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Last week, I celebrated Neville Marriner’s 100th birthday. Heather chose Jasper Fforde for her author for ‘F’ in the A-to-Z challenge. Tina, who loves other Rosamunde Pilcher books, was disappointed by The Empty House.

We enjoyed Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy on BritBox.

One reason that I wanted to watch this was because Penelope Wilton (Isobel Crawley on Downton Abbey) was featured heavily in the trailer.

It’s a good thing that David Jonsson managed to be just as mesmerizing on screen, because Penelope Wilton’s character was dead before the end of the second scene.

David Jonsson plays Luke Obiako Fitzwilliam. I was skeptical that Agatha Christie wrote a Nigerian character as her main sleuth. I was right.

Murder is Easy was a 1939 novel. The main character was a recently retired police officer, just returned from overseas — not a newly-arrived immigrant who was promised a job in Whitehall. Reading the summary of the novel on Wikipedia, many things stayed the same — the characters and the main thrust of the mystery plot, which I found intriguing.

I enjoyed the changes that made a diverse cast work while still having it set in the past (although it was moved from the 1939 to the 1950s to help that situation).

This is not the first TV adaptation of Murder is Easy. The American TV film adaptation from 1982 also changed the character of Luke — in this version, he was a professor visiting England from MIT. I was surprised that two of the women in 1982 were played by Olivia de Havilland and Helen Hayes. Both women had very long careers, given that they began as actors during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Olivia de Havilland had several roles on television in the 1980s, before she retired in 1989. Helen Hayes portrayed Miss Marple in a couple of made-for-TV films in the mid-1980s.

Have you seen this new version? What did you think?