Henry rose and began to rush across to the phone, but stopped half-way and proceeded at a dignified walk. ‘Hello,’ he said into the receiver.
Clarissa took Henry’s hat and coat to the hall but returned immediately and stood behind him.
‘Yes–speaking,’ Henry announced. ‘What?–Ten minutes later?–Shall I?–Yes–Yes, yes–No–No, no–You have?–I see–Yes–Right.’
He replaced the receiver, shouted ‘Clarissa!’, and then turned to find that she was right behind him. ‘Oh! There you are. Apparently another plane came in just ten minutes after the first, and Kalendorff was on it.’
‘Mr Jones, you mean,’ Clarissa reminded him.
‘Quite right, darling. One can’t be too careful,’ he acknowledged. ‘Yes, it seems that the first plane was a kind of security precaution. Really, one can’t fathom how these people’s minds work. Well, anyway, they’re sending–er–Mr Jones over here now with an escort. He’ll be here in about a quarter of an hour. Now then, is everything all right? Everything in order?’ He looked at the bridge table. ‘Do get rid of those cards, will you, darling?’
Clarissa hurriedly collected the cards and markers and put them out of sight, while Henry went to the stool and picked up the sandwich plate and mousse dish with an air of great surprise. ‘What’s on earth’s this?’ he wanted to know.
Rushing over to him, Clarissa seized the plate and dish. ‘Pippa was eating it,’ she explained. ‘I’ll take it away. And I’d better go and make some more ham sandwiches.’
‘Not yet–these chairs are all over the place.’ Henry’s tone was slightly reproachful. ‘I thought you were going to have everything ready, Clarissa.’
He began to fold the legs of the bridge table. ‘What have you been doing all the evening?’ he asked her as he carried the bridge table off to the library.
Clarissa was now busy pushing chairs around. ‘Oh, Henry,’ she exclaimed, ‘it’s been the most terribly exciting evening. You see, I came in here with some sandwiches soon after you left, and the first thing that happened was I fell over a body. There.’ She pointed. ‘Behind the sofa.’
‘Yes, yes, darling,’ Henry muttered absent-mindedly, as he helped her push the easy chair into its usual position. ‘Your stories are always enchanting, but really there isn’t time now.’
‘But, Henry, it’s true,’ she insisted. ‘And that’s only the beginning. The police came, and it was just one thing after another.’ She was beginning to babble. ‘There was a narcotic ring, and Miss Peake isn’t Miss Peake, she’s really Mrs Brown, and Jeremy turned out to be the murderer and he was trying to steal a stamp worth fourteen thousand pounds.’
‘Hmm! Must have been a second Swedish yellow,’ Henry commented. His tone was indulgent, but he was not really listening.
‘I believe that’s just what it was!’ Clarissa exclaimed delightedly.
‘Really, the things you imagine, Clarissa,’ said Henry affectionately. He moved the small table, set it between the armchair and the easy chair, and flicked the crumbs off it with his handkerchief.
‘But, darling, I didn’t imagine it,’ Clarissa went on. ‘I couldn’t have imagined half as much.’
Henry put his briefcase behind a cushion on the sofa, plumped up another cushion, then made his way with a third cushion to the easy chair. Meanwhile, Clarissa continued her attempts to engage his attention. ‘How extraordinary it is,’ she observed. ‘All my life nothing has really happened to me, and tonight I’ve had the lot. Murder, police, drug addicts, invisible ink, secret writing, almost arrested for manslaughter, and very nearly murdered.’ She paused and looked at Henry. ‘You know, darling, in a way it’s almost too much all in one evening.’
‘Do go and make that coffee, darling,’ Henry replied. ‘You can tell me all your lovely rigmarole tomorrow.’
Clarissa looked exasperated. ‘But don’t you realize, Henry,’ she asked him, ‘that I was nearly murdered this evening?’
