Читать книгу Curtain Up: Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre - Julius Green - Страница 13

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was fascinated by theatre from an early age. In sleepy, Victorian middle-class Torquay, ‘one of the great joys in life was the local theatre. We were all lovers of the theatre in my family,’ she writes in her autobiography. Older siblings Madge and Monty visited the Theatre Royal and Opera House in Abbey Road practically every week, and the young Agatha was usually allowed to accompany them. ‘As I grew older it became more and more frequent. We went to the pit stalls always – the pit itself was supposed to be “rough”. The pit cost a shilling and the pit stalls, which were two rows of seats in front, behind about ten rows of stalls, were where the Miller family sat, enjoying every kind of theatrical entertainment.’¹ Clara and Frederick Miller clearly did everything they could to encourage this interest in their children, and Agatha was always captivated by the colourful dramas unfolding in front of her:

I don’t know whether it was the first play I saw, but certainly among the first was Hearts and Trumps, a roaring melodrama of the worst type. There was a villain in it, