Dramatic change is unusual in people in their sixties. Agatha welcomed new friends, new books, plays and films, she discussed new ideas and visited new places, but her tastes and habits were fixed. Though she accepted and adjusted to change, advancing age reinforced her natural conservatism. This was also true of her work. Throughout the nineteen-fifties she produced a succession of detective stories that in superficial respects changed with the times; as her work of the ’forties had reflected attitudes, circumstances and tricks of speech of the late ’thirties, so the books she wrote between 1950 and 1960 suggested the manners, situation and expectations of English middle-class society in the decade following the war. These changes were, however, so subtle, and her books came so regularly, that they were barely perceptible. Moreover, shifts in her tone of voice were easily overlooked because stylistically she made few experiments. She continued to impress the public by the way in which she manipulated her characters and her readers and by the sleight-of-hand she demonstrated in her plots. She did not wish to try new forms.
This is disappointing if one believes that had Agatha written fewer books with greater care, she might have polished her style and explored other avenues. That, however, is an unrealistic assumption. Agatha knew what she did well and stuck to it. Writing was not the most important aspect of her life; she drafted her books, as she had always done, in interludes between other occupations – gardening, cooking, outings, helping Max – and she would willingly abandon a chapter for a walk, a conversation or a picnic. She did not talk about her detective stories and her friends knew better than to discuss them with her. Where her writing was concerned, Agatha was self-sufficient. She understood her market, knew how to satisfy it, and was content with that.
It was hard work, ‘a chore’, she called it. Ideas for plots came easily but she found writing difficult and tedious. It is a mistake to think that because her technique did not vary and her style remained simple in book after book, Agatha took few pains with her work. It was not effortless. She had developed a certain knack which needed constant practice. She was unambitious but industrious.
She was, as she had admitted to Max, unadventurous. If invited, she would go with a guide but her disposition was to wait prudently at home. As a child, she had amused herself privately and in her own time; grown up and growing old, she was reflective, unhurried. She was, however, immensely energetic. In her sixties she walked, gardened, drove and ran errands enthusiastically and, though she ran more slowly on the tennis court, placed the ball as firmly as ever. Her emotions were active, too. There were no displays, for Agatha had never been quarrelsome or complaining, but she cared intensely about the way people behaved towards each other, their behaviour to children and animals, the beauty and misery of the world. She seemed calm but from time to time psoriasis, a sure sign of tension, inflamed her feet, hands and scalp.
Her imagination was unceasingly busy. She dreamt at night and mused during the day, jotting down her ideas for plots and characters on any scrap of paper. These energies fuelled her writing and gave her books their force. They did not change them. Though each plot was a surprise, her technique varied little. Her detective stories continued to follow a pattern of progressive mystification interwoven with progressive enlightenment and there was to be only one more Mary Westmacott. Her style was unaltered, though she still had a sharp ear for colloquial speech, and by this time could invent convincing dialogue. Writing books was demanding but it was routine. Now, rather than producing a different sort of book, she turned increasingly to the theatre. By the end of the decade she had proved herself as much a popular dramatist as a novelist.
There was initially little sign of this. Her first delivery to Cork, before setting off for Nimrud at the beginning of 1950, had been a typescript she had completed at Greenway the previous summer, They Came to Baghdad, the book the currency authorities had been told Agatha intended to write when she and Max had first set out again for Iraq after the war. She had been true to her word; as much a thriller as a detective story, the book was set in places where she had stayed, including the Hotel Zia, and her own house, Karradet Mariam 17. The fourth edition of Brentano’s Baghdad: How To See It, saved from 1939, also came in useful. There was something familiar about one of the characters, too: the figure of Sir Rupert Crofton Lee, with ‘curling grey hair growing down over a muscular red-brown neck’, had a strong suggestion of Max’s archaeological colleague, Mortimer Wheeler. Cork and Ober both liked this book, Ober thinking it in some ways the best novel she had done recently, though he was bothered by ‘a feeling of unreality’ towards the end.
Collins’s editor was blunt: ‘difficult to believe that Mrs Christie regards this as more than a joke … Plot and many of the situations far-fetched and puerile to a degree.’ He was obliged to admit, however, that it was ‘eminently readable’; as with all Agatha’s novels, the reader whose attention has been engaged by the first page will generally pursue the story to the end, disregarding the improbability of the plot, the contrivance of the situation, or even banalities of style. Agatha, who certainly did not regard the book as a joke, was anxious that it should be published as soon as possible, since the political situation in the Near East was precarious and she was afraid the story would date. Collins promised publication in early 1951 and Dodd, Mead’s American edition appeared shortly afterwards.
