The Mousetrap
PLAY (1952)
‘I knew after I had written The Hollow,’ Agatha Christie recalled in her autobiography, ‘that before long I should want to write another play, and if possible, I thought to myself, I was going to write another play that was not adapted from a book. I was going to write a play as a play.’ At this stage in her career, despite the existence of several successful ‘Agatha Christie plays’, she had written only two as original plays: the Poirot mystery, Black Coffee, staged in 1930, and the non-mystery play, Akhnaton, which had not been performed. The other plays which she had written, or of which in one instance she had been co-author, were those she had adapted from her novels or stories.
Having resolved to write an original play, one not based on any earlier work, Agatha Christie now proceeded to write the play known to the world as The Mousetrap, which was, however, based on her story ‘Three Blind Mice’, which was, in turn, based on her 1947 radio play of that name. The new play for the stage was written in the autumn of 1951 and called, naturally enough, ‘Three Blind Mice’. Shortly after Christmas, Agatha Christie asked Peter Saunders to lunch. ‘Over the coffee she handed me a brown paper parcel,’ Saunders recalled later, ‘and said, “This is a little present for you. Don’t unwrap it until you get back to your office.”’ The present was the script of a play called Three Blind Mice.
As soon as he had read the typescript, which was stained with innumerable coffee-cup circles, Saunders was keen to stage it. There was a slight difficulty concerning the nursery-rhyme title. It had been used earlier by another West End management for a moderately successful play, and it seemed advisable to choose a completely new title for Agatha Christie’s play. The author’s son-in-law, Anthony Hicks, made the suggestion that the title of a play mentioned in Shakespeare’s Hamlet should be lifted out of context and bestowed upon Three Blind Mice. In Act III, sc. ii of Hamlet, during the performance which Hamlet causes to be staged before Claudius and Gertrude, the King asks ‘What do you call the play?’ to which Hamlet replies, ‘The Mousetrap’. Later in his speech Hamlet refers to the play as a ‘knavish piece of work’, but it was very far from Anthony Hicks’ mind to imply any criticism of his mother-in-law’s play when he suggested that it be called The Mousetrap.
With Richard Attenborough and his wife, Sheila Sim, leading the cast, and directed by Peter Cotes, who had been recommended by Attenborough, The Mousetrap went into rehearsal in September 1952, and opened at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, on 6 October. It then toured to Oxford, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds and Birmingham, before opening in London at the Ambassadors Theatre on 25 November. The other members of the cast of eight, all of them of equal importance as characters – there are no star parts and no small roles in The Mousetrap – were Jessica Spencer, Aubrey Dexter, Mignon O’Doherty, Allan McClelland, Martin Miller and John Paul. (The play which Peter Saunders had read nearly a year earlier contained ten characters and required two sets. In the interests of economy, one set and two characters were disposed of by the playwright within hours!)
The reviews after the first night in London were almost uniformly favourable. ‘Even more thrilling than the plot is the atmosphere of shuddering suspense,’ wrote John Barber in the Daily Express, adding with more enthusiasm than literary ability, ‘No one brews it better than Agatha Christie.’ The Evening Standard declared: ‘What a wily mistress of criminal ceremonies Agatha Christie is. She is like a perfect hostess at a cocktail party.… There is none of this hiding of vital facts in Mrs Christie … it is this honesty of procedure that puts her so high in the ranks of police novel writers.’ ‘We have all of us been well and truly diddled,’ said the Weekly Sporting Review.
Pleased with the reception the play had been given, Peter Saunders told the playwright that he had hopes of a long run of twelve or fourteen months. Mrs Christie was more cautious: ‘It won’t run that long,’ she said. ‘Eight months perhaps.’
Set somewhere in Berkshire, in the depths of winter, in an old manor house converted for use as a guesthouse or private hotel, The Mousetrap is good, traditional Christie, presenting a number of people isolated from the outside world, in this case by a blizzard, and faced with the realization that one of them is a killer. The plot does not stray far from its beginnings in the radio play of 1947 and the story of the following year, so anyone planning to see The Mousetrap should avoid reading ‘Three Blind Mice’. The characters in the play are less fully realized than those in The Unexpected Guest or The Hollow, but they serve their purpose admirably as pawns in their author’s game. There are the young couple, Millie and Giles Ralston, the proprietors of Monkswell Manor who have no previous experience of catering, and there are their guests, expected and unexpected. Among the expected are the effeminate young architect who rejoices in the name of Christopher Wren, and the bossy matron, Mrs Boyle. Unexpected are Mr Paravicini, the somewhat mysterious foreigner whose car has broken down, and Detective Sergeant Trotter who turns up on skis. And there are two other guests. Several of these people are either other or more than they appear to be. A plot linking most of them with certain past events emerges from the circumstances of their apparently chance meeting as fellow-guests.
When Sergeant Trotter announces that a murderer for whom the police are searching is not only among the guests but has come to Monkswell Manor in search of his next victim, the atmosphere of suspicion, distrust and unease is palpable. Tension mounts, relationships waver, and sympathies are readjusted. As always with Agatha Christie at her best, the dénouement is startling and the end, thereafter, comes with the brutal swiftness of an early Verdi opera. Six important pieces of explanatory information are thrust forward in a page and a half of fast dialogue after the murderer is apprehended, and then a final joke brings the curtain down.
Who did it? Those who have seen the play in London have behaved impeccably for nearly fifty years in not spreading the news abroad to spoil the enjoyment of those who have yet to see it. There is one recorded exception: a taxi-driver who delivered a family party to the theatre where The Mousetrap was playing is said to have been so disgusted at the smallness of the tip he was given that he took his revenge by shouting after them as they walked towards the entrance, ‘…… did it!’
An unusual matinée performance of The Mousetrap was given on 14 May 1981, when six interpreters simultaneously translated the dialogue into sign language for the benefit of an audience of 350 deaf people.
Why should The Mousetrap, an ingenious, entertaining and well constructed murder mystery but not the best of Agatha Christie’s plays, have broken all theatrical records? Agatha Christie, pondering the question after the play had been running for thirteen years, thought that it was ninety per cent luck but that also ‘there is a bit of something in it for almost everybody: people of different age groups and tastes can enjoy seeing it’.
The Mousetrap is now fast approaching its fiftieth year in the West End of London. Twenty-one years after it had opened at the Ambassadors Theatre, the production transferred, on 25 March 1974, to the slightly larger St Martin’s Theatre, next door. After five-and-a-half years, it had broken the record for the longest-running play in London, previously held by the musical play Chu Chin Chow (1916). It went on to break whatever other records there were to be broken, and is, beyond any shadow of doubt, the most successful play ever staged anywhere at any time.
After eight years, Peter Saunders began a custom of changing the cast yearly, on the anniversary of the opening, and of having the production restaged by a new director. By 1981, one hundred and seventy-one actors and actresses had appeared in the London production, and the play had been performed in at least forty-one countries, including several in Eastern Europe. (It did no more than reasonably well, however, when staged in New York in 1952, though it ran for six months when revived at an ‘Off-Broadway’ theatre in the 1960–61 theatrical season. In Paris, as La Souricière, it lasted for more than two years.)
The success of The Mousetrap is, to put it mildly, somewhat disproportionate to its inherent quality. In the first years of its run, Peter Saunders nursed the production along, but for many years now he has merely had to give a party every so often, to celebrate and mark the passing of the years, and more publicity has generated more success which in turn has generated more publicity and so on ad, it would seem, infinitum. There was a spectacular 1958 party at the Savoy to celebrate the fact that The Mousetrap was now the longest-running play. At the tenth anniversary in 1962 when one thousand guests were invited, the doyenne of British theatre, Dame Sybil Thorndike, made a speech which began, ‘I have been chosen to make this speech because The Mousetrap is the oldest run in the theatre, and I am one of the oldest girls in show business.’ She presented Agatha Christie with a copy of the 1952 script of the play, bound in gold.
In 1972, a very frail Agatha Christie attended the twentieth anniversary party, but tried to avoid speaking to anyone except intimate friends because she had left her teeth at home. Nearly two years after her death, The Mousetrap celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday in November 1977, again at the Savoy, and in 1992 its fortieth. There is now no reason why it should ever close. Tourists alone, on whose list of things to see in London it features along with Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, could easily keep it alive for as long as the tourist industry survives.
When the company gave a performance of The Mousetrap at Wormwood Scrubs, a London gaol, two prisoners in the audience took the opportunity to escape, thus giving the play some additional publicity. In 1968, the journalist Bernard Levin produced some odd statistics relating to the play’s run. ‘In nearly sixteen years,’ he wrote, ‘after sixteen leading ladies, twenty-six miles of shirts, four carpets, six thousand cigars, eleven tons of programmes, no one has built a more successful Mousetrap.’ The wardrobe mistress who had ironed the twenty-six miles of shirts was interviewed in a popular London newspaper. The figures have now to be regularly updated. It was several years ago that the souvenir programme of The Mousetrap sold at the theatre referred to forty-six miles of shirts and one hundred and sixty tons of programmes! When Agatha Christie was once asked, ‘Is The Mousetrap being kept on to beat more records?’ she replied in some bewilderment, ‘What records are there to beat?’
To whom do the profits go? When The Mousetrap opened in 1952, Agatha Christie gave all her rights in the play to her grandson, Mathew Prichard, who was then nine years old. He is now in his late-fifties, and the play has made him a millionaire. As his grandmother tartly observed:1 ‘Mathew, of course, was always the most lucky member of the family, and it would be Mathew’s gift that turned out the big money winner.’
Authority to negotiate various subsidiary rights in the play was acquired, along with stage production rights, by Peter Saunders, who sold the film rights to Romulus Films in 1956, a condition of the sale being that no film could be released until six months after the end of the London stage run. The rights have changed hands since then, but Peter Saunders has so far been unsuccessful in his attempts to buy them back. Apparently, someone in the film industry believes that somewhere, someday, a film will be made of The Mousetrap.
Success breeds jealousy, envy, and a certain crabbedness of the spirit. Nicholas de Jongh of the London Guardian complained that ‘Mr Peter Saunders must have deprived other theatre managers of the opportunity of presenting daring, experimental, or difficult plays.’ Neither of the two West End commercial theatres in which The Mousetrap has played has ever housed anything remotely resembling a daring, experimental or difficult play. The daring, the experimental and the difficult continue to open and close with monotonous regularity in countless London fringe theatres, completely unaffected by the monstrously unfair success of the undaring, non-experimental and entertaining Mousetrap.
A Pocketful of Rye
MISS MARPLE (1953)
With the Mallowan expedition in Nimrud, in addition to writing her novels in the mornings, and helping with the photography, the cataloguing and the repairing of ivories and other items in the afternoons and evenings, Agatha Christie also acquired a reputation as the team’s chronicler of events in verses which became known as ‘Agatha’s Odes’. Max Mallowan had a secretary, Barbara Parker. Good-humoured and hard working, ‘a woman of dauntless courage, usually dressed in white, red or blue Kurdish trousers, florally adorned,’2 Miss Parker was also, it seems, noisy in the early morning. Agatha dedicated an ode to her:
Is that a fog horn that I hear,
Rising in the morning air?
No, it comes from Barbara’s tent;
Up she gets on duty bent,
Dons her Kurdish trousers gay,
Once again it’s ladies day!
And once more the trumpet goes
As our Miss Parker blows her nose!
In 1953, Penguin Books reprinted six Agatha Christie crime novels, with prefaces newly written by the author. Two novels, one featuring Poirot and one Miss Marple, were published during the year, and a new Christie play, Witness for the Prosecution, was staged.