Henry looked at his watch. ‘Either Sir John or Mr Jones might arrive at any minute,’ he said anxiously.
‘What I’ve been through this evening,’ Clarissa continued. ‘Oh dear, it reminds me of Sir Walter Scott.’
‘What does?’ Henry asked vaguely as he looked around the room to make sure that everything was now in its proper place.
‘My aunt made me learn it by heart,’ Clarissa recalled.
Henry looked at her questioningly, and she recited, ‘O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.’
Suddenly conscious of her, Henry leaned over the armchair and put his arms around her. ‘My adorable spider!’ he said.
Clarissa put her arms around his shoulders. ‘Do you know the facts of life about spiders?’ she asked him. ‘They eat their husbands.’ She scratched his neck with her fingers.
‘I’m more likely to eat you,’ Henry replied passionately, as he kissed her.
The front door bell suddenly rang. ‘Sir John!’ gasped Clarissa, starting away from Henry who exclaimed at the same time, ‘Mr Jones!’
Clarissa pushed Henry towards the hall door. ‘You go out and answer the front door,’ she ordered. ‘I’ll put coffee and sandwiches in the hall, and you can bring them in here when you’re ready for them. High level talks will now begin.’ She kissed her hand, then put it to his mouth. ‘Good luck, darling.’
‘Good luck,’ Henry replied. He turned away, then turned back again. ‘I mean, thanks. I wonder which one of them has got here first.’ Hastily buttoning his jacket and straightening his tie, he rushed off to the front door.
Clarissa picked up the plate and dish, began to go to the hall door, but stopped when she heard Henry’s voice saying heartily, ‘Good evening, Sir John.’ She hesitated briefly, then quickly went over to the bookshelves and activated the panel switch. The panel opened, and she backed into it. ‘Exit Clarissa mysteriously,’ she declaimed in a dramatic stage whisper as she disappeared into the recess, a split second before Henry ushered the Prime Minister into the drawing-room.
The Plays of Agatha Christie
Alibi, the earliest Agatha Christie play to reach the stage, opening at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, in May 1928, was not written by Christie herself. It was an adaptation by Michael Morton of her 1926 crime novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Hercule Poirot was played by Charles Laughton. Christie disliked both the play and Laughton’s performance. It was largely because of her dissatisfaction with Alibi that she decided to put Poirot on the stage in a play of her own. The result was Black Coffee, which ran for several months at St Martin’s Theatre, London, in 1930.
Seven years passed before Agatha Christie wrote her next play, Akhnaton. It was not a murder mystery but the story of the ancient Pharaoh who attempted to persuade a polytheistic Egypt to turn to the worship of one deity, the sun-god Aton. Akhnaton failed to reach the stage in 1937, and lay forgotten for thirty-five years until, in the course of spring cleaning, its author found the typescript again and had it published.
Although she had disliked Alibi in 1928, Agatha Christie gave her permission, over the years, for five more of her works to be adapted for the stage by other hands. The earliest of these was Love From a Stranger (1936), which Frank Vosper, a popular leading man in British theatre in the twenties and thirties, adapted from the short story ‘Philomel Cottage’, writing the leading male role for himself to play. The 1932 Hercule Poirot novel, Peril at End House, became a play of the same title in 1940, adapted by Arnold Ridley, who was well known as the author of The Ghost Train, a popular play of the time. With Murder at the Vicarage, a 1949 dramatization by Moie Charles and Barbara Toy of a 1940 novel of the same title, Agatha Christie’s other popular investigator, Miss Marple, made her stage debut.
Disillusioned with one or two of these stage adaptations by other writers, in 1945 Agatha Christie had herself begun to adapt some of her already published novels for the theatre. The 1939 murder mystery Ten Little Niggers (a title later changed, for obvious reasons, to An
d Then There Were None) was staged very successfully both in London in 1943 and in New York the following year.
