Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

OUT NOW: The Darkest Midnight in December, edited by Storm Constantine (Immanion Press, 2017)

A new collection of seasonal ghost stories, including 'Log', a tale of festive foliage by yours truly...

The ghost story is a Christmas tradition; shadows looming over the brightly-lit tree in a room where logs crackle in the hearth, and the smell of spice and brandy fill the air. Outside the weather is chill; perhaps snow is falling. The house is far from town – lights twinkle in the distance. And over the festive season, as people gather to celebrate and welcome in the New Year, eerie breath might be heard in a dark corridor, hurrying footsteps overhead, a sigh in the depths of a stairwell. When all are supposed to be happy and secure, the intrusion of fear, grief or sadness are alien, and yet bizarrely integral to a time of celebration whose roots lie in ancient, pagan festivals. What stirs in the darkness?

Contents:

An Eye for an Eye by Rosie Garland
On the Loop Line by Misha Herwin
Holly and Ivy by Fiona Lane
The House with the Gable by Nerine Dorman
When He Comes Home Through the Snow by Storm Constantine
Bethany's Visit by Jessica Gilling
The Supernatural Stocking by Rhys Hughes
Log by Hannah Kate
Driving Home for Christmas by Fiona McGavin
Gift from the Sea by Adele Marie Park
Kindred Spirit by J.E. Bryant
A Midwinter Nightmare by Suzanne Gyseman
Spirit of the Season by Rick Hudson
The Shadow by Wendy Darling
Jay's Ghost by Louise Coquio

For more information, or to buy a copy of the book, please visit the Immanion Press website.

3 Minute Santas - Festive Flash Fiction Wanted

A call for seasonal submissions to be broadcast on the radio!

In response to some comments on my 3 Minute Scares competition for Hannah's Bookshelf on North Manchester FM, I've decided to do something a bit different at Christmas this year. Say hello to... 3 Minute Santas!

I'm looking for recordings of festive (not necessarily Christmas) stories for inclusion on my radio show on Saturday 16th December - but they can only be 3 minutes long! Stories are welcome from anywhere in the world, and in any genre. A selection of 3 Minute Santas will be broadcast on the show on 106.6FM (in the North Manchester area) and on digital (for the rest of the world) - and don't worry, there's a 'listen again' feature just in case you're in a different time zone!

3 Minute Santas isn't a competition, but a call for submissions. It's open to anyone, and the more the merrier! For details of how to submit a story, just click here. The deadline is Sunday 3rd December.

And please do share this info with anyone you think might be interested!

OUT NOW: TransGothic in Literature and Culture, ed. Jolene Zigarovich (Routledge, 2017)

A new academic edited collection on the Gothic, with a chapter from me on Horace Walpole, Twilight, Black Mirror, 17th-century politics and the meaning of romance...

This book contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which Gothic literature, visual media, and other cultural forms explicitly engage gender, sexuality, form, and genre. The collection is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of subject areas and methodologies. It is concerned with several questions, including: How can we discuss Gothic as a genre that crosses over boundaries constructed by a culture to define and contain gender and sexuality? How do transgender bodies specifically mark or disrupt this boundary crossing? In what ways does the Gothic open up a plural narrative space for transgenre explorations, encounters, and experimentation? With this, the volume’s chapters explore expected categories such as transgenders, transbodies, and transembodiments, but also broader concepts that move through and beyond the limits of gender identity and sexuality, such as transhistories, transpolitics, transmodalities, and transgenres. Illuminating such areas as the appropriation of the trans body in Gothic literature and film, the function of trans rhetorics in memoir, textual markers of transgenderism, and the Gothic’s transgeneric qualities, the chapters offer innovative, but not limited, ways to interpret the Gothic. In addition, the book intersects with but also troubles non-trans feminist and queer readings of the Gothic. Together, these diverse approaches engage the Gothic as a definitively trans subject, and offer new and exciting connections and insights into Gothic, Media, Film, Narrative, and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Contents

- Foreword, Susan Stryker
- Introduction: 'Transing the Gothic', Jolene Zigarovich
- Chapter 1: 'Beyond Queer Gothic: Charting the Gothic History of the Trans Subject in Beckford, Lewis, Byron', Nowell Marshall
- Chapter 2: 'Go to Hell: William Beckford’s Skewed Heaven and Hell', Jeremy Chow
- Chapter 3: 'Transgothic Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya', Jolene Zigarovich
- Chapter 4: 'That Dreadful Thing That Looked Like A Beautiful Girl: Trans Anxiety/Trans Possibility in Three Late Victorian Werewolf Tales', Ardel Haefele-Thomas
- Chapter 5: 'Monster Trans: Diffracting Affect, Reading Rage', Harlan Weaver
- Chapter 6: 'More Than Skin Deep: Aliens, Fembots, and Trans-Monstrosities in Techno-Gothic Space', April Miller
- Chapter 7: 'Gothic Gender in Skin Suits, or The (Transgender) Skin I Live In', Anson Koch-Rein
- Chapter 8: 'The Media of Madness: Gothic transmedia and the Cthulhu mythos', Jason Whittaker
- Chapter 9: 'Black Weddings and Black Mirrors: Gothic as Transgeneric Mode', Hannah Priest
- Chapter 10: 'The State of Play: Transgressive Caricature and Transnational Enlightenment', Ian McCormick

For more information, please visit the publisher's website.

OUT NOW: Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic, ed. Robert McKay and John Miller (University of Wales Press, 2017)

A new academic edited collection on werewolves from University of Wales Press, featuring a chapter by me on bad dads, painful transformations and the embarrassment of morning-after nudity...

Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Werewolves therefore raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic.

This is the first volume concerned with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia.

Contents

- Introduction, Robert McKay and John Miller
- Like Father Like Son: Wolf-Men, Paternity and the Male Gothic, Hannah Priest
- Wicked Wolf-Women and Shaggy Suffragettes: Lycanthropic Femme Fatales in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras, Jazmina Cininas
- Postcolonial Vanishings: Wolves, American Indians, and Contemporary Werewolves, Michelle Nicole Boyer
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ubernatural: The Other(ed) Werewolf in Twilight, Roman Bartosch and Celestine Caruso
- ‘Becoming woman’/Becoming Wolf: Girl Power and the Monstrous Feminine in the Ginger Snaps Trilogy, Batia Boe Stolar
- ‘Something that is either werewolf or vampire’: Interrogating the Lupine Nature of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Kaja Franck
- Saki, Nietzsche and the Superwolf, John Miller
- A Vegetarian Diet for the Were-wolf Hunger of Capital: Leftist and Pro-animal Thought in Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris, Robert McKay
- Everybody Eats Somebody: Angela Carter’s Wolfish Ecology, Margot Young
- ‘But by Blood No Wolf Am I’: Language and Agency, Instinct and Essence – Transcending Antinomies in Maggie Steifvater’s Shiver Trilogy, Bill Hughes
- Transforming the Big Bad Wolf: Redefining the Werewolf through Grimm and Fables, Matthew Lerberg

For more information, please visit the publisher's website.