With the Miss Marple novel, A Pocketful of Rye, the reader is plunged again into the Christiean nursery rhyme syndrome: a series of murders committed concurrently with the progress of the images in a nursery rhyme. The rhyme on this occasion is ‘Sing a song of sixpence’, which must have been one of Agatha Christie’s favourites, for she had already made use of it in two short stories, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ (from The Listerdale Mystery, 1934) and ‘Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds’ (from Three Blind Mice, 1948). Miss Marple discerns that the rhyme is the link between a series of rather odd murders, when the third victim, a parlour maid who had at one time been employed by her, is found dead, strangled by a nylon stocking and with a clothes-peg clipped onto her nose. The two earlier victims, she claims, can be seen as the king and queen of the rhyme:
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye,
Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?
The king was in his counting house, counting out his money,
The queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey,
The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes,
Along came a dicky bird, and nipped off her nose.
The first victim, though not a king, was a financier whose name was Rex (Latin for ‘king’) Fortescue and the loose grain (rye?) found in his pocket was perplexing. Fortescue’s wife was poisoned with cyanide at tea-time. The clothes-peg on the parlour maid’s nose no doubt symbolized the dicky bird, but some non-symbolical, real blackbirds are involved in the story as well. ‘Have you gone into the question of blackbirds?’ Miss Marple asks a puzzled policeman, Inspector Neele. Neele is not one of the Christiean regulars, but an investigating officer who makes only one further appearance, in Third Girl (1966), which is a pity for he is an attractive and potentially interesting character.
Most of the action takes place in and around Yewtree Lodge, Rex Fortescue’s house in the outer suburban stockbroker-belt, a house whose model was the residence of Mr and Mrs Christie at Sunningdale which had already found its way into the pages of Taken at the Flood (1948) and Crooked House (1949). The characters are well drawn, and, although the nursery rhyme parallel seems at moments rather forced, there may be a reason for this. Mrs Christie, after all, was by this time quite experienced in juggling rhymes and crimes. She was also, of course, mistress of the ambiguous statement, but did she overreach herself with an especially cheeky sentence in an early chapter of A Pocketful of Rye) The really astute reader may well think so, and in consequence may even correctly guess the murderer. An interest in, or at least an awareness of, geography would be an advantage on this occasion.
‘How well she nearly always writes, the dear, decadent old death trafficker,’ said Maurice Richardson of A Pocketful of Rye in the London Observer. ‘They ought to make her a Dame or a D. Litt.’ (In due course ‘they’ were to do both.) And it was in her review of this novel in The Bookman that the distinguished historian C. V. Wedgwood wrote:
Mrs Christie always plays fair; her puzzles work out with near plausibility and no loose ends; her social settings, her characters and her dialogue are always accurately observed. There is no better all-round craftsman in the field.
A television adaptation of the play, starring Penelope Keith as Clarissa, was first transmitted by BBC TV on Christmas Day 1982.
After the Funeral
Alternative title: Funerals Are Fatal
POIROT (1953)
After the Funeral is the British title, and Funerals Are Fatal the American. It was immediately after the funeral of the wealthy Richard Abernethie, when his relatives were gathered in Abernethie’s country house in the north of England to hear his will read, that the dead man’s sister, Mrs Cora Lansquenet, disconcerted the others by remarking, quite casually, ‘But he was murdered, wasn’t he?’ It had been assumed that Abernethie, an elderly man, had died a natural death. When Cora was discovered dead shortly afterwards, the circumstances were such that there could be no doubt that she was murdered. The family solicitor, Mr Entwhistle, pursued certain enquiries, and then decided to consult Hercule Poirot.
This time, Christie the conjuror has begun her tricks almost while the audience are still settling into their seats. She is at her best with complicated family relationships, and the Abernethie family is so complicated that a family tree is provided. The reader may or may not be helped by a study of the family tree: he would certainly do well to resist the author’s determined attempt to force his attention in a certain direction.
The Delphic ambiguities emanating from the preceding paragraph are as nothing compared with Mrs Christie’s mystifications in After the Funeral, which is a distinctly above-average example of her tales of soured family relationships. The motive for the crime is very successfully concealed until the author is ready to reveal it; but then it is comparatively easy to conceal a motive from the reader if the reader has also to grapple with the question, ‘Motive for what?’
Mr Goby, an eccentric private investigator with whom Poirot had been associated in The Mystery of the Blue Train a quarter of a century earlier, comes out of retirement to assist the detective again. He is to make two further appearances in Hercule Poirot novels, in Third Girl and Elephants Can Remember.
‘Women are never kind,’ Poirot observes at one point in the narrative, ‘though they can sometimes be tender.’ The great detective’s attitude to the other sex has always been more than slightly perplexing. He is sentimental about mother-love, cynical about romantic attachments (though he carries a tender regard for the Countess Vera Rossakoff with him throughout life), and not, it seems, at all interested in the sexual act per se. More than one prurient reader has hinted at homosexual leanings, and even suggested that Poirot and Hastings – but, no, it is inconceivable. Poirot and Hastings were just good friends. We know that Hastings was susceptible to red-haired females, and indeed that he married one. Poirot is one of those admittedly rare beings to whom sex does not appear to have been important at any time in their lives.
The negligence of Mrs Christie’s editors has been remarked upon earlier. An example of it occurs in After the Funeral, in Chapter VIII, when Dr Larraby is made by the author to say that Abernethie had been suffering from a disease which would have proved fatal within, ‘at the earliest’, two years, when from the context it is clear that ‘at the latest’ is meant. What are editors for, if not to prevent readers from discovering that writers are capable of making mistakes?
The series of Miss Marple films made in the 1960s had already been mentioned. The second film, Murder at the Gallop, in which Miss Marple joins a riding academy to investigate the death of an old recluse, is based, very distantly, on After the Funeral, with Poirot turned into Miss Marple, and the plot turned by a scriptwriter named James Cavenaugh into a pointless jumble. ‘I get an unregenerate pleasure when I think they’re not being a success,’ Mrs Christie said of these films. This one was directed by George Pollock, and featured Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple. (‘To me she’s always looked like a bloodhound,’ the author is reported to have said.) Charles Tingwell, Robert Morley, Flora Robson and Stringer Davis play the other leading roles.
Murder at the Gallop was released in 1963, and a new paperback edition of After the Funeral was issued in that year by Agatha Christie’s British publishers as Murder at the Gallop, in order to achieve additional sales as ‘the book of the film’.
Witness for the Prosecution
PLAY (1953)
The Mousetrap had been running for some weeks when Peter Saunders, staying for a few days at Agatha Christie’s home in Devon, suggested to the author that she should adapt for the stage one of her short stories, ‘Witness for the Prosecution’.3 Mrs Christie thought this would be too difficult a task, and doubted her ability to write a convincing courtroom scene. Saunders’ attempts to persuade her that she could do it finally led Agatha Christie to say to him, ‘If you think there’s a play in it, write it yourself.’ This he proceeded to do, and in due course delivered a first draft of the play to Mrs Christie at her London apartment. When she had read it, she told him she did not think the play, as it stood, was good enough, but that he certainly had showed her how it could be done. Six weeks later, her typescript arrived on his desk, and Saunders immediately made plans to put the play into production. It opened in Glasgow, and toured to Edinburgh and Sheffield, before London.
‘It was one of my plays that I liked best myself,’ Agatha Christie wrote in An Autobiography. ‘I was as nearly satisfied with that play as I have been with any.’ She took great pains to get the courtroom scene right, reading several of the Famous Trials series of books, and asking questions of barristers and solicitors, until ‘finally I got interested and suddenly I felt I was enjoying myself – that wonderful moment in writing which does not usually last long, but which carries one on with a terrific verve as a large wave carries you to shore.’ It was, she thought, one of the quickest pieces of writing she had achieved, taking no more than two or three weeks after her preparatory reading had been done. In later years, she was to say that she thought Witness for the Prosecution the best play she had written.
On the play’s first night at the Winter Garden Theatre, in Drury Lane, London,4 28 October 1953, the audience sat spellbound by the ingenuity of the surprise ending. At the curtain call, the entire cast of twenty-eight5 lined the front of the stage and bowed to the author, who was seated in a box. ‘So I was happy,’ she wrote6
and made even more so by the applause of the audience. I skipped away as usual after the curtain came down on my ending and out into Long Acre. In a few moments, while I was looking for the waiting car, I was surrounded by crowds of friendly people, quite ordinary members of the audience, who recognized me, patted me on the back, and encouraged me – ‘Best you’ve written, dearie!’ ‘First class – thumbs up, I’d say!’ ‘V-signs for this one!’ and ‘Loved every minute of it!’ Autograph books were produced, and I signed cheerfully and happily. My self-consciousness and nervousness, just for once, were not with me. Yes, it was a memorable evening. I am proud of it still. And every now and then I dig into the memory chest, bring it out, take a look at it, and say, ‘That was the night, that was!’
Witness for the Prosecution played for 468 performances at the Winter Garden Theatre, and enjoyed an even longer run of 646 performances in New York, where it opened on 16 December 1954. The leading roles in London were played by David Home (as Sir Wilfrid Robarts, the QC who defends Leonard Vole), Derek Blomfield (as Leonard Vole) and Patricia Jessel (as Vole’s wife, Romaine). The play was directed by Wallace Douglas. In New York the following year, Agatha Christie’s old friend and Poirot interpreter, Francis L. Sullivan, played Sir Wilfrid, and Patricia Jessel repeated her London success as Romaine. The director was Robert Lewis. The New York Drama Critics Circle chose Witness for the Prosecution as the best foreign play of 1954, with Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as the best American play.
The London reviews were almost unanimously enthusiastic. ‘Agatha Christie must be happy this morning,’ wrote the Daily Mirror critic. ‘While one thriller, The Mousetrap, is packing them in at the Ambassadors Theatre, another play opened with great success last night at the Winter Garden Theatre.’ It was left to the legal magazine, The Magistrate, to find fault with at least one aspect of Mrs Christie’s courtroom scene. Her counsel, The Magistrate considered, ‘are properly counsel-like in manner and mannerisms, but most umealistically succinct in speech.’ That, however, could be construed as a criticism of the legal profession rather than of the playwright.
In the excerpt from her autobiography two paragraphs above, Mrs Christie speaks of the curtain coming down ‘on my ending’. The personal pronoun is important, for the play ends differently to the story on which it is based. The story, written in the early 1930s, has a superb ending which allows the murderer to get away with it. By 1953, however, the author was no longer prepared to see murder (or at any rate this particular murderer) go unpunished. The murderer escapes legal justice but not private retribution. This is meted out in the last moments of the play in an ending which seems ‘tacked-on’ and which, though morally impeccable, is aesthetically deplorable. Most people concerned with the production of the play had wanted the author to retain the original end of the story. ‘I stuck out over the end,’ said Mrs Christie. ‘I don’t often stick out for things, I don’t always have sufficient conviction, but I had here. I wanted that end. I wanted it so much that I wouldn’t agree to have the play put on without it.’7 Apart from its expansion for the stage, there are no other significant differences between story and play. Leonard Vole’s Viennese wife has become a Berliner, for no obvious reason.
Agatha Christie would not have agreed, and no doubt the Agatha Christie Estate would not agree, but this entertaining and ingenious play would be even better than it is if the final curtain were to come down about a minute and a half earlier, after Sir Wilfrid Robarts says, ‘I see no reason to change my opinion.’
In 1957, Agatha Christie having sold the film rights for £116,000, Witness for the Prosecution became an expensively made Hollywood film, directed by Billy Wilder for United Artists, and starring Charles Laughton as Sir Wilfrid, Tyrone Power as Leonard Vole, and Marlene Dietrich as Vole’s wife, whose name was changed from Romaine to Christine. A number of Hollywood-based British performers appeared in the film, among them Charles Laughton’s wife, Elsa Lanchester, for whom a role was written into the film; Henry Danieli, who in London in 1928 had played the buder in Alibi, the stage adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; Ian Wolfe; Una O’Connor; John Williams; and Torin Thatcher. The screenplay was written by Billy Wilder and Harry Kurnitz. A facsimile of a courtroom in London’s Old Bailey was constructed on Stage Four on the Sam Goldwyn lot, at a cost of $75,000. Much was made of the surprise ending, and the publicity department placed a huge, framed placard outside the studio while filming was taking place, which all visitors were obliged to sign:
‘WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION’
No One – But No One – Ever Told the Secret!
