BBC One has greenlit seven adaptations of Agatha Christie’s classic mystery novels for TV. Agatha Christie, who wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, will now have an even larger presence in British television.
This news of the adaptations comes after an announcement that Ben Affleck is to direct a film based on The Witness for the Prosecution and Murder on the Orient Express.
The dramas will be released by Agatha Christie Productions over the next four years and Mammoth Screen — behind Witness for the Prosecution — will produce the first, Ordeal by Innocence, which is being adapted by Sarah Phelps, writer of last year’s And Then There Were None.
The adaptations include Death Comes As The End, set in ancient Egypt, and The ABC Murders, a 1930s novel about Detective Hercule Poirot as he is pit against a serial killer terrorizing Britain in alphabetical order. The names of the other adaptations have yet to be released.
And Then There Were None was one of the most successful programs in the 2015 BBC One Christmas schedule, and the BBC will be building on the success of it with the seven Christie adaptations to come, according to Hilary Strong, CEO of Agatha Christie Limited. Strong said that Phelps had brought a “new way of interpreting Christie for a modern audience”.
In addition to the seven adaptations, a two-part The Witness for the Prosecution is currently being filmed, adapted by Phelps from Christie’s 1925 short story. It will be directed by Julian Jarrold and star Toby Jones, Andrea Riseborough and Kim Cattrall.
Director of BBC Content, Charlotte Moore, said that the seven new adaptations “continue BBC One’s special relationship as the home of Agatha Christie in the U.K. Our combined creative ambition to reinvent Christie’s novels for a modern audience promises to bring event television of the highest quality to a new generation enjoyed by fans old and new.”