Gothic to Goth: a weekend course in London

Come and take a trip to the dark side…

This October, I’ll be running Gothic to Goth, a weekend course at the V&A in London. With lectures over two days, the course will cover everything from Bram Stoker to Robert Smith… from Sweeney Todd to Edward Cullen… from Strawberry Hill to Silent Hill.

Gothic to Goth will be on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd October, 11-4pm. I’ll be giving lectures on penny dreadfuls, Gothic romance and horror literature/film, and there’ll be some other wonderful lecturers giving talks on Gothic architecture, Dracula, Goth music and Alexander McQueen.

You can register for the course via the V&A website (info about course fees can also be found here), but here’s a little taste of what the programme will look like…

Saturday 21st October

Session 1. The Gothic Past
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest
Session 2. Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill
Lecturer: tbc
Session 3. Penny Dreadfuls and Victorian Pulp Fiction
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest
Session 4. Enter Dracula
Lecturer: Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, MMU

Sunday 22nd October

Session 1. Goodbye Romance, Hello Horror
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest
Session 2. Dark, Punk and Goth
Lecturer: Professor Isabella van Elferen, Kingston University
Session 3. Gothic Style and Alexander McQueen
Lecturer: Claire Wilcox, V&A
Session 4. The Gothic Future
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest

Weekend courses at the V&A give you the opportunity to spend a couple of days immersing yourself in a topic, learning from experts, and enjoying the splendour of the V&A building.

To find out more about Gothic to Goth, or to register for the course, please click here for details.

A little video about my local park...

In July, it was #LoveParks week, an initiative by Keep Britain Tidy intended to show 'how much our country loves parks'. As you may or may not know, I'm on the committee of Friends of Crumpsall Park, and I took the lead this year on our #LoveParks activity.

Crumpsall Park is a small urban park in North Manchester, officially opened in 1899. Crumpsall isn't the richest area in the city (though it's not the poorest), and it doesn't always get the best press. In fact, it doesn't always get any press at all, as our local paper is notorious for its lack of reporting on the north side of the city. The best we can usually expect is coverage of crime, complaints about the hospital, and the occasional story about someone being fined for fly-tipping.

Things were very different at the end of the nineteenth century. Crumpsall had only just been incorporated into the City of Manchester, and it was still (in places) quite rural. Having escaped the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution, Crumpsall was slowly being developed into a city suburb, as new houses were built to accommodate Manchester's workforce - leading to the construction of new schools, shops and parks for the benefit of residents.

At the official opening ceremony of Crumpsall Park in 1899, the Lord Mayor addressed the crowd, acknowledging that, given that Crumpsall was 'more or less in the country', the construction of a new park might seem unnecessary. He added: 'some of [you] might think it was not wanted to-day, but a time would come when [your] successors would say that the Corporation had done well in securing it.'

Crumpsall can no longer (by any stretch of the imagination) be described as 'more or less in the country', and I thought it would be nice to see what the people of today's Crumpsall think of our little park.

So I asked, and this is what they said...

GUEST POST; or, Why You Can't Trust Anything on the Internet

From time to time, I like to post guest blogs written by people I know, sharing work that interests me (and that I think will interest you). While most of these are written by people I have invited, I also get requests from guest bloggers who want to contribute to the site.

I do get quite a few of these emails, and I don't like to dismiss them off-hand, so sometimes I like to look into the background of the person contacting me. So when I get an email like this...

"Hello,

My name is James and I'm a freelance blog writer from London. Most of my work so far has been focused around various cleaning, travel and marketing tips as that is something that I have had a lot of personal experience with.

I've taken a look at some of the guest posts on your site, and I must say that I really like how they're done. I'd appreciate it if I could have a chance to contribute to your website in the same way, the topics I have in mind are:
- Cleaning Tips: Cleaning Your Home For The Holidays
- 8 Helpful Cleaning Tips For Incredibly Lazy People
- 10 Cleaning Tips That Will Make Your Home Sparkle
- 5 Time-Saving House Cleaning Tips for your Staged Home
- 7 Expert Cleaning Tips You Need To Be Using
- Top 5 Speedy Deep Cleaning Tips

As mentioned, I possess a hefty amount of knowledge in this field so I really think that I could provide you with some quality material. I'm attaching an example of my work.

If you do not find these topics interesting for your community, please let me know, I am sure I can write a right content for your audience."

... I like to see what sort of work the writer has done before. I don't just post any old article on speedy deep cleaning tips on this site. I need to know that my contributors really do have the hefty amount of knowledge about cleaning tips for staged homes that they claim.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find much work by 'James Tolbert, freelance blog writer from London', so I had to try another tack. As a professional writer, James naturally included a headshot in his email signature:

I thought maybe if I did a reverse-image search, I might be able to find out a bit more about James's freelance work.

And wow.

Just... wow.

This guy is incredible. He's had a staggering career. Seriously. Judging by his picture, he's not that old. But he's worked all over the world, you guys. In so many different industries. And, oddly, under so many different names (I'm not making any judgement here - I also write under different names - but James has a lot of pen-names). Reading through my search results, I knew James was exactly the sort of fascinating character I would love to have write for the site.

So here's the response I sent him:

"Dear James/Rodney,

I'd love to have you write for my site - you sound just right. But I think you're selling yourself short by offering a rather pedestrian piece on household cleaning. A quick Google search shows me that you have much more to offer!

It'd be great to have a piece for my blog on your experiences as a computer programmer and author, and your work as a youth pastor. Or perhaps you could write about your work as an interior decorator in Mumbai? I'd love to know more about your role as an Operations Manager, and your experience of using a professional resume-writing service - how did this square with your own background as Marketing Manager for Resumes Planet?

Alternatively, it would be great to get a piece on your experiences of doing an MBA in France, or the time you took out dental insurance under the name 'Jorge V'.

I'd also be happy with a piece about wine or environmentalism - two subjects that I know are close to your heart. Or on the challenges of balancing running a digital marketing agency in Dallas, while also managing an Italian restaurant in Bangalore. That must be an incredible amount of work! You have so much energy!

I see you have a small cohort of colleagues that you enjoy working with on numerous projects. Could you write something about your work with Joseph, Ken Burns and John Rodney? I know you guys have worked together on both property development and entrepreneur support. How did you guys start working together?

Final suggestion: I'd love to know more about your work, under the name Roderigo Cervantes, as CEO of an avant-garde architectural design company.

