Murder in the Mews
Alternative title: Dead Man’s Mirror
POIROT SHORT STORIES (1937)

Murder in the Mews, the last of the 1937 Christies, is a volume of Hercule Poirot stories, unusual in that there are only four stories (three in the American edition, Dead Man’s Mirror, which omits ‘The Incredible Theft’) and that each is much longer than the average Christie short story. The title story of the English edition, ‘Murder in the Mews’, and that of the American edition, ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, are both novella-length. The fourth story, ‘Triangle at Rhodes’, is shorter, but even so is about twice the length of most stories by Agatha Christie.

In all four stories, Poirot is functioning on his best form. ‘Murder in the Mews’ finds him and Inspector Japp collaborating more closely than has often been the case to solve a murder disguised as suicide in a mews house, presumably somewhere in Mayfair. (At the beginning of the story Japp and Poirot have been dining together, and find themselves walking through Bardsley Garden Mews, taking a short cut to Poirot’s flat.) The characterization is superb, and the plot clever and convincing, though the author had already used the central device in ‘The Market Basing Mystery’.⁴²

‘The Incredible Theft’ is an earlier story, ‘The Submarine Plans’, expanded to more than three times its original length, and much improved in the expansion. The submarine has now become a bomber, and Poirot retrieves the plans by an especially brilliant exercise of his little grey cells. (In its expanded version, this story has not been published in the United States.)

Mr Satterthwaite of the Harley Quin stories and Three-Act Tragedy (or Murder in Three Acts) is among the characters in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, another expanded retelling of an earlier tale, in this case ‘The Second Gong’,⁴³ and a first-rate example of the conventional murder mystery with a body in the library, a collection of suspects the most unlikely of whom turns out to be the murderer, and the obligatory plan of study and hall as an aid to comprehension. One of the characters quotes from Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ the lines which twenty-five years later will provide the title of a Christie novel:

    The mirror crack’d from side to side;

    ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried

        The Lady of Shalott.

Agatha Christie was, throughout her long career, not well served by her editors. No doubt she would have resisted having her spelling or grammar changed, but surely she would have been grateful for the opportunity to get rid of careless errors as, for instance, in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’ where she allows Poirot to show to one suspect a bullet-shaped pencil he had earlier relinquished to its owner, another suspect.

Incidentally, Poirot has been known to sneer at the type of detective who races about the lawn, measuring footprints in the wet grass, but in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’ we find him doing precisely this with every appearance of relish.

‘Triangle at Rhodes’, the final story in the volume, must have been in Agatha Christie’s mind when she came to write Evil Under the Sun (1941), for there are distinct similarities in the relationships of the leading characters to one another. It is, in some ways, the most interesting story in the volume, for it reaches out beyond the murder mystery genre. It has correspondences, although no similarities of plot, with an earlier story, ‘The Bloodstained Pavement’ in Miss Marple’s The Thirteen Problems (or The Tuesday Club Murders).

All four stories were adapted for television in the series which featured David Suchet as Poirot, and were first transmitted on London Weekend TV on various dates in 1989 and 1993.

Appointment with Death
POIROT (1938)

The Mallowans spent what was to be their final pre-war season in the Middle East in 1938, when they moved from Tell Brak ‘because of the blackmailing pressure of the Sheikhs of the Shammar tribe who were obviously bent on inducing our workmen to strike’,⁴⁴ and set up camp more than a hundred miles to the west, in the Balikh Valley, remote marsh-like country but a paradise for the archaeologist. There they spent a profitable and enjoyable few months, until at the beginning of December it was time to pack up and return to England.

In Come, Tell Me How You Live, Agatha Christie described her mood of nostalgic regret as she and Max Mallowan left Beirut by ship. She stood looking over the rail at the lovely coastline ‘with the mountains of the Lebanon standing up dim and blue against the sky’, breathing in the romance of the scene. Then, suddenly, a cargo vessel crossed her line of vision, its crane accidentally dropped a load into the water, and a crate burst open. The surface of the sea before her was now dotted with lavatory seats. ‘Max comes up and asks what the row is about. I point, and explain that my mood of romantic farewell to Syria is now quite shattered!’

Two crime novels were published in 1938: Appointment with Death and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas.