In faithful compliance with the conspiracy of silence entered into by everyone who has seen Agatha Christie’s remarkable play ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ which is being produced for the screen by Arthur Hornblow for United Artists release, I agree to continue this silence by promising not to reveal any of the secrets relating to its electrifying climax. Therefore if, working on or visiting its sets during photography, I discover clues which lead to the disclosure of the surprise ending, I promise to let other people enjoy discovering it for themselves – properly, in a theater.
Among the signatures on the poster are those of Noël Coward, William Holden and Burt Lancaster. Security was apparently strictly enforced: a publicity still issued in advance of the film’s release shows the director Billy Wilder denying Sam Goldwyn entry to his own sound stage. As for the film, it was good enough to survive a flashback scene in post-war Berlin, in which Marlene Dietrich entertains the army of occupation by singing a song entitled, ‘I’ll Never Go Home Any More’! Miss Dietrich gave a virtuoso performance as Christine Vole, Charles Laughton enjoyed himself hugely as Sir Wilfrid, and that intelligent film star and underrated actor, Tyrone Power, utilized the strain of weakness in his own undoubted charm to offer a convincing portrait of Leonard Vole. Photographed in black and white, this was the best Christie film since the 1945 version of Ten Little Niggers, and is still one of the best.
Destination Unknown
Alternative title: So Many Steps to Death
(1954)
In 1954, the year in which she received the first Grand Masters Award of the Mystery Writers of America, Agatha Christie published one novel and had a new play staged in London. On 16 December, her 1953 play Witness for the Prosecution opened on Broadway, and two days later the London Daily Telegraph noted that drama critics in New York had been unanimous in finding it one of the most exciting and best acted plays seen in New York for years, and that Patricia Jessel and Francis L. Sullivan had collected a number of very favourable reviews for their performances.
The 1954 novel was Destination Unknown, which was not published in the United States until the following year, when it appeared as So Many Steps to Death. This is one of the Christie thrillers. In fact, it could be said to form the central part of a trilogy of post-Second World War thrillers which also includes They Came to Baghdad (1951) and Passenger to Frankfurt (1970), for these three novels share a basic plot premise concerning the existence of a wealthy megalomaniac determined on world domination or anarchy, and they also resemble one another in that their author’s personal opinions intrude into the narrative much less circumspectly than in her domestic crime novels.
These opinions, as we have seen earlier, range from the cautiously liberal to the conservative. A tolerance of ‘misguided’ reformers of the left oddly increases as the years go by, and is certainly more easily discernible in the works written in the fifties than those written thirty years earlier, but the general message emanating from Agatha Christie is that which she puts into the mind of Hilary Craven, the heroine of Destination Unknown:
Why do you decry the world we live in? There are good people in it. Isn’t muddle a better breeding ground for kindliness and individuality than a world order that’s imposed, a world order that may be right today and wrong tomorrow? I would rather have a world of kindly, faulty human beings, than a world of superior robots who’ve said goodbye to pity and understanding and sympathy.
Hilary Craven is another of those Christie characters who is saved from suicide by the intervention of a stranger. The stranger, this time, is a British Secret Service agent who cleverly suggests to Hillary that, if she doesn’t mind dying, she might like to combine it with doing her country a service in the meantime. Hilary is roped into an adventure involving the mysterious disappearance of promising young scientists, and thus she rediscovers the will to live.
Destination Unknown was written at a time when one or two cases of missing scientists had made international headlines (the Fuchs and Pontecorvo affairs), and the novel postulates not a Soviet Communist plot but something odder. The action moves from England to Casablanca to a remote spot in the High Adas Mountains of northwest Africa where a secret scientific complex exists, disguised as a leper colony. The dénouement is unusual for two reasons. One is that it is accomplished without bloodshed and that, in a sense, the evil mind behind the conspiracy (if, that is, it can be called an evil mind) survives to go on to the next coup. Another is that embedded in all the international intrigue is a domestic murder mystery, which surfaces only in the final sentence of the penultimate chapter at the point at which it is solved.
This, like so many of Agatha Christie’s thrillers, is both a farrago of hokum and a first-rate adventure story. It moves swiftly, but not at the expense of intelligent characterization, and Hilary Craven is one of the most engaging of a long line of mercurial Christiean heroines. Although, like most of the thrillers, Destination Unknown is viewed somewhat disparagingly by Christie commentators, it can safely be said that, if you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you will like. It is, of its kind, excellent and entertaining.
Spider’s Web
PLAY (1954)
With two Agatha Christie successes on his hands, The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution, Peter Saunders now launched a third. Over lunch at the Mirabelle in Mayfair, he arranged a meeting between Agatha Christie and the popular British film actress, Margaret Lockwood, who ten years earlier had been the top money-making star in British films, but who was now tired of playing femmes fatales. She had appeared in one or two plays, among them Barrie’s Peter Pan and Shaw’s Pygmalion, and now wanted to play a modern role, preferably in a comedy.
Agatha Christie agreed to write a play for Margaret Lockwood, and to provide her with a role which would display the actress’s talent for comedy. She even agreed, at Miss Lockwood’s request, to include a role for the well-known light comedy actor, Wilfrid Hyde White, but when the script was completed Hyde White did not like his role, which was played instead by Felix Aylmer.
Spider’s Web, directed by Wallace Douglas, and with Margaret Lockwood and Felix Aylmer supported by a first-rate cast including Harold Scott, Myles Eason, Margaret Barton and Judith Furse, opened out-of-town at the Theatre Royal Nottingham, underwent some rewriting on tour, and came to the Savoy Theatre, London, on 14 December 1954, where it stayed for 774 performances, joining The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution in the West End. Agatha Christie now had three successful plays running simultaneously in London.
The author herself was pleased with Spider’s Web. She enjoyed writing the role of Clarissa (a form of her own mother’s name, Clara) for Margaret Lockwood who, she thought, had ‘an enormous flair for comedy, as well as being able to be dramatic’. ‘When Margaret Lockwood proceeded to lead the Police Inspector up the garden path she was enchanting,’ Agatha Christie wrote in her autobiography. The actress’s comedy technique and splendid sense of timing certainly contributed greatly to the success of the play’s first production.
Clarissa, the wife of a Foreign Office diplomat, is a delightful character, much given to daydreaming, and to playing a game with herself which she calls ‘Supposing’:
Supposing I were to come down one morning and find a dead body in the library, what should I do? Or supposing a woman were to be shown in here one day and told me that she and Henry had been secretly married in Constantinople, and that our marriage was bigamous, what should I say to her? Or supposing I had to choose between betraying my country and seeing Henry shot before my eyes? (She smiles suddenly at Jeremy) Or, even – (she sits in the armchair) supposing I were to run away with Jeremy, what would happen next?
Clarissa has her chance to find out, when she does discover a body, not in the library but in the drawing-room of her house in Kent. For what are made to seem perfectly sensible reasons, it becomes necessary to dispose of the body before her husband Henry arrives home with an important foreign politician, so Clarissa persuades her three house guests to become accessories and accomplices. The murdered man was not unknown to certain members of the house party. Why he was killed is as much a mystery as by whom, and Clarissa’s attempts simultaneously to persuade a police inspector that there has been no murder and to discover the identity of the murderer are highly diverting in both senses of the word.
The play is an enjoyable comedy-thriller which does not attempt to rival the complex plots of The Mousetrap or Witness for the Prosecution, but which is highly successful on its own level. It makes satirical and ironic use of that creaky old device, the secret passage. ‘Exit Clarissa mysteriously,’ declaimed Margaret Lockwood, disappearing into it as the Savoy Theatre curtain fell on the last act, always to thunderous and delighted applause. Though no one knew it at the time, it was falling also on Agatha Christie’s last big success in the theatre. Some of her subsequent plays did better than others, but none was to come anywhere near rivalling the great trio of the mid-fifties: The Mousetrap, Witness for the Prosecution, and Spider’s Web.
In 1960, a colour film of Spider’s Web was made by the Danziger Brothers in England, and released by United Artists. Run-of-the-mill direction by one Godfrey Grayson vitiated perfectly good, necessarily stagey performances by Glynis Johns (Clarissa), John Justin, Ronald Howard and others. That popular British husband-and-wife musical comedy team of the thirties, Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert, played the roles originally taken on the stage by Judith Furse and Felix Aylmer.
Adapted by Charles Osborne as a novel, Spider’s Web was first published in the autumn of 2000.
Hickory Dickory Dock
Alternative title: Hickory Dickory Death
POIROT (1955)
Agatha Christie celebrated her sixty-fifth birthday in 1955. For some years now, her life and that of Max Mallowan had followed a set pattern, between Nimrud, London and Devon; though not too firmly set, for there were a number of incidental pleasures to vary the routine. One of Mrs Christie’s pleasures was buying houses, and furnishing them. At one time she owned eight houses, and, though she was persuaded to part with a number of them, she did so with great reluctance.
A particular pleasure for Agatha Christie in 1955 must have been the occasion when Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh visited their local repertory theatre, the Theatre Royal, Windsor, to see the company perform Witness for the Prosecution. Declining to make use of the Royal Box, the Queen and her party sat in the balcony stalls. After the performance the royal visitors went backstage where the playwright and members of the cast were presented to the Queen.
It was by now customary for a new Agatha Christie title to be published in the summer or autumn of each year: ‘A Christie for Christmas’ was the publisher’s slogan. The 1955 Christie was a Poirot novel, called in Great Britain Hickory Dickory Dock after the nursery rhyme (‘Hickory Dickory Dock/The mouse ran up the clock/The clock struck one, the mouse ran down/Hickory Dickory Dock’) and in the United States Hickory Dickory Death, which sounds smart but means nothing.
The British title is almost equally meaningless, for there is no connection between the old rhyme and Agatha Christie’s plot. In vain does she allow Poirot to quote the rhyme at the end, merely because he hears a clock strike, or insert a parody of it into the mouth of one of the suspects earlier in the novel (‘… The police said “Boo”, I wonder who/Will eventually stand in the dock’). In vain does she set the scene of the crimes in Hickory Road. The connection refuses to be made, and Mrs Christie ought not to have allowed her fixation on nursery rhymes to land her with so unsuitable a title.
That said, it must be admitted that Hickory Dickory Dock is both interesting and entertaining, though the solving of the case involving three murders can hardly be counted as one of Hercule Poirot’s greatest triumphs. Poirot is led into the affair through his secretary, the chillingly efficient Miss Lemon. We first met Miss Lemon back in 1934 when she worked for Mr Parker Pyne (Parker Pyne Investigates), and later encountered her as Poirot’s secretary in some of the short stories in The Regatta Mystery and The Labours of Hercules. This is Miss Lemon’s first appearance in a Poirot novel, and it is only now that we – and, apparently, her employer – discover her first name to be Felicity. Felicity Lemon’s usual efficiency is impaired because she is worried about her sister who manages a student hostel where strange things have been occurring.
Foreign students sent to 26 Hickory Road by their Embassies, by the British Council, by the London University Lodging Board? This is not the usual world of Agatha Christie, but she makes a brave and remarkably successful attempt to move, temporarily, with the times, away from the grand country houses or the cosy cottages of St Mary Mead and into the genteel squalor of students’ London in the mid-1950s. And she drags Hercule Poirot with her. Poirot even delivers a lecture to the students on some of his past successes, giving away part of the plot of an earlier novel in the process. To most of the students he is hardly known at all, although one of them betrays some knowledge of the events of Mrs McGinty’s Dead.