I am fascinated by your company's approach to marketing, not least the decision to only use quotes from Moby Dick, War of the Worlds and Around the World in 80 Days as text on your website. (Could you also clarify - sorry for being confused - why, although you're listed as CEO on the home page, the 'Philosophy' page lists Vincent Vega as CEO, with Mia Wallace and Jules Winnfield as General Manager and Lead Architect?)

Anyway, lots of suggestions from me! Let me know your thoughts, and thanks again for getting in touch."

I'm going to wait until James/Rodney replies to ask him about all his other businesses. A cursory glance through Yelp reveals that he's sure got his fingers in a lot of pies (and I know that these must all be aliases of the same person, because Yelp has a policy of rejecting stock images for Business Account profiles).

Sadly, James/Rodney hasn't got back to me yet. Maybe I can commission a guest blog from Ken Burns, Joseph or John Rodney? I'm sure they'd have some crazy stories to tell.


If you would like to use James/Rodney's face for a fake testimonial, wine blog or Yelp business profile, you can download it here for free (please do buy the photographer a coffee).

To read more about my unending fascination with dodgy guest-blogging services, please enjoy these other articles:
Guest Bloggers Wanted (but only if you exist)
Another Guest Post from a Non-Existent Blogger

3 Minute Scares is back for its second year!

North Manchester FM presenter Hannah Kate wants you to scare her this Halloween! She’s asking people throughout Greater Manchester to submit their scariest 3-minute stories for her annual creative writing competition. Writers keen to be crowned Greater Manchester’s spookiest wordsmith can submit a recording of their mini-tale via Hannah’s website, with the best entries being played on air on the Halloween edition of Hannah’s Bookshelf on Saturday 28 October. Winners will also have the chance to read their story at the Boggart Hole Clough Halloween Lantern Parade later that evening.

The Halloween flash fiction competition will be judged by horror author Simon Bestwick and Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlaínn of MMU’s Centre for Gothic Studies, with the writer of the best entry receiving a prize from Breakout, Manchester’s real life escape room game. Entries need to be 3 minutes long, meaning a word count of 350-400 words. The judges will be looking for style and originality, as well as how scary the story is.

Last year’s competition was won by Ian Peek, with a terrifying little tale about Jack o’Lanterns. North Manchester FM presenter Hannah Kate says: ‘Ian set the bar pretty high with his winning entry last year, but I’m looking forward to seeing what this year’s competition brings. The standard of entries from all over the region last year shows that there’s a lot of talent for terrifying out there.’

All writers need to enter the competition is a computer with a microphone… and a good story. Entries can be recorded via Hannah’s website. More information and rules of the competition can also be found on the website.

Hannah’s Bookshelf is North Manchester FM’s weekly literature show, and it goes out live every Saturday 2-4pm. The show has been running since January 2015 and has featured guests including Rosie Garland, Ramsey Campbell, Tony Walsh and Gwyneth Jones. The show broadcasts on 106.6FM for North Manchester residents and through the ‘listen online’ feature for the rest of the world.

Review: The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World (Greater Manchester Fringe)

Sunday 9th July 2017
Hope Mill Theatre, Pollard Street

On Sunday, I was at a performance of the verbosely titled The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World, one of the shows being staged this year for the Greater Manchester Fringe. If that grand title itself doesn’t intrigue you, then I should tell you that this is a theatre production that is performed in complete darkness.

I must admit, I was rather excited when I saw this show was being staged at the Fringe. Forgive the self-promotion, but you may have seen that my edited collection She-Wolf has just come out in paperback from Manchester University Press. In the book, there’s a chapter by Australian artist and writer Jazmina Cininas entitled ‘Fur Girls and Wolf Women: Fur, Hair and Subversive Female Lycanthropy’, which discusses the cultural history of hairy women. Julia Pastrana is one of the historical women Cininas writes about, along with the sixteenth-century Gonsalus sisters and nineteenth-century Krao Farini. Having edited Cininas’s work, I’ve become familiar with Julia Pastrana’s story from an academic perspective – so the fact that the play was being performed at the same time as She-Wolf’s paperback was being launched was a wonderful twist of fate.

By way of background, Julia Pastrana was an indigenous Mexican woman, born with hypertrichosis terminalis (abnormal hair growth) and other genetic conditions. Her nose, lips and gums were unusually large and thick, and her face and body were covered in hair. At some point in her early life, Pastrana was sold and taken to the United States to perform in a travelling show. She was billed as a ‘Bear Woman’ and ‘The Ugliest Woman on Earth’, and she was toured around North America. There she met Theodore Lent, who took over her management and exhibited her around Europe and America. In 1854, Lent and Pastrana married. Her fame began to increase, and she was the subject of scientific studies as well as freakshow entertainment. One nineteenth-century commentator, George O’Dell, concluded that Pastrana was ‘semi-human’, a cross between a woman and an orangutan.

In 1860, Pastrana gave birth to a son, who inherited some of her genetic conditions. The child died within three days, and Pastrana herself died shortly afterwards from post-partum complications. Lent had the bodies of his wife and child embalmed, and continued to exhibit them until his own death in 1884. He also remarried, wedding a hirsute German woman who was exhibited under the name Zenora Pastrana (and who, he falsely claimed, was Julia’s sister).

The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana was written by Shaun Prendergast, and was first performed in 1998. It’s an hour-long one-act play performed in complete darkness by a cast of five or six. It’s an unusual and immersive experience, with Pastrana’s story unfolding through short vignettes (it’s hard to call them ‘scenes’, given the way the play is staged) that chart her sale, performances, marriage, childbirth, death and post-mortem ‘career’. We begin with carnival grinders announcing their attractions: ‘limbless wonder’, ‘fish boy’, etc. Despite the small cast, the hustle and bustle surrounds the audience, with voices seeming to come from all sides.

With words based on historical descriptions of her act, Julia Pastrana cuts through the noise to introduce herself. In a sweet and lyrical voice, she describes the deformity of her facial features, before explaining that, despite this, her figure is ‘neat’ and her mind sharp. And then, at the instigation of a baying audience, she begins to sing – and at that moment it becomes impossible to imagine her as ‘the ugliest woman in the world’.

And that’s part of the reason for the show’s ‘gimmick’. The True History is a play that must be performed in complete darkness. The lack of a visual experience is not simply a trick or an experiment (and it’s not just that reconstructing Pastrana’s features would be too complicated): it’s vital to our understanding of the characters that we don't descend into gawping at ‘ugliness’. This is the story of a woman who lived her life as an exhibit – her whole career revolved around her being a spectacle, a thing to be looked at. By the time we reach the end of the story, the darkness takes on a further layer of heart-breaking significance (but you’ll need to see the show to fully understand that aspect).

