: and true to life. There is that sense of power mingled with impotency which comes with getting older: the power to correctly identify what is going to happen, and the lack of will or mechanism to do anything about it. Choosing the lesser evil becomes your path.

ChristieFanForLife

@Griselda: Did you see the David Suchet version of Dead Man's Folly? If so, what did you think of it? There was also a version with Peter Ustinov in the 80s.

Griselda

I didn't see the 80s version, but I thought the David Suchet one was all right. It was cinematic, and interesting. On some level, I think that the tension was missing from it.

Madame_Doyle

I think Suchet brought the whole production down.  By that time, he was too morose to fit the part.  However, the rest of it was well done.  Zoe W. as Mrs. Oliver is outstanding, and of course the setting at Greenway was spectacular.  I didn't like the casting of Marlene, but it wasn't too detrimental to the story.

ChristieFanForLife

Griselda said:

I'm afraid to say I find other twentieth century mystery writers quite clunking and childish by contrast.

I would love to hear you expand on what you mean by this. 

GKCfan

I'd like to hear specific names mentioned, too, please, if you don't mind.

Griselda

I can't remember which ones wrote the books, but they were the English ones who are supposed to be pretty amazing. I will research and let you know. There was one murder mystery about a young man who was set up by a sociopathic girl who pretended at one point that she was feeding a dog, and he was supposed to have helped feed it, but he'd forgot, and she said he'd let it die, but she'd never been minding the dog in the first place. He was an impoverished writer. Then there was a story by someone else or the same person about a girl was a bit OCD and washed all the time in her new shower, and didn't like lent clothes, and offended the lender by dry cleaning them again. She worked in a dry cleaners.  She met a sociopathic lover, he tricked her and other women who were less sentimental... and she lost her balance of mind and stabbed him - I think in a cinema. There was one, also, about an academic, whose motive to murder was somehow mixed up with incest and his sister. I don't like to slag off individuals, but all these writers, who are supposed to be  greats, or the two main British ones, whom everyone knows, come across as VERY MIDDLE CLASS, and trying to imagine how working class people would think, or people of the opposite sex would think, and printing these great long internal monologues which do not reflect how people perceive there lives, even if they behave in what seem humdrum ways, and the novels are facile, except for the fact you've been waiting for the punchline for so long that you feel relieved when you find out at last - and they can write in good English. With Christie, by contrast, you have something approaching genius, I feel. You have the ability to create a unique context for the story, not setting, but an artistic space for the creativity, so that the effects you created come across as truth. The other efforts by the other people come across as writing, which is the equivalent of knitting. Something is made at the end of it, but it has no beauty.

ChristieFanForLife

@Griselda, how do you feel about many of today's mysteries? 

Griselda

I'm sorry to say, I haven't read many. I have a nice reading list to get round to thanks to kind recommendations from people on this forum. Am hoping to have some time this August.

I tend to think that the American television series, Columbo, has something of the quality of Christie's work. It's finished being made now, of course. The setting of the charcter is just perfect, all his approaches to detection embedded in every gesture, nuance and word. Like Poirot, he gets a hunch at the start who has the psychology to do the crime. I saw one repeat a few days ago which was directed by Stephen Speilberg, and was about a writer bumping off his partner in writing. The duo wrote mysteries, and their protaganist was called Mrs Melville. A nod to Miss Marple, I thought.  I've seen the Christie influence in that series quite a lot.

Which other writer do you like the most? 

ChristieFanForLife

I don't read too many of today's mystery writers. I haven't tried P.D. James' books yet but that is on my list to read. But the writer that I like the most is Anne Perry and her Charlotte & Thomas Pitt books. The Pitt books aren't technically in the same vein as Agatha Christie, in the respect of physical clues and that softens the puzzle aspect which was so heavily prominent in Christie's books. 

taliavishay-arbel

I loved Anne Perry's Earlier Pitt books, but the later ones, where Pitt gets a higher position, dealing with political issues, I found boring. Maybe that's just me. 

ChristieFanForLife

I was going to mention about that. I haven't read the political ones yet so I can't form an opinion about them but I'm hoping that I will like them just as much. I hope at some point Anne Perry will go back to the earlier formula of the books but since Pitt is at a higher position, it looks like all the cases will be political

Griselda

I've just finished re-reading Dead Man's Folly.What I like about it so much, is as always with AC novels and how I see them, the original premise.SPOILER, there is a family, about to lose their ancestral hoe; it is beautiful; the village community is kept strong by the ties the family at the house is able to make. When the house is sold, it will become a youth hostel or a school , or hotel; the proportions of the rooms will be altered. All that was good about the place for those who always knew it will go. Or that is what many in the community think. There shows a way to keep the house.