Agatha had arrived in Baghdad in 1950 with a heavy cold. She felt very ill for a fortnight: ‘lay in bed and groaned’, she informed Cork, but ‘enforced meditation has given me heaps of brilliant ideas.’ Once at Nimrud, she was cheered by glorious weather and a hoard they discovered in the Governor’s Palace. She began to work enthusiastically, drafting nearly all the book that became Mrs McGinty’s Dead, thinking about plans for ‘Mary Westmacott’, and tinkering with older ideas. One typescript she dusted off was the Marple book she had written during the War. ‘As I seem to be well ahead,’ she told Cork, ‘I thought I might as well go over it thoroughly, as a lot of it seems to date very much. I have removed all political references, etc., or remarks which seem to echo the trend of the time. The scene of it must remain laid in that period, as so much of the action depends on servants (plentiful then) and ample meals, etc.!’ Rightly, she observed, ‘It’s more catchwords and particular phrases that seem to make a book old-fashioned.’ Nevertheless, she concluded, ‘On rereading it, I think it’s quite a good one. I am not sure I haven’t gone down the hill since then!’
Agatha also brought herself to look over the dramatised version of Towards Zero, with which Lee Shubert had been vaguely dissatisfied at the end of the War. She, too, felt uncomfortable about this play. As she told Cork, ‘the Whodunnit with everyone suspected in turn, and plenty of comic red herrings thrown in, really by now quite sickens me on the stage! And it’s not the kind of story that Towards Zero is!’ She went on, ‘Lots of my books are what I should describe as “light-hearted thrillers” (10 Little Niggers was) and, if you want that kind of play, dramatise one of them. Don’t twist the kind of book that hasn’t the right atmosphere. You might just as well start with an entirely new story.’ ‘Frankly,’ Agatha observed, ‘I have never seen Towards Zero as good material for a play … its point is not suspicion on everybody – but suspicion and everything pointing toward the incrimination of one person – and rescue of that victim at the moment when she seems to be hopelessly doomed. But, if fun and thrills are wanted, go to some other of my fifty offspring!’ She concluded, ‘It might be better to pass the whole thing up. What do you think?’ Cork advised Agatha to wait.
During her absence he took care to keep her fully informed about the progress of The Murder at the Vicarage, her play, and A Murder Is Announced, her novel, now in proof. (‘Quite unobjectionable,’ he wrote of the jacket, ‘no silly hooded figures.’) The play was still doing. well at the end of January 1950, though Bertie Meyer had been disappointed in his hope of gaining extra publicity by holding a party on the stage ‘to say farewell to a famous authoress going off to the Middle East to dig with famous husband’. Cork had been sceptical and Agatha had firmly dished that idea. At the beginning of February, audiences dropped in ‘the wettest and most dismal weather on record’, Cork reported, and, it was believed, because of the imminent general election. Everyone, including Bertie Meyer, took cuts, hoping for what Cork termed ‘an uplift’. Cork also arranged to bring forward the serialisation of A Murder Is Announced in the Daily Express, which might remind readers that The Murder at the Vicarage was still playing. In April, however, the play had come, in Cork’s words, to ‘an ignominious conclusion’, but, he assured Agatha, ‘it was on long enough to build a fine property for repertory and amateurs.’ He now encouraged her to pursue another idea, the dramatisation of The Hollow. A contract with Bertie Meyer was signed, Cork’s plan being that the play should be ‘presented in a de luxe manner in time for the Festival next year’. (The Festival of Britain was to be opened in May 1951 as a celebration, in the words of the official guide, of ‘faith in the Nation’s future’, after the difficult struggles of the dreary post-war years). ‘I really am delighted,’ Agatha assured Cork. ‘Do hope it goes well when the time comes (or if, of course – it’s always “if” in theatrical matters, isn’t it?).’
On her return to England, Agatha worked furiously, completing two typescripts – Mrs McGinty’s Dead and They Do It with Mirrors – and finishing the adaptation of The Hollow. Meanwhile, Dodd, Mead put together a collection of early stories, including the one about the Clapham Cook Agatha had sent Dorothy L. Sayers, for publication in America as ‘The Underdog’. There was more. During the autumn, as she turned out some old papers, Agatha came across something by ‘Mary Westmacott’ which she had written at the end of the nineteen-thirties, a play called A Daughter’s a Daughter, dealing with the familiar Westmacott theme of possessiveness. A Daughter’s a Daughter has at its centre a widow, still young, who pushes aside a suitor and another marriage when her nineteen-year-old daughter objects. It is an obvious theme for Agatha to have considered, given her interest in the nature of maternal love, in independence and self-assertion. The relationship she described here had nothing to do with herself or Rosalind, however, though to those who knew them there were touches of Agatha’s old friend from Abney, Nan, and her daughter, Judy.
It is not clear when this play was written, though Cork had reported in January 1940 that Basil Dean was interested in it. Now Agatha sent Cork another copy: ‘Any good …?’ He forwarded it to Peter Saunders, a young impresario who had taken over the rights to The Hollow from Meyer and whose enthusiasm and energy Agatha had admired. Saunders returned the play at the beginning of December 1950, with suggested alterations, mostly to small remarks that dated the original: Edith, for example, ‘would not ask for six-penn’orth of ice’; ‘muffins’ would probably be ‘buttered toast’; and, ‘I do not think that today one “falls back on Austrian maids”. That is pre-War.’ Agatha approved these amendments and Saunders sent the play to various actresses. To Agatha’s disappointment none was sufficiently keen. ‘Feel sure it is sentimental enough to be a success,’ she told Cork, ‘if only someone would fancy themselves in it.’ In the end the play, billed as being by ‘Mary Westmacott’, was tried out in Bath. The author’s identity was not a secret for long and the theatre was packed. Saunders, however, did not believe the play would survive in the West End but Agatha was, for once, uncritical. (He thought she judged A Daughter’s a Daughter less acutely than her other plays.) Saunders said no more and, in his words, ‘Agatha allowed it to slide from her memory.’ As a play, that is, but not otherwise, for she turned A Daughter’s a Daughter into a novel, ‘knocked off without a word to anybody’, Cork told Harold Ober, who had been enquiring repeatedly on Rinehart’s behalf as to when another ‘Mary Westmacott’ might be expected.
