Tab 2

Agatha Christie’s short story The Witness for the Prosecution is a detective fiction story

built around suspense, deception, and a final twist that redefines everything the reader

thought they understood. One of its most compelling elements is the character of

Leonard Vole, a man accused of murdering a wealthy older woman. In the short story,

Vole is portrayed as a charming and seemingly innocent man whose true nature is only

revealed at the very end: he is, in fact, the murderer, and has coldly manipulated both

his legal team and his partner Romaine to secure his acquittal. However, the 2016 film

adaptation, directed by Julian Jarrold and written by Sarah Phelps, transforms

Leonard’s character dramatically. In the film, Leonard is a haunted World War I veteran

suffering from emotional trauma, poverty, and disillusionment. This shift alters the core

tone of the story. The Leonard Vole of Christie’s story is a deceptive predator; the

Leonard of the film is a broken man crushed by circumstance. By reframing Leonard as

a tragic figure, the film introduces emotional complexity and historical depth that

fundamentally change how audiences perceive his guilt and moral character.

In Christie’s short story, Leonard Vole is introduced through the perspective of Mr.

Mayherne, the solicitor defending him. Leonard appears naive, sincere, and perhaps a

little foolish. When first describing his relationship with the victim, Emily French, Vole

insists, “After the first visit, she pressed me to come again, spoke of being lonely and

unhappy.” His testimony seems earnest and unthreatening. However, this image

unravels in the final pages. The shocking twist—that Romaine’s dramatic betrayal in

court was a calculated act to manipulate the jury—recontextualizes everything. The

story ends with a chilling final line from Romaine: “I knew he was guilty!” Vole is implied

to be a manipulator who orchestrated his lover’s false testimony and had, in fact, coldly
murdered Miss French for her money. This brutal ending emphasizes the genre’s focus

on rationality and justice: the criminal has fooled the system, and the reader is left with a

sense of moral unease. Vole has no interiority beyond what he presents to others; he is

a puzzle piece in a tightly wound mystery, a man defined by the cleverness of his

deceit.

In contrast, the 2016 film adaptation reimagines Leonard with psychological depth and

vulnerability. The story is framed around a shell-shocked veteran navigating a post-war

London that has little room for broken men. From the beginning, the film emphasizes

Leonard’s fragility. He coughs blood, walks with a limp, and is shown wandering through

streets thick with smog and despair. Flashbacks to his time in the trenches reveal a man

permanently scarred by the horrors of war—he watches his friends die, struggles with

survivor’s guilt, and clings to Romaine as his sole source of comfort and meaning.

These additions humanize Leonard in a way the short story does not. For example,

during one scene, Leonard tearfully recounts how Miss French offered him kindness

and companionship when no one else did, saying, “She was good to me. She liked me.

That’s all.” His words, and the trembling way he delivers them, are sincere—even if the

viewer later learns they are part of a greater lie.

The film also reframes Leonard’s relationship with Emily French. In the short story, his

motives for spending time with her seem suspect from the start. Though he claims

innocence, the implication is clear: he charmed her to gain access to her fortune. In the

film, however, their relationship is more ambiguous. Emily French, played by Kim

Cattrall, is lonely and vulnerable, but her affections toward Leonard are tender and

maternal at times, flirtatious at others. Leonard does not appear calculating in these
interactions. Instead, he seems unsure, even frightened, of the intimacy she offers. His

financial desperation and emotional instability complicate the dynamic. Rather than a

predator manipulating an older woman, Leonard becomes a man caught in a power

imbalance he does not entirely understand or control. The moral clarity of the short story

becomes muddied; Leonard is no longer just a liar, but a victim of his own

circumstances and decisions.

This emotional reconstruction of Leonard’s character also transforms his relationship

with Romaine. In Christie’s original, Romaine is cool, intelligent, and ultimately revealed

to be more cunning than Leonard himself. She plays the role of the jilted lover to trick

the court into believing Leonard is guilty, only for her forged letters and false testimony

to absolve him. In the film, Romaine (played by Andrea Riseborough) is similarly

complex, but her relationship with Leonard is portrayed as deeply co-dependent and

emotionally entangled. Rather than being a calculated manipulator acting alone,

Romaine becomes a damaged and devoted partner who sacrifices her integrity to

protect the man she loves. The emotional tension between them is built on shared

trauma and quiet desperation. She stages her courtroom betrayal with visible anguish,

and unlike in the short story, her actions are not part of a cold, calculated scheme but

stem from a deep need to preserve what little connection she still has. When Leonard is

ultimately revealed to be guilty, the film does not depict this as a betrayal of Romaine—

but rather as a tragedy they both accept. Their final escape together is not triumphant

but bleak, underscoring the film’s darker tone. The twist still comes, but instead of

evoking admiration for a clever deception, it leaves the audience unsettled, watching
two broken people vanish into the shadows, bound together by love, complicity, and

ruin.

The filmmakers’ choice to add these layers of psychological and historical realism aligns

with contemporary expectations of character development in film. As the essay

“Adaptation: From Novel to Film” notes, “Films tend to externalize what is internal in

fiction,” using visual and performative cues to suggest inner turmoil or complexity. In

adapting Christie’s story, the filmmakers exploit the medium’s strengths: the lingering

gaze of the camera, flashbacks, and performances that evoke unspoken suffering. This

creates a Leonard Vole who is not just an enigma to be solved but a human being to be

understood—until the very end, when that understanding collapses. Furthermore, by

embedding the story in the context of post-WWI disillusionment, the film transforms a

puzzle-box mystery into a tragedy of moral ambiguity. In doing so, it speaks not just to

genre expectations, but to the trauma of a generation.

Ultimately, the adaptation of Leonard Vole from short story to film marks a profound shift

in tone, theme, and audience experience. In Christie’s story, Leonard is the perfect

villain for a detective narrative: clever, charming, and ultimately revealed as monstrous.

In the 2016 film, Leonard is instead a product of his time—broken, haunted, and

dangerous in ways he does not fully understand. This change reorients the story’s moral

compass. The question is no longer simply whether Leonard did it, but whether guilt, in

a world as broken as the one left behind by the Great War, still means the same thing.

The twist remains, but its impact is transformed. Rather than marveling at a cleverly

executed deception, the audience is left mourning a man who seemed worth saving—

until he proved he wasn’t.

Christie, Agatha. The Witness for the Prosecution. 1925.

The Witness for the Prosecution. Directed by Julian Jarrold, written by Sarah Phelps, BBC One,
2016.