Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Helen Baxendale, Gina Bramhill, Elizabeth Tan, Alistair Petrie, Vanessa Grasse, Blake Harrison, Jodie McNee, Daniel Caltagirone, Morgan Watkins, Jacqueline Boatswain, Scott Chambers, Thomas Chaanhing,

If you can’t make the programmes or films you want, then there is always a way to produce something close, a piece of art that fills the same shaped gap and which will always have the fan clamouring to add to their memory, giving them just that little extra taste of their favourite character or person; even if the situation is versed in the realm of the imaginative alternative history.

Such is the pull of Tom Dalton’s own work and appreciation of Agatha Christie, having already brought the alternative history of times when the queen of British crime fiction herself was otherwise out of the public eye in two other stories, it makes sense to use her own intellectual acumen to solve another perplexing mystery; only this time in Agatha and the Midnight Murders that sense of the thriller in the dark is more than willing to bite back, one that is pushed by the obscurity of someone willing to take her life into the bargain.

There is always a spark of creative genius to be seen being employed when an actor is cast as the villain of the piece, and whilst to the trained armchair detective the sense of wickedness at the heart of Agatha and the Midnight Murders, and that comes in the matching of an unexpected duo of Blake Harrison and Liverpool’s Jodie McNee. Indeed, it should be noted that Ms. McNee was on exceptional form in her role as P.C. O’ Hanauer, one that would have reminded her home city’s audience of her time in the theatres there; full of drive and mischief, of precise accuracy in the delivery of the role.

Whilst the story itself is always going to be one of who, this particular story, more so than the two previous outings of Agatha and the Truth of Murder and Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar, is more centred on the why, the grim understanding of any investigation that has at its centre a murder most foul. The question of Why?, often overlooked, cruelly misplaced by the watcher, but in this particular alternative history of Agatha Christie’s life, one that is to be a warning to those who have success around others, that often those that you believe are cheering for you, are in actual fact damning in their mind your achievement, no matter how small you may consider it is.

Agatha and the Midnight Murders is an intriguing locked room mystery but placed on the other side of the door; and one that is an entertaining delve into a night when Ms. Christie’s own life cannot be explained away, where her presence is not recorded in history. A tale of greed set against the backdrop of World War Two, Agatha herself caught between the depths of another’s imagination.

Ian D. Hall