Guy Cuthbertson

And Mellers is a servant.

He is not supposed to be the romantic interest for someone like Lady Chatterley.

And he's a gamekeeper.

Gamekeepers were not romantic figures.

No one fancied gamekeepers.

The mistake is sometimes made of imagining Mellers as a gardener.

Gardeners can be sexy.

But no, he was a gamekeeper, facilitator of slaughter and defender of the property of the rich.

relationships between master and servant do occur in christy too such as in the tuesday nightclub or there is the reference in the body in the library to the woman who 10 days before her wedding day ran away with the chauffeur

This contrast between the place and the passion within it has been particularly glaring in TV adaptations, which have increasingly indulged in beautiful English nostalgia, while injecting extra sex into the stories.

Where once the sex had been taken out of Chatterley, it is now put into Christie.

Christy on TV becomes more like a Chatterley adaptation, with sex and swearing, and Christy fans don't always like it, towards Zero in 2025 being particularly enraging.

On television in 2004, Miss Marple was also given a romantic past, an affair with a married man no less, one Captain Ainsworth.

The backstory is a little bit Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Both Lady C and Miss M have had an adulterous affair with a World War I army officer.

Lady Chatterley's Lover enters through the TV adaptations too in the sense that you can spot an actor who has also appeared in a screen version of Lady Chatterley.

There's the unforgettable Lady Chatterley herself, Jolie Richardson in The Dream, a Poirot from 1989, four years before she played Lady C. Or there's her husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, the actor James Wilby playing Stanley Kirkwood in an adaptation of The Sitterford Mystery from 2006, which, unlike the book, included Geraldine McEwan's Miss Marple.

In the 1981 film version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mellors is played by Nicholas Clay, who a year later was one of the leads in the Poirot film Evil Under the Sun.

Christie and Lawrence are ultimately not so different, on screen but even in print.

Both, indeed, have rather a dark view of humanity.