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Agatha Christie mastered the detective novel and its crowd-pleasing appeal early on in her career, and then she spent the better part of six decades stacking hit novel on top of hit novel by alternately riffing on and twisting around the blueprint she herself had set. Given the level of relentless professionalism we're talking about, it should not be particularly difficult to make solid movies and TV shows out of Christie's oeuvre. Her works practically slide onto the screen by themselves, every twist and every peak and valley of tension ingrained into the raw material.

And yet.

For a writer whose work has served as the basis for so many adaptations, it's actually pretty impressive how strong the batting average of Christie-ins

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