The story that unfolds is cruel in places, unsettling in others, and yet imbued with a sweetness and sympathy (for Pastrana but also, in places, for Lent). It pulls no punches, and there were some moments when I felt distinctly uncomfortable, and ironically voyeuristic. This is not a story with a happy ending, and at the show’s powerful climax I was very pleased that it was performed in darkness, as that meant no one could see me crying.

Prendergast’s writing is excellent here. Although the play does deviate a little from the ‘true history’ – it is Lent who purchases Pastrana in Mexico, there’s no mention of any previous ‘owner’, and reference to Lent’s later marriage is omitted – this makes sense in terms of the limitations of a one-act play. The interactions between Lent and Pastrana beautifully capture the complex nature of their relationship, with Lent moving between money-hungry showman and loving husband, sometimes within the space of a few sentences. And Pastrana is sweetly naïve, beautifully melancholy, and knowingly complicit by turns.

Oddly, this performance didn’t have a programme or cast list available. I presume that, in the spirit of Theodore Lent, Watershed Productions didn’t want to run the risk of anyone spotting their ‘star turns’ out in the real world and ruining the illusion. But as the performances were so impressive, I took the liberty of checking out the show’s Twitter account to find out whose voices I’d been hearing.

Julia Pastrana was played wonderfully by Karina Jones, who captured the prettiness and fragility of ‘the ugliest woman in the world’ in both speech and song. Lent’s brash showmanship was brought to life by Matt Concannon – who did a great job of delivering Lent’s more unsettling (downright disturbing, by the end) lines in a way that made it just about possible to pity him. The rest of the cast – Ruby Ablett, Richard Innocent, Jonathan Blaydon and Colleen Prendergast (who also directed) – took the other roles, filling the auditorium with characters, crowds and sound effects (and… did I imagine it?... smells?) to the extent that it was easy to forget their small number. Although health and safety requirements meant that we had the mechanisms of performance revealed to us before the show started, having voices suddenly ringing out from all sides was still a surprise.

As well as the cast list, there was something else missing from this performance. The play was performed as written in 1998, and so Pastrana’s story ended – so painfully – at the point it had reached that year. But there is a postscript (easily found on Wikipedia, but I don’t want to spoil the play’s ending here), which wasn’t mentioned at any point during the performance. I don’t think this is a criticism, though, as inserting the final ‘ending’ of the story may well have weakened the punch of the climax. Pastrana’s story is one of cruelty and exploitation, and an attempt to tack on a redeeming feature (albeit one based in fact) would have detracted from this.

The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World is a fantastic piece of theatre. Stunning, disturbing and moving – I think it’s going to stay with me for a long time.

OUT NOW: She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Paperback Edition)

My edited collection She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves is now available in paperback from Manchester University Press! Essays on lady-lycanthropes in folklore, history, witchcraft trials, literature, cinema, television and gaming, by Merili Metsvahi, Rolf Schulte, Jay Cate, Jazmina Cininas, Shannon Scott, Carys Crossen, Willem de Blécourt, Peter Hutchings, Barbara Creed, Laura Wilson, and me!

She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves
Edited by Hannah Priest
Price: £14.99

She-Wolf explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. The book includes contributors from various disciplines, and offers a cross-period, interdisciplinary exploration of a perennially popular cultural production. The book covers material from the Middle Ages to the present day with chapters on folklore, history, witch trials, Victorian literature, young adult literature, film and gaming. Considering issues such as religious and social contexts, colonialism, constructions of racial and gendered identities, corporeality and subjectivity - as well as female body hair, sexuality and violence - She-wolf reveals the varied ways in which the female werewolf is a manifestation of complex cultural anxieties, as well as a site of continued fascination.

Contents:

- Introduction: A History of Female Werewolves - Hannah Priest

- Estonian Werewolf Legends Collected from the Island of Saaremaa - Merili Metsvahi

- 'She transformed into a werewolf, devouring and killing two children': Trials of She-Werewolves in Early Modern French Burgundy - Rolf Schulte

- Participatory Lycanthropy: Female Werewolves in Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Jay Cate

- Fur Girls and Wolf Women: Fur, Hair and Subversive Female Lycanthropy - Jazmina Cininas

- Female Werewolf as Monstrous Other in Honoré Beaugrand's 'The Werewolves' - Shannon Scott

- 'The complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul': Conflict Between Societal Expectations and Individual Desires in Clemence Housman's 'The Werewolf' and Rosamund Marriott Watson's 'A Ballad of the Were-wolf' - Carys Crossen

- I was a Teenage She-Wolf: Boobs, Blood and Sacrifice - Hannah Priest

- The Case of the Cut Off Hand: Angela Carter's Werewolves in Historical Perspective - Willem de Blécourt

- The She-Wolves of Horror Cinema - Peter Hutchings

- Ginger Snaps: The Monstrous Feminine as Femme Animale - Barbara Creed

- Dans Ma Peau: Shape-shifting and Subjectivity - Laura Wilson

For more information, or to buy a copy, please visit the publisher's website.

Review: The Marriage of Kim K (Greater Manchester Fringe)

Monday 3rd July 2017
53two, Albion Street

On Monday, I was at the Manchester launch night of The Marriage of Kim K, one of the (many) shows being staged this year for the Greater Manchester Fringe. I’d been promised that the show would be the ‘Kim Kardashian opera’ I’d been waiting for – or the ‘Mozart musical’ I’d been waiting for… at the same time. I didn’t know I’d been waiting for either of those things, so I was intrigued.

Written by Leo Mercer and Stephen Hyde (who write together as leoe&hyde), the show takes as its starting point Kim Kardashian’s ill-fated 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries in 2011. Sort of. Kim and Kris’s car crash of a marriage is played out (stage right) through numbers that run the standard musical gamut from comic to heartfelt to tragic. But it’s not too long before we’re introduced to another couple – the Count and Countess from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro – who perform their marital dissatisfaction in a series of operatic excerpts (and interpretations) stage left.

The juxtaposition of Kim/Kris and the Count/Countess is the hook that sells the show, but in truth it’s the centre stage relationship that really holds the play together. There is a third marriage on stage, that of Amelia and Stephen, a couple drifting apart as life pulls them in different directions. Stephen is a playwright, determined to produce something of ‘beauty’ (like a Mozart opera), despite facing constant rejections. Amelia has just a new job, and combats the stress of work by watching reality TV. Amelia wants to watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians; Stephen puts on a DVD of The Marriage of Figaro.

As Stephen and Amelia fight over the remote control, and bicker about their (seemingly) conflicting priorities, we cut between scenes of Kim and Kris (when Amelia chooses the channel) and the Count and Countess (when Stephen gets the upper hand). All the while, Amelia and Stephen keep up an impressive lyrical performance that is one part chorus, one part counterpoint to their televisual counterparts. As we move faster and faster between the Kardashian and Mozart songs, the tribulations of the three couples begin to merge, building up to finale that is both satisfying and heart-warming.