The weather that summer was dreadful. Agatha stayed at Greenway, beautiful even when the garden was sodden and the estuary obscured by drizzle. It was there, at the very end of August, that she heard the news of Madge’s death. She hurried north to Abney, and on her return to Devonshire she felt the summer and her holiday had ended. ‘Do send some typewriting paper to Greenway,’ she begged Cork, for it was impossible to find locally. ‘You see, I mean to work.’ Her own generation of the family was vanishing but Greenway was not lonely. Rosalind and Anthony brought Mathew in the late spring and summer, colleagues and students came to stay, and Mrs North was a regular visitor. Agatha spent her days tranquilly but she was always ready to join an expedition along the estuary, to the moors and the beach, to bathe in the sea or take a picnic to Dartmoor. She was still, as she had once explained to Max, ‘a dog to be taken for walks’, amusing herself quietly but taking part in any fun that was proposed.
Mid-September brought her sixtieth birthday. Cork had warned Agatha that a certain amount of fêting was inevitable, to which, she replied, she was quite agreeable, as long as she did not have to make any speeches. Collins celebrated her anniversary and her sixtieth book, A Murder Is Announced, with a festive party. Agatha had not entirely forgotten recent skirmishes: ‘Thank you for asking me to meet Agatha Christie,’ she replied to the official invitation. ‘If you don’t mind, I am bringing my old friend Mary Westmacott with me.…’ Penguin Books marked the occasion by reprinting a list advertised as the ‘Christie Million’, which in fact sold two and a half million copies, while Dodd, Mead agreed with the Avon Publishing Company to reprint eight titles in America, starting with The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
It was at Greenway, however, that Agatha really celebrated her birthday, enjoying herself robustly: ‘Thank goodness,’ she told Cork, ‘we’ve got a wonderful temporary cook. Her Vol-au-Vents! Her Soufflés! Though rain pours down, eating is always eating!’
1951 was a successful year. It began with Peter Saunders’s production of The Hollow, directed by Hubert Gregg, a well-known actor in light comedy but then an inexperienced director. The play opened in Cambridge at the beginning of February. Agatha had been anxious because Peter Saunders wished to produce it as a thriller: ‘Don’t like this …“Whodunnit” publicity,’ she told Cork. She was also worried about the author’s photographs. ‘Which one is it of me?… I won’t have them using pictures I have not seen or authorised. Rub it in!’ She was unable to attend the first night of the provincial tour, but arranged from Iraq for flowers to be delivered to ‘my actresses … something rather exotic for Jeanne de Casalis’ (who played Lady Angkatell) ‘and probably tulips of different colours for the others.’ She was nervous: ‘Oh dear, I hope it will be a success. I do think it is a good cast and well produced and I want it to be a success. The omens are good since it opens on St Agatha’s Day. A candle for St Agatha.’
Peter Saunders cabled Agatha to say that the play was a hit and Cork confirmed this by air-mail, adding, however, that during the first night’s performance he had been afraid that ‘the drama might be sunk by the comedy’, particularly as Jeanne de Casalis had made the most of a part suited to ‘a natural droll’. At a six-hour conference afterwards, he, Saunders and Gregg had discussed remedies, with the result, he assured Agatha, that on the following night ‘there were no unexpected laughs and it seemed to have already got a nice balance’. ‘How maddening that I can’t see it,’ she replied. ‘It’s just got to be running in London in May.’ Saunders pleased her greatly by sending regular cables reporting the play’s progress. It proved difficult to find a suitable West End theatre but he eventually managed to secure the Fortune Theatre, starting in the first week in June. The play was taken off for a few weeks after its provincial tour, slightly recast, and brought back first to the Fortune and then to the Ambassadors. It ran in London for eleven months altogether, so Agatha was able to see it after all.
Saunders was in favour, Bertie Meyer out. Cork, however, now reported that Meyer wished to hold them to the arrangement that ‘because of old associations’ he should put Towards Zero on the stage, if he could adapt it. Meyer had sent the play to Gerald Verner, who supplied something unobjectionable; in fact, Cork ventured, ‘we think it is damn good.’ Agatha sportingly replied, ‘I must hand it to Bertie Meyer for sticking to it!!’ Nothing, in fact, happened, nor was to happen for another five years.
