Critic Reviews

This may be a new take but it’s still Agatha Christie through and through.

Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Easy modernizes an 85-year-old text simply by changing the nationality of its main character, and it makes the story a whole lot less creaky as a result.

"Murder Is Easy" will be best enjoyed by those with an appreciation for the idiosyncrasies of Christie, for fictional English murder and for pumping new fuel into antique vehicles.

It works perfectly well, though in the end, this becomes more of a routine whodunnit than it first suggests.

There's nothing more exciting in a whodunnit than being met with a village of people, all hiding their own secrets that we get to find out more about. So it's a slight disappointment we don't get to dig into them all that much more, especially where these meatier themes are involved.

It is more fun when we are dealing with the village characters and a pub that falls deathly silent when Fitz walks in. But things warm up when he tries pork scratchings and finds them disgusting (he's right). I wasn't convinced by the sexual chemistry between Bridget (Morfyyd Clark) and Fitz.

Murder Is Easy doesn’t do anything to stand out from the pack, but it doesn’t puff itself up as more than it is: a simple, easy mystery, letting Christie tie up her story in a neat bow as she has so many hundreds of times before.

While overall subtly done (a real-life Fitzwilliam would have had it far worse), if anything, it heightens the mystery, adding another dimension of threat.

Too bland to excite the violent impulses of the Line of Duty generation, yet insufficiently zippy or playful to stir Christie aficionados. The script is only part of the problem: more striking, perhaps, is the cheapness of the design.

But the mundane truth is that this isn’t one of Christie’s top-tier works – her plotting is smart but there is no Marple or Poirot to pep it up. Rather than attempt to add interest by making changes, the BBC should have left this one on the shelf.