In lesser hands, this conceit could have been a gimmick. But for all its quirky premise, there’s something quite subtle and ‘real’ about The Marriage of Kim K. The writers cleverly avoid forcing comparisons between the marital discord of Kim/Kris, Amelia/Stephen and the Count/Countess. These are three different couples – existing in different times and media – and the problems they are dealing with have different causes and resolutions. Instead, the audience see parallels not analogies, being reminded (with some humour) that there are similarities even within a sea of differences.

The Marriage of Kim K is a sung-through musical (or an opera buffa, depending on which way you look at it), so it really puts its performers through their paces. Fortunately, the cast were more than up to the task, and all six of the performances were brilliant.

Photocredit: www.toriabrightside.com

Emily Burnett was vocally impressive as the Countess Rosina, capturing both the fragile sadness and the stubborn anger of the character. She was paired with Nathan Bellis, who was fantastic as the Count. I enjoyed the way that, while the Marriage of Figaro songs were initially performed in Italian, Burnett and Bellis seamlessly switched to singing in English when Amelia ‘turned the subtitles on’. This wasn’t just a language change either – the pair subtly altered their performance of the scenes to make the dynamics of their exchanges more accessible to audiences less familiar with operatic style (and to draw out some of those parallels with the other couples on stage).

James Edge played Kris Humphries, and his performance was a lot of fun to watch. Essentially playing the comic character of the piece, Edge brought a swaggering assurance and charm to the role. His on-stage spouse was played by Yasemin Mireille, who was tasked with portraying a surprisingly multi-faceted version of Kim Kardashian. The Marriage of Kim K isn’t afraid to shy away from the ‘vapidity’ of reality TV, so we had a charming little number in which Mireille sweetly sings an almost contentless make-up tutorial for her adoring fans, but it also brought out the humanity of a woman caught up in a situation that’s spiralling out of control.

The third couple were played by Amelia Gabriel and Stephen Hyde. In many ways, these were the tougher roles, as the couple sang out their bickering and commentary in tandem with both the musical and operatic scenes, switching between styles at the drop of a hat (or the push of a button). Gabriel, in particular, did a sterling job of harmonizing both Kim and the Countess, making an effective vocal ‘glue’ that held the two ‘fictional’ couples together. Hyde’s crochetty counterpoint, rattling off criticisms of reality TV and effusive (but naïve) tributes to opera, stayed just the right side of unsympathetic.

And perhaps that was what was so engaging about The Marriage of Kim K. On the surface, we have six characters who should be unlikable. Stephen is a rather pretentious artist, who has stopped paying attention to his wife; Amelia is becoming weirdly obsessed with Kim Kardashian. Kris is a dim jock who counts his biggest achievement as getting to have sex with a hot famous wife; Kim is a vapid celebrity who performs make-up tutorials and plans to cheat on her husband with a rapper (guess who). The Count is a staggering lothario who revels in humiliating his wife; the Countess spends almost all her time listing the many faults of her husband. And yet… I didn’t dislike any of them at the end. There was warmth, affection and sympathy in all of the characters, for all the pointed lyrics and biting humour.

If I have one criticism of the performance, it would be a technical one. This is a very ambitious piece (musically), as operatic and musical styles are quite different – both in terms of vocal and orchestral performance. Due to technical limitations, this didn’t quite gel as well as it could have done (the hi-hat cymbal overpowered the string quartet at times, and Burnett’s opera occasionally overwhelmed Mireille’s singing). This isn’t a criticism of the performers or the composition, but more that the play at times seemed to stretch the technical limitations of the (admittedly lovely) venue. This is one play that really could do with a sound desk.

But this is a minor criticism, and doesn’t detract from how much I enjoyed the play. The Marriage of Kim K might sound like a bit of a mad idea, but I came away thinking that it all made complete sense. It’s touring a number of fringe festivals this summer, including Birmingham, London and Edinburgh, and there are five more performances at the Greater Manchester fringe this month as well. And it’s a definite recommendation from me.

For more information about the production and upcoming performances, please see the show's website.

Poirot Project: The ABC Murders (review)

This post is part of my 2016 2016-17 Poirot Project. You can read the full story of why I’m doing this in my Introduction post. The previous post was a review of ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’.

Due to the various commitments and stresses of life, I’ve had to take a little bit of a break from this project. It’s been over six months since my last Poirot Project post. But I’m pushing on now, and I’m totally sure I’ll get to Curtain by Christmas this year (haha!). In a way, it’s kinda appropriate that I’ve had a six-month break, as that fits quite nicely with The ABC Murders, which is where I’m picking up.

Beware: Here be Spoilers

The first episode of the fourth ‘series’ of Agatha Christie’s Poirot was first broadcast on 5th January 1992. I’ve put inverted commas around ‘series’ here, as the 1992 episodes were a bit of a departure from the previous adaptations. There were only three stories shown this year, and each one was a feature-length adaptation of a novel, rather than the (at this point) standard hour-long short story episodes. It’s now usual to refer to these three episodes as the ‘fourth series’, and they were broadcast in a regular weekly slot that January, but I’m just not sure we really thought of them as a ‘series’ in 1992. In fact, I don’t think we thought about TV in terms of series in the same way at all back then. We had ‘serials’ (usually long-running dramas, often soap operas, where a continuous narrative developed episode-to-episode) and ‘series’ (often sit-coms and crime dramas, where a set of related episodes – most commonly six – were shown weekly, though the narrative wasn’t necessary continuous). But we also had a lot of one-off or self-contained programmes, where a single story was presented (either in one go or in instalments). The BBC’s adaptations of the Miss Marple stories were like this, as were The Ruth Rendell Mysteries. I don’t remember ever referring to these as a ‘series’ in the 90s – you’d just say ‘there’s a new Inspector Wexford on this week’, not ‘there’s a new series of Inspector Wexford starting on Sunday’.

But time – and technology – have changed all that. Once long-running shows were packaged up (retrospectively) for VHS, DVD and then streaming, they were divided up into series. So ‘The Dead of Jericho’, ‘The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn’ and ‘Service of All the Dead’ stopped being ‘three feature-length dramas shown in January 1987’ and started being ‘Series 1 of Inspector Morse’. And so ‘The ABC Murders’, ‘Death in the Clouds’ and ‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’ became ‘Series 4 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot’. On the whole, this makes sense: these particular episodes of Poirot, like the Inspector Morse adaptations, were shown weekly as a short series, and they were sandwiched between two clearly defined series of eight and ten episodes. But I might have to return to this niggly little point when we move on to the run of feature-length episodes, as they’ve been lumped together into ‘series’ almost at random, in order to better fit the boxset model of TV-watching that we’re all more comfortable with now (at least, that’s the only reason I can think of why ‘Appointment with Death’ is counted as part of ‘Series 11’ and ‘The Clocks’ as ‘Series 12’).

