From The Sculptress to Sharp Objects: the best TV crime novel adaptations of all time
The new Netflix drama Ripley sees Andrew Scott take on the role of everybody’s favourite serial killer, Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. But will this eight-part dramatisation of the oft-adapted novel The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) do justice to the insidious brilliance with which Highsmith manipulated her readers into rooting for her wicked protagonist?
Netflix does not have great form when it comes to adapting crime fiction: Anatomy of a Scandal, derived from Sarah Vaughan’s political thriller, and Obsession, an adaptation of Josephine Hart’s disturbingly erotic Damage, were both overblown misfires. But it is possible to make a great crime novel into outstanding television. Here’s a rundown of the macabre murder miniseries that do justice to their source material.
Malice Aforethought (BBC, 1979)
This unusually spiky and sardonic period drama is based on Francis Iles’s novel of 1931, and stars Hywel Bennett, 1970s TV’s go-to for creepy oddballs, as village doctor and “awful little worm” Edmund Bickleigh.
Bickleigh’s bullying, snobbish wife Julia (Judy Parfitt) finds wealthy village newcomer Madeleine (a Bafta-nominated Cheryl Campbell) too ostentatious: “£100 for the church restoration fund! 10 would have been ample”. But Bickleigh falls for Madeleine and plots to dispose of his wife, setting him on an accidental killing spree. The book was partly inspired by real-life uxoricide Herbert Armstrong, although in Cyril Coke’s production Bennett is a dead ringer for Dr Crippen.
Iles was one of the first British crime writers to offer a psychological portrait of a murderer rather than a whodunit, shocking his readers by revealing the criminal’s identity in the first sentence. The adaptation ingeniously preserves the book’s famous opening lines - “It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter. Murder is a serious business” - in a snatch of voiceover, later revealed to be the Prosecution counsel at Bickleigh’s trial.
The series perfectly captures Iles’s subversive spirit and deadpan humour - much more effectively than the woeful camped-up 2005 remake starring Ben Miller.
Where to watch: currently unavailable but surely it should be repeated in the BBC Four archive slot pronto.
The Sculptress (BBC, 1996)
Birds of a Feather star Pauline Quirke defied expectations as prison inmate Olive Martin in Reg Gadney’s dramatisation of Minette Walters’s 1993 chiller. As Olive - nicknamed “The Sculptress” after making an installation out of the dismembered bones of her mother and sister - the Bafta-nominated Quirke oscillated convincingly between dead-eyed calm creepiness and pulling-the-sink-out-of-the-wall rage.
Sporting a latex fat-suit and lank hair extensions, she was a repellent visual underscoring of the novel’s central point: that prejudice against Olive’s appearance may have led to her being wrongly convicted of the murders. The series follows the efforts of true-crime writer Rosalind Leigh (Caroline Goodall) to befriend the rebarbative Olive and establish her innocence. (Walters was inspired to write the book when she was a prison visitor and encountered a terrifying-looking inmate - “a mountain of a man on remand for rape” - who was later proved to be innocent).
Walters was one of the first British crime novelists to process the influence of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs and show that the genteel genre could successfully encompass Gothic gorefests. TV crime drama swiftly embraced the trend - in a blow for sensitive-stomached viewers, The Sculptress began in the same month that Silent Witness debuted - and this was the first of five annual Walters adaptations by the BBC.
Where to watch: UKTV Play
Red Riding (Channel Four, 2009)
David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet is often cited as British crime fiction’s finest achievement so far this century, and Channel Four’s grim, gripping dramatisation (adapted from three of Peace’s four novels) has its fervent admirers too. David Thomson, doyen of film critics, has called it “better than The Godfather” - “but it leaves you feeling so much worse”, he added.
Starring David Morrissey as a corrupt copper, Sean Bean as a corrupt property developer and Peter Mullan as a corrupt cleric all up to their necks in murder and paedophilia, Red Riding is set against the backdrop of the bungled hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Any well-known actor born within sniffing distance of Yorkshire - Jim Carter, Maxine Peake, Warren Clarke, Paddy Considine, Mark Addy - was co-opted to fill out the large cast of dodgy cops and untouchable crooks.
Jumpy editing and a tricksy chronological structure give the series much the same woozy-making effect as Peace’s fragmentary, incantatory prose. Less a realistic portrait of Ripper-era policing than a deliciously demented fever dream, almost every decent character comes to a nasty end; most viewers will be grateful that scriptwriter Tony Grisoni gave the series a slightly more upbeat ending than Peace’s: “David doesn’t save anyone. Whereas I needed to.”
Where to watch: ITVX
And Then There Were None (BBC, 2015)
This was the first of several Agatha Christie adaptations by ex-EastEnders scriptwriter Sarah Phelps and caused tabloid outrage by interpolating a cocaine-fuelled bacchanal into the story. But compared with subsequent dramatisations, in which Phelps changed murderers and motives (Ordeal By Innocence, The Pale Horse), killed off Poirot’s beloved sidekick Inspector Japp (The ABC Murders) and devised the least erotic sex scene in television history for Toby Jones (Witness for the Prosecution), her version of And Then There Were None is strikingly faithful to the book.
But then Christie’s novel of 1939, in which 10 people who arrive for a weekend house party on an island off Devon find that they are to be horribly punished for committing crimes they thought they had long ago got away with, is perhaps the darkest of all her books - or, if you like, the most Phelpsian. With no twinkling detective to provide a sense of reassurance, both book and drama portray the enacting of justice as something brutally relentless, even malign, as each guest endures the hell of waiting to be bumped off.
In a sense Phelps is more faithful to Christie than Christie was. When Dame Agatha adapted the novel for the stage, she thought it would be strong meat for a theatre audience and substituted a happier ending; most screen adaptations have followed suit. And as for the bacchanal, it’s not as if Phelps was writing Miss Marple and Dolly Bantry indulging in a coke orgy at Gossington Hall: the idea suits the desperate, doomed characters to a T - one can imagine Christie herself applauding the scene.
Where to watch: BBC iPlayer
Sharp Objects (HBO, 2018)
After Gillian Flynn’s 2012 thriller Gone Girl conquered the world in 2012, and David Fincher made a decent fist of the movie adaptation two years later, producers eagerly turned their attention to Flynn’s back catalogue. The result was this eight-part adaptation of Flynn’s 2006 debut novel, starring Amy Adams as alcoholic, self-harming journalist Camille Preaker, dispatched against her wishes to her small Missouri hometown to report on the murder of two little girls.
Flynn was part of the writing team, and the miniseries perfectly captures what she has described as the “moist, gothic tone” of the novel, as well as the book’s central theme: “Why is so much violence always directed toward girls, and why do we direct so much violence toward ourselves, physically and psychologically?” Patricia Clarkson won a Golden Globe as Camille’s icy mother, whose idea of a pep talk for her lonely daughter is to say: “I never loved you [and so] you were born to [your] cold nature. I hope that’s some comfort to you.”
One of the great triumphs of the series is its editing, as scenes of Camille reluctantly revisiting her childhood haunts shift seamlessly into flashbacks recalling terrible events in her youth, capturing the novel’s sense of her being perpetually battered by appalling memories. Much of the editing was credited to Jai M Vee, a pseudonym for the show’s director, the late Jean-Marc Vallée: Sharp Objects was his triumphant swan song.
Where to watch: Now TV