Agatha thoroughly approved of Peter Saunders. He was keen and knew she liked to be kept well-informed; he was deferential when suggesting amendments and understood how to flatter. Most important, he seemed to care about Agatha’s work as much as she did herself, believing her plays to be highly entertaining, even if he did not see them as vehicles for important statements. Furthermore, Saunders was full of ingenious ideas for attracting publicity. Agatha had always been upset when her work was insufficiently publicised in bookshops; she liked her publishers and producers to be visibly proud of it and, while she shrank from publicity herself – and had occasional qualms about some of Saunders’s more exotic notions – she welcomed his efforts. Disliking self-advertisement, she would nonetheless fall in with his schemes – perhaps because he could cajole her, possibly because somehow the theatre and everything associated with it was in a way unreal.
There was one sadness at the beginning of 1951. A month after Agatha and Max arrived in Baghdad, they had heard from Philip Mallowan, a schoolmaster in Surrey and the younger of Max’s two brothers, that Agatha’s mother-in-law was not expected to live much longer than a fortnight. Her health had been poor for some time but when the Mallowans had left England they thought she had been suffering only from exhaustion after bronchitis – ‘if I’d known I’d have stayed,’ Agatha wrote to Cork. Cecil Mallowan was also abroad. In fact, Marguerite had incurable cancer. Moved to a nursing home, she asked to be taken home. Agatha arranged for nurses and for flowers to be sent twice a week. ‘I imagine she will be kept under sedatives most of the time,’ she wrote to Cork, ‘but she does love flowers.’ Agatha was also very anxious that Mrs Mallowan should have an advance copy of They Came to Baghdad; ‘If you could get hold of one and have it delivered … at once, I think it would be a great pleasure to her. Not that she can read it – but every time I went to see her she asked me for it and said, ‘I can’t wait. I want it now.’ Before Marguerite could return home, however, she died quickly and peacefully. It was a great shock to Max. Fortunately there was much to do at Nimrud.
They were so busy that spring that there was hardly time for writing. Agatha had, however, left behind two typescripts: Mrs McGinty’s Dead and They Do It with Mirrors. Hughes Massie sent corrected copies out to Nimrud with Robert Hamilton; ‘I still feel a glow of gratitude,’ Cork wrote to Agatha, ‘for your producing all those manuscripts out of the blue.’ ‘Mrs McGinty’s Dead’ was the name of a children’s game, unknown in the United States, where the phrase caused some perplexity, but Collins were delighted: ‘It’s like a breath of fresh air,’ they told Agatha, in rather an odd simile, ‘to get away from the old blood, murder and death formulas of our title pages.’ There was, on the other hand, an argument about the jacket. Mrs McGinty, an old woman apparently done to death by her lodger, was hit on the head ‘with something rather in the nature of a meat chopper with a very sharp edge’. The weapon turned out to be a sugar hammer, or, as Agatha called it in her letter to Cork, a sugar cutter, and it was this she wanted on the jacket, photographing her own as a sample.
The ideas in this book are familiar – the complexities of relations between mothers and daughters, the burden the innocent carry until the guilty are identified, and, as in many of Agatha’s other stories, the importance of visual clues, in this case provided by old photographs. Mrs McGinty’s Dead is in some respects a gruesome book, as a later jacket designer, Tom Adams, perceived when he chose to paint a large bluebottle hovering malevolently over what could be discerned, just, as Mrs McGinty’s dead body. Even the title was too unappetising for Woman’s Journal, which was to serialise the book in Britain. They wanted to change it to something more innocuous; Agatha wrote scathingly to Cork, ‘I really think WJ shouldn’t take murder stories if they funk labelling them as such. “Just like Mrs McGinty” doesn’t seem to make any sense, as the second murder doesn’t take place until halfway through the book. Why not put “Mrs McGinty” or something weak like “A Condemned Man” or “The Paying Guest”?’ Agatha dedicated Mrs McGinty’s Dead to Peter Saunders, ‘in gratitude for his kindness to authors’.
They Do It with Mirrors, the second mystery Agatha left for Cork in 1951, also alluded to the theme of maternal love and to the possessiveness which, Agatha believed, was even more strongly felt by women, not themselves mothers, towards children for whom they assumed responsibility. It took up, too, another thought which had always interested her, the nature of reality and illusion. Part of the story deals with preparations for the production of a play (The Nile at Sunset) by the various inhabitants of a school for rehabilitating juvenile delinquents. In Agatha’s description, not only are some of these children confused about their identity and motivation, but the adults who look after them are for the most part equally muddled, though to themselves their theories and objectives are crystal clear. ‘The illusion is in the eye of the beholder,’ as one of the characters, a theatrical designer, says. His remarks give Miss Marple the clue to solving the mystery. The theatricality of the crime has bemused them all: ‘This is a stage scene,’ she realises, ‘only cardboard and canvas and wood.’ Miss Marple sees how illusion is created: ‘Bowls of goldfish, yards of coloured ribbon … vanishing ladies … all the panoply and misdirection of the conjuror’s art.’ Agatha, so cunning at misleading her readers, constructing a narrative to convey distracting information, spoke here through Miss Marple, and in this novel again revealed her fascination with the suspension of disbelief that can be produced on the stage. ‘They do it with mirrors’ is an expression used to explain how magicians perform their sleight of hand. It is also an apt phrase to describe Agatha’s work; much of it concerned mirrors, looking glasses, window panes, which, like the rivers she loved and by which she lived, refracted as well as reflected. A pity, then, that in America They Do It with Mirrors was considered too puzzling a title and Murder with Mirrors used instead. It completely missed the point.
Agatha’s affection for Peter Saunders was in part for a fellow-illusionist, an ingenious theatrical producer who was also skilled at attracting attention by tricks of publicity – anniversary parties, special performances, press stories about the cast – in which the quickness of the hand deceived the eye. In the summer of 1951 she finished a piece of work which was to give his gift for advertisement its fullest scope, the adaptation for the stage of her story Three Blind Mice. The original radio play of 1947, which had been very short, had since been a great success in America, and Agatha had been pursued by American film companies for the rights, though she had not permitted Cork to negotiate. Now she expanded the play, calling it The Mousetrap, a title supplied by Rosalind’s husband Anthony. On seeing the play, Saunders was delighted. He declared that, if he could find a theatre, it would be produced in 1952. Agatha, pleased, asked Cork to look out another effort, an old play adapted from The Secret of Chimneys, which, she reminded him, ‘was going to be done at the Embassy’ and was ‘all about oil concessions’. This had never been produced. Cork, however, put that script aside, pressing rather for another ‘Mary Westmacott’. Agatha promised that something would be coming but, apart from the book based on A Daughter’s a Daughter, there was to be nothing more from that author for a year or two. Instead, she sent for copies of the American edition of ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ and brooded about dramatising that.
Summer and autumn were happy. American sales of They Came to Baghdad outstripped those of any of Agatha’s previous books. She was chosen by the readers of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, in what Frank Dodd reported to be an international poll, as one of the ‘ten greatest living mystery writers’, or, rather, ‘ten greatest active mystery writers’, the criterion being changed at the last minute to exclude Dorothy L. Sayers, ostensibly because she now wrote largely about religion, but actually to conceal the organisers’ embarrassment at disqualifying Dashiell Hammett, jailed on charges of sympathising with Communism. It took some months for Agatha to receive her prize, a small wooden plaque from which was suspended an antique pistol, which the United States Post Office refused to accept for mailing, on the grounds that, ‘even theoretically’, it could be fired. They did agree to dispatch another item marking Agatha’s apotheosis; ‘squares of yellow muslin,’ she told Cork derisively, ‘for me to sign and send back to be incorporated in a quilt! Object, a Mothers’ Milk Bank!!! I do think Americans phrase things unfortunately! I long to write back and say I thought it was a most indelicate idea – and one which I believed was only practised in Soviet Russia!!’ To have been charged with such an un-American activity would indeed have shocked the matrons proposing it.
In 1952 the Mallowans returned to Iraq, for what was to be, as Max described it, the expedition’s annus mirabilis. A month after they arrived King George VI died in London. Agatha and Max took part in the memorial service in Baghdad, ‘all the Iraqi Cabinet attending and a procession of Sheikhs signing the book at the Embassy. All my clothes are unfortunately rather lurid,’ Agatha told Cork, ‘and I have to wear my one black dress in all weathers.’ This year there was no difficulty in finding a typewriter, ‘they seem to be flowing in Baghdad … so I have bought myself a portable Royal which I like very much – and which I hope will encourage me to be industrious.’ In fact she did little writing that spring, managing only to provide a new ending for A Daughter’s a Daughter, ‘less sloppy, I think.’
The exploration of Nimrud’s wells was not her sole distraction, for there was an interminable correspondence with Cork about a crisis at home. Agatha had engaged someone to oversee the gardener and two boys who looked after the struggling market garden at Greenway. In 1952 the new supervisor took up her post and immediately – and ominously – began bombarding Hughes Massie with requests for helpful literature – books about commercial glass-house crops, and the like. ‘So far, she seems rather zealous,’ was all Cork needed to report to Agatha in Iraq. Three weeks later, while on holiday in the South of France, he was summoned home: the supervisor, depressed by her failure to organise the gardeners and, it later turned out, to forecast winning horses, had tried to do away with herself, the police had called Rosalind and Anthony from Wales, while Agatha’s butler and housekeeper had decided to emigrate to Australia. Rosalind and Anthony searched for a new gardener, ‘preferably married to a treasure’; Cork dealt with a torrent of bills. The crux of the situation, however, was, as he wrote to Agatha, the whole future of the market gardening scheme. This was his first and only visit to Greenway (for he observed to the end Hughes Massie’s advice about keeping a distance from his authors) and he was astonished at its extent and expense. ‘The freshness and graciousness of everything was a dream,’ he assured Agatha, ‘but it is a big expensive dream, which increasing costs have made extremely difficult to carry on.’ Agatha’s staff had as their only object the supply of whatever she liked, rather than growing for the market: ‘There is an exceptional crop of peaches and they are almost ecstatic as to how much you will enjoy them – Excuse this digression, but it does illustrate the conflict of viewpoint.…’ At least mushrooms were showing signs of life and could be sold locally. Heroic efforts by Rosalind, Anthony and Cork, however, saved the garden; a new man was hired; Mr Heaven, the new accountant, managed to put matters on a footing that would satisfy the Revenue; and, by the end of 1952, Agatha was able to tell Cork that ‘the garden looks wonderful. All bursting with plants and lettuces, etc. It really does look professional at last.’