Poirot has gone to Hickory Road to look into an outbreak of petty theft, but soon finds himself investigating murder. And why have the thefts led to murder? What is it all about? Those whose memories go back more than a quarter of a century to the episode of ‘The Ambassador’s Boots’ in the Tommy and Tuppence adventure, Partners in Crime, may have an advantage.
The students are clearly and sometimes amusingly characterized: the American Sally Finch, the West African Mr Akibombo, the Indians Chandra Lal and Gopal Ram (to find this name, Mrs Christie seems to have overturned Ram Gopal, an Indian dancer well-known in Great Britain in the fifties), and an assortment of British students. One of the female students simulates an odd neurosis in order to attract the interest of an otherwise absent-minded young psychologist, and this makes muddy for a time the waters into which Poirot attempts to peer.
Stronger on characterization than on plot, Hickory Dickory Dock has its supporters and its detractors, critical opinion of the novel having been divided from the beginning. The mystery writer Francis Iles, reviewing it in the London Sunday Times, wrote: ‘It reads like a tired effort. The usual sparkle is missing, the plot is far-fetched and the humour too easy (all foreigners are funny, but coloured foreigners are funnier).’ On the other hand, the reviewer in the Sunday Times’s rival newspaper, The Observer, noted that ‘One is pleased, though not in the least surprised, to find her so vociferously sound on the colour problem.’
Hickory Dickory Dock is mentioned in the Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, though not by title. In his entry for 18 July 1955, Waugh enumerates ‘the joys and sorrows of a simple life’. Among the joys are ‘A new Agatha Christie story which began well’, while the sorrows include ‘the deterioration of Mrs Christie’s novel a third of the way through into twaddle’.8
In the early sixties, there were plans to turn Hickory Dickory
Dock into a lavish stage musical. The idea emanated with the well-known merchant, arts patron and entrepreneur, Sir Nicholas (‘Micky’) Sekers. Impresarios Peter Daubeny and Bernard Delfont were both involved in the project, a young John Wells (author and star of the 1981 stage success, Anyone for Denis?) gave up a safe teaching job to write the script, and the music was to be (and some of it actually was) written by an equally young Bulgarian, Alexis Weissenberg (a Sekers protegé who went on to become an internationally-known concert pianist). It was expected that Johnny Dankworth would orchestrate Weissenberg’s score. Sean Kenny was mentioned as designer, and Peter Sellers as Poirot.
John Wells produced a first draft, entitled Death Beat, and he and Weissenberg had more than one meeting with Agatha Christie, at which they played and read parts of the show to her. Mrs Christie was enormously impressed with Weissenberg’s playing: ‘God, it must be wonderful to be you,’ John Wells remembered her explaining to his collaborator. She was helpful to Wells, and thoroughly professional in her approach to the work in hand. But something, somehow, went wrong, Delfont failed to sustain his interest in the project, and eventually the whole thing fell apart. Presumably Alexis Weissenberg still has the tunes he wrote for the principal numbers. Certainly John Wells kept his script in a bottom drawer to the end of his life.
A television adaptation of Hickory Dickory Dock, with David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 12 February 1995.
Dead Man’s Folly
POIROT (1956)
At the beginning of 1956 Queen Elizabeth II made Agatha Christie a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). The announcement came on New Year’s Day, in the New Year’s Honours List.
In September, Towards Zero, the play which the author and Gerald Verner had fashioned from her 1944 novel, was staged in London.
A news item in the London Daily Telegraph on 20 November announced that, because of what the newspaper referred to euphemistically as the ‘Suez dispute,’9 the manager of the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, Kent, had decided the previous evening to cancel the production of Agatha Christie’s play, Murder on the Nile, which the resident company had planned to stage the following week. Although there was nothing offensive to anyone’s national or political sensibilities in the play itself, the manager thought its title, in the circumstances, might be considered ‘a little unfortunate’.
The 1956 Christie was Dead Man’s Folly. During the year, The Burden by Mary Westmacott was also published.
The first of the murders in Dead Man’s Folly occurs at one of those typically English affairs, the village fête which is held on a Saturday afternoon in summer in the grounds of the local manor house. At Nasse House, in Nassecombe, on the river Helm in Devon, that celebrated detective-story writer Mrs Ariadne Oliver agrees to take part in the fête and to invent a Murder Hunt, based on the Treasure Hunt game. During the fête, a local girl, cast as ‘the body’ in the Murder Hunt, is found dead.
The local names are fictitious. For Nasse House and the river Helm, read Greenway House and the Dart, for Agatha Christie has based this ‘big white Georgian house looking out over the river’ on the house on the upper reaches of the Dart which she and Max Mallowan had purchased in 1939 and had lived in since the end of the war. (The author’s daughter and son-in-law now occupy it.) She has even made use of Greenway House’s boathouse: ‘It jutted out on to the river and was a picturesque thatched affair.’10 That was where Mrs Oliver intended ‘the body’ to be discovered, and that is where, despite the presence of Hercule Poirot at the fête, it is discovered.
Poirot was summoned by Mrs Oliver, who had vague forbodings that something might go wrong, for she had been staying at Nasse House for a day or two before the fête, and sensed that the atmosphere was somehow wrong. Dead Man’s Folly begins with Mrs Oliver’s phone call to Poirot, whose telephone number, trivia collectors will want to note, as TRAfalgar 8137. ‘I don’t know if you’ll remember me,’ Mrs Oliver says to Poirot, but of course he does. They first met twenty years earlier (see Cards on the Table, 1936) and, again, only four years earlier when Poirot investigated the death of Mrs McGinty (Mrs McGinty’s Dead, 1952).
And so Poirot takes a train to Devon, and to the riverside house not far from Dartmoor. The moor, one of Agatha Christie’s favourite places where in old age she still loved to picnic with family and friends, does not intrude into the narrative but is palpably there in the background as it is in more than one other Christie novel. (The chauffeur who conveys Poirot from the railway station at Nassecombe to Nasse House attempts to draw the great detective’s attention to the beauties of the scene – ‘The River Helm, sir, with Dartmoor in the distance’ – and Poirot makes the proper appreciative noises although he has very little interest in nature and scenery.)
More often than not, when characters in a Christie novel refer to previous events which are irrelevant to the plot it will be found that the reference is to an earlier novel. As we have seen, such references can sometimes be irritatingly indiscreet. But, in Dead Man’s Folly, when Poirot claims to remember the local police investigator, Inspector Bland, from fifteen years ago when Bland was a young Sergeant, he appears to be recalling a case which has not been recorded. The reader has not previously met Inspector Bland.
Dead Man’s Folly is a good, average, traditional Poirot novel, entertaining though not outstanding. The colourful Ariadne Oliver, Mrs Christie’s good-natured parody of herself and her writing habits, plays a leading part: the story would lack flavour without her. Mrs Oliver’s appearances in Christie novels, mostly those also involving Poirot, will become increasingly frequent in future years, and always to splendid effect.
At the end of Dead Man’s Folly, Poirot announces his solution and identifies the murderer, but the novel ends before the person in question is apprehended by the police. In fact, it is not absolutely certain that an arrest will take place, for Poirot’s brilliant guesses are not always supported by the kind of evidence that would stand up in a court of law. Often, he has to trick his criminal into confession or collapse. Here, the question is left open. The feeling, however, is that the killer, ‘ruthless … without pity … and without conscience’ as described by a close relative, will not get away with it.
Some critics of this novel have failed to be convinced by the author that an army deserter could return to his local village disguised only by a beard and a change of name, and not be recognized. They have a point.
A TV movie of Dead Man’s Folly was made in 1986, with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot.
The Burden
MARY WESTMACOTT (1956)
Agatha Christie was in her mid-sixties when she wrote The Burden, the last of her Mary Westmacott novels. Thereafter, her ‘extra-mural’ writing time was devoted almost exclusively to her autobiography, and her ‘official’ time devoted with almost as much vigour as she had displayed ten and twenty years earlier to producing her crime novels. She continued to publish at least one each year, approximately a third of them featuring Poirot, a third Miss Marple, and a third making do without either of her most popular characters.
‘There is nothing immoral in my books, only murder,’ Mrs Christie once said to A. L. Rowse,11 and you can see what she meant. But, of course, there is much that is immoral in the Mary Westmacott novels, although there are no murders. There is obsessive jealousy, cruelty, greed, hatred, and adultery which, in certain circumstances, qualifies as immorality. In The Burden, there is a great amount of guilt which, if it is not immoral, is certainly destructive. The burden, however, is not that of guilt but of love, the over-protective love of an elder sister for a younger, the substitute-mother love of Laura for Shirley which leads to the younger sister’s disastrous marriage.
The end of the novel is over-explicit, or perhaps merely too compressed, but, as always with Mary Westmacott, the characters ring true, and you can discern in them traces of people in Agatha Christie’s life, though she does not anywhere attempt to place a real person in a fictitious situation. Having been married to Archie Christie helped her to understand and to describe Shirley’s husband, Henry, and to deal ironically with his charm but gently with his abhorrence of responsibility. To love is a burden for Henry, just as to be loved is a burden for Laura, the elder sister, who comes to an acceptance of it only after much pain and distress have been caused by her attempts to protect her younger sister from something against which there can be no protection: life.
Whether writing as Agatha Christie or Mary Westmacott, Mrs Christie was usually able to create believable children in her novels, which is an especially difficult thing to do. To imagine the behaviour of other adults is much easier than to remember your thought processes as a child. The child Laura in the early pages of The Burden is a remarkable creation, and Laura’s scenes with her elderly friend Mr Baldock are particularly impressive. Through Mr Baldock, the author utters words of wisdom about the parent-child relationship without seeming to preach or to be delivering those messages so disliked by Samuel Goldwyn.
Relationships, the future, the nature of time, all are involved in the scheme of this seemingly unambitious novel, which is about Kant’s three questions, as posed by Dr Llewellyn Knox, an American ex-evangelist: What do I know? What can I hope? What ought I to do? (Dr Knox puts one in mind of the American preacher, Dr Billy Graham, who made evangelistic tours of Great Britain in the early fifties and later.)
‘How should I live?’ is what not only The Burden but all the Westmacott novels are about. Absent in the Spring is the only one which is set in the desert, but images of the desert within the soul pervade them all, just as Chekhov’s three sisters yearning for Moscow pervade the dissatisfied daydreams of Lady Wilding in The Burden. These introspective examinations of a way of life she knew, a way of life shared by a great many of her readers, are an oddly and unjustly neglected part of Agatha Christie’s oeuvre. To a certain extent, they are the victims of publishers’ primitive ideas about marketing and about their authors’ images. Would Agatha Christie’s readers have recoiled in horror if they had been allowed to consider Giant’s Bread by Agatha Christie? Unfinished Portrait by Agatha Christie? … The Burden by Agatha Christie? Need the author have resorted to a pseudonym which, in the event, robbed the books of much of the critical attention they would surely otherwise have received? It is difficult not to agree with Max Mallowan on the value of these six books:
The Mary Westmacott novels are of uneven quality, but every one of them is readable and has studies of character easily absorbed, thanks to Agatha’s extraordinary gift for telling a story. At best these books are dramatic, and concentrate an interest on the solution to situations which arise out of the high tensions in life. It will be a pity if they are forgotten against the popular achievement of the detective fiction. I do not think that they will be.12
4.50 From Paddington
Alternative title: What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw
MISS MARPLE (1957)
The yearly visits to Nimrud continued, and Agatha Christie was by now a very important member of the team. She was no longer responsible for photographing objects found, for this function had now been assumed by Barbara Parker (the subject of Agatha’s Ode earlier). She had, however, become a very experienced repairer of ivories, and she also helped her husband pay the local workers each week. She continued to produce Odes on members of the party, visitors, and events.
