Yours truly is a genuine Agatha-Christiephile. I know that's not an official term, but what else would you call someone who's literally obsessed with everything regarding the legendary female mystery-author. I worship her novels & short stories, love the flamboyant film-adaptations of her most famous books and am fascinated with the enigmatic facts of her personal life. In 1926, Christie disappeared for a period of eleven days. An impressive search party followed, and she was eventually located in a hospital supposedly with amnesia. Multiple speculations arose, but the true circumstances and reason of her disappearance were never fully clarified. This modest made-for-TV production is a fictional tale about where she could have been, much like the 1979-film "Agatha", directed by Michael Apted and starring Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman. At first, I was reluctant to see this, but I'm glad I did because it's a compelling and well-acted, albeit largely inconspicuous little film.
The 36-year-old Agatha Christie balances on the verge of a massive depression in 1926. Her husband Archie insists for a divorce, so that he can marry his much younger mistress, and she suffers from a writer's block because her fans always guess the identity of the culprit of her stories via the wrong method. When she's literally begged to help solving the real-life murder of nurse Florence Nightingale, who got brutally bludgeoned to death on a train six years earlier, she sees an opportunity to both escape her personal problems and to perform research and seek inspiration for her work.
The plot isn't exactly plausible, but it's nice to see how the writers attempt to hint at the possible origin of famous Agatha Christie stories that followed after 1926, like the luring of guests to a remote location (And Then There Were None - 1939) and the train settings for "4.50 from Paddington" and "Murder on the Orient Express". The anti-climax actually fits the plot rather well. None of the performances are highly memorable, but the entire cast does their best. You're still better off reading an authentic Christie novel, but "The Truth of Murder" certainly isn't a waste of time.