Agatha wrote little at Nimrud in 1952 and came home full of plans not for books but for plays. She completed a short radio drama for the BBC, Personal Call, about a woman who either pushes herself or is pushed by her husband under a train: ‘Any station will do,’ Agatha wrote. ‘Newton Abbot telephone boxes and station geography would have to be vetted, of course,’ and ‘more or less fun can be had with trains by the BBC as they choose.’ The producer found the play first-rate, ‘making full use of radio techniques and possibilities.’ As for the stage, Peter Saunders had secured Richard Attenborough and his wife, Sheila Sim, for the cast of The Mousetrap, which he intended to open in Nottingham in October and bring to the West End in December in time for Christmas. Auditions began in August and in September Saunders engaged Peter Cotes as producer. (The original plan to have John Fennell had fallen through.) Bertie Meyer was still sitting on Towards Zero (‘I never feel it is properly my child,’ Agatha lamented to Cork) and Lee Shubert, though constantly making what Cork called ‘excited noises’, had still done nothing about the American production of The Hollow, though the play continued to flourish in London, hardly dented by a decline in theatre attendance after the King’s death.
The Mousetrap opened in Nottingham in October 1952. Though the play needed minor adjustments, Peter Saunders was happy with it, if ‘not terribly excited’. Agatha, who was there, thought it ‘quite a nice little play’ and forecast a run of six months or so. There is a myth that she wept and declared it a disaster; nothing could be less true. Nor was it the case, as some maintain, that its reception in London was cool. One newspaper, the Sunday Dispatch, disliked the play; other critics were enthusiastic. All seats were full for the first three months and to Saunders’s amazement it continued to prosper. Agatha was quietly amused, keeping an eye on her creation by discreetly dropping into the theatre from time to time and reporting any lack of polish. The launching of The Mousetrap in fact marked an important moment. Agatha had learnt to apply her knack to the theatre. Here, too, she instinctively understood what the public wanted. Like her books, her plays had a strong story, a mixture of tragedy and comedy, and a swift pace. Her acts and scenes, like her chapters and paragraphs, closed at exactly the right point, and, as she stimulated her readers by constantly providing new information, so she presented her audience with a succession of characters and possible relationships. Like her books, her plays were intellectually demanding but safe; violence occurred offstage. By now Agatha knew her audience as she knew her readers, and her producers, like her editors, acknowledged it. She judged casts and sets as coolly as titles and plots and she was rarely mistaken. Her theatrical touch was sure.
1952 was a particularly wet summer in the South-West. At Lynmouth the estuary broke its banks and Agatha donated the takings from the midweek matinee of The Hollow, playing at Exeter, to the disaster fund. Confined to the house, she made up for lost time by planning two detective stories, After the Funeral and A Pocket Full of Rye. The first of these mysteries was delivered at the end of August; by November Agatha was tersely writing ‘No!!!’ against Collins’s draft blurb. She was frustrated in her efforts to finish A Pocket Full of Rye before the autumn ended, for in September, on her birthday, she fell and broke her wrist, putting an end to typing. Cork produced a dictating machine and, despite her loathing of gadgets, by October she had mastered it sufficiently well to deliver several chapters for transcription. It was not until November, however, that she could send Cork a shakily handwritten note: ‘What a pest I must be to you! But oh dear; All this money rolling in and a far more working life than when we had £400 a year and I wheeled a pram to the Park every day!!’
A Pocket Full of Rye was delivered to Collins in February 1953. Agatha’s editor liked it, especially the ‘exotic element … lent by the murderer’s curious insistence on the paraphernalia of the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence”.’ This macabre children’s rhyme had been the first Agatha ever used as the theme of a detective novel. Her short story with that title had formed part of the collection, The Listerdale Mystery, published in 1934, and a story called ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’ had also appeared in 1940. Collins were to publish A Pocket Full of Rye in the winter, Dodd, Mead in the spring, the Daily Express first serialising it in Britain and the Chicago Tribune in America. Ober’s only qualm was that the murderer was such an attractive character, though Cork disagreed: ‘Patricia was my sweetie.’ Rosalind, listening to Agatha reading aloud each chapter on summer evenings at Greenway, guessed the murderer’s identity from the start. The royalties from this book were given to the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, part of the benefaction being set aside to support Max’s book on Nimrud.