Christie’s adaptation of Appointment with Death, a crime novel published in 1928, was staged in 1945, and two other novels which she subsequently turned into plays were Death on the Nile (1937), performed in 1945 as Murder on the Nile, and The Hollow, published in 1946 and staged in 1951. These three novels all featured Hercule Poirot as the investigator, but in adapting them for the stage, Christie removed Poirot. ‘I had got used to having Poirot in my books,’ she said of one of them, ‘and so naturally he had come into this one, but he was all wrong there. He did his stuff all right, but how much better, I kept thinking, would the book have been without him. So when I came to sketch out the play, out went Poirot.’
For her next play after The Hollow, Agatha Christie turned not to a novel, but to her short story ‘Three Blind Mice’, which had itself been based on a radio play she wrote in 1947 for one of her greatest fans, Queen Mary, widow of the British monarch George V. The Queen, who was celebrating her eightieth birthday that year, had asked the BBC to commission a radio play from Agatha Christie, and ‘Three Blind Mice’ was the result. For its transmogrification into a stage play, a new title was found, lifted from Shakespeare’s 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’. The Mousetrap opened in London in November 1952, and its producer, Peter Saunders, told Christie that he had hopes for a long run of a year or even fourteen months. ‘It won’t run that long,’ the playwright replied. ‘Eight months, perhaps.’ Fifty years later, The Mousetrap is still running, and may well go on for ever.
A few weeks into the run of The Mousetrap, Saunders suggested to Agatha Christie that she should adapt for the stage another of her short stories, ‘Witness for the Prosecution’. But she thought this would prove too difficult, and told Saunders to try it himself. This he proceeded to do, and in due course he delivered the first draft of a play to her. When she had read it, Christie told him she did not think his version good enough, but that he had certainly shown her how it could be done. Six weeks later, she had completed the play that she later considered one of her best. On its first night in October 1953 at the Winter Garden Theatre in Drury Lane, the audience sat spellbound by the ingenuity of the surprise ending. Witness for the Prosecution played for 468 performances, and enjoyed an even longer run of 646 performances in New York.
Shortly after Witness for the Prosecution was launched, Agatha Christie agreed to write a play for the British film star, Margaret Lockwood, who wanted a role that would exploit her talent for comedy. The result was an enjoyable comedy-thriller, Spider’s Web, which made satirical use of that creaky old device, the secret passage. In December 1954, it opened at the Savoy Theatre, where it stayed for 774 performances, joining The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution. Agatha Christie had three successful plays running simultaneously in London.
For the next theatre venture, Christie collaborated with Gerald Verner to adapt Towards Zero, a murder mystery she had written ten years previously. Opening at St James’s Theatre in September 1956, it had a respectable run of six months. The author was now in her late sixties, but still producing at least one novel a year and several short stories, as well as working on her autobiography. She was to write five more plays, all but one of them original works for the stage and not adaptations of novels. The exception was Go Back for Murder, a stage version of her 1943 Hercule Poirot murder mystery, Five Little Pigs, and once again she banished Poirot from the plot, making the investigator a personable young solicitor. The play opened at the Duchess Theatre in March 1960, but closed after only thirty-one performances.
Her four remaining plays, all original stage works, were Verdict, The Unexpected Guest (both first staged in 1958), Rule of Three (1962), and Fiddlers Three (1972). Rule of Three is actually three unconnected one-act plays, the last of which, ‘The Patient’, is an excellent mystery thriller with an unbeatable final line. However, audiences stayed away from this evening of three separate plays, and Rule of Three closed at the Duchess Theatre after ten weeks.
Christie’s final work for the theatre, Fiddlers Three, did not even reach London. It toured the English provinces in 1971 as Fiddlers Five, was withdrawn to be rewritten, and reopened at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, in August 1972. After touring quite successfully for several weeks, it failed to find a suitable London theatre and closed out-of-town.