The setting of Appointment with Death, a novel which begins in Jerusalem and moves to Petra, the ‘rose red city, half as old as time’, is one of Agatha Christie’s most exotic, and the characters, the majority of whom are one large family of Americans touring the Holy Land, are among her most colourful. The Boynton family consists of old Mrs Boynton, fat, grotesque and a mental sadist, her four offspring, and the wife of one of them. The party of tourists who make the excursion to Petra also includes a French psychiatrist, a young English woman who is a medical student, and Lady Westholme, a formidable British Member of Parliament described as ‘a big, masterful woman with a rocking-horse face’. It also includes M. Hercule Poirot. Poirot is travelling for pleasure, like the others, but he also has an introduction from his old friend Colonel Race to Colonel Carbury, who is with the British Army in Transjordania. When Mrs Boynton is murdered at Petra, Poirot is asked to help with the investigation.

It was in 1938, the year in which Appointment with Death was published, that Agatha Christie said of Hercule Poirot in an interview she gave to the London Daily Mail,

There are moments when I have felt: ‘Why – why – why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature? … eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustache and tilting his egg-shaped head.…’ Anyway, what is an egg-shaped head.…? I am beholden to him financially … On the other hand, he owes his very existence to me. In moments of irritation, I point out that by a few strokes of the pen … I could destroy him utterly. He replies, grandiloquently: ‘Impossible to get rid of Poirot like that! He is much too clever.’⁴⁵

Clearly, the author still had a very soft spot for her famous detective, however much she may have become exasperated with him, and her affection for the childishly arrogant but nonetheless endearing Poirot is evident throughout Appointment with Death. This is an especially well-plotted novel, and the atmosphere of the various places described, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Judean desert, the Dead Sea, the brooding, timeless beauty of Petra, is conveyed with an easy economy.

It was not often that Agatha Christie modelled a character on a recognizable person in real life. However, you are tempted to identify Lady Westholme, the overbearing Member of Parliament in Appointment with Death who is ‘much respected and almost universally disliked’, with Lady Astor. Like Lady Astor, Lady Westholme is an American who married into the English aristocracy and successfully stood for election to Parliament. The French psychiatrist’s comment on Lady Westholme (‘that woman should be poisoned … It is incredible to me that she has had a husband for many years and that he has not already done so’) puts one in mind of the often-quoted exchange between Lady Astor and Winston Churchill:

If you were my husband, sir, I would poison your coffee.
If you were my wife, madam, I would swallow it.

Seven years after publication as a novel, Agatha Christie turned Appointment with Death into a play. In doing so, she made a number of significant changes. Chief among these is the deletion of Poirot from the cast of characters. (She had done this once before, in her dramatization of Death on the Nile.) The investigation of Mrs Boynton’s death is now undertaken alone by Colonel Carbery (formerly ‘Carbury’, but then Agatha Christie was often careless about spelling), but it is one of the suspects, and not Carbery, who discovers what really happened. Also, the ending of the play is different from that of the novel. The character who, in the novel, turned out to be the murderer, is, in the play, perfectly innocent. More than this it would not be proper to reveal, though it is probably safe to add that the play has a new character: not a substitute for Poirot, but a comical local politician called Alderman Higgs (or, as he pronounces it, ‘Halderman ‘Iggs’). ‘Ah coom from Lancashire – same as you do’, he says with a chuckle to Lady Westholme. He is, of course, of a different political colour from the Conservative Lady Westholme, and intends to oppose her as an Independent candidate at the next by-elections. The role of the Arab guide or Dragoman has also been built up to provide the conventional comic relief which used to be thought necessary in plays of this kind.

After a short, pre-London tour which opened in Glasgow, Appointment with Death came to the Piccadilly Theatre, London, on 31 March 1945. Mary Clare was greatly liked as the evil Mrs Boynton, and other leading roles were played by Ian Lubbock (Lennox Boynton), Beryl Machin (Nadine), John Wynn (Raymond), Carla Lehmann (Sarah King), Owen Reynolds (Colonel Carbery), Janet Burneil (Lady Westholme) and Percy Walsh (Alderman Higgs). The play was directed by Terence de Marney.

In 1988 a feature film version of the story was released by the Cannon Group, starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot for the third time. Adapted by Anthony Shaffer and directed by Michael Winner, the film was shot in Israel with a big-name cast including Lauren Bacall, Carrie Fisher, Hayley Mills, Michael Sarrazin and Sir John Gielgud.

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Alternative title: Murder for Christmas
POIROT (1938)

Murder for Christmas is the title under which Hercule Poirot’s Christmas first appeared in the United States, some months after its British publication. When it was reissued in paperback in the USA in the forties, the title was changed to A Holiday for Murder. All the titles seem to promise one of the cosier Christie murders, with perhaps a dash of arsenic in the Christmas pudding, but the epigraph from Macbeth which prefaces the volume – ‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ – suggests something more violent, as does the author’s dedicatory note to her brother-in-law, James Watts:

My dear James,

You have always been one of the most faithful and kindly of my readers, and I was therefore seriously perturbed when I received from you a word of criticism.