The film version of Witness for the Prosecution was made during 1957, and Mrs Christie gave her share in the film rights to her daughter Rosalind. It was in this year, also, that Agatha Christie succeeded Dorothy L. Sayers as President of The Detection Club. The 1957 Christie was 4.50 From Paddington.
4.50 From Paddington was too parochial a title for the American edition of Miss Marple’s latest adventure, which became in the USA What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw. What Mrs McGillicuddy saw from the window of her train, the 4.50 from Paddington to the west country, was a murder being committed in a train passing on a parallel line. At first, the only person Mrs McGillicuddy could find to believe her story was her friend Jane Marple. It was only after some extraordinarily cunning detective work on Miss Marple’s part that the police began to take an active interest. That interest was fully aroused when, as a result of Miss Marple’s efforts, a body came to light.
4.50 From Paddington, despite its title, is not one of those thrillers set, like Murder on the Orient Express or The Mystery of the Blue Train, in whole or in large part on a train. It merely begins on one. The real action takes place in and about Rutherford Hall, an overgrown country estate adjacent to a curve in the railway line, and the majority of the characters involved are members of the Crackenthorpe family. Miss Marple is growing even older and perhaps physically feebler, and at first she is not certain that she can manage to take on the task of tracking down a murderer yet again. But her natural curiosity triumphs over bodily weakness, and she enlists the aid of her nephew Raymond’s second son, David, who is grown up and working for British Railways. She also writes to Dermot Craddock, the young policeman who is Sir Henry Clithering’s godson. She had made Dermot’s acquaintance in A Murder is Announced: he is now a Detective-Inspector at New Scotland Yard, and she and he make a good team (as they were to do once again, five years later, in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side).
Agatha Christie is frequently at her most ingenious when dealing with a large family, its secrets and its tensions. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was very much a family affair, as were such first-rate mysteries as Appointment with Death (though here the family is on the move rather than at home), Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and Crooked House. In 4.50 From Paddington the Crackenthorpes are a family whose past is ripe for investigation, and Miss Marple investigates both at first hand and through Lucy Eylesbarrow, a fascinating young woman whom you would like to have welcomed onto the permanent Marple team. Alas, Lucy does not appear again in the pages of Agatha Christie.
‘I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest,’ Mrs Christie once told an interviewer. And this particular domestic murder is, in its way, quiet and almost cosy, if not in its method then at least in the way in which it is presented to the reader. This cosiness, thought by the writer’s critics to be a weakness, is seen by Christie enthusiasts as one of her most endearing attributes. The crimes and attempted crimes in 4.50 From Paddington are violent ones, but the novel is far from violent, and is full of gentle humour.
To what lengths can the author of a murder mystery go in concealing from the reader the murderer’s identity? Many people thought Agatha Christie went too far in 1926 in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and a few even considered that the author behaved unfairly to her readers in 4.50 From Paddington. Ambiguity is one thing, those few might have said, but disingenuousness is another. In some of her novels, e.g. Ten Little Niggers and Towards Zero, there are points at which the murderer’s thoughts are given without any identification of the character thinking those thoughts. In other novels, the murderer’s thoughts are given and are attributed, but they are not thoughts about the murder. These are not Mrs Christie’s only methods of dealing with her murderers before identification. She has several, and most of them are more satisfactory than her tightrope-walking in 4.50 From Paddington.
The solution to this particular mystery is not in itself unsatisfactory, though the method by which Miss Marple arrives at her discovery of the murderer is by no means clear. Feminine intuition, it would seem, has played a larger role than usual. What is unsatisfactory, surely, is Miss Marple having to resort to unlikely physical action in the course of apprehending the criminal. ‘With incredible swiftness Miss Marple slipped’ from the villain’s grasp, we are told, and, a few lines later, ‘again, swiftly, Miss Marple was between’ villain and threatened witness. Jane Marple is a very old, rather frail lady and she is extremely fortunate not to have been strangled in Chapter 26 of 4.50 From Paddington. This incident is almost as embarrassingly unlikely as her hiding in a cupboard and indulging in mimicry in A Murder is Announced.
Agatha Christie’s strong views on the subject of capital punishment are made to emerge from the lips of Miss Marple in the final chapter, ‘everything — did was bold and audacious and cruel and greedy, and I am really very, very sorry,” finished Miss Marple, looking as fierce as a fluffy old lady can look, “that they have abolished capital punishment because I do feel that if there is anyone who ought to hang, it’s—.”’
It is all very well for Miss Marple to ‘twinkle’ at her young police Inspector friend a few moments later: in some ways she is a very stern old pussy. And so is her creator.
In 1961, the series of Miss Marple movies made in England by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Margaret Rutherford as Jane Marple, was begun with Murder, She Said, whose screenplay by David Pursall and Jack Seddon was based on 4.50 From Paddington. This is not only the first, but also the best of the series, despite the fact that, in the interests presumably of economy, Miss Marple takes on the functions of two of the novel’s other characters as well: Mrs McGillicuddy, who witnessed the murder on the train, and Lucy Eylesbarrow, who posed as a maid in the Crackenthorpe house.
The director (of this and indeed all the films in the series) was George Pollock, and Margaret Rutherford led a cast which included Muriel Pavlow, James Robertson Justice, Ronald Howard, Arthur Kennedy, Stringer Davis and, as Inspector Dermot Craddock, Charles Tingwell, who was to play Craddock in all four films.
Although Margaret Rutherford, a resourceful, eccentric and engaging comedienne, achieved a popular success as Miss Marple, she bore little resemblance to the character as described by Agatha Christie. Asked what she thought of this particular piece of casting, Mrs Christie left it to her secretary to reply:13 ‘Mrs Christie … has asked me to tell you that, while she thinks Miss Rutherford is a fine actress, she bears no resemblance to her own idea of Miss Marple.’ Nevertheless, a later Miss Marple novel, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962), was dedicated ‘to Margaret Rutherford in admiration’. (When The Mirror Crack’d was filmed in 1980, Agatha Christie had been dead for four years. Would she, you wonder, have approved of Angela Lansbury’s Jane Marple?)
To coincide with the release of the film, a new paperback edition of the novel 4.50 From Paddington was published in the United States in 1961 under the title, Murder, She Said.
Under its original title the novel was adapted for television and first transmitted by BBC TV on Christmas Day 1987.
Verdict
PLAY (1958)
On 12 April 1958, The Mousetrap reached its 2,239th performance at the Ambassadors Theatre, thereby breaking the record for the longest London run of a play. On the following evening, a Sunday, Peter Saunders gave a party at the Savoy Hotel to celebrate, and on Monday, 14 April the London Daily Mail published this account of the party:
A silver-haired middle-aged woman with a motherly smile walked into the Savoy Hotel last night and was stopped by a porter as she approached the banqueting hall where a big theatrical party was about to begin. ‘Your ticket, please, ma’am,’ said the porter. But she didn’t have a ticket. She was the guest of honour. Her name: Mrs Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan – Agatha Christie, Queen of the Thrillers, to you. Shy and reserved, she seldom comes out in public. ‘I know many people don’t know me. But they did let me in,’ she added with a smile.
To commemorate the breaking of the record, Agatha Christie presented to the Ambassadors Theatre a specially designed mousetrap. She was, of course, delighted that her Mousetrap had broken all records, and she must have had great hopes for a new play she had written, and of which she thought very highly. This was Verdict, which Peter Saunders presented at the Strand Theatre on 22 May. But Verdict failed to please, and closed one month later, on 21 June. The resilient Mrs Christie murmured, ‘At least I am glad The Times liked it’, and immediately set to work to write another play, which she finished within four weeks: The Unexpected Guest opened at the Duchess Theatre on 12 August.
Verdict is unusual in that it is not a murder mystery. A murder does occur in the play, but there is no mystery attached to it for it is committed in full view of the audience and, on this occasion, Mrs Christie is not playing tricks. A middle-European professor, his crippled wife and his secretary, all three of them refugees from some unspecified totalitarian regime, live together in a flat in Bloomsbury. A female student, in love with the professor, kills his wife. Thereafter, the plot becomes, if not more complex, then certainly more complicated. Verdict, however, is not really a play about murder but about a certain type of idealist. It is an examination of the character of Professor Karl Hendryk.
In her autobiography, Agatha Christie stated that, although it had not been a success with the public, Verdict (a bad title, in her view) had satisfied her completely. She continued:
I had called it No Fields of Amaranth, taken from the words of Walter Landor’s: ‘There are no flowers of amaranth on this side of the grave’. I still think it the best play I have written, with the exception of Witness for the Prosecution. It failed, I think, because it was not a detective story or a thriller. It was a play that concerned murder, but its real background and point was that an idealist is always dangerous, a possible destroyer of those who love him – and poses the question of how far you can sacrifice, not yourself, but those you love, to what you believe in, even though they do not.
It is a good theme, and a fascinating one. ‘Charity begins at home’ is, perhaps, another statement of it. Mrs Christie has fashioned an interesting play around her professor who, for the best of motives, creates havoc, not because his abstract principles are other than admirable, but because he does not have the imagination to envisage the likely outcome of his actions.
The sentence from Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations is quoted in the play by the professor’s secretary, Lisa Koletsky, though it seems unlikely that a female Middle-European physicist would be well up in Landor in general or his Imaginary Conversations in particular. The Strand Theatre programme thought it necessary to print a note on the meaning of ‘Amaranth’, and so does the published acting edition of the play: ‘Another name for the plant called “Love-lies-bleeding” – an imaginary flower that never fades. From the Greek amarantos, never-fading.’
When Sir William Rollander, a wealthy industrialist, says to Professor Hendryk, ‘The Spanish have a proverb, “Take what you want and pay for it”, says God’, that particular Spanish proverb is making at least its third appearance in Mrs Christie’s oeuvre.
Verdict is a serious, worthy play, and not unentertaining. It was booed by the gallery on its first night in London, not because anyone felt cheated at not being offered a mystery to be solved, but because of a lighting-cue misunderstanding which caused the curtain to come down on the final scene about forty seconds too soon. This prevented the ‘surprise’ re-entrance of an important character, and completely changed the ending of the play! ‘So there was no dextrous twist at the end,’ wrote the Daily Telegraph’s critic, W. A. Darlington, ‘instead there was a great scene of renunciation and parting, which rang false and fell flat.’ The critic’s flurry of metaphors was misplaced, and on the following day the Telegraph published this news item:
Verdict, the play by Agatha Christie at the Strand Theatre, was more enthusiastically received last night, when the company took six curtain calls. On Thursday, the first night, there was booing from the gallery.
It was revealed yesterday that on Thursday the curtain was rung down 40 seconds too soon, before the vital two lines between Gerard Heinz and Patricia Jessel. These lines complete a happy and more satisfactory ending to the play. The mistake in lowering the curtain was due to an error by a member of the stage manager’s staff.
However, the fact that Agatha Christie had written a murder play which appeared to lack one important ingredient, mystery, was surely the major cause of its disappointingly short run. Verdict is occasionally performed, though not as frequently as Mrs Christie’s murder mysteries. It may lack mystery: it does not lack suspense.
At the Strand Theatre, London, the leading roles were played by Gerard Heinz (as Professor Karl Hendryk), Patricia Jessel, who had scored a great personal success in Witness for the Prosecution, both in London and New York (as the professor’s secretary, Lisa), Viola Keats (as the professor’s wife, Anya), Moira Redmond (as the student, Helen) and Derek Oldham (as Dr Stoner). The play was directed by Charles Hickman.
The Unexpected Guest
PLAY (1958)
Undeterred by the failure of Verdict, Agatha Christie wrote another play very quickly, and Peter Saunders immediately put it into production. Verdict had closed on 21 June 1958. The new play, The Unexpected Guest, played for a week at the Hippodrome in Bristol, and then moved to the Duchess Theatre in the West End of London, where it opened on 12 August. It played 604 performances there over the following eighteen months.