Verdict, which opened at London’s Strand Theatre in May 1958, is unusual in that, although a murder does occur in the play, there is no mystery attached to it, for it is committed in full view of the audience. It closed after a month, but its resilient author murmured, ‘At least I am glad The Times liked it,’ immediately set to work to write another play, and completed it within four weeks. This was The Unexpected Guest, which, after a week in Bristol, moved to the Duchess Theatre, London, where it opened in August 1958 and had a satisfactory run of eighteen months. One of the best of Agatha Christie’s plays, its dialogue is taut and effective, and its plot full of surprises, despite being economical and not over-complex. Reviews were uniformly enthusiastic, and now, more than forty years later, it has begun a new lease of life as a novel.
A few months before her death in 1976, Agatha Christie gave her consent for a stage adaptation to be made by Leslie Darbon of her 1950 novel, A Murder is Announced, which featured Miss Marple. When the play reached the stage posthumously in 1977, the critic of The Financial Times predicted that it would run as long as The Mousetrap. It did not.
In 1981, Leslie Darbon adapted one more Christie novel, Cards on the Table, a Poirot murder mystery published forty-five years earlier. Taking a leaf from the author’s book where Hercule Poirot was concerned, Darbon removed him from the cast of characters. To date, there have been no more stage adaptations of Agatha Christie novels. With Black Coffee, The Unexpected Guest, and now Spider’s Web, I have started a trend in the opposite direction.
CHARLES OSBORNE
ALSO BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
The Mousetrap and Selected Plays
The first-ever publication in book form of The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the history of London’s West End, plus three other Christie thrillers.
The Mousetrap
A homicidal maniac terrorizes a group of snowbound guests to the refrain of ‘Three Blind Mice’…
And Then There Were None
Ten guilty people, brought together on an island in mysterious circumstances, await their sentence…
Appointment With Death
The suffocating heat of an exotic Middle-Eastern setting provides a backdrop for murder…
The Hollow
A set of friends convene at a country home where their convoluted relationships mean that any one of them could be a murderer…
Christie’s plays are as compulsive as her novels. Their colourful characters and ingenious plots provide yet more evidence of her mastery of the detective thriller.
ISBN: 0 00 649618 0
ALSO BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays
The first-ever publication in book form of Witness for the Prosecution, Christie’s highly successful stage thriller which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play, plus three of her classic mysteries.
Witness for the Prosecution
A stunning courtroom drama in which a scheming wife testifies against her husband in a shocking murder trial…
Towards Zero
A psychopathic murderer homes in on unsuspecting victims in a seaside house, perched high on a cliff…
Go Back For Murder
When the young feity Carla, orphaned at the tender age of five, discovers 16 years later that her mother was imprisoned for murdering her father, she determines to prove her dead mother’s innocence…
Verdict
Passion,
murder and love are the deadly ingredients which combine to make this one of Christie’s more unusual thrillers, which she described as ‘the best play I have written with the exception of Witness for the Prosecution.’
ISBN: 0 00 649045 X
ALSO AVAILABLE BY CHARLES OSBORNE
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie was the author of over 100 plays, short story collections and novels which have been translated into 103 languages; she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Many have tried to copy her but none has succeeded. Attempts to capture her personality on paper, to discover her motivations or the reasons for her popularity, have usually failed. Charles Osborne, a lifelong student of Agatha Christie, has approached this most private of people above all through her books, and the result is a fascinating companion to her life and work.
This ‘professional life’ of Agatha Christie provides authoritative information on each book’s provenance, on the work itself and on its contemporary critical reception set against the background of the major events in the author’s life. Illustrated with many rare photographs, this comprehensive guide to the world of Agatha Christie has been fully updated to include details of all the publications, films and TV adaptations in the 25 years since her death.
ISBN: 0 00 257033 5 Hardback
ISBN: 0 00 653097 4 Paperback
About the Author
Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English with another billion in 100 foreign countries. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. She is the author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, 19 plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.
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