You complained that my murders were getting too refined – anaemic, in fact. You yearned for a ‘good violent murder with lots of blood’. A murder where there was no doubt about its being murder!

So, this is your special story – written for you. I hope it may please.

             Your affectionate sister-in-law,
                 Agatha.

The reader of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas would do well to think carefully about the Macbeth quotation. (Shakespeare is the writer most quoted in the works of Agatha Christie, and there are more allusions to Macbeth than to any other Shakespeare play. The English poets of the nineteenth century are also frequently quoted, and so is Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. But it is traditional English nursery rhyme that Agatha Christie most frequently turns to: there will be occasion to mention this in a later chapter.)

Two themes are combined in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas: the traditional murder in the English country house party, in this case a house in the Midlands with the family of a wealthy, unpleasant old man assembled at Christmas from far-flung outposts; and the locked-room mystery, more of a feature of John Dickson Carr than of Agatha Christie, who preferred to humanize her puzzles. Though the action takes place over Christmas, there is as little Christmas atmosphere in the novel as there is Christmas feeling in the hearts of its characters: the old patriarch is brutally murdered on Christmas Eve. The family suspects are, for the most part, stereotypes of the exotic foreigner, the strong, silent colonial prodigal son, the sympathetic, understanding wife, and so on. One of them is explored in more detail, his weakness of character, his artistic interests, his dependence on a strong-willed wife delicately and sensitively presented, but not to such an extent that the conventional form of the mystery novel is endangered. Agatha Christie maintains the perfect balance. She is also invariably two steps ahead of the reader, especially that reader who imagines he is one step ahead of her.

The clue to the locked-room mystery is an oddly unsatisfactory one. When it proves to be part of something larger, you are tempted to ask, ‘Where’s the rest of it?’ If you do, you will receive no answer. The clue to the murder, on the other hand, lies buried in the family and in family resemblances. The diabolically cunning author makes great play with this, and appears to be making things rather easy for the reader. References to a sense of déjà vu abound. At one point, Tressilian, the butler, says, ‘It seems sometimes, sir, as though the past isn’t the past! I believe there’s been a play on in London about something like that.’ He is right: it is not mentioned by name, but the play Tressilian is thinking of is J. B. Priestley’s I Have Been Here Before, produced in London in 1937.

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is one of the least realistic but most ingenious Christies, and Poirot performs brilliantly. He is on the scene because he has been staying with the Chief Constable of Middleshire, Colonel Johnson. Middleshire is a fictitious county: when Poirot last encountered Colonel Johnson, in Three-Act Tragedy, Johnson was Chief Constable of Yorkshire, which is generally thought not to be fictitious. Incidentally, the reader is warned that, in Johnson’s conversation with Poirot in section 5 of Part III, the identity of the murderer in Three-Act Tragedy is taken for granted and, by implication, revealed.

An example of the way in which the author fooled her readers as a conjuror does his audience occurs when Poirot indicates a large calendar hanging on a wall, ‘with tear-off leaves, a bold date on each leaf’, and asks why the date has been left as it is. The elderly butler, Tressilian, ‘peered across the room, then shuffled slowly across till he was a foot or two away’. Tressilian informs Poirot that the leaf has been torn off, and that the date is correct. ‘It’s the twenty-sixth today.’ Poirot then asks whose responsibility it is to keep the calendar up to date, and is told. We are encouraged to assume that Poirot has some complex theory connected with the calendar. In fact, as will become apparent only much later, in the dénouement, he has simply been testing Tressilian’s eyesight, and has satisfied himself that the old butler is extremely short-sighted.

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas received generally favourable reviews, the poet and critic Edwin Muir in The Listener asserting that ‘even the corpse is meritorious’. But the novelist Howard Spring, reviewing it in the Evening Standard, did not play fair, and John Dickson Carr (at that time Secretary of the Detection Club) was moved to protest: ‘Mr Spring has carefully removed every element of mystery. He discloses (a) the identity of the murderer, (b) the murderer’s motive, (c) nearly every trick by which the murder was committed, and (d) how the detective knew it. After this massacre, it is safe to say that little more harm to the book could possibly have been done.’

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 1 January 1995.

Murder is Easy
Alternative title: Easy to Kill
(1939)

Ashfield, Agatha Christie’s childhood home in Torquay, had over the years become hemmed in by new building developments. By 1938, its view of the sea had been completely cut off by a noisy secondary school, and the house next door had become a nursing home for mental patients. The Mallowans decided to sell the house in order to buy another in the country outside Torquay. This was Greenway House, a property which Agatha had known when she was young: ‘a white Georgian house of about 1780 or 90, with woods sweeping down to the (river) Dart below, and a lot of fine shrubs and trees,’⁴⁶ about four-and-a-half miles up river from Dartmouth.

