4 Agatha Christie Novels That Have Never Been Adapted for the Screen

Even the best-selling novelist of all time wrote stories that didn’t win over fans or earn screen adaptations. Agatha Christie’s mysteries have inspired dozens of film and TV productions, but four entries from her bibliography are still waiting to be filmed.

Perhaps Agatha Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence, a BritBox series premiering on Tuesday, September 15, will bring that number down to three. The new adaptation stars Josh Dylan and Antonia Thomas as the titular duo, who are partners in crime-solving and, occasionally, romance. Christie wrote Tommy and Tuppence stories for a half century, concluding their narrative with Postern of Fate, one such novel that has never reached the screen.

Read on for details on these unadapted works from Christie’s official website, contemporaneous reviews, a recent biography of the mystery writer, and a Reddit discussion about whether these projects are truly unfilmable.

Death Comes as the End (1944)

Christie took her readers four millennia in the past for this serial-killer mystery set in Egypt circa 2000 BC. That’s when Renisenb, daughter of a priest, seeks to prove that the death of Nofret, her father’s concubine, was murder… and discovers evil lurking close to home.

The author wrote Death Comes as the End at the request of a friend, the Egyptologist Stephen Glanville, and drew upon not just her own research but her expeditions to the Middle East with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, according to Christie’s official website. But Glanville and Christie’s publishers convinced her to change the ending, a decision she always regretted.

 

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The BBC hired screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes to script a television adaptation of Death Comes as the End in 2018, according to Radio Times, but that production never came to fruition.

“DCATE is probably out of the usual budget scale for the standard Agatha Christie [adaptation],” one fan observed on Reddit. “Sure, they took Bette Davis to the Nile, but recreating Ancient Egypt is another level altogether.”

Destination Unknown (1954)

After preeminent scientists go missing, the one woman who might have the key to solving the mystery is dying from injuries sustained in a plane crash in Morocco. Meanwhile, a divorced woman in a nearby hotel — who thinks she has nothing to live for — gets presented with the chance to join the spy game in this thriller published in the United States under the title So Many Steps to Death.

Reviews of Destination Unknown are mixed. “At first tasting this is not the best Christie: The climax is a little tame by normal thriller standards, and the final touch of romance smacks of fabrication,” a 1954 review in The Bulletin reads. “But the vanishing without trace is extremely good — sizzling, in fact, and if the subtleties of solution are allowed time to register the reader may end by thinking the whole thing alarmingly plausible.”

 

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Warner Bros. Television secured the rights to Destination Unknown in 1979, but an adaptation of the story never transpired. And Christie buffs, even ones who detest the story, think one could work. “I loathed Destination Unknown, although I think you could get a decent film out of it with the right tone — make it a comedy that’s self-aware, knows how dumb it is, and [is] in on the joke, something along the lines of Romancing the Stone,” a Reddit user wrote.

Another user agreed, writing, “There’s definitely comic potential. It’s kind of an over-the-top James Bond plot.”

Passenger to Frankfurt (1970)

The 80th Agatha Christie book published — and one published in time for the author’s 80th birthday — centers on an English diplomat named Sir Stafford Nye, who’s traveling home from Southeast Asia when he meets a woman who tells him someone is trying to kill her. He later crosses paths with the same woman, who’s then going by a different name, and soon becomes caught in a web of international intrigue.

 

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Passenger to Frankfurt “reads today as utterly bonkers,” especially because it involves Adolf Hitler surviving World War II by hiding in an asylum and spawning a son to continue his work, as biographer Lucy Worsley wrote in Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman.

The novel also got bad reviews from The New York Times, which wished someone had “discourage[d] its publication,” and Dorothy Olding, Christie’s literary agent at the time, who called it “a bad imitation of a spy story and a damned weak one at that,” Worsley recounts.

But at least one reader sees potential for an adaptation. “I read Passenger to Frankfurt a few months ago, and I definitely think there’s a great thriller film or TV miniseries in it,” that Reddit user said. “In many ways, it feels like a story that belongs to our current moment. So with a lot of polishing, a lot of fleshing out, and updating it to the present day, I think it’d be ripe for adaptation.”

Postern of Fate (1973)

The last novel in Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence series — and, according to the author’s official website, the last novel she ever wrote — Postern of Fate has the married detectives, now in their 70s, move into an old house in an English village. The house comes with a collection of antique books, and in the pages of one of those vintage tomes, Tuppence finds a secret message spelled out in underlined letters: “Mary Jordan did not die naturally.”

Postern of Fate’s setting recalled Ashfield, the writer’s childhood home in Torquay, England, but that might be the only element of the novel that comes off as classic Christie. “Pretty ghastly, isn’t it?” Olding said of Postern of Fate, according to Worsley. “Much worse than the last two… Poor dear, I wish there was a way for somebody to tell her that this shouldn’t be published — for her sake.”

 

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Could Postern of Fate work on screen, though? “I’m convinced that there’s actually a pretty good story in there,” a fan wrote on Reddit. “We’ve got the attraction of Tommy and Tuppence’s last adventure together, plus a ‘money pit’ real estate/home renovation saga (bonus of getting to snoop through Christie’s childhood home!), a cold case, and geopolitical intrigue. Christie put in some interesting stuff, but being able to sort through all the conflicting accounts and tie together the past [and] present cases may have stymied her.”

If BritBox keeps Agatha Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence running long enough, perhaps some intrepid TV writer will find a postern into a better version of this story…

Agatha Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence, Series Premiere, Tuesday, September 15, BritBox