Murder Most Graphic by David_Brawn

Agatha Christie has always been very popular in France. I worry sometimes that maybe the French must think that the English all live in sleepy villages secretly plotting to kill one other and then relying on faintly absurd foreigners to do our detective work for us. But the Gallic passion for Agatha Christie has over the years translated itself – if you forgive the pun – into an array of imaginative ways of publishing and re-publishing Agatha’s books, from omnibuses and editions for younger readers to potentially one of the most controversial – the bande dessinée, or what Wikipedia describes as the ‘Franco-Belgian comic book’.

Indeed, when first proposed to Agatha Christie’s estate by the original publisher Claude LeFrancq back in 1994, the agent was fearing a swift and predictably painful response regarding the pile of sample artworks that had been assembled for Rosalind Hicks, given that such a radical new initiative would have to be approved by Agatha’s elderly daughter. Surely she was not someone who would understand the appeal of the graphic novel? But it was to his surprise, and Rosalind’s credit, that she said she rather liked them and looked forward to seeing the comic books in print.

Though in France and Belgium the bande dessinée had already become so established that most bookshops had a section proudly displaying these books, sadly very few of them apart from Tintin and Asterix have ever survived the dangerous journey across the sea to Britain – so even with Rosalind’s blessing, it was to be some years before anyone in the UK would look at publishing them here.

A decade later, and although the traditional European comic book was still very poorly represented, by 2006 the growth of Japanese Manga and the ‘trade paperback’ version of American comic books had resulted in many major British bookshops now stocking comic books, and with a new venture in India also interested in selling them, we agreed that it was finally time to start publishing the comics in English.

Have you ever played that game of putting a piece of English through a translator and then translating it back again? Suffice to say, the first attempts to turn the bandes dessinées into English were a disaster! Though some passages turned out fine, most of Agatha’s usually very accomplished dialogue had become unnaturally stilted and certainly nothing like the books. And so we realised that the only way to do this effectively was to dig into the novels to reinstate the original passages that the double translation process had all but destroyed. In restoring Agatha’s turns of phrase to the books rather than approaching them as slavish translations, they began to feel like authentic adaptations. How much dialogue each character can have is always dependent on the size of the original speech bubble, and a ten-word sentence in French can become five or fifteen words in English, so we often have to edit creatively and also be led by the pictures – if the artist has drawn a brick being thrown through a window, you can’t call it a rock, whatever Agatha first called it. And the comic books have so far been very successful – even though many bookshops don’t really know whereabouts to display them: Crime? Children’s? SF and Fantasy? (Of course – with the other graphic novels!) With eight published in 2007 and another six in 2008, we have now caught up with the French publisher and are looking ahead to releasing books in 2009 and 2010 almost simultaneously with the French publisher, Emmanuel Proust, who has now commissioned a number of well-known artists, some new to the range, to continue the programme.

But before the new ones arrive (starting in the summer with Cards on the Table and Dumb Witness – you heard it here first!), we are at last publishing one of the first titles the French publisher released, Dix Petits Nègres or, as we now know it, And Then Then Were None. Now that the official English version of the novel contains the rhyme ‘Ten Little Soldier Boys’, while the French artwork from 1996 depicts little negro caricatures, we feared we might end up fighting a rearguard action against the tabloid press in the way the publishers Egmont were forced to over last year’s Tintin in the Congo racism ‘scandal’.

Thanks to the co-operation of Emmanuel Proust, the artist Frank Leclercq has skilfully redrawn for us 27 separate panels of artwork with little Grenadier guardsmen, and the new edition in May 2009 will finally make available Agatha Christie’s most successful book as a comic strip. Younger readers probably won’t even recognise that Judge Wargrave has been modelled rather brilliantly on Vincent Price (who?) – they’ll be too busy enjoying the copious amounts of red ink that have been used in the making of this particular edition!

David Brawn

Publishing Director, HarperFiction

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• Posted 14 January 2009 at 11:37a.m. GMT
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