Under Agatha Christie’s supervision, certain Victorian additions were removed and Greenway House was restored and decorated in time for them to move into it in the autumn of 1939, just as the Second World War broke out. Max Mallowan later recalled listening on the radio in the kitchen to the proclamation of war, while their kitchen help wept into the vegetables.

1939 saw the publication of three volumes by Agatha Christie: two novels, in neither of which Hercule Poirot was among the characters, and a volume of short stories. The first of the three to appear was Murder is Easy, whose title was changed for its American publication to Easy to Kill.

One of the quintessential Christies in that it deals with a series of murders in an ostensibly sleepy village thirty-five miles from London, Murder is Easy nevertheless differs from most of its predecessors in having as its chief investigator someone who, although he is a policeman, involves himself in the village murders simply out of curiosity. Luke Fitzwilliam is a youngish policeman who has just returned to England after several years’ service in the Far East. A chance conversation with an old lady in a train in which she tells him that she is on her way to Scotland Yard to report a number of unexplained deaths, and that she thinks she knows who the next victim will be, is brought back to Luke’s mind when he reads in his newspaper the following day that the old lady has been run over and killed by a hit-and-run driver. When some days later he discovers from another news item that the village doctor, whom the old lady prophesied would be the next to die, has indeed died, Luke decides to go to Wychwood-under-Ashe and investigate.

The characters, most of them potential suspects, are a varied and colourful lot, and include one of Agatha Christie’s rare homosexuals, Mr Ellsworthy, who keeps the local antique shop and also dabbles in witchcraft: ‘a very exquisite young man dressed in a colour scheme of russet brown. He had a long pale face with a womanish mouth, long black artistic hair and a mincing walk.’ As this is pre-war England, Mr Ellsworthy’s sexual tastes are not explicitly revealed; but, although doubtless no double entendre is intended, the sour comment made by a female character that ‘there will be gay doings in the Witches’ Meadow tonight’ is probably not far off the mark.

The murderer in Murder is Easy kills not for gain or out of hatred but from a lunatic compulsion, though several people in the village have perfectly sane motives for most of the murders committed. If the exposition of this highly entertaining novel is superb, the dénouement is hardly less so. In the penultimate chapter Scotland Yard is called in, in the person of Superintendent Battle, one of Agatha Christie’s most sympathetic policemen, but it is still Luke Fitzwilliam who arrives first at the truth, and, excitingly, just in time to prevent another murder.

Murder is Easy is the kind of novel into which Miss Marple would easily have fitted. Indeed, Lavinia Pinkerton,⁴⁷ the old lady who is killed off at the beginning of the story, is very like Miss Marple. And, rather oddly, so is Miss Pinkerton’s friend in the village, Honoria Waynflete. ‘We women are good observers, you think?’ Miss Waynflete asks Luke, who answers ‘Absolutely first-class’. It must have been the presence of these Marple-like ladies which led Barzun and Taylor in A Catalogue of Crime to commit one of their rare errors in describing Murder is Easy. ‘Miss Marple,’ they say, ‘is credible and does not irritate by fussiness.’ But Miss Marple is nowhere to be found in Murder is Easy. Her presence was not needed; nor, for that matter, was Superintendent Battle’s appearance at all necessary. The credit for solving an especially difficult mystery is due entirely to Luke Fitzwilliam, formerly of the Mayang Straits Police Force.

A TV movie version of Murder is Easy was made by Warner Brothers in Great Britain in 1981, with Olivia de Havilland as Honoria Waynflete and Bill Bixby as Luke Fitzwilliam.

And Then There Were None
Original title: Ten Little Niggers
(1939)

There can be few readers of this book who do not know, at least in outline, the plot of what is probably Agatha Christie’s best-known and most popular novel: ten people, from various walks of life, are lured to a house on an island where, one by one, they are murdered. Each one dies in a manner related to the appropriate verse about one of the ‘ten little niggers’ of the nursery rhyme, which hangs in a gleaming chromium frame over the fireplace in every bedroom in the house:

Ten little nigger boys went out to dine;
One choked his little self and then there were Nine.

Nine little nigger boys sat up very late;
One overslept himself and then there were Eight.

Eight little nigger boys travelling in Devon;
One said he’d stay there and then there were Seven.

