Zero (1944), where we are introduced to a collection of characters months before the approaching zero hour of the inevitable murder. Ordeal by Innocence (1958) is both a deeply felt exploration of the consequences of a possible miscarriage of justice and a clever whodunit.
Christie also wrote a number of short stories that achieved fame in their own right, including “Witness for the Prosecution.” First published in 1925 under the title “Traitor Hands,” almost thirty years later it became not just Christie’s best stage play, but also one of the best courtroom dramas ever. “Philomel Cottage,” also a short story from the 1920s, became the stage play and film Love from a Stranger. And, of course, before its incarnation as a play, The Mousetrap had been a short story, “Three Blind Mice.”
Christie the Dramatist
Agatha Christie is still the only crime novelist to achieve equal fame as a crime dramatist. The first stage play based on her writing was Alibi, an adaptation, but not by the author herself, of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which opened in London in 1928. That year she also adapted her 1925 novel, The Secret of Chimneys, as a three-act play but failed to have it staged. She then wrote an original script, Black Coffee (1930), in which Poirot is summoned to find a missing document vital to the country’s security, but finds himself investigating a murder at the home of Sir Claud Amory. A further adaptation of Peril at End House followed in 1940, but Christie was disappointed with adaptations of her stories by other hands. So she adapted her own novel And Then There Were None in 1943 and it had a successful run of almost a year in London’s West End, despite the destruction of its theatrical home during the height of the Blitz, and a transfer to another.
Spurred on by this success, she adapted Appointment with Death and Murder on the Nile in 1945 and 1946. Miss Marple made her stage debut in 1949 in Murder at the Vicarage. The 1950s was Christie’s golden age of theater. Beginning with The Hollow (1951), and followed by Witness for the Prosecution (1953), Spider’s Web (1954), Towards Zero (1956), Verdict (1958), and The Unexpected Guest (1958), this impressive roster of dramas contributed to her unique theatrical success. To this day, she is the only female playwright to have had three plays running simultaneously in the West End.
In 1952, the most famous stage play in the world, The Mousetrap, began its inexorable advance to the status of national institution. Originally written as a radio play to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Queen Mary, it was subsequently adapted as a novella and, finally, as the stage play that is now older than most of the UK population. This theatrical landmark celebrates its sixtieth birthday in 2012.
In 1962, another experiment, Rule of Three, debuted on the London stage. Although not well received by the critics, it remains fascinating to fans as each of the three one-act plays, totally different in style and plot, display aspects of Christie not hitherto seen on the stage. The Rats is a claustrophobic will-they-get-away-with-it? play; Afternoon at the Seaside is a very funny sketch involving missing jewelry with a surprise revelation in the last moments; and The Patient is an ingenious whodunit with an artfully concealed central clue. As late as 1972, Christie’s love of the theater is evident in Fiddlers Five, or, as it later became, Fiddlers Three. Although it did not receive a West End production and, compared to her earlier theatrical hits, is, despite its many clever ideas, disappointing, it is clear that her love of playwriting remained with Christie until the end of her life.
Other Works
Interspersed with her detective fiction, Christie also experimented with noncrime material, showing an aspect of her imagination not obvious from her crime fiction alone. In 1924, she published Road of Dreams, a poetry collection, and six years later published Giant’s Bread, the first of six Mary Westmacott novels to appear over the next thirty years. Best described as bittersweet love stories, these titles show glimpses of the real Agatha Christie and mirror many situations in her own life. Giant’s Bread centers on the composer Vernon Deyre and reveals Christie’s lifelong love of music; two years later, Unfinished Portrait contains, consciously or otherwise, many elements from Christie’s own life, including a marriage, idyllic at the start but later ruined by infidelity, culminating in divorce; an unhappy wife who takes up writing; and a subsequent mother/daughter relationship. A similar theme is also explored, even more devastatingly, in the 1952 novel, A Daughter’s a Daughter. In her Autobiography, Christie describes how she wrote Absent in the Spring (1934) over a single weekend; in it, Joan Scudamore, trapped by bad weather in a remote area of Turkey, spends four days examining her life and conscience before resolving to transform herself. The Westmacott pseudonym remained a secret for many years and Christie was always very pleased that the books were accepted for publication and reviewed on their merits alone, not because they were written by a famous crime writer. The final Westmacott, The Burden (1956), explores the love between two sisters.
In 1946, she published Come Tell Me How You Live, a rambling memoir of day-to-day life on an archaeological dig written to answer the innumerable questions of friends and acquaintances. Although her publishers would have preferred a whodunit, her love of this life shines through every page of the book. In 1937, she wrote Akhnaton, a play based on the life of the doomed Egyptian king. Although it has never received a professional performance, the script was published in 1973 and proved to be a well-researched and poignant play; although essentially a noncrime title, it does feature a poisoning and the unmasking of a killer in the final scene. Star Over Bethlehem (1965) is, as the name suggests, a religious-themed collection of very short stories and poems.
Finally, the year after her death, An Autobiography was published. Christie had worked on this for over fifteen years, beginning in Baghdad in 1950 where, she explains in the foreword, she was suddenly overtaken by the urge to write down the story of her life. After her death, it fell to her daughter and an editor at Collins to reduce the vast amount of material to a manageable size, and the book was published in October 1977 to international acclaim. As easily readable as all of her writing, An Autobiography is a fascinating look at the woman who wrote the world’s bestselling books, but there is little in the way of solid information about the creation of any particular title. She does give an account of the creation of Hercule Poirot and a less detailed one for Miss Marple, but the genesis of most of her books remains as mysteriously elusive as the books themselves.
The Legacy
Almost forty years after her death, Agatha Christie’s name is still synonymous with the very best detective fiction. She refined an already existing template, and for over a half-century, she expanded and experimented with it to produce a body of work that continues to transcend every known border of age, sex, race, background, and level of education. Her entire output is still available in every language and she is read avidly from Melbourne to Moscow, from Iceland to India. She is enjoyed by teenagers and pensioners; she is studied by academics and linguists and social historians. Her work provides a regular source for film and TV adapters, for computer game developers, for animators, and graphic-novel artists. Quite simply, in the field of detective fiction no other writer ever did it as often, as well, or for as long. Agatha Christie remains unique and, thus far, immortal.
John Curran is the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity award-winning author of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks and Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making. A recognized expert on the life and works of Agatha Christie, he is a frequent speaker and contributor to programs about her. He lives in Dublin, where he is writing a doctoral thesis on Christie.
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