by Janet Morgan
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.
&nbs
p; 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.
22
‘I sh
all go on enjoying myself …’
‘So much bathing in holiday sunshine I’ve no time for work,’ Agatha wrote to Cork in the summer of 1954. These were languorous months at Greenway, with all the garden blossoming. Agatha’s new gardener, Frank Lavin, carried off so many prizes at the Brixham Flower Show that she presented a cup for those who gardened without paid help. There were tiny new vegetables from the kitchen garden, strawberries, peaches, grapes, nectarines and figs, the fruit served on Auntie-Grannie’s green-bordered dessert plates, each with a different painted fruit in the centre. Gowler, the mediumistic butler, craftily managed so to distribute the plates that, on raising the finger bowl and lace mat, each member of the family found his favourite plate, once and only once a week. Agatha’s was the Fig, Rosalind’s the Gooseberry. There was salmon from the Dart, plaice and shellfish from Brixham. Mrs Gowler’s dairy bill was phenomenal, though Max and Anthony, whose discussions about wine seemed to Agatha interminable, were in no position to reproach her for her fondness for thick cream. Not all the meals were rich, however, for she liked simple food as much as banquets, especially if it could be eaten out of doors.