SOLUTIONS REVEALED
Death in the Clouds • The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side • A Murder is Announced • One, Two, Buckle my Shoe • Peril at End House • Sparkling Cyanide • Three Act Tragedy
Batch three of Unused Ideas includes a number of sketches for possible plays.
THE MOUSETRAP II
Mousetrap II?
A reunion dinner – the survivors of revolution? war (Airman and passengers lost in desert)
Man gate crashes – a lawyer? elderly? Mannered? Felix Aylmer type or a [Sir Ralph] Richardson.
A murder – here – one of group is a murderer – one of group is a victim. Doesn’t know victim
End of Scene – I’m the prospective victim amn’t I? (Really murderer)
Possibility of house in street Soho hired for party – waiters hired for joke! One man is waiter – brings drink to guest – later enters as guest – with moustache.
Death at the Dinner – man drinks – dies – a doctor present says this glass must be kept. It is then he puts poison in it – real drink was poisoned earlier – before dinner
(A mixture of 3 Act Tragedy (Sir Charles) and Sparkling Cyanide?) Is wrong person killed?
The biggest mystery about this sketch is the reason for calling it ‘Mousetrap II’, as it has nothing in common with that famous play. Perhaps it was so called in the hope of another stage success that might rival the record-breaking title? It is also difficult to date this extract as most of the contents of Notebook 4, from which these notes are excerpted, remain unpublished. Much of it is taken up with notes for the relatively unknown play Fiddlers Five (later Fiddlers Three), first staged in 1971, so it seems reasonable to assume this extract dates from the late 1960s. Strength is also lent to this argument by the fact that by then The Mousetrap was a record-breaker.
As Christie herself states, there are strong similarities with Three Act Tragedy – the subterfuge with glasses, the cryptic note ‘Doesn’t know victim’, the guest disguised as a waiter/butler – and Sparkling Cyanide – the unexpected death at the dinner table and a similar waiter/guest ploy. This ruse is also a variation on that adopted by the killer in Death in the Clouds. The oddly specific reason outlined for the reunion – survivors of a revolution – has echoes of the revolution in Ramat that culminated in murder at Meadowbank School in Cat among the Pigeons. And the prospective victim as murderer was a favourite throughout Christie’s career – Peril at End House, One, Two, Buckle my Shoe, A Murder is Announced, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. Despite these echoes of earlier novels, this late in her career Christie was still coming up with original ideas: the trick with the glass did not feature in any of her earlier poisonings.
The actor Felix Aylmer played Sir Rowland Delahaye in the first production of Spider’s Web in 1954; and Sir Ralph Richardson would play, many years later, one of Christie’s most famous creations, Sir Wilfrid Robards, in a 1983 TV remake of Witness for the Prosecution.
THE REUNION DINNER
Reunion Dinner 3 Act Play
Collinaris Restaurant
Waiter – old man like a tortoise
Waiter – young Italian type (conversation between them about this dinner)
Victor Durel – business type (approves menu etc. – wines)
Valentine Band (Clydesdale? Harborough?) – rich furs and so on
Major Allsop – sharp practice type company partner
Isadore Cowan – old Jew
Janet Spence – Middle aged, forthright (missionary? UNESCO?!)
Captain Harley ex pilot – now rich
Lowther – Company lawyer
Canon Semple (not a Canon – an actor pretending)
The Dinner
Before it begins Durel makes speech – object of dinner
The plane came down – our miraculous preservation – two three of our number left us – to the memory of our missing friends – Joan Arlington – Gervase Cape – Richard Dymchurch. Canon says grace – For what we are about to receive may the Lord
Conversation?
The old man waits about watching – pours wine
Possibilities
1. Wine – a truth drug?
2. Wine – poison for somebody
3. Canon is shown to be not a canon – but CID? Or oil surveyor
4. Victor Durel points out – item out paper tonight – two skeletons have been found on an oil survey –
Joan A[rlington]? R[ichard Dymchurch]? G[ervase Cape]?
5. Isadore asks Harley about circumstances – dismissed for error of judgement – but very well off?
Suggests: was it an error of judgement? Or were you paid to put down jet there
These very detailed notes from Notebook 52 may be connected to the previous entry, from Notebook 4, although the two Notebooks seem to date from different years. The idea of survivors of an air crash is common to both and there are indications that, in each case, poison is the murder method. The full names (even of the missing characters) and backgrounds included would seem to indicate that considerable thought went into this idea. But there is no script, not even a rough draft – nothing but these intriguing notes. This Notebook also contains the notes for The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side and The Clocks, both published in the early 1960s, and is directly ahead of the notes for the screen adaptation of Dickens’s Bleak House, on which Christie worked in 1962. Puzzlingly, therefore, it would seem that this more detailed sketch preceded the first sketch, discussed above. UNESCO had recently designated Christie the most translated writer, apart from the Bible, so the exclamation mark after their name may be a private joke.
In many ways this is uncharted and untypical Christie territory – survivors of a plane crash, someone paid to ‘put a jet down’, skeletons found during an oil survey, a truth drug. During the 1950s she published two ‘foreign travel’ titles – They Came to Baghdad and Destination Unknown – and the latter does contain much air travel as well as a crashed plane. But while the background to the plot outlined above may contain adventurous concepts, the murder plot is Christie on home ground: a poisoning during dinner at a restaurant (‘Yellow Iris’, Sparkling Cyanide); a clergyman who is not a clergyman (Murder in Mesopotamia); a middle-aged missionary (Murder on the Orient Express); a detective in disguise (The Mousetrap, And Then There Were None). The description of the elderly waiter as ‘like a tortoise’ has distinct echoes of Lawrence Wargrave from Chapter 13 of And Then There Were None; this possibility is further strengthened when we read the ‘old man waits about watching’. And is it pure coincidence that there are ten characters listed – eight guests and two servants?