Collins were now more enthusiastic than ever about their best-selling author. Agatha’s paperback sales had doubled, sometimes tripled, between 1951 and 1952, returning to 1948 levels, which had been phenomenal. It was decided that for the new Fontana paperback edition she should receive a higher royalty than had been negotiated with other authors: a penny ha’penny a copy for home sales and a penny for export sales. (She had been receiving three farthings on the one-and-sixpenny White Circles.) In her absence abroad, Collins made arrangements for a new car. Before leaving for Baghdad in 1953 she inspected various models; as she wrote to Cork, the new Humber Imperial ‘is very much our cup of tea. Really lashings of room. And with the continual transport of Max’s books, flowers and vegetables that I bring up from Wallingford, and being able to get seven or eight people down to the beach or for picnics in summer, I think room is the thing.’ Billy Collins suggested that a Jaguar would be more fun, ‘but I think,’ said Agatha, ‘pure fun is less important to me now than comfort and space. You’ve no idea the amount of things archaeologists take about with them!’ So a black seven-seater Humber Imperial was ordered, for Agatha’s return in May. Collins could not do enough: ‘Do you know,’ they asked Cork, ‘if Mrs Mallowan wants any extras like radio, heater, loose covers?’
Agatha spent the beginning of 1953 in Baghdad ‘sitting on the balcony in the sun recovering from OVERWORK!’ She did, however, adjust the end of Witness for the Prosecution, which she had now discussed with Peter Saunders, who had initially tried to dramatise it himself. Agatha had explained to him how she wrote a play. It was, she said, as if one were driving a car, knowing the point of departure and the ultimate destination but choosing one of several ways to get there. On reading Saunders’s draft of Witness for the Prosecution, she had proposed a destination which surprised him. The denouement she wanted was highly ambitious in terms of staging, since she wished to set the end of the play in a courtroom. It was equally ambitious dramatically, for she proposed a final twist she hoped would leave the audience gasping. Saunders himself gulped but agreed to try. Agatha now tidied up her draft, sending it home ‘by one of the Embassy lads’. ‘I devoutly hope this won’t turn out to be Saunders’ Folly,’ she told Cork. ‘Anyway he seems to be rushing upon his doom!’
Cork replied that Saunders was sure Witness for the Prosecution was going to be tremendous. He had concocted a good deal of ‘legal fun’ and the play had been sent for vetting to the actor Leo Genn and the barrister Humphrey Tilling. It also seemed that, were there ever to be a film, Charles Laughton, who had played Poirot in Alibi in 1928, might take the part of the Q.C. who defends the suspected murderer. Saunders’s arrangements for bringing Witness for the Prosecution to London depended to some extent on whether Bertie Meyer hoped to put on Towards Zero; there was more talk but still nothing happened. ‘I’m really fed up with Bertie,’ Agatha wrote to Cork. ‘He’s had years.… Peter does put my plays on.’ Cork and Saunders were, if anything, more exasperated with Lee Shubert over the delay in putting on The Hollow in America. Saunders was anxious to buy out the American rights but it proved impossible to prise them away, so the only course was to wait. The Mousetrap, however, continued to do well, though business in the theatre was otherwise poor. Advance bookings, too, Cork told Agatha, were exceptionally strong.
Theatrical prospects were exciting – but there was no sign of any new book. Collins had for their winter 1953 list A Pocket Full of Rye (dedicated to Bruce Ingram, who had first published Agatha’s stories in the Sketch) and After the Funeral, but they were asking anxiously for a novel for 1954. Agatha brought nothing back from Nimrud and in August cheerfully told Billy Collins, ‘I haven’t begun another book yet – at least I have – but have got hopelessly stuck. I really don’t want to do any work!! Do you ever feel like that?’ It had been too pleasant a summer for work: Coronation summer. The tireless Cork, unfrustrated by successive requests for additional tickets, had procured fifty-guinea seats at 145 Piccadilly for Agatha’s large party, ‘with a scrumptious lunch in the marquee’, he promised, ‘and everything’. There was Wimbledon (thanks to Billy Collins), a brief trip to Paris with Max and expeditions to Dartmoor and the beach. Despite Agatha’s vow to Billy Collins that ‘the old rattle trap’ would do for Devon lanes, ‘car has been heavenly. We went eleven in it the other day to a picnic.’ Its only flaw was revealed one day as Max drove Agatha to Greenway from Torquay. The window beside her exploded; ‘You nearly lost an author,’ she told Collins, ‘I thought I was shot.’
When Agatha was stimulated, however, she could work fast. In September 1953 a theatrical agent asked Peter Saunders whether she would write a play for a client of his, Margaret Lockwood, who had hitherto appeared in the West End only in a popular Peter Pan. Agatha was introduced to Miss Lockwood over luncheon at the Mirabelle and within a month delivered Spider’s Web, in which she had not only written, at Miss Lockwood’s request, parts for the actress herself and for Wilfrid Hyde White, but also, unsolicited, for Miss Lockwood’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Julia.
That script was completed during the last weeks of preparation for Witness for the Prosecution, which was fortunate, for it occupied Agatha when she might otherwise have wanted to sit in on final rehearsals. As Cork tactfully explained, this time there was no need for her to be there. The first night of Witness for the Prosecution was September 26th at Nottingham. ‘It’s a very expensive production,’ Cork wrote to Ober, ‘so it has to click from the word go.’ Much of the expense derived from the fact that the play had a cast of thirty, with two sets, one a huge replica of the Old Bailey. It opened in London on October 28th. Saunders had experienced the usual difficulty in securing a theatre and was obliged to take the Winter Garden in Drury Lane, a cavernous place with more than sixteen hundred seats. The production was a sensational success, the only first night Agatha ever enjoyed. She beamed and waved as the company and the audience turned to her box and applauded, something she remembered to the end of her life, together with the words of a woman outside the theatre; ‘Best you’ve written yet, dearie.’