The Unexpected Guest could perhaps be described as a murder mystery disguised as a murder non-mystery, for it begins when a stranger, the ‘unexpected guest’ of the title, runs his car into a ditch in dense fog in South Wales, near the coast, and makes his way to a house where he finds a woman standing with a gun in her hand over the dead body of her husband, Richard Warwick, whom she admits she has killed. He decides to help her, and together they concoct a story and a plan of action.
The murdered man, a cripple in a wheelchair, appears to have been an unpleasant and sadistic character; apart from members of his own family, there are others who might have murdered him if they had been given the opportunity, among them the father of a child killed two years earlier by Richard Warwick’s careless and perhaps drunken driving. As the play progresses, the possibility arises that Laura Warwick may not have killed her husband, but may be shielding someone else. Richard Warwick’s young half-brother, mentally retarded and potentially dangerous? Laura’s lover, Julian Farrar, who is about to stand for Parliament? Warwick’s mother, a strong-minded old matriarch who knows she has not long to live? Or, of course, the father of the little boy who was killed?
The investigating policemen who turn up in Act I, scene ii, are a shrewd and sarcastic Inspector and a poetically inclined young Sergeant who quotes Keats. Towards the end of the play’s second and final act, they identify and apprehend the real murderer. Or do they? This being an Agatha Christie mystery, there is a further surprise in the play’s last lines. Can it be that Mrs Christie allows a killer to escape punishment? If so, might this be because she thinks of the murder of Robert Warwick as a just retribution?
Through the character of Michael Starkwedder, ‘the unexpected guest’, Mrs Christie makes the interesting assertion that:
Men are really the sensitive sex. Women are tough. Men can’t take murder in their stride. Women apparently can.
The character of the murdered man, as described by his wife, was based, at least in part, on someone whom Agatha Christie had known very well. Here is Laura Warwick, describing one of her late husband’s nocturnal habits:
Then he’d have this window open and he’d sit here looking out, watching for the gleam of a cat’s eyes, or a stray rabbit, or a dog. Of course, there haven’t been so many rabbits lately. But he shot quite a lot of cats. He shot them in the daytime, too. And birds … a woman came to call one day for subscriptions for the vicarage fête. Richard sent shots to right and left of her as she was going away down the drive. She bolted like a hare, he said. He roared with laughter when he told us about it. Her fat backside was quivering like a jelly, he said. However, she went to the police about it and there was a terrible row.
And here is Agatha Christie, in her autobiography, describing her brother Monty, as an invalid towards the end of his life:
Monty’s health was improving, and as a result he was much more difficult to control. He was bored, and for relaxation took to shooting out of his window with a revolver. Tradespeople and some of mother’s visitors complained. Monty was unrepentant. ‘Some silly old spinster going down the drive with her behind wobbling. Couldn’t resist it – I sent a shot or two right and left of her. My word, how she ran’ … Someone complained and we had a visit from the police.
The Unexpected Guest was an original Christie, not only in the sense that it was written by the author herself and not dramatized by someone else from a Christie novel or story, but also in being, like Spider’s Web but unlike The Mousetrap or Witness for the Prosecution, completely new and not an adaptation by the author of an earlier work of hers. It is, in fact, one of the best of her plays, its dialogue taut and effective and its plot full of surprises despite being economical and not over-complex. It demonstrates, incidentally, the profound truth that seeing is not believing. The leading roles in 1958 were played by Renée Asherson (Laura Warwick), Nigel Stock (Michael Starkwedder) and Violet Farebrother (Mrs Warwick, senior), with Christopher Sandford (Jan Warwick), Paul Curran (Henry Angell), Roy Purcell (Julian Farrar), Winifred Oughton (Miss Bennett), Michael Golden (Inspector Thomas), Tenniel Evans (Sergeant Cadwallader) and Philip Newman (the corpse). The play was directed by Hubert Gregg.
Reviews were uniformly enthusiastic, many of them contrasting the success of the new play with the recent failure of Verdict. ‘After the failure of her last play, Verdict’ wrote the Daily Telegraph critic, ‘it was suggested in some quarters that Scotland Yard ought to be called in to discover who killed Agatha Christie. But The Unexpected Guest, turning up last night at the Duchess before even the reverberations of her last failure have died away, indicates that the corpse is still very much alive. Burial of her thriller reputation is certainly premature.’ The Guardian combined reportage and criticism: ‘Only seven weeks after Agatha Christie’s last play was booed off the stage, the old lady of 66 [sic] stumped defiantly back into a London theatre last night. She had a new whodunit ready. She watched from the back of the circle, white-faced and apprehensive … But no boos came this time. No rude interruptions. At the end she heard the kind of applause that has given her Mousetrap a record six-year run.’
Adapted by Charles Osborne as a novel, The Unexpected Guest was first published in the autumn of 1999.
Ordeal by Innocence
(1958)
The 1958 Christie murder mystery was Ordeal by Innocence. ‘Of my detective books,’ wrote Agatha Christie in An Autobiography, ‘I think the two that satisfy me best are Crooked House and Ordeal by Innocence.’ In neither novel does any one of Mrs Christie’s ‘official’ investigators appear. Can she really have preferred these two perfectly acceptable murder mysteries to the best of her Poirot and Miss Marple novels of the thirties and forties? Of these two favourites of the novelist herself, Ordeal by Innocence is the better. Arthur Calgary, a well-known and respected geophysicist, returns to England from an Antarctic expedition, to find that a young man who had been convicted of the murder of his mother has died in prison. Calgary, who was inaccessible in the Antarctic at the time of the trial and the subsequent events, could have given evidence which would have resulted in the young man being found innocent and acquitted. Feeling that he owed it to the young man’s family to reveal this, Calgary visits them in the familiar Christie country of South Devon. No doubt he hopes also to assuage his own burden of guilt, but he expects that, after the initial shock, the young man’s relatives will be relieved to know he was innocent.
Of course, they are not relieved. If Jacko did not kill his mother, someone else did; someone, perhaps a member of the family, who is still living in the house. Until the truth is known, the innocent will suffer with the guilty. Why, the Argyle family wishes fervently, could not Mr Calgary have kept his awkward truth to himself? The police investigation into Mrs Argyle’s murder is reopened, and a second death ensures before the real truth is discovered. Arthur Calgary plays his part in that discovery, and is present at the house at Viper’s Point at the moment of truth.
All of Mrs Christie’s country cottages are the same cottage, all of her ‘desirable residences’ in the home counties are the same retreat for tired businessmen, and all of her houses on cliffs jutting into the channel from the south Devon coast are the same house. From Torquay southwest along the coast to Salcombe, with Dartmoor in the hinterland, all of this is Christie country, and it is a stronger presence than usual in Ordeal by Innocence.
This is one of Mrs Christie’s novels of family relationships, a theme which she always handled with confidence and therefore with conviction. By way of epigraph, she places two verses from the Book of Job at the beginning of the novel. They are printed as though they were consecutive verses:
If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me.
I am afraid of all my sorrows. I know that thou wilt not hold me innocent.
However, the first sentence is part of verse 20 of Chapter 9. The complete verse reads: ‘If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me: if I say, I am perfect, it shall also prove me perverse.’ (The second and third sentences of the epigraph are verse 28.) Mrs Christie may consciously have suppressed the phrase after the colon because she thought it irrelevant to her purpose. She may also have subconsciously repressed what an especially perspicacious reader may construe as a clue of sorts, or at least a pointer in a certain direction. We should bear in mind that it is, if not impossible, then at least highly unusual for Agatha Christie to admit any serious imperfection or miscarriage of justice in the English judicial system. On the other hand, Mrs Christie does, to put it mildly, deal in the unusual. The course is a circular one. You may think you are several paces ahead of her when she is actually nearly a lap ahead of you. From what we learn of the murdered woman, she appears to have had much in common with Professor Hendryk in Verdict.
What Ordeal by Innocence may lack in the way of brilliant detection it compensates for in highly perceptive social observation and lashings of that rare commodity, commonsense, of which Agatha Christie always seemed to have plenty to spare. She was also as greatly concerned with the protection of innocence as with the punishment of guilt. It is as well to bear this in mind when reading Ordeal by Innocence. Her implied sneer at Beckett’s Waiting for Godot may be out of place – in its context, the remark ‘You were going to see an amateur performance of Waiting for Godot at the Drymouth Playhouse’ sounds like a sorrowful reproach – and the ability of a certain member of the family to quote Phèdre may not convince (‘Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée …’ runs through his mind: it is identified simply as ‘a line of French verse’). However, on the important issues, the Serpent of Old Devon is sound; as long, that is, as you do not trust her for a moment about anything.
Cat Among the Pigeons
POIROT (1959)
On 15 March 1959, the cast of The Mousetrap gave a performance of the play at Wormwood Scrubs prison in London. The set and furniture did not have to be transported to the prison as these were provided, the prisoners having constructed the décor from designs supplied by Peter Saunders. An audience of three hundred prisoners, all men serving long sentences, enjoyed the play and applauded warmly at the end. Or rather, two hundred and ninety-eight of them applauded, for two had taken the opportunity to escape during Act II.
During the year, UNESCO released the information that the Bible had been translated into one hundred and seventy-one languages, Agatha Christie into one hundred and three, and Shakespeare into ninety. The statistics concerning numbers of copies of volumes sold revealed the Bible and Shakespeare to be ahead of Agatha Christie, who came third with something like 400,000,000 copies.
Mrs Christie may have been translated into only one hundred and three languages by 1959. Forty years later the number is higher (and the sales figures are considerably higher!) but she was not necessarily admired uncritically in all of them. Under the heading, ‘A Slight Case of Poison, Agatha’, the London Daily Express published this story by its Moscow correspondent on 20 May 1981:
Crime writers in general came under heavy fire at the Soviet Writers’ Congress today. And, in particular Agatha Christie who ‘reflects the poisoned air which exists in bourgeois society’.
Seventy-year-old Kornel Chukovsky, a translator, said of her: ‘She has talent – but what a waste. If she had written six or seven books in her life instead of seventy they might have been good. As it is, she has become a virtuoso in extermination.
‘She makes no attempt to build up pity for her victims – for the child who died because of licking a poisoned postage stamp. She only creates admiration for the murderer’s technique. Human interest is excluded from her work. She concentrates on only how to conceal crime, on plot and intrigue, on the intellectual ability of the murderers and the technical excellence of their crimes.
‘The extent of inhumanity of the crime writer is frightful. There is a mass psychosis for crime stories. They have poisoned people’s brains to such an extent that they cannot absorb normal literary food. People have become incapable of reading books in which there are no ingenious murders.
‘Agatha Christie’s great stunt is to throw suspicion on everyone. Readers are not allowed to believe in noble virtues like honesty, sincerity, and friendship, in unselfish motives or feelings. She fosters feelings of suspicion, fear, hate, and disbelief in the goodness of people.’
One would like to think that, if her press cutting service landed this news item on the author’s desk, she read it with a smile, and murmured, ‘Look who’s talking!’
The 1959 Christie, a new Poirot mystery called Cat Among the Pigeons, is one of the best of the later novels. Agatha Christie is not a writer whose work can be neatiy divided into the usual three periods of promise, maturity or achievement, and decline; nevertheless her creative output did alter throughout the years. The thrillers became less light-hearted, while the structure of the mysteries loosened up somewhat, and occasionally to a perilous degree. The plotting of some of the Poirot and Miss Marple novels which Agatha Christie wrote in the last fifteen years of her life is more than a trifle lax. When this happens, there is usually a compensation in the form of especially convincing characterization. Cat Among the Pigeons, however, is quite strongly plotted, and its characters, even its minor characters, are more than usually vivid.
