India, Jan. 24 -- Agatha Christie's fair-play puzzle architecture has allowed her stories to travel across cultural boundaries.

1929 saw the first German adaptation of a Christie novel: Die Abenteurer GmbH, based on The Secret Adversary (1922).

In India, Premendra Mitra's 1960 Bengali murder mystery film Chupi Chupi Aashey transplanted Christie's famous play, The Mousetrap, from a snowbound house in England to a hotel in Bengal cut off by floods. BR Chopra's Dhund channelled Christie's 1958 play, The Unexpected Guest. In 2003, Rituparno Ghosh adapted The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962), with a heavyweight cast that included Rakhee and Sharmila Tagore. In the south, Mohanlal starred in a Malayalam retelling of The ABC Murders (19...