Charles Osborne. Black Coffee (1997)

 

    Charles Osborne. Black Coffee (1997) Osborne has adapted Christie’s first play as a novel, clumsily. A famous scientist is poisoned after revealing that the formula for a powerful explosive has been stolen. Poirot, whom he had summoned, enters minutes after the death. There is a marriage on the rocks, a mysterious foreigner, a suave private secretary, a bright young thing who delights in shocking her elders, an impassive butler, and of course Hastings and Inspector Japp. A couple of subplots are left unresolved. If Christie had “adapted the play as a novel”, she would have expanded on these, making for a more complex plot and puzzle, and a more depth to the characters.

    What Osborne has done is convert the stage directions into narrative. He’s careful to tell us where everybody sits, when they leave the room, when they move around, and so on. He describes their expressions and gestures as if he reporting a stage performance. But basically he can’t write, and we get no sense of character, despite these details. Christie’s strength was dialogue; her stories move swiftly because she knows how to make dialogue seem natural even as it propels the plot. This is the reason they make such entertaining movies: one can use the dialogue almost exactly as written as a first draft of the script.
     True, Christie has a tin ear for characteristic speech, for the rhythms and turns of phrase that make it personal and revealing. But she has a shrewd eye for the telling detail (it’s no accident that this is one of Poirot’s strengths as a detective). The effect is to make the story matter to us while we read it. Almost all of this is missing in this book. I guess that Osborne was afraid to expand the script. An actor can put a lot of meaning into a single word. The novelist must supply that information by other means. Osborne doesn’t do this, whether from too much respect for Christie’s script or lack of talent is hard to say. I suspect the latter.
     Osborne apparently had a minor career as an actor (he actually played in Black Coffee one summer), before making a name for himself as a critic. The blurb claims international fame for him, but that fame has not extended as far as Northern Ontario.
     Osborne wrote a biography of Christie, which fact seems to have persuaded Christie’s grandson Matthew Pritchard that Osborne could do the job. Not that the job was necessary. The script shows through the threadbare patchwork of prose, and it would be more interesting to read that. But then Pritchard would have to forgo the royalties on this book. It must have had quite a sale as a “new” book by Christie. I bought this copy at the library’s book sale for fifty cents. That’s about what it’s worth.
     Poirot’s mania for straightening things gives him the clue he needs to find the stolen formula: it has been torn up and rolled into spills for lighting the fire. Christie used this motif again. In fact, she reused the concept of this play, but I can’t recall which book. *  (2007)