The Mysterious Battle of Ypres

Agatha Christie wrote her first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, during World War I. Her day job--filling prescriptions in a dispensary--gave her the idea of how the killer would poison Mrs. Inglethorp. She wrote her first draft by hand, then typed up a second. But according to Bill Peschal's notes in The Complete, Annotated Mysterious Affair At Styles, the story grew more complicated with each draft, until her ingenuity crashed into a brick wall. With her creativity stifled, she left Torquay to spend some solitary time at the Moorland Hotel in Dartmoor. When she returned home, she had figured out the intricacies of the plot, and carried a completed manuscript.

No doubt she had some work still to do, massaging and fine-tuning her writing. But Peschal states that she finished it in 1916. World War I was still going on at that point, and although she began submitting her manuscript to publishers, The Mysterious Affair at Styles would not be published until 1920, two years after the war had ended. 

Agatha Christie introduces us to Lieutenant Arthur Hastings by having him narrate the novel. In the first few paragraphs, he explains that he was recovering from injuries in a military hospital when he happened to bump into his old friend John Cavendish. In his adaptation of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, screenwriter Clive Exton introduces us to Arthur Hastings by showing him in a dark projection room. There he sits with other wounded soldiers and watches newsreel footage of the Battle of Passchendaele, or the Third Battle of Ypres. The silent black and white images play out on the screen, accompanied only by the sound of the projector's clicking, as the operator turns the film reel with a hand-operated crank. Hastings watches soldiers climbing from their trenches, fighting on the battlefield, and tanks blasting at enemy positions. Then the images change, and he sees Belgian refugees disembarking from the ships that brought them to England. Although Hastings doesn't know it yet, one of those Belgian refugees is none other than his old friend Hercule Poirot. Or, at least, that's what Clive Exton suggests, by inserting this scene into his TV adaptation.

The Battle of Passchendale, or the Third Battle of Ypres, was a controversial campaign that, all told, cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Yet refugees began arriving in cities and towns all over England shortly after the war began in 1914. Their presence in Torquay inspired Agatha Christie to feature them in her novel, and make the star of her novel a Belgian police officer. So here's the question: Why do you think Clive Exton set his adaptation of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1917 instead of two or three years earlier, when Agatha Christie actually conceived it? And does it alter Christie's story in a substantial way? 


Some related links
See The B&W Newsreel Footage that Arthur Hastings watched.