‘Petronella will be there’ is an affectionate glance at Vanessa Redgrave… the most prominent member of the Socialist Workers Party at demos.
Christie biographer Martin Fido on a quote from Passenger to Frankfurt
Agatha Christie’s personal account of her life was published a year after her death in An Autobiography (1977). Despite writing frankly about the breakdown of her first marriage, she chose not to discuss the mystery of her subsequent eleven-day disappearance in December 1926. The decision not to mention this aspect of her past only increased speculation and led to a stream of published investigations and theories to rival the myths surrounding Jack the Ripper and the Loch Ness Monster.
The first book to emerge about the case of the missing author was ‘an imaginary solution to an authentic mystery’ by Kathleen Tynan in Agatha: A Mystery Novel (1978). Several months before the work was published, it was announced that it was to be adapted into a film produced by David Puttnam. The news brought an indignant response from Agatha’s daughter, Rosalind, who wrote a letter to The Times complaining that the family had not been consulted about the forthcoming ‘fairytale’:
It is, however, the idea of the positive identification of my parents – both in the proposed title of the film Agatha, and also presumably in the names of characters in an admitted work of fiction – that I find particularly objectionable and morally beneath contempt.
Kathleen Tynan dedicated the book to her husband, controversial theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. The couple had themselves been involved in a divorce scandal when Kathleen abandoned her marriage to set up home with Tynan, then became his second wife when she was six months pregnant. In 1967, the couple were married before a New York Justice of the Peace. During the ceremony, star guest Marlene Dietrich, who ten years earlier had played the role of Christine Vole in the acclaimed film production of the Agatha Christie play Witness for the Prosecution, attempted to discreetly back across the office in order to close the doors that had been left ajar, causing the judge to briefly interrupt the marriage vows by issuing a warning: ‘And do you, Kenneth, take Kathleen for your lawful wedded – I wouldn’t stand with your ass to an open door in this office lady – wife to have and to hold?’
A theatre critic famed for his vitriolic reviews in the same mould as Kenneth Tynan, is the central character in another work that shamelessly exploited the reputation of the recently deceased ‘Queen of Crime’. First produced in 1978, Who Killed ‘Agatha’ Christie?, a play by Tudor Gates, toured the provinces before opening in October at the Ambassadors Theatre, London. As reviewer Ned Chaillet wryly observed in The Times: ‘Of course, the Agatha Christie referred to is not the sweet old lady who wrote fantasies of murder, but really Arthur Christie, the dramatic critic who butchered plays and players with his criticism and had a secret homosexual life. Agatha is a term of endearment’. In the story, playwright John Terry (originally played by James Bolam), whose productions have been malevolently savaged by the critic, lures Arthur, aka Agatha, (Gerald Flood) to a rented flat to listen to recorded sex acts between the critic’s boyfriend and the playwright’s wife. John Terry’s intent is to have his revenge by killing the love cheats and his poison pen friend in this ‘thrilling psychological drama with a devilish dash of macabre humour’.
In Kathleen Tynan’s Agatha, a highly imaginative reconstruction of the famous author’s disappearance, the missing woman is not suffering from amnesia but, distraught over her husband’s other woman, plans to commit suicide at a hotel by means of electrocution in the hydro-bath. By utilising her crime writing skills, the death is to be staged to appear like murder at the hands of Archie’s ‘other woman’. Starring in the title role of the film version Agatha (1979) was Oscar-winning actress Vanessa Redgrave (b. 1937), who five years earlier had appeared as governess Mary Debenham in Murder on the Orient Express.
A prominent political activist, Redgrave donated her £40,000 fee for the part of ‘Agatha’ to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. In 2003, she hit the headlines by providing a £50,000 surety to support Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen separatist campaigner. He was fighting a legal action to extradite him to Russia, where he was accused of thirteen serious offences including: armed rebellion, kidnapping two priests, torturing a suspected informer, taking part in a firing squad, and the murder of 300 troops and twelve civilians. The former Culture Minister and actor was likened to Islamic terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden and said to be implicated in the 2002 Moscow theatre siege. This tragic episode resulted in the death of 130 people when armed Chechen rebels, with explosives strapped to their waists, held a theatre audience of 800 people to ransom, demanding that Russian forces be withdrawn from their homeland. Three days later, when negotiations had failed to bring about a peaceful solution to the crisis, Russian troops stormed the building after sedative gas was pumped into the theatre in an attempt to render the terrorists unconscious. The military intervention resulted in the deaths of eighty members of the public and all fifty of the suicide bombers. At a hearing at Bow Street Court, a judge rejected Russia’s request for extradition on the grounds of fears that Zakeyev faced torture if he was forced to return to face questioning and because the crimes allegedly involving the defendant were committed during an ‘internal armed conflict’. Vanessa Redgrave pronounced that the political asylum seeker was a highly respected actor in his home state, ‘not a warlord and not a terrorist’.
Mass murder in a theatre had previously been attempted in South Africa during the showing of Agatha Christie’s play The Hollow, in which glamorous actress Veronica Crane attempts to rekindle a romance with former fiancé Dr John Christow. When the ex-lovers meet at a secret rendezvous, the physician is shot dead and the killer later dies drinking tea laced with poison. Under the headline, ‘A Real Life Whodunnit’, the Sunday Express reported in March 1984:
A stage hand has been charged with attempted murder in a real-life ‘whodunnit’ backstage at a Johannesburg theatre where an Agatha Christie play was showing. The man was charged after poison was found in the cast’s kettle only fifteen minutes before the villain in The Hollow ‘died’ on stage… of poisoning.