Cimorene

I mean... while I see 'go whole hog on the grimdark!' as a comprehensible and valid choice and the result as somewhat amusing, I do find the result in her work kind of... silly? Much like filmed grimdark Batman at moments (but not just moments for Phelps's Christie, it's all the time), it's cartoonishly overdrawn, sort of... pantomime-level with villains who seem like they're on the verge of literally eating scenery. And when it comes to the grossout elements, they really aren't to my taste.

But I still have to say that I enjoy them. Especially Ordeal by Innocence and particularly because she changed who done it (well, and how), when that particular story and similar stories of its type often, in my view, are really let down by their failure to thoroughly think through and engage with what they're doing with gender.

More specifically, I always feel like the father IS the bad guy in Ordeal by Innocence and the end twist is wrong, both because of the toxic environment she sets up and the cheapness and psychological thinness of the 'creepily maternal sexual obsession of a middle-aged laughable othered character with a Bad Young Man' - there's just so much wrong with gender and class and all that in this mess that you hardly know where to start. But those things are all symptomatic of problems with the genre that persist to the present day in crime procedurals but in many cases are at their worst in golden age classics like Christie which cover the grosser bits of misogynist stuff up with a well-mannered veneer, so I kind of appreciate her determination to re-uglify.

We just watched her version of The Witness for the Prosecution too, which is also worth a look, though she does something different with it (like, she still uglifies it obviously, but the other bits are different).