The novel is set, for the most part, in a girls’ school in England, which has led some critics to compare it to a murder mystery published in 1946 by one of Mrs Christie’s rivals: Josphine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes, in which certain events in a girls’ physical education college lead to a death. The school background apart, however, there is little similarity between the two novels. Agatha Christie’s school, Meadowbank, is said to have been based on her daughter Rosalind’s school, Caledonia. The school and its staff are certainly described very convincingly, and the crotchety illiberality of outlook which occasionally creeps into the pages of late Christie is completely absent. In fact, the liberal commonsense of the headmistress and founder of the school, Miss Bulstrode, is presented in such a way as to suggest it has the author’s wholehearted approval.
The skill with which the summer term at Meadowbank is combined with a revolution in Ramat, a small but rich Arab state in the Middle East, is masterly. Hercule Poirot is required to discover who is busily murdering the staff of the school, and it is not long before a plethora of motives is revealed. Elements of the domestic mystery and the thriller are combined, and two characters whom we shall later meet in the thrillers are first encountered in Cat Among the Pigeons: Colonel Pikeaway, who seems to be in charge of intelligence, and is given to remarking ‘We know all about things here, that’s what we’re for’ (he will say it again in Passenger to Frankfurt and, as a old man in retirement, in Postern of Fate): and the enigmatic financier, Mr Robinson, ‘Fat and well-dressed, with a yellow face, melancholy dark eyes, a broad forehead, and a generous mouth that displayed rather over-large very white teeth’. Mr Robinson will make an appearance in Postern of Fate and a Miss Marple adventure, At Bertram’s Hotel.
For some years, Hercule Poirot has lived in an apartment in Whitehaven Mansions, London, Wl. We learn in Cat Among the Pigeons that the number of his apartment is 228, but the block of flats is now called Whitehouse Mansions. Mrs Christie’s carelessness again? Or simply a misprint in certain editions? Or has Poirot moved without telling even his creator?
At one point in the narrative a schoolgirl mentions one of the characters from Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and Poirot reminisces: this time without giving away the solution of the earlier novel. The reader enjoys such harmless and cosy links between novels, but not when vital information is carelessly and unnecessarily revealed.
Julia, the schoolgirl, is taken to a performance of Faust at Covent Garden. If Mrs Christie had been in the habit of researching in the interests of accuracy, she would have discovered that Gounod’s opera had not been staged at Covent Garden since 1938. Julia was taken either to Sadler’s Wells Theatre, or the Welsh National Opera, or the old Carl Rosa Company on tour. Or, of course, to Paris!
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
POIROT & MISS MARPLE SHORT STORIES (1960)
On 14 March 1960, the London Daily Telegraph reported that a survey in Poland had revealed Agatha Christie to be the author most popular with the youth of that country. This information had recently been published in the Polish weekly magazine, Zycie Literackie, but the poll itself had been carried out two years earlier and the results suppressed, presumably because they were an embarrassment to Poland and its writers.
Agatha Christie’s play Go Back for Murder, a dramatization of her novel, Five Little Pigs, opened on 23 March at the Duchess Theatre, London, where it ran for no longer than a month. The Mousetrap began a six-month run in New York.
The full title of the volume of short stories which was published in 1960, in Great Britain only, is The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, and a Selection of Entrées. In a Foreword, the author described this book of Christmas fare as ‘The Chef’s Selection’, with herself as Chef. There were, she said, two main courses: ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ and ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’. The other four stories made up the entrées.
The Foreword ends: ‘And a happy Christmas to all who read this book.’ The stories themselves, however, with the possible exception of ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’, can hardly be described as flowing with seasonal good cheer, for the usual murders abound, to be solved in five of the stories by Hercule Poirot, and in the sixth by Jane Marple. The two ‘main courses’ are very long stories, and one of the so-called entrées, ‘The Under Dog’, is even longer.
Only two of the stories are new, in that they appear here in a volume for the first time. They are ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’, and the Miss Marple story, ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’. In the title story, Poirot reluctantly spends Christmas in an English country house, but manages to enjoy a gigantic Christmas dinner of the kind described in Mrs Christie’s Forward, and even copes admirably when a body is discovered lying in the snow. (An earlier version of this story, entitled ‘Christmas Adventure’, was published in 1997 in While the Light Lasts and Other Stories.) Miss Marple, in ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’, has reason to be ‘pleased with her perspicuity’, as the author puts it in her Foreword, especially as it is impossible for the reader to discern by what rational steps she arrived at her solution.
Although they had appeared in volumes published in the USA, the other stories were new to Great Britain, with the exception of ‘The Under Dog’ which had been published together with a story by E. Phillips Oppenheim in a volume, The New Crime Stories 2 in 1929. It also appeared in the volume of stories, The Under Dog, published in the USA in 1951. ‘The Dream’ was in the 1939 American volume, The Regatta Mystery, and ‘Four-and-twenty Blackbirds’ was in Three Blind Mice (1950). ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’ will be found in The Regatta Mystery, but in a shorter version as ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’. The differences between the two are outlined earlier .
The two new stories, ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ and ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’, were to appear in Double Sin, a 1961 American collection in which the ‘Christmas Pudding’ story had its title changed to ‘The Theft of the Royal Ruby’.
Two of the stories were adapted for television, with David Suchet as Poirot. ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’ was first seen on London Weekend TV in 1991, and ‘The Underdog’ in 1993.
Double Sin
POIROT & MISS MARPLE SHORT STORIES (1961)
In 1961 Agatha Christie received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Exeter University, in her native county of Devon. The regular yearly visits to the Middle East had ended the previous year. Max Mallowan was free to take up an academic post in Britain and his wife to spend more time in Devon. Now in her seventy-first year, Mrs Christie continued to keep up her output of at least one book annually. In 1961, two were published, though the first of them, Double Sin, appeared only in the USA. Thirteen for Luck!, ‘a selection of mystery stories for young readers’, published in the USA in 1961, contained only stories which had appeared in earlier volumes. When Thirteen for Luck! was published in the UK in 1966, Julian Symons in the Sunday Times thought it contained ‘much dazzling Christie ingenuity’.
Double Sin is a collection of eight stories, four of them dating from the 1920s and four written in the 1950s. Although this title was never published in Great Britain, two of the stories had already appeared in the 1960 British volume, The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, one had been published in 1933 in the British volume, The Hound of Death, while the others were to turn up, years later, in Poirot’s Early Cases (1974) and the posthumous Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979).
In the title story ‘Double Sin’, written in 1929, Poirot and Hastings undertake a journey across Devon from south to north in order to be of service to Poirot’s friend, the Jewish theatrical agent, Joseph Aarons. ‘If you want to know anything about the theatrical profession,’ Poirot had once said, ‘there is one person who knows all there is to know and that is my old friend Mr Joseph Aarons.’ Aarons had been of assistance to Poirot in Murder on the Links, The Big Four and The Mystery of the Blue Train. In ‘Double Sin’, Poirot solves Mr Aarons’ problem but finds the mystery of a theft from a passenger on the coach in which he and Hastings have travelled across Devon much more intriguing. Hastings, needless to say, finds the auburn-haired young lady who is the victim of the theft equally intriguing. A pleasant little tale, ‘Double Sin’ is an excellent example of the early Poirot stories which Hastings used to narrate.
Hastings plays no part in ‘Wasps’ Nest’, another 1929 Poirot story in which the great detective confesses to being able to pick pockets, and manages to solve a murder in the planning stage, thus preventing it from taking place.
‘The Theft of the Royal Ruby’, the longest story in the volume, is said by such writers on Agatha Christie as John Barnard and Nancy Blue Wynne14 to be almost identical with ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’. It is not almost identical: it is, word for word, the same story. Nothing is changed except the title.
Though it was to appear later in Miss Marple’s Final Cases, ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ is not a Miss Marple story but one of Agatha Christie’s tales of the supernatural, and a particularly effective one with a wondering half-close rather than a conclusion. ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’, an authentic Miss Marple story, had appeared in the volume, The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, in 1960.
The earliest story in Double Sin is ‘The Double Clue’, a Poirot adventure narrated by Hastings, and dating from 1925. This is the story in which Poirot first encounters the Countess Vera Rossakoff who was to impress him deeply, who would remain in his thoughts for the rest of his life, but who would actually cross his path again only twice: in The Big Four (1927) and ‘The Capture of Cerberus’ from The Labours of Hercules (1947). ‘What a woman!’ Poirot cries enthusiastically to Hastings, after his initial involvement with the Countess in ‘The Double Clue’.
‘The Last Seance’ is the powerful supernatural tale which, written in 1926, was one of the most successful stories in The Hound of Death. The final story in Double Sin is a Miss Marple adventure, ‘Sanctuary’, which makes use not only of the village of Chipping Cleghorn, the locale of A Murder is Announced (1950), but also of some of the characters from that novel: the Rev. Harmon, the vicar with a classical education which he delights in showing off; his wife Bunch, who is a friend of Miss Marple; and the vicarage cat, Tiglath Pileser, named after an Assyrian king. Inspector Craddock from A Murder is Announced also turns up. (Agatha Christie gave the serial rights in this story to Westminster Abbey Appeal Fund.)
Four of the stories were adapted for television, with David Suchet as Poirot, and first shown on London Weekend TV: ‘Double Sin’ (1990), ‘Wasp’s Nest’ (1991), ‘The Double Clue’ (1991) and ‘The Theft of the Royal Ruby’ (1991).
The Pale Horse
(1961)
The title of The Pale Horse, the 1961 new Christie novel and one of the most fascinating of the crime novels of Mrs Christie’s old age, derives from the New Testament. Chapter 6, verse 8, of the Book of Revelation of St John the Divine, reads: ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’
In the novel, the Pale Horse is the name of an organization which appears to be a group of professional murderers with a difference, the difference being that their method of assassination is based upon black magic. The Pale Horse is also the name of an old house in the village of Much Deeping; a house which in years gone by was an inn and which is now the home of three women who are thought to be the local witches, and who certainly do some very unpleasant things with live cockerels. (There is a great deal of blood: the narrator ‘felt horribly sick’, and the more squeamish reader may too, at the end of Chapter 17.)
This may sound like distinctly unpromising material for Agatha Christie, but it is not. On the contrary, The Pale Horse is an extraordinary study of evil, and if, at some point, it requires our willing suspension of disbelief, this is not for reasons connected with witchcraft, though belief in the efficacy of witchcraft is an important element in the proceedings.
None of Mrs Christie’s regular investigators appears in The Pale Horse, unless Mrs Ariadne Oliver can be thought a regular investigator, for she plays a leading role. This is, incidentally, the first time since she met Hercule Poirot (in Cards on the Table, 1936) that Mrs Oliver appears in a novel in which he does not. Her only other non-Poirot adventures, in fact, were back in the days when she was a freelance employee of Mr Parker Pyne (Parker Pyne Investigates, 1934).
Mrs Oliver becomes involved in the mystery of the Pale Horse because she is a friend of the young historian, Mark Easterbrook, who is the narrator of most of the novel. It is, as they say, a small world, for Mark’s cousin is Rhoda Dawes who, in 1936, had been involved in the investigation of Mr Shaitana’s murder, in Cards on the Table. She married Colonel Despard, one of the suspects in that case, and she and her husband play a major part in the investigation of the Pale Horse murders. Oddly, Despard’s first name, which was John in 1936, has become Hugh in 1961.
The Reverend Caleb Dane Calthrop and his wife, old friends from The Moving Finger (1943), are also on hand. The investigation is an interesting example of the collaboration of amateur with professional. The amateur, Mark Easterbrook, puts in some good work, but he is by no means the brilliant outsider who makes the stolid, local police look stupid, and it is his professional colleague, a somewhat philosophical detective called Lejeune, who arrives at the correct solution to the mystery.