NB: There is no ‘Season 4’ of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, just as there is no ‘Season 4’ of Sherlock. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I start referring to UK TV shows in terms of ‘seasons’.

Right… that said…

‘The ABC Murders’ was based on the novel of the same name, which was published in early 1936. Just to satisfy the academic part of me, I should say that the edition I’m using here is the paperback edition published by HarperCollins in 1993. This is the first Poirot book I’ve had to go out and buy specifically for this blog project, as (weirdly) I discovered that I didn’t actually own a copy of The ABC Murders. Turns out my Agatha Christie collection is a little haphazard – I own four copies of Death on the Nile, but had to buy ABC.

Although The ABC Murders was published after Murder on the Links, it is narrated by Hastings. Like The Big Four and Peril at End House, it begins with Hastings making a trip back to England and reconnecting with his old friend. As the opening pages tell us, it’s now June 1935, and Hastings has come to England for six months to deal with certain business affairs. However, he soon forgets that was the reason for leaving his wife in Argentina:

‘I need hardly say that one of my first actions on reaching England was to look up my old friend, Hercule Poirot.’

Hastings discovers that some things have changed. Poirot has moved out of lodgings and into a brand new flat:

‘I found him installed in one of the newest type of service flats in London. I accused him (and he admitted the fact) of having chosen this particular building entirely on account of its strictly geometrical appearance and proportions.’

This flat, as we later discover, is in Whitehaven Mansions, EC1 (the postcode area covering City of London, Islington, Camden and Hackney). The TV show had this as Poirot’s permanent address throughout the episodes – though the style and size of the building’s interior changed as the programme progressed – but Christie only moved her Poirot into this ‘newest type of service flat’ in 1935. The 1930s saw a number of new art-deco constructions in central London that might have inspired Christie’s description of a building with ‘strictly geometrical appearance and proportions’ – including Guy Morgan and Partners’ Florin Court, EC1, which was being constructed as she was writing The ABC Murders and which, of course, was used by LWT as the TV version of Whitehaven Mansions.

While Poirot’s residence has changed, the man himself remains curiously unaltered. Hastings is initially baffled by this, exclaiming that his friend looks ‘hardly a day older than when I had last seen him’. This feels, at first, like Christie having a little joke at her famous creation’s longevity. After all, given that Poirot had a distinguished career in the Belgian police force before The Mysterious Affair at Styles (set c.1916), he has to be in his 60s by now – and yet, he seems no different to when he made his first appearance. But it turns out this isn’t the case. In fact, Hastings’s comment on Poirot’s unchanged appearance kicks off a weird little hair obsession that runs throughout the story.

Hastings notes that Poirot has ‘fewer grey hairs than when I saw you last’, which makes his friend beam with pride and reveal a little secret:

‘REVIVIT – To bring back the natural tone of the hair. Revivit is NOT a dye. In five shades, Ash, Chestnut, Titian, Brown, Black.’

After this little exchange, Poirot reveals to Hastings that he has received an anonymous letter (signed only ‘A.B.C.’) suggesting that a crime will take place in Andover on the 21st of the month. Poirot believes that the note should be taken seriously, and so the two men head over to visit another old friend and begin their new adventure.

Inspector Japp has previously dismissed the anonymous letter, but he seems pleased enough to see his old sleuthing buddies back together again. He gives Hastings a ‘hearty welcome’, but this camaraderie is short-lived. Never mind the anonymous note, we’re back to hair again. Japp’s enthusiastic surprise at seeing Hastings reveals something of a raw nerve in our narrator:

‘Quite like old days seeing you here with Monsieur Poirot. You’re looking well, too. Just a little bit thin on top, eh? Well, that’s what we’re all coming to. I’m the same.’

This does not go down well. Hastings winces, as he believed the ‘careful way’ he brushes his hair ‘across the top of [his] head’ made its thinness ‘unnoticeable’. A couple of pages later, he’s still not let it drop. When Poirot jokes that Japp ‘does not change much’, Hastings can’t resist making a dig:

‘“He looks much older,” I said. “Getting as grey as a badger,” I added vindictively.’

Poirot – tactful as ever – realizes that Hastings is still smarting after Japp’s jape, and suggests that Hastings could buy a toupee. This also does not go down well. Hastings has a massive rant, ‘roaring’ about Poirot’s ‘confounded hairdresser’ and the fact that Japp ‘always was an offensive kind of devil’, and blaming his hair loss on the ‘hot summers’ in Argentina. He eventually recovers his temper and admits he is a bit touchy about his hair, but this doesn’t stop him making several sly digs about other characters’ hair later in the book (he comments on Poirot’s moustaches drooping in the heat, and bitchily notes that Megan Barnard’s hair must have recently been permed, as ‘it stood out from her head in a mass of rather frizzy curls’). Let it go, Hastings, let it go.

Anyway… that anonymous letter… obviously, The ABC Murders isn’t really a book devoted to Hastings’s insecurities about his bald patch. It’s about a serial killer. The letter Poirot receives is only the beginning of the case. As forewarned, there is a murder in Andover (Mrs Alice Ascher), and a copy of the ABC railway guide is left near the body. Shortly afterwards, Poirot receives a letter warning that the next murder will take place in Bexhill-on-Sea.

This type of crime is a complete departure for our dynamic duo. As Hastings himself says:

‘Do you know, this is the first crime of this kind that you and I have worked on together? All our murders have been – well, private murders, so to speak.’

When the murder of Carmichael Clarke at Churston follows Betty Barnard in Bexhill, the pattern of the killings is clear, and Poirot has to face the fact that he is well and truly out of his comfort zone. The victims are unrelated, and appear to have been chosen simply for their initials. The main clue – the ABC guide left at the site of each murder – is more a ‘calling card’ than a clue. Poirot’s investigation has to unfold in quite a different way than is usual, with lengthy ‘conferences’ (with police experts and psychologists) replacing the more common one-to-one interviews. There are discourses on the nature of serial killing, expositions on the motivations of anonymous letter writers, and discussions of ‘deadly mania’ and varying types of ‘insanity’.

And it isn’t just the investigation that’s different. The narrative itself is different. Although Hastings is our narrator, and he pretty much carries out this role as he always did, he’s not the only voice we hear. Interspersed with the first-person reportage of our follicly-challenged friend are short chapters titled ‘Not from Captain Hastings’s Personal Narrative’, which are written in third person and describe the movements of a character named Alexander Bonaparte Cust. Poirot (and the rest of the gang) have no knowledge of Cust’s existence until the end of Chapter 27, and even then they only have a signature (which they misread as A.B. Case or Cash).