Everything is good in this novel, except for the development of the immediate circle of   characters. Agatha Christie should have gone back over it to paint in some detail, and to make them more real. Their shadowiness, in the end stymies the little plots which belong to them. Alec Legge, Sally Legge, Michael Weyman: there isn't enough there, little incidents to bring the whole situation to life. In the end, we are just being told by Poirot what is the situation between them all, without being able to see it for ourselves. Mrs Masterton is a well-used characature - like the friend of the murdered woman in Dumb Witness. Her husband, well, he is barely there. The agent, Captain Warburton needs filling out to be a suspect. AC needed to go over the first half of the novel and re-do it.
The detail of Etienne de Souza is very full, and good. I think she put her efforts into misleading us in the second half, especially with a plot around him, and making sure we did not guess. More incidents involving the murderer were really called for so that we could see his character. In the end, after several re-reads I find I can imagine how it could have been, and what a great novel it might have been. ( I feel the same about Three Act Tragedy.) It is brilliant , in DMF, the way we suddenly realise SPOILER, hang on, Ettienne De Souza the cousin is extremely rich, yet we've been told that his and Hattie's family lost all their money. It is as if we should have seen it. It is brilliant the way that Ariadne Oliver has sensed what is going on, and put it in her own story, the one behind the murder hunt. In the novel also, there is the usual  troupe as they call it, the person gabbling on, saying the truth of why the murder is committed, but they seem so confused and the type to make things up that we dismiss it.  There is the other troupe of nobody really knowing who suggested an idea in the first place, but someone has dropped a suggestion into conversation and all the characters take it up and repeat it: e.g. who suggested taking cake and juice to Marlene, and who suggested her to play the murder victim in the first place. More needs to be done to see these suggestions being made.

I'd like to see a really good new dramatisation done of this, and a lot more done to flesh out the characters.

ChristieFanForLife

In the David Suchet version of Dead Man's Folly, I didn't feel like the characters were well-developed. It's been quite a while since I last saw the film but I think if I saw it again I would come to the same opinion.

Tommy_A_Jones

I wondered what was wrong with it, you are right, I prefermCards On The Table and Mrs McGinty's Dead.

ChristieFanForLife

Cards On The Table became a mess towards the end....it would have been an okay adaptation if the screenwriters didn't feel the need to change things.....and unnecessarily I may add too 

taliavishay-arbel

Does anyone remember the Peter Ustinov version of Dead Man's Folly? Was it any better?

ChristieFanForLife

@taliavishay-arbel: Well the Ustinov version was updated to the 80's but other than that I think the film was a tad bit better. If you look beyond the 80's update, music, clothes, hairstyles, and all that and look at the story and the way it was adapted, it was a bit better. It wasn't as polished as the Suchet version...and polished doesn't always mean better

Tommy_A_Jones

I liked the Ustinov version of Dead Man's Folly, I liked the fact Hastings was in it, I liked Jonathan Cecil and Jean Stapleton, There is nothing good about Cards On The Table Adaptation, it is horrible the moment Ariadne tells Poirot who people are.

ChristieFanForLife

To be honest, I kind of find Jean Stapleton, though she is an American, a little bit more closer to the attitude of Ariadne Oliver than Zoe Wanamaker. Though Jean Stapleton doesn't fit the overall image of what I had in my mind as Oliver (especially with the voice), she does look a little more similar to what I had in mind than Wanamaker. But I have yet to have seen a definitive actress to play Miss Oliver on the screen. 

Griselda

I've never seen the Ustinov film, so I have a treat in store. Ustinov is very good at modelling the movement of Poirot's ideas. You sense the great brain at work.

Tommy_A_Jones

I agree with you ChristieFanForLife, Stapleton is far closer to my idea of Ariadne than Zoe Wanemaker I also think the Radio Ariadne's (Stephanie Cole and Julia McKenzie sound perfect as Ariadne but I would put Zoe, Stephanie and Julia all on the Short list to play an British Ariadne, Zoe is a bit too ascerbic for me.