In addition to its extraordinarily ingenious plot, there are many felicities in The Pak Horse. Mrs Oliver, for instance, is presented in such a way that her similarity to Mrs Christie is more clearly marked than ever. She really is a delightful piece of amiable self-parody.
There is a curious passage in Chapter 4, in which a character tells a story, not strictly relevant to the plot, of finding himself waiting in the reception room of a mental home,
and there was a nice elderly lady there, sipping a glass of milk. She made some conventional remark about the weather and then suddenly she leant forward and asked: ‘Is it your poor child who’s buried there behind the fireplace?’
Mrs Christie was to make more significant use of this same incident seven years later in By the Pricking of My Thumbs (and she had already done so in Sleeping Murder, written in the 1940s, though not published until shortly after the author’s death). Could this little incident, of which she made so much (although not in The Pale Horse) have been something from her own experience? Did some little old lady in a waiting room somewhere ask Mrs Christie that disconcerting question?
The character who tells that story in The Pale Horse with no greater relevance to the plot also offers his views on how to produce the witches’ scenes in Macbeth. Mrs Christie makes Jane Marple in a later novel15 expatiate upon this as well, and suggest the same approach to the problem. It was, apparently, just one of the many bees in that positive hive of a bonnet.
The Pale Horse is a remarkably fresh and imaginative creation for a writer entering her seventies. As another writer on Agatha Christie has already noticed, she ‘makes use of “The Box”, a piece of pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus fashionable in the West Country in the fifties (one of the things that drove Waugh to the verge of lunacy, as narrated in Pinfold).’16
In her autobiography, Mrs Christie describes in some detail someone she knew and worked with during the First World War. ‘His memory remained with me so long,’ she wrote, ‘that it was still there waiting when I first conceived the idea of writing my book The Pale Horse – and that must have been, I suppose, nearly fifty years later.’ A very long gestation period, but then it produced one of her own favourites among her crime novels.
Life imitates art, and life has plagiarized The Pale Horse mercilessly. To the author’s distress, a series of murders was committed in Bovington, Hertfordshire, ten years after the publication of the novel, using virtually the same method. The London Daily Mail set out the resemblances between the real murderer and Mrs Christie’s, and quoted a senior detective as confirming the similarity.17
Max Mallowan, in his memoirs, reports a letter which Agatha Christie received in 1975 from a woman in a Latin-American country whose knowledge of The Pale Horse led her to recognize and thwart a case of attempted murder. The letter concluded: ‘Of this I am quite certain – had I not read The Pale Horse, X would not have survived; it was only the prompt medication which saved him; and the doctors, even if he had gone to hospital, would not have known in time what his trouble was.’
The Pale Horse connected with real life a third time, shortly after the death of Agatha Christie, when a nurse, on duty at the bedside of a child dying of an ailment which doctors were unable to diagnose, was passing the time reading Mrs Christie’s novel. One of the child’s symptoms was paralleled in the novel, a fact which the nurse brought to the attention of the specialists attending her patient. Laboratory tests were made which led to the child’s life being saved, thanks to the depth and accuracy of Agatha Christie’s knowledge in a certain area. To say more would put the potential reader’s enjoyment of The Pale Horse at risk.
A television adaptation of The Pale Horse was seen on Anglia TV on 23 December 1997.
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
MISS MARPLE (1962)
In March 1962, a UNESCO report stated that Agatha Christie was now the most widely read British author in the world, with Shakespeare coming a poor second. The tenth year of The Mousetrap ended with a huge birthday party at the Savoy. A cake with ten candles was ceremoniously cut by the author. A new novel was published in time to catch the Christmas sale, and three one-act plays were produced on tour and in London. During the year, Colonel Archibald Christie died.
The novel was The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. This is not the first time that Agatha Christie had occasion to refer to Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott:18
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.
The lines are quoted in the novel by Miss Marple’s old friend, Dolly Bantry. When her husband, Colonel Bantry, had died, Mrs Bantry sold their house Gossington Hall (where a body had been found in The Body in the Library) and the land attached to it, retaining for herself what had been the East Lodge. After the huge house had changed hands once or twice, it was acquired by the famous filmstar, Marina Gregg, returning to England after years in Hollywood.
At a fete held in the grounds of Gossington Hall, one of the guests dies after swallowing a poisoned drink. It seems likely that the poison was intended for Marina Gregg, and indeed, shortly before the death of the guest, Mrs Bantry had noticed ‘a kind of frozen look’ come over the face of the famous star. Attempting to describe it later to Jane Marple, she resorted to Tennyson and ‘The mirror crack’d from side to side; “The doom [sic] has come upon me,” cried the Lady of Shalott.’
The Mirror Crack’d (the shortened form of the title under which the novel was published in the USA) is the last of the Agatha Christie mysteries to be set in Jane Marple’s St Mary Mead; in fact, it is the last of the English village mysteries.
St Mary Mead is not what it was, Miss Marple thinks to herself as she sits knitting. The old landmarks were still there, the church and the vicarage and Dr Haydock’s house, but the appearance of so many of the shops in the village street had been rendered unrecognizable by modernization, and the new housing development was, to Miss Marple, an eye-sore. Miss Marple was growing old, and so was Agatha Christie, who was now nearly as old as her beloved village sleuth had always been. In The Mirror Crack’d, she charts the changes with a not unsympathetic accuracy, but never at the expense of the plot, which is kept firmly in the foreground. The first murder is followed by others. Miss Marple’s young friend Dermot Craddock, now a Chief Inspector, investigates, but it is she who arrives at the truth. A close reading of Chapter 2 suggests that Miss Marple is thinking along the right tracks well before the first murder has been committed.
Permanently disfigured by progress, St Mary Mead is temporarily either disfigured or adorned by the famous filmstar Marina Gregg, her husband Jason Hudd, who is to direct her new movie, and several other film people. One of Marina Gregg’s greatest films had been Mary, Queen of Scots: the new film was to be about Elisabeth of Austria. This is not a world in which Miss Marple moves with great certainty, and she is at a further disadvantage in not having been present on the occasion when the first victim died. She has to rely on Dolly Bantry’s account of what happened. The final death, after the mystery has been uncovered, is perhaps a suicide, perhaps a compassionate murder. Miss Marple is content not to know for certain.
Some months before publication, Agatha Christie visited a movie studio, where Murder at the Gallop, the second of the Miss Marple films, was being made. She visited the set while filming was in progress, and met Margaret Rutherford, who played Miss Marple. Mrs Christie had already expressed herself on the subject of the actress’s unsuitability for the role, but the two women got on remarkably well and, when The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side was published in the autumn, it was dedicated ‘To Margaret Rutherford in admiration’.
When The Mirror Crack’d came to be filmed, many years later in 1980, both Agatha Christie and Margaret Rutherford were dead, and Miss Marple was played by Angela Lansbury. Though it was produced for EMI by the same team which had been responsible for the films of Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978), and was, like those films, a star-studded affair, The Mirror Crack’d (the movie used this abbreviated title) was distinctly inferior to them. The blame is to be shared among the script-writers, Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandler, and the director, Guy Hamilton. The writers attempted to jazz up the dialogue with ghastly double-entendres and phrases which one never thought to hear in Agatha Christie. One actress says of another that she entered, ‘looking like shit’. There is an embarrassingly coy reference to the police inspector’s ‘night-stick’. A number of tired old jokes which had been going the theatrical rounds for years are worked into the script as examples of witty Hollywood-type repartee.
Already crippled by its dialogue, the film is finally dealt its death blow by the slow, heavy and cliché-ridden direction. You sympathize with the cast, headed by Elizabeth Taylor (Marina Gregg), Rock Hudson (her husband), Angela Lansbury (Miss Marple), Edward Fox (Inspector Dermot Craddock, here said, for no apparent reason, to be Miss Marple’s nephew), Tony Curtis, Kim Novak and Geraldine Chaplin.
Presumably because the mass audience would not be quite certain who Elisabeth of Austria was, the film Marina Gregg is making is about Mary, Queen of Scots. Perhaps a remake of her earlier success?
A television adaptation was first shown on BBC TV on 27 December 1992.
Rule of Three
PLAY (1962)
Three short plays, intended to be produced together on one evening, formed Agatha Christie’s farewell to her London theatre public. Nearly ten years later, she was to write her final play, but it closed on tour without reaching the West End.
The three one-act plays of 1962 are well contrasted. When they were first produced, under the collective title of Rule of Three, they were performed in the following order: (i) The Rats, (ii) Afternoon at the Seaside, (iii) The Patient. However, like the plays which make up Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8.30, they do not depend upon being produced in any particular order or even being produced together at all. (As separate one-acters, they have proved useful to amateur drama societies.)
Tension is well sustained in The Rats, a tautly effective little melodrama set in a flat in Hampstead, and involving only four characters, one of them described by the author as ‘a young man of twenty-eight – or nine, the pansy type, very elegant, amusing, inclined to be spiteful’. Though the other three characters are more charitably described, they are all ‘rats’ of a kind, though only two find themselves caught in a trap. An important element in the plot derives from the story ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’ (also known, in an expanded version, as ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’), which is to be found in the 1939 volume, The Regatta Mystery.
The central play, Afternoon at the Seaside, is, in a way, disappointing in comparison with the plays which precede and follow it, though it provides a certain light relief from their more dramatic atmosphere; its weakness of construction is probably more easily disguised when it is performed away from the other two plays. There is a wisp of a plot concerning a stolen necklace, but the real charm of Afternoon at the Seaside lies in its curiously old-fashioned, pre-war picture (though it is not specifically set in the past) of the lower-middleclasses relaxing on a crowded beach at a resort called, improbably, Little Slyppinge-on-Sea. Both setting and plot owe something to a story, ‘The Rajah’s Emerald’, from The Listerdale Mystery (1934) and The Golden Ball (1971). Uneconomically, the play requires a cast of twelve, with accents ranging from false genteel to unashamed cockney. Full marks to Agatha Christie for trying something different. As one of the London reviewers said:
Well, well, Agatha, we never knew. All these years writing serious thrillers and then you come up with Afternoon at the Seaside. It is just as if you had sent us a naughty postcard from Brighton. Afternoon bears all the marks of that particular brand of rude, breezy humour …19
The final play, The Patient, with a cast of nine, is set in a private room in a nursing-home where ingenious means are found to enable a woman, totally paralysed and unable to speak after a fall from her balcony, to indicate whether she fell accidentally or was pushed. Those suspected of having pushed her are assembled, and the heavily bandaged patient is wheeled in. Clues abound, but so do surprises, and the name of the would-be murderer, withheld until the final line, will come as the final surprise to most. ‘You may come out from behind that curtain now,— —,’ says the police Inspector. The murderer comes out from behind the curtain and takes a pace down-stage. The lights black out and the curtain falls.
When Rule of Three opened its pre-London tour in Aberdeen, The Patient ended differently, with the identity of the murderer not revealed to the audience. At this stage of its life, the play ended with the recorded voice of Agatha Christie pointing out that the audience had been given all the clues. Who was the villain?
This did not go down well on the first night in Aberdeen, and Peter Saunders sent a telegram to the playwright, who was in Teheran with her husband, informing her that they were reverting to her alternative ending. When The Patient arrived in London, on 20 December 1962, it was an excellent mystery thriller, with an unbeatable final line.
Rule of Three received mixed reviews from the London press, ranging from ‘as rich and succulent a mixed grill as we’ve had in the theatre for a long, long time’ to ‘bricks cannot be made without straw, and this commodity Miss [sic] Christie has surprisingly failed to provide.’ Mixed grill sans straw, Rule of Three survived at the Duchess Theatre for no more than ten weeks. The four leading players who appeared in all three plays were David Langton, Betty McDowall, Mercy Haystead and Raymond Bowers. The director was Hubert Gregg, who had also directed The Hollow (1951), The Unexpected Guest (1959) and Go Back for Murder (1960).