So The ABC Murders offers the possibility of a technique that Christie very rarely uses in her detective fiction – dramatic irony. The readers are aware of a character and a set of actions that are explicitly not known to the detective (or the narrator). From Chapter 2 onwards, we know that there is a man who has the initials A.B.C., and we know he has both a railway guide and a list of names that he’s checking off methodically. The mystery is not whodunit, but (as all those confabs about psychology and motive reminds us) whydunit. What a dramatic departure for Poirot and Hastings! No domestic intrigues or jealous family members, no murderers hiding their true nature under a façade of jovial compliance! Not a country house or an inheritance to be seen!

LOL. This is Agatha Christie we’re talking about.

The ABC Murders is an absolute gem of a bastard of a book. Of course there’s no dramatic irony. Of course the reader doesn’t know the murderer’s name before Poirot does. Of course the question is whodunit (with the ‘why’ turning out to be the most mundane of all Christie’s stockpile of motives). As with a lot of Christie’s ‘trick’ books, rereading this book is a lot of fun, as you spot all the ingredients that you weren’t supposed to notice the first time round. Christie is in cahoots with the murderer, forcing us to investigate the wrong sort of crime, when the real clues were under our nose all along.

Before I move on to the adaptation, just a couple of other things I like about Christie’s novel (aside from the fact that Hastings is back! and this time he’s paranoid about his hair!)

A few of the Poirot stories refer back to earlier stories (in more or less spoiler-y ways, depending which one you’re reading). The ABC Murders pulls off the interesting trick of referring to stories that have yet to be published (or even written). In Chapter 3, Poirot outlines his ‘ideal’ murder case:

‘“Supposing,” murmured Poirot, “that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four, while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?”’

Hastings isn’t convinced.

‘“Well,” I said. “I can’t see any excitement in that!”’

If Hastings isn’t enthused by this teaser for Cards on the Table (which was published in November 1936, just ten months after The ABC Murders), Japp has a bit more fun coming up with future plotlines for the detective:

‘“I shouldn’t wonder if you ended by detecting your own death,” said Japp, laughing heartily. “That’s an idea, that is. Ought to be put in a book.” “It will be Hastings who will have to do that,” said Poirot, twinkling[.]’

Now. There’s an idea.

In some previous posts, I’ve had a bit of a muse over Hastings’s financial situation, and the reason why he spent so much of the 20s apparently mooching off Poirot. A while ago I suggested that Hastings might be upper middle class, but without any real family money or property. His lack of aptitude or enthusiasm for a career may have left him cash-strapped and in need of free board with his illustrious associate. It seems in The A.B.C. Murders that Hastings is still trying to make a go of things in South America, though his ranch has been struggling due to the ‘world depression’. (That he’s left his wife to manage things for six months on her own isn’t too much of a surprise – after all, Poirot slyly suggested that in Peril at End House that Mrs Hastings is the real business brain in that family.) As I’ve said, we don’t learn very much about Hastings’s background in the Poirot stories, though we can deduce certain things from his character. There is a little nugget in The A.B.C. Murders though – a blink and you’ll miss it moment that confirms my suspicions about Hastings’s class and status.

Towards the end of the novel – just before Poirot meets Cust for the first time – he and Hastings overhear some children singing a song about catching a fox. Poirot comments that fox-hunting is a ‘strange sport’. Hastings is quick to defend the practice, attempting to claim that it isn’t really as cruel as it sounds. So far, so upper-crust English gent. But then, when Poirot asks if people really hunt foxes in England, his friend says: ‘I don’t. I’ve never been able to afford to hunt.’ Poor old Hastings – follicly and fiscally challenged as ever.

One final little detail that always makes me giggle before I move on (though it’s probably just me): after Poirot receives the letter warning them about Bexhill, the Chief Constable of Sussex (one of the many people drawn into the investigation) demands that the local constabulary keep a watch on any small shopkeepers with a ‘B’ initial, and also that they keep tabs on all strangers arriving in Bexhill. The local superintendent immediately objects:

‘With the schools breaking up and the holidays beginning? People are fairly flooding into the place this week.’

Nous aurons besoin d’un bateau plus gros, mon ami.

So on to the TV adaptation… ‘The A.B.C Murders’ was written by Clive Exton and directed by Andrew Grieve. With that team at the helm, it probably goes without saying that it’s a pretty faithful adaptation. All of the key elements of the story are included, and the changes that are made are necessary to fit the format (and chronology) of the TV series as a whole.

Just as in Christie’s book, we begin with Hastings arriving back in England after a period of absence. However, as we’ve not reached Murder on the Links yet, Hastings hasn’t actually moved to Argentina. Instead, he’s been on holiday to South America for six months. His old friend picks him up at the station, and the two have a warm reunion. Hastings is meant to be staying at a hotel, but Poirot won’t hear of it:

‘There is no hotel, mon ami. Until you regain your apartment, you stay with Poirot!’

This neat little switch allows for some of the dynamics of Christie’s novel to be replicated in the adaptation (despite the fact that TV Hastings hasn’t yet left home for good). It means that Japp can beam with pleasure at being reacquainted with Hastings – and also that he can comment on his thinning hair without it seeming out of place. Part of this exchange is retained from the source material, though the TV-Hastings lets it drop a lot quicker than his literary counterpart, but the earlier reference to Poirot dyeing his hair is removed (presumably because his pride in doing this wouldn’t fit with the hint dropped in the adaptation of ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’ that Poirot is surreptitiously tinting his barnet).

What does have to be dropped, though, is the reference to Poirot having moved to a new flat. Obviously, within the TV series, he hasn’t moved at all, and so they return to a Whitehaven Mansions that is familiar from previous adventures. Similarly, the reference to Poirot having previously retired to grow vegetable marrows is removed, as we’ve not got to that yet in the TV series. Oddly, one of the more domestic scenes between Hastings and Poirot is also removed (despite the fact that this would have fitted in well with the on-screen version of their relationship). In Christie’s novel, after the misdirected Churston letter arrives, Hastings decides there’s no time to waste, and so bursts into Poirot’s bedroom and starts packing his friend’s clothes into a suitcase. To be fair, Hastings is only following suit here – after the Bexhill murder, Hastings wakes up to discover his friend standing over him, offering to bring him a cup of coffee.

The adaptation seems a bit coy about showing Hastings and Poirot popping in and out of each other’s bedrooms, folding each other’s clothes and bringing each other coffee in bed. So we lose the lovely ‘regard what you have done to my pyjamas’ line from Christie’s novel. Instead, it’s replaced by a similarly domestic (but less boudoir) scene of domestic harmony, in which the two friends do the dishes together while discussing the case.