Seven little nigger boys chopping up sticks;
One chopped himself in halves and then there were Six.

Six little nigger boys playing with a hive;
A bumble bee stung one and then there were Five.

Five little nigger boys going in for law;
One got in Chancery and then there were four.

Four little nigger boys going out to sea;
A red herring swallowed one and then there were Three.

Three little nigger boys walking in the Zoo;
A big bear hugged one and then there were Two.

Two little nigger boys sitting in the sun;
One got frizzled up and then there was one.

One little nigger boy left all alone;
He went and hanged himself and then there were None.

In 1939, the title Ten Little Niggers gave little or no offence, at least in Great Britain. In today’s violent world, it appears to be thought by many to be more reprehensible to refer to niggers, yids,⁴⁸ wops, wogs, poms, poofs, dagos, japs, dykes, and so on, than to murder representatives of such categories of people. ‘Nigger’, an English or Irish dialect pronunciation of ‘negro’ is no longer acceptable; nor, for that matter is ‘negro’, though it simply means ‘black’. ‘Black’, which means ‘negro’, is not objected to at present.

American reprints were for some years entitled Ten Little Indians. However, this title is inappropriate, for it refers to a children’s counting song which has nothing to do with the plot of the novel:

One little, two little, three little Indians,
Four little, five little, six little Indians,
Seven little, eight little, nine little Indians,
Ten little Indian Boys.

‘Nigger’ has been considered an offensive term in the United States since before the Civil War, so it is hardly surprising that Agatha Christie’s title should not have found favour there. Preferable to Ten Little Indians, however, is the title under which the novel was first published in the USA in 1940, some months after the original British publication. This was And Then There Were None,⁴⁹ the final words of the nursery rhyme, and this title was adopted as the ‘official’ one for all English language editions in the 1980s. (The title of the French edition, Dix petits nègres, offends no one.)

So much for irrelevant etymological detail. Whatever you choose to call it, Agatha Christie’s novel is one of her masterpieces, with a stunningly original plot, varied and believable characters, and strongly generated suspense as the guests of an unknown host die one by one. Even when only two of the ten are left, there are still surprises to come.

And Then There Were None carries the ‘closed society’ type of murder mystery to extreme lengths. Nigger Island, a mile or so off the coast of Devon, ‘had got its name from its resemblance to a man’s head – a man with negroid lips’. It is not much bigger than the house built on it by an eccentric millionaire, so there is no possibility of a killer being hidden elsewhere on the island, and in stormy weather no boat from the mainland can approach it. The arrogant Mrs Christie this time set herself a fearsome test of her own ingenuity, passed it with flying colours, and was well aware that she had written a really brilliant murder mystery:

I had written the book Ten Little Niggers because it was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me. Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer being obvious. I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning, and I was pleased with what I had made of it. It was clear, straightforward, baffling, and yet had a perfectly reasonable explanation; in fact it had to have an epilogue in order to explain it. It was well received and reviewed, but the person who was really pleased with it was myself, for I knew better than any critic how difficult it had been.⁵⁰

Nursery rhymes frequently proved a source of inspiration to Agatha Christie. Among later titles which derive from nursery rhymes are One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Five Little Pigs (‘This little piggy went to market…’), Three Blind Mice, A Pocketful of Rye and Hickory, Dickory, Dock, and in several of these novels the murderer, too, seems to have been inspired by the old rhymes. But nowhere is a nursery rhyme put to more brilliant use than in this book.

When four little nigger boys sailed out to sea, ‘a red herring swallowed one, and then there were three’. The astute reader will leap on the ‘red herring’ as a possible clue: the three surviving ‘niggers’ certainly considered it to be one, at the time. But finally there are, as the murderer all along intended, no little niggers left. How can that be? There is an epilogue, signed by the murderer, which gives the answers, but it ends with these words (and, with it, the novel): ‘When the sea goes down, there will come from the mainland boats and men. And they will find ten dead bodies and an unsolved problem on Nigger Island.’

When Ten Little Niggers was published, the reviews, not surprisingly, were without exception wildly adulatory. The New Statesman critic wrote:

Mrs Christie’s name again heads the list, but it is no use trying to compare her with other writers of detection. She stands hors concours, in a class of her own. No one else in the world would have attempted seriously to manipulate a plot like that of Ten Little Niggers without a hopeless presentiment of failure. To show her utter superiority over our deductive faculty, Mrs Christie even allows us to know what every character present is thinking – and still we can’t guess! The book must rank with Mrs Christie’s previous best – on the top notch of detection.

