Essentials?
JUNIUS: The Army, the Navy and the Administration of Justice. Now we pay for a grandmother not a government!
ROCKHAVEN: The incapables would loathe to lose their grandmother.
…
ROCKHAVEN: I suppose you believe that all men are born equal?
JUNIUS: No. But there is a chance they might be bred equal if they had an equal chance.
ROCKHAVEN: You’ll never eliminate human nature.
JUNIUS: I want to eliminate poverty. Now we’re taxing wealth. What harm does wealth do a country? If there is a man capable of making money, for Heaven’s sake encourage him to make more!
This is hardly the stuff of gripping drama, but neither is it what immediately springs to mind as the likely subject of breakfast conversation in the Miller/Watts/Christie households. Oranges and Lemons does not appear to have been performed. Agatha says in her autobiography that after The Claimant Madge ‘wrote one or two other plays, but they did not receive London productions’,45 which does not rule out the possibility that they were performed at regional repertory theatres in productions listed in the Lord Chamberlain’s plays card index (which Oranges and Lemons isn’t), or indeed by amateurs. We are told by Agatha that Madge was ‘quite a good amateur actress herself, and acted with the Manchester Amateur Dramatic’ so, after her brief spell as a West End playwright, we must assume that this is where she focused her theatrical energies.
Amongst Agatha’s own unpublished and unperformed early works are two very different full-length plays, The Clutching Hand and The Lie. The first of these, ‘A Play in Four Acts by A. Christie’, states on the title page that it is ‘Adapted from the novel The Exploits of Elaine by Arthur B. Reeve’. Significantly, this is undoubtedly her first dramatic adaptation of a novel, albeit not one of her own.46
Arthur B. Reeve was a journalist who became America’s most popular writer of detective fiction in the second decade of the twentieth century. His recurring character, ‘scientific detective’ Craig Kennedy, was billed as ‘The American Sherlock Holmes’, and Kennedy’s investigations are characterised by the use of pioneering forensic techniques and bizarre gadgets created by him in his lab. In fact he would probably have had more success than me in dating some of Agatha’s manuscripts and correspondence. Of course this particular detective’s investigative techniques may well have appealed to Agatha the chemist, although it is notable that her own sleuths tend to treat forensic evidence as secondary to an analysis of character and an understanding of motive.
The Exploits of Elaine itself is an odd hybrid. Conceived by Pathé in 1914 as a fourteen-part film serial, it was primarily a vehicle for their star Pearl White, who had been a huge success in the Perils of Pauline series. Arthur B. Reeve was employed to create the storyline, and included the character of Craig Kennedy. This meant that the syndicated newspaper instalments of the story, when compiled into a book the following year, effectively became both the next Craig Kennedy novel and the ‘book of the film’ of The Exploits of Elaine. It has to be said that the result is far from being a literary masterpiece; Reeve is no Raymond Chandler, and the disjointed ‘novel’, the chapter titles of which exactly reflect the titles of the film serial’s episodes, very much betrays its origins.
Quite how this ended up on Agatha’s bookshelf, and why she felt drawn to adapt it for the stage, is something of a mystery; it may have been done in response to her sister’s challenge to write a piece of detective fiction, which more famously resulted in her first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. We know that she had read Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins; but we can now add Arthur B. Reeve’s brand of pulp fiction to the august roll-call of those who inspired Agatha’s early experiments in crime fiction.
The book and play concern the efforts of the plucky young Elaine Dodge to track down her father’s murderer, a master criminal known as The Clutching Hand, who leaves ‘a warning letter signed with a mysterious clutching fist’ next to the body of each of his victims. In order to do this, she enlists the help of Craig Kennedy, scientific detective, and his ‘Doctor Watson’, the journalist Walter Jameson. Other characters include the lawyer Perry Bennett and three gangsters named Limpy Red, Dan the Dude and Spike. For good measure, the book also includes Chinese devil worshippers and even a medium performing a séance, none of whom, perhaps thankfully, make it into Christie’s dramatisation.
Whilst the play is an interesting early exercise in the efficient adaptation of a novel for the stage, it would be fair to say that Agatha is no Damon Runyon when it comes to a grasp of New York vernacular. Her leading characters tend to speak in cut-glass English accents and her gangsters endearingly lapse into cockney while referring to ‘drug stores’ and ‘janitors’. Agatha’s father was a New Yorker, but although she was proud of her American ancestry she herself did not travel to America until she was thirty-one, and it seems either that Frederick Miller’s American accent cannot have been a strong one, or that by the time Agatha wrote The Clutching Hand her memory of it was distant.
Although The Clutching Hand never made it as far as the stage, the influence of The Exploits of Elaine can be seen in Christie’s early adventure fiction; in particuar, the pursit of an elusive master criminal was a theme that she would return to on a number of occasions. As she says in her autobiography, “Thriller plays are usually much alike in plot – all that alters is the Enemy. There is an international gang à la Moriarty – provided first by the Germans, the “Huns” of the first war; then the Communists who in turn were succeeded by the Fascists. We have the Russians, we have the Chinese, we go back to the international gang again and again, and the Master Criminal wanting world supremacy is always with us.’47
Arthur B. Reeve’s adventurous young heroine undoubtedly held a particular appeal for Agatha. Tuppence Beresford (The Secret Adversary, 1922), Anne Beddingfeld (The Man in the Brown Suit, 1924) and Virginia Revel (The Secret of Chimneys, 1925) would all appear to owe something to Reeve’s Elaine Dodge. Here, to cherish, is his description of her: ‘Elaine Dodge was both the ingénue and the athlete – the thoroughly modern type of girl – equally at home with tennis and tango, table talk and tea. Vivacious eyes that hinted at a stunning amber brown sparkled beneath masses of the most wonderful auburn hair. Her pearly teeth, when she smiled, were marvellous. And she smiled often, for her life seemed to be a continuous film of enjoyment.’48
When, in 1922, Christie was writing notes for The Man in the Brown Suit while on the Grand Tour, they appear under the heading ‘Adventurous Anne Episode 1’.49 Reeve’s heroine and ‘episodic’ format were therefore very much on her mind – although she later claimed that ‘Anne the Adventuress’, the title under which the novel was serialised in the Evening News the following year, was ‘as silly a title as I had ever heard’.50 All of this, though, seems to indicate that the script for The Clutching Hand pre-dates 1922, and Agatha’s own first visit to America.
And now on to more serious matters, in the shape of an unpublished and unperformed three-act ‘domestic drama’ called simply The Lie. In her autobiography Agatha mysteriously states, ‘I wrote a gloomy play, mainly about incest. It was refused firmly by every manager I sent it to. “An unpleasant subject”. The curious thing is that, nowadays, it is the kind of play which might quite likely appeal to a manager.’51 I believe The Lie to be that play and, although the chronology in her autobiography is notoriously inaccurate, Agatha clearly places it in the mid-1920s after her and Archie’s return from the Grand Tour. The action of the play, of which