The investigation is also played out on similar lines to that in Christie’s original novel, but with some changes made here and there to keep the episode to time. The murders and anonymous letters follow the same pattern as in the book, and the ‘Legion’ of interested parties formed to assist Poirot is retained, though it meets for the first time with much less preamble than in the novel. Miss Lemon is sadly not present in this episode, but she was also absent from Christie’s novel, despite having made her debut appearance as Poirot’s secretary the previous year (George is also missing from Christie’s novel, by the way – it’s almost as though these surrogate Watsons are just sent away the second Hastings sets foot in England).

Some things are cut from the adaptation. Many of the investigators are cut, with their roles being conflated into the all-purpose Japp (a common occurrence in the early episodes of the series). A lot of the early interviews, particularly those conducted in Andover, are also cut, as are the lengthy conferences on the nature of serial killers and mania. Presumably the programme-makers thought they were on safe ground excising most of the explanations of ‘the “chain” or “series” type of murder’ in 1992. The psychology of serial killers might have been brand-new when Christie was writing her novel (the German term Serienmörder was coined in 1930), but it needed little exposition in the early 90s. (First principles, Clarice. What does he do, this man you seek?)

However, the episode is very clear on when it is set (August 1936, which doesn’t really give Hastings time to have had a six-month holiday since their last case, so it’s a good thing I’ve given up on any sort of coherent timeline), so the programme-makers needed to keep some sense of the ‘newness’ of this type of murder investigation. To keep things concise, they give a flavour of the more academic discussions of A.B.C.’s crimes through a number of shots of newspaper stories and headlines.

Despite the condensed investigation and the chastened Poirot/Hastings relationship, the episode does a good job in capturing the flavour of Christie’s novel. There are trains everywhere, and much of the ‘action’ consists of the gang running back and forth to catch trains to other destinations. There are plenty of fab shots of steam trains hurrying across the countryside, and a number of head-to-heads with Poirot and Hastings discussing the case in various train carriages.

In addition to this, an attempt is made to keep the feel of Christie’s narration style. On the whole, the episode follows the dynamic duo’s perspective, just as the book was told through Hastings’s first-person reportage. However, interspersed throughout are little scenes of the man we’ll come to know as Cust going about his daily business in a more and more suspicious way. This is a nice touch, and a good way of remaining faithful to Christie’s novel, but it does lead to a slightly annoying anachronism early on. When we first see Cust, he is in the cinema. The man on the screen exclaims:

‘That’s where you’re wrong. I am the Dorset murderer! I killed Lily James, and all the others, and now I am going to kill you!’

Cust is enraptured by this, his excited face picked out in the flickering glow of the screen, while the rest of the audience remain obscured by shadows. The snatch of dialogue we’re given allows us (perhaps) to spot that the film is Black Limelight, which is about a series of random murders carried out by a madman and which spark a sensationalist press frenzy. It’s a very apt film to use in this first introduction to Cust, and it plays along with Christie’s game. But it came out in 1939. Sigh.

(We see Cust in the cinema again towards the end of the episode. This time he’s watching Number 17, which came out in 1932. I can only assume from this that the programme-makers wanted to suggest that Doncaster was somewhat behind the times.)

What about Cust though?

The casting in this episode has its ups and downs. But Donald Sumpter’s portrayal of Alexander Bonaparte Cust is just perfect. He is exactly the character I imagined when I read the book. In particular, Sumpter manages to capture the darkness of the character – Cust is a man who, unusually for Christie’s fiction, is utterly broken by his experiences in WWI. The scene in which Cust has a conversation with a younger man about the Churston murder is retained (though it’s conducted in a library, rather than in a public gardens, in the TV episode), and it conveys perfectly the sense of a man mentally unravelling:

‘“Sorry, sir, I expect you were in the war.”
“I was,” said Mr Cust. “It – it – unsettled me. My head’s never been right since. It aches, you know. Aches terribly.”’

Other casting is also good. Pippa Guard makes a good Megan Barnard (though she’s a tad more forceful than her literary counterpart), and Nicholas Farrell (in his first of two Poirot appearances – he’ll be back for another train-based adventure in The Mystery of the Blue Train) is a good choice for poor old Donald Fraser.

Where the casting falls down, though, is with Franklin Clarke (played by Donald Douglas). Christie’s Franklin was ‘a big fair-haired man with a sunburnt face’. When everything’s out in the open, Poirot describes ‘[t]he daring adventurous character, the roving life […] [t]he attractive free and easy manner – nothing easier for him than to pick up a girl in a café’. This really doesn’t fit with the character as portrayed by Douglas, who ditches ‘free and easy’ for ‘uptight and serious’. Annoyingly, the episode actually draws attention to this problem. After Cust’s arrest, Poirot throws a question over his guilt by asking whether or not Cust would have been able to flirt with Betty Barnard and persuade her to remove her own belt:

‘Can you imagine Monsieur Cust, as you English say, getting off with a pretty young girl?’

No we can’t. But neither can we imagine the staid old Franklin Clarke out on the pull on Bexhill beach.

These niggles aside, it’s still a great episode and a good adaptation of a very enjoyable book. I feel I may have waffled on far too much about this one (that’s what comes of taking such a long break from writing about Poirot), so I’ll end (as I often do) with some of the little details that made me smile.

Of course, I have to mentioned Hastings’s cayman.

Hastings has brought this ugly-looking specimen, which he calls Cedric, back from Venezuela as a gift for Poirot. There’s quite the story behind it as well – but Poirot and Japp seem a wee bit reluctant to hear it. Poirot is also rather unsettled to discover that he is expected to display Cedric in the middle of the ‘geometrical appearance and proportions’ of his cherished apartment.

For some people – like my husband Rob, who was watching this episode for the first time – it’s the resolution of the running Cedric joke that gets the biggest laugh. For me, though, it’s the moment when Poirot complains about the cayman’s smell and Hastings proudly announces that he’s doused it in some cologne he found in the bathroom. Poirot’s face is the perfect picture.

Cedric aside, my other favourite little snippet comes near the beginning of the episode. After Poirot and Hastings have their little reunion, we cut to Japp hard at work in his office. Except he’s not really – he’s taking down a shopping list being dictated over the phone by his wife, Emily. And he’s not happy about being asked to keep sausages in his desk drawer.

Good old Mrs Japp. If Mrs Columbo could get her own show, I have no idea why Emily Japp Investigates was never made.

And on that note, I really do think it’s time to move on. Two more episodes to get my teeth into for this ‘series’. Get my teeth into… do you get it? Well, you will do shortly.

Next up: ‘Death in the Clouds’