The Observer thought it ‘one of the very best, most genuinely bewildering Christies yet written’, while the Daily Herald acclaimed it as ‘the most astonishingly impudent, ingenious and altogether successful mystery story for fourteen or fifteen years – since The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.’ Of the American edition, And Then There were None, Time Magazine said, ‘One of the most ingenious thrillers in many a day.’ One person, however, was not taken in. Max Mallowan⁵¹ revealed that he especially liked his wife’s Ten Little Niggers because it was

one of the few novels in which I have guessed the culprit with a feeling of certainty for purely psychological reasons. This novel was read … and tried out at a house-party in Devon, and great was Agatha’s indignation when I won the prize for spotting the murderer – for the wrong reason.

When Agatha Christie decided to turn Ten Little Niggers into a play, sometime after the outbreak of the Second World War, she was not an experienced playwright. She had written two plays, only one of which, the Poirot murder mystery, Black Coffee, had been produced: and she had seen three of her works adapted for the stage by other hands. Ten Little Niggers would surely prove impossible to adapt; but, since she dealt in impossibilities in her books, Mrs Christie accepted her own challenge:

I thought to myself it would be exciting to see if I could make it into a play. At first sight that seemed to be impossible, because no one would be left to tell the tale, so I would have to alter it to a certain extent. It seemed to me that I could make a perfectly good play of it by one modification of the original story. I must make two of the characters … come safe out of the ordeal. This would not be contrary to the spirit of the original nursery rhyme, since there is one version of ‘Ten little nigger boys’ which ends: ‘He got married and then there were none’.⁵²

The necessary changes were made, and the new ending, with its own last-minute surprise, proved startlingly successful in the theatre. But not immediately: the first theatrical managements to whom the play was submitted rejected it on the grounds that it would be too difficult to produce, and that audiences would laugh at the multiplicity of murders. The impresario C. B. Cochran liked the play and was willing to take it on, but could not persuade his backers to agree. Eventually the Bertram Meyer management, who had put on Alibi in 1928, accepted the play, which was put into rehearsal under the direction of Irene Hentschel and which began a short tour at the Wimbledon Theatre before coming in to the St James’s Theatre in the West End of London, in November 1943.

The reviews of the play were no less favourable than those the novel had collected. ‘You see what a task Mrs Christie sets herself,’ wrote W. A. Darlington in the Daily Telegraph. ‘She must play fair because her reputation depends on it. She must stick to her pattern. And she must somehow contrive to keep you and me guessing, even when the choice of suspects has narrowed down. Well, she succeeds.’ With an excellent cast, which included Henrietta Watson (as Emily Brent), Linden Travers (Vera Claythorne), Percy Walsh (William Blore), Terence de Marney (Philip Lombard), Allan Jeayes (Sir Lawrence Wargrave), Eric Cowley (General Mackenzie) and Gwyn Nichols (Dr Armstrong), Ten Little Niggers ran until the St James’s Theatre was closed by bombing, and then continued for several more months at another West End theatre, the Cambridge. When it was produced in New York on 27 June 1944, tactfully retitled Ten Little Indians, directed by Albert de Courville and starring J. Pat O’Malley, Estelle Winwood and Halliwell Hobbes, the play had a very successful run of 426 performances.

Although the novel is no longer known in Great Britain as Ten Little Niggers, the play has been called Ten Little Indians when revived by repertory companies or by amateurs, and the island on the Devon coast on which it is set is no longer Nigger Island but Indian Island.⁵³ The change of title in Great Britain came about when the play was revived in Birmingham in 1966, and more than twenty members of the Co-ordinating Committee Against Racial Discrimination paraded in front of the theatre while customers waited in a queue to purchase tickets. One demonstrator carried a placard giving the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘nigger’: ‘a contemptuous reference to coloured people.’ ‘The Committee’s Chairman pointed out that the title had been changed in the United States and demanded the same in England. Without argument, the producers quietly complied.’⁵⁴

Ten Little Indians was not considered an acceptable title in Nairobi, where the play was staged as Ten Little Redskins!

In the spring of 1976 a small, charming, unpretentious musical, Something’s Afoot, opened in New York, where it played for a few weeks at the Lyceum Theatre. Its plot was very loosely and distantly based on that of Ten Little Indians: ten people are marooned on an island estate, Rancour’s Retreat, and murdered one by one. One of the characters Miss Tweed, a kind of amalgam of Mrs Christie and Miss Marple, was played by the English music-hall performer, Tessie O’Shea, one of whose songs was ‘I Owe It All to Agatha Christie’. The show had first been concocted in 1973, and tried out in a tour which opened in Washington, but had undergone a great deal of revision before being presented in New York. It was later seen in London, but achieved only a short run.

