Comic Christie: Murder or reincarnation?

Will Agatha loyalists make room in their hearts and minds for the comic version?

Agatha Christie goes comic book! You knew it was coming. Those "grey cell mysteries" have weathered the test of time, jumping out of printed pages into fictionalised biopics, television series, cinema, even theatre.

And now Christie's body of work has crossed over into graphic novel form. Euro Books, the publishing division of Euro Kids India, has just launched 13 titles (interestingly, Christie herself often capitalised on the number 13 superstition""The Thirteen Problems, Thirteen at Dinner, etc) that are English adaptations of comics strips that originated in France a few years ago.

There's plenty of the lovable Poirot and the shrewd but woolly Miss Marple. Because each title is illustrated by a different artist, though, consistency suffers. Poirot, from title to title, is recognisable only for being rotund and mustachioed and little else. Imagine anybody but Herge rendering Tintin!

Bundling Christie's trademark thick plots and brisk pace into 48 pages of animated frames, Euro Books hopes to seduce the next generation of readers with the pith of Agatha, while necessarily sparing them some of her mastery over plot construction.

Not that her tales ever suffered from diminishing relevance for modern audiences. The reaction to these comic strip editions on the official Agatha Christie website discussion board is unanimously chary. "If it is only 48 pages has the plot been thinned out?" "Is the language affected?"

"How can you appropriate classic literature into comic format? Would you make Shakespeare a comic?" wails a fan.

Actually, the plot stays complex, but without the luxury of time (or space) to unravel it, it's all a bit hurried and therefore confusing to the reader unfamiliar with Christie. As for the adaptation, it is a little halting, because of the French-English translation undertaken locally, and, sadly, Poirot's involuntary bursts of French are entirely missing, for the benefit, one assumes, of new audiences.

What rendering the stories in comic format has done is insert more of a sense of physical dynamism than one gets from the novel. What Christie, whose writing was always more conversation-driven than action-oriented, leaves to individual deduction, is made immediately visually familiar to the reader. Some will like that, others will resent being deprived of the guessing game.

These titles have been released at a time when there is an explosion of interest in the contemporary graphic novel (an oft-misused term), but it's actually hard to say whether these are comic books simplified for younger readers, or graphic novels (by virtue of being a long-form comic story) for mature audiences.

Interestingly, HarperCollins has simultaneously released 10 titles of Agatha Christie in graphic format in the UK, and it has to be said that at a cursory glance, the HarperCollins illustrations are richer and more cinematic in composition than their Indian counterpart.

The fact of the matter is, if you're one of those who believes that comics are a format one should outgrow and that abridged versions of novels are dumbed down for dummies, you will pass up the graphic adaptations.

Instead, if you look at them as simply a new way of enjoying some of the world's most popular and exciting mysteries, you might just enjoy these shortened bursts of Christie's genius. Although it must be said that if they put young readers off the originals, they would be doing nothing short of a terrible disservice.