When I was 11 years old, I wanted nothing more than to be Captain James Bigglesworth of the RFC. It may sound woefully weird, but I confess, I was a podgy, ungainly child with never an ounce of athletic ability and while my peers spent their time sweating away on the playing fields, I preferred to remain ensconced in the privacy of my dormitory and lose myself in W.E. Johns’ wonderful novels.

To this day, I am unsure what it was about Biggles that appealed to me so much. Perhaps it was the simple straightforwardness of his ‘Boy’s Life’ values, those old fashioned notions of gentlemanly conduct and fair play. Or maybe it was the swashbuckling adventures he embarked upon with his compatriots Algy, Ginger and Bertie that appealed to me, or the fact that Biggles was Indian born and bred, as Indian as curry, but I spent many hours imagining myself in his place, piloting a Sopwith high above the clouds, free from the restraint of gravity.

In fact, twin analeptics that sustained me through the torment of boarding school, through the bullying and the loneliness – they were the madcap adventures of Biggles and Agatha Christie’s incomparable mysteries.
The first Agatha Christie mystery I ever read was the delightful Evil Under the Sun and after enjoying the bumbling, bustling, hem-hawing investigations of Monsieur Poirot and the characteristic high drama of the coup de grace at the end when he revealed who the murderer was, I was hooked.

Since then, lamentably, my affaire de coeur with the grande dame of crime fiction has become quite intermittent and I read mysteries rarely now. Nonetheless, there is still a soft spot deep inside my cynical heart for those classic capers of crime fiction that I used to read by torchlight as a boy, huddled beneath my quilt in boarding school, those thrillers where even killers were well mannered and good always triumphed over evil.
You can scarcely imagine my surprise then, when I happened to be told that both the Biggles books and Agatha Christie’s classic whodunnits had been adapted as graphic novels of all things by a publisher called Euro Books and were now being sold in India, targeted particularly at young readers.

A quick visit to the bookstore later and 25 shocked minutes spent perusing one of these so-called graphic novels and I am, perhaps for the first time in my life, at a loss for words. I am appalled…dismayed and completely horrified…No, mortified. The literary critic Walter Benjamin once wrote, “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block out its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original more fully.”

That is the inevitable peril than any adaptation faces, I think, that through the act of transliterating a work of literature from one medium to another, it will fail to maintain fidelity to the original. This is because the act of adaptation is, in many ways, also an act of translation and it is the burden of the translator to ensure that his interpretation does not end up ruining the intrinsic essence of the original. Sadly, that is precisely what the new Agatha Christie and Biggles graphic novels fail to do entirely.

Let me make this much clear. These adaptations are not graphic novels, certainly not in the Will Eisner, Frank Miller sense of the phrase. These are at best comic books, and at that, not particularly good ones. The artwork is derivative and amateurish, and much of the quintessence of the originals – that atmospheric ambiguity which is the hallmark of Agatha Christie’s prose and the devil-may-care which makes Biggles such a compelling hero – much of that élan vital, that vital ardour, is lost, reduced to a mere transposition of dialogue and storyline, and the result is a crude, somewhat inchoate set of caricatures that are at most, mere shadows of the originals.

I do not mean to say that there have not been fine adaptations of Agatha Christie and W.E. Johns. One has to look no farther than the recent Solidor adaptations of Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder on the Links, and there have been many enjoyable Biggles adaptations over the years, the most notable of which, in my opinion, was the 1978 Biggles and the Golden Bird, written and illustrated by Bjorn Karlstrom.

In fact, the last few years have been particularly fecund for comic-book adaptations. From the charming Picador version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass to Marvel Comics’ recent rendition of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. As is evidenced by these fine editions, it is not the literal representation of the original that makes an adaptation exciting, but rather the treatment of its spirit, the translation of its esse, of its context rather than its text, that gives it an identity and a vitality of its own.

However, in the case of these Euro Books versions, even the slightest semblance of such merit is sorely lacking, both stylistically and qualitatively. Sadly, as we see in these shabby adaptations, the diminution of Biggles and Poirot to such a dismal and utterly commercialised product is symptomatic of the age which we inhabit today, an era which values marketability far more than aesthetics, and more alarmingly, is symbolic of a far greater malaise, that tragic triumph of retail values over imagination.

Unfortunately, that is the very sin that these Euro Books versions are guilty of most, not of literary exploitation, but of trivialising good writing by making it tawdry and uninspiring, and that, more than anything else, is what I cannot forgive, for when the brilliance of a wonderful book is dimmed and diffused by the dense fog of pedestrian adaptation and readers are robbed of that clear light of delight they deserve to feel when they encounter a fine piece of writing, that is not just a sin, but a crime against literature itself.

After all, as the poet Robert Lloyd once said,
“True Genius, like Armida’s wand,
Can raise the spring from barren land.
While all the art of Imitation,
Is pilf’ring from the first creation.”