Three films have been made of Ten Little Niggers, all of them based not on the novel but on the play, with its comparatively happy ending.

The earliest film version was And Then There Were None, made in Hollywood by Twentieth Century-Fox, in 1945. Directed by René Clair, this is one of the most successful of the Christie movies, and a remarkable and highly exciting film. The cast was made up of ten of Hollywood’s finest character players, among them Louis Hayward, Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, C. Aubrey Smith, Judith Anderson, Roland Young and Richard Haydn. Anthony Marston, the upperclass young man-about-town of the play, was turned into an expatriate Russian prince so that he could be played by the Russian actor, Mischa Auer, who specialized in eccentric comedy roles. In general, however, the film stayed reasonably close to its source, except when it substituted a conventionally sinister old mansion for the streamlined contemporary house of the play. For its release in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, And Then There Were None reverted to the old title, Ten Little Niggers.

The second film, this time called Ten Little Indians, was made in England by Seven Arts Films in 1965, and directed by George Pollock, who had in the previous three years directed four Miss Marple films. The ten victims, among them Wilfrid Hyde White, Stanley Holloway, Dennis Price, Fabian, Shirley Eaton, Leo Genn, and Hugh O’Brien (TV’s Wyatt Earp), are assembled not on an island off the coast of Devon but in an isolated hotel in the Austrian Alps in winter. Why? No one knows. Badly directed and cheaply produced, this was a waste of its cast’s talents. Several of the characters were changed from the original, for no good reason. An oddity is the film’s ‘Who-done-it’ break, just before the dénouement, in which the audience is given a chance to guess the solution before it is revealed on the screen.

In 1975, Ten Little Indians was remade again by Avco-Embassy in Great Britain. Ploddingly directed by Peter Collinson, this was even worse than the 1965 version. More changes were introduced in the characters, presumably in order to accommodate an international cast which included Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, Richard Attenborough, Gert Frobe, Charles Aznavour, Adolfo Celli and Herbert Lom. The action takes place neither on a Devonshire island nor in the Austrian Alps, but in the Shah Abah Hotel, in Isfahan, Iran. The voice of Orson Welles is heard as the assembled company’s mysterious host, Mr U. N. Owen.

Agatha Christie is said to have been appalled at the liberties taken with her play by the 1965 and 1975 films. The latter film received universally unfavourable reviews, that in the New York Times appearing under the headline, ‘Global disaster in Iran’.

The Regatta Mystery
POIROT & MISS MARPLE SHORT STORIES (1939)

The Regatta Mystery, a volume of short stories which takes its title from the first story, was published in the United States of America in 1939. It has never been published in Great Britain; but all the stories have appeared in other volumes published in Great Britain since 1939. Five of the stories are mysteries solved by Poirot, one is told by Miss Marple, and two are the only Parker Pyne stories which are not included in the 1934 volume, Parker Pyne Investigates (Mr Parker Pyne, Detective in the USA). The remaining story is one of Mrs Christie’s odd crypto-supernatural fragments.

In the title story, ‘The Regatta Mystery’, Mr Parker Pyne clears someone from suspicion of having stolen a valuable diamond from Isaac Pointz, a Hatton Garden diamond merchant. The theft is a cleverly organized affair, and takes place not in the City of London but in a restaurant at Portsmouth overlooking the harbour, where Isaac Pointz and his partner Leo Stein are entertaining a party of friends who have come ashore from Pointz’s yacht. ‘The Regatta Mystery’ is also to be found in Poirot Lends a Hand, Thirteen for Luck,⁵⁵ a selection of Agatha Christie mystery stories for young readers, published in the USA in 1961 and in Great Britain in 1966, and in Problem at Pollensa Bay (1991).

‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’, an excellent Poirot story narrated by Hastings, was expanded to almost twice its original length and given a new title, ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’, when it appeared in Great Britain in 1960 in a volume of short stories entitled The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding. The plot remains the same, but the later version of the story is told in the third person, and Hastings’ role has been usurped by Poirot’s efficient secretary, Miss Lemon.⁵⁶ Some of the characters’ names are slightly changed in the second version of the story: Lady Alice Chatterton becomes Lady Abbie Chatterton, Edward Clayton becomes Arnold Clayton; Marguerita Clayton changes the spelling of her name to Margharita, and Major Jack Rich becomes Major Charles Rich. These slight alterations can hardly have been for copyright reasons: you wonder why the author bothered to make them, and almost suspect monumental carelessness!

