3. Queering Dame Agatha Christie: Barry Sandler’s Camp Adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d (1980)

With his screenplay of Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d (novel 1962; film 1980), Barry Sandler transformed a standard Miss Marple mystery novel into a campy gem. Camp is chiefly theorized as a performative mode and one that a given performer envisions and controls, and so the challenge for screenplay writers is that their humorous ambitions must be achieved through the coordinated efforts of the directors, actors, and other professionals creatively contributing to the film’s production. As the film adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d illustrates, and as interviews with Sandler detail, camp serves as a defining principle of queer adaptation yet one that necessarily reframes camp as a collaborative endeavor, even when some of the participants might not realize the humor afoot.