‘It is the most successful play Agatha Christie has written,’ Cork told Ober in mid-November, ‘though I do not suppose it will run more than a few months, as it is such an expensive production.’ A fortnight later, he wrote again, ‘It was put on at the worst time of year in the worst theatre in the West End, and it is just packing out. We are selling rights of it all over Europe on terms which we had only heard about before!’ Lee Shubert dared to bid for the right to produce the play in America but there were no dealings with him this time. Instead, Peter Saunders joined the Dramatists’ Guild in the United States and arranged that Gilbert Miller should take over the American production. In London it ran for 468 performances. Bids began to come in from Hollywood – from United Artists, Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox. It was a triumph for Agatha – and a relief for Saunders, for the cost of the production had far outstripped his expectations and before the opening in London he knew his capital was exhausted. It had seemed that the enterprise might indeed turn out to be ‘Saunders’ Folly’, but, as he confessed years later, Agatha’s instinct was right.
Christmas was celebrated on a wave of delight. ‘A bit bemused by heavy eating’, Agatha carried off an immense party to the pantomime at Plymouth and another to Witness for the Prosecution in January. At the beginning of February 1954, she invited a hundred guests to the Savoy – Dorothy North, James Watts, Barbara Toy and Moie Charles, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Sharp, Humphrey Tilling the barrister, Campbell and Dorothy Christie, whose Carrington VC was also a West End hit – all her friends, colleagues and relations. ‘You might send me an invitation card to let me see what it looks like!’ she wrote joyfully to Cork, who took care of liaison with the Banqueting Manager over such matters as flowers, champagne, extending the licence and provision of ‘a little map’. Agatha also celebrated less conspicuously, proposing to Cork that she donate a story to the Fund for the Restoration of Westminster Abbey. This was ‘Sanctuary’, her first short story for eight years. The only difficulty was – as usual – arranging for the American fee to be paid. ‘The Save the Abbey Fund does not pay tax in this country, so the Dean cannot properly sign the Tax Exemption Certificate,’ Cork confided to Ober; ‘How can we get round this?’ Somehow they managed.
Collins were becoming increasingly worried by the absence of any new book for 1954. They had considered the idea of publishing a volume of short stories but that had foundered, since difficulties in sorting out copyrights were compounded by the fact that Agatha did not wish Three Blind Mice to be republished while The Mousetrap was running. She also felt that to reprint the original ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ would disappoint her readers, as the 1948 version was so far removed from the present play. There were, nonetheless, no reproaches from Billy Collins who produced instead a gift of ‘Hardy Rhododendrons’ and a detective story called The Cretan Counterfeit, ‘which might appeal to Max as well’.
Agatha had in fact been planning a detective story, Destination Unknown, promised to Cork in February 1954; she could not complete it until she could work on it at Nimrud, undistracted by the theatre. A thriller, it concerned the search for an international group of scientists and their eventual escape from a remote and extraordinary prison. The story, labelled ‘preposterous nonsense’ by one American magazine editor, was nevertheless a success within the United States and at home, perhaps because it dealt not only with popular fantasies of conspiracy and escapism but also with a theme – the causes and consequences of defection – that had obsessed the public since the conviction of Klaus Fuchs, the nuclear scientist, in 1950.
Agatha brought the finished draft of this novel back from Iraq in May but, again, her chief preoccupation was plays. Spider’s Web was to open in Nottingham in September, coming to the Savoy Theatre in London in mid-December, while the American production of Witness for the Prosecution was being tried out at the same time in New Haven, opening in New York in December. She had drunk her fill of publicity and urged Cork to spare her this time: ‘You can give any personal details you can think of or invent. I cannot have any more photographers taking pictures of me, so choke them off!’ In the summer, when there were constant applications for a meeting with her at Winterbrook, she wrote adamantly: ‘Interviews, yes, if you say so. Photos: no! Look at poor old Allen Lane in this week’s Sunday Times, looking a tired old man of seventy – was thinking of writing an indignant letter to them!’
New York embraced Witness for the Prosecution with rapture. It played for nearly two years on Broadway and was chosen by the New York Drama Critics Circle as the best foreign play of 1954. Spider’s Web, meanwhile, was an immediate hit at home, running even longer. Agatha, as much as her audience, was enchanted with Margaret Lockwood, who starred in the first fifteen months’ performance. She played Clarissa, a diplomat’s whimsical but clever wife, who attempts to dispose of a body discovered in her drawing-room. Though Clarissa had Agatha’s mother’s name and her impulsiveness, she was not modelled on Clara. There was, however, an echo of Agatha’s own daydreaming in her heroine’s game of ‘supposing’, but, when Clarissa fantasised about finding a body in the library, it was a joke. For Agatha it was not only fun but, more convincingly than ever, her profession.