‘It is indeed the irony,’ Poirot says to himself in ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’, having asked his secretary to make a precis of some newspaper reports, ‘that after my dear friend Hastings I should have Miss Lemon. What greater contrast can one imagine? Ce cher Hastings – how he would have enjoyed himself. How he would have walked up and down talking about it, putting the most romantic construction on every incident, believing as gospel truth every word the papers have printed about it. And my poor Miss Lemon, what I have asked her to do, she will not enjoy at all!’

The title of ‘How Does Your Garden Grow’ is taken from the nursery rhyme,

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

How does your garden grow? With silver bells, and

cockle-shells,

And pretty maids all in a row.

Poirot has one of his sudden insights when he remembers the rhyme. How fortunate that his education as a child in Belgium was wide enough to include a course in old English nursery rhymes! The beginning of the story is similar to that of the novel, Dumb Witness (Poirot Loses a Client), discussed earlier. ‘How Does Your Garden Grow’ is also to be found in the collection of stories, Poirot’s Early Cases, published in both the United Kingdom and the United States in 1974. (The American title is Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases.)

‘Problem at Pollensa Bay’ is set on the Spanish island of Majorca, where the problem facing an English tourist is solved in a most engaging fashion by Mr Parker Pyne. The tourist, a middle-aged, middleclass mother, at one point in the story utters words which Mrs Christie might well have been prepared to speak in propria persona:

What are the years from twenty to forty? Fettered and bound by personal and emotional relationships. That’s bound to be. That’s living. But later there’s a new stage. You can think, observe life, discover something about other people and the truth about yourself. Life becomes real – significant. You see it as a whole. Not just one scene – the scene you, as an actor, are playing. No man or woman is actually himself or herself till after forty-five. That’s when individuality has a chance.

‘Problem at Pollensa Bay’ will also be found in the volume, Thirteen for Luck and in Problem at Pollensa Bay (1991).

‘Yellow Iris’, a first-rate Poirot story is virtually Sparkling Cyanide (a novel published in 1945) in embryonic form. At least, it adumbrates the central premise of Sparkling Cyanide (whose American title is Remembered Death). Poirot does not appear in the novel, whose investigators are Colonel Race and one other. ‘Yellow Iris’ includes the texts of two songs performed by a girl in a night-club, which reveal Agatha Christie to have had a pleasant, sub-Cowardish talent for popular lyrics. The story ends with a pair of lovers dancing to the second of the songs:

There’s nothing like Love for making you miserable

There’s nothing like Love for making you blue

Depressed

Possessed

Sentimental

Temperamental

There’s nothing like Love

For getting you down.

Mrs Christie would have been perfectly capable of composing the tune as well.

In ‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’, the only Miss Marple adventure which that good lady narrates herself, we are told that the name of her nephew Raymond’s wife is Joan. It appears to be the same girl that we knew when they were merely engaged, but her name then was Joyce. Readers in Great Britain will find ‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’ in the volume of stories entitled Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979). Its publication in this American volume The Regatta Mystery (1939) marks Miss Marple’s first appearance since the stories of The Tuesday Club Murders or The Thirteen Problems in 1932. She is not encountered again until The Body in the Library (1942). Two Miss Marple novels appeared in the nineteen-forties, four in the fifties, three in the sixties, and one in the seventies. (The Poirot novels continued to be more numerous: seven in the nineteen-forties, four in the fifties, four in the sixties, and two in the seventies.)

‘The Dream’ is a somewhat far-fetched but highly entertaining Poirot story which later appeared in the British volume, The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960). ‘In a Glass Darkly’, a chilling little tale of the supernatural, seems to have strayed into the wrong volume. It would have fitted perfectly into The Hound of Death in 1933: actually it did not find its way into a volume published in the UK until 1979 and Miss Marple’s Final Cases into which it fitted most imperfectly, not being one of Miss Marple’s cases! It was seen on television in 1982 as an episode in Thames TVs ten-part serial, The Agatha Christie Hour.

The final story in The Regatta Mystery is ‘Problem at Sea’, in which the problem solved by Poirot is that of discovering who plunged a dagger into the heart of one of the passengers of an ocean liner while the ship was at berth in Alexandria. The story was reprinted in (Hercule) Poirot’s Early Cases, published both in the UK and the US in 1974. It is also known as ‘The Mystery of the Crime in Cabin 66’ and ‘Crime in Cabin 66’. Under the latter title, it was published in 1944 by Vallency Press Ltd, London, as a sixteen-page booklet, one of a series of fourpenny ‘Polybooks’.

Two of the stories were adapted for television, with David Suchet as Poirot, and first transmitted on London Weekend TV in 1989 (‘The Dream’) and 1993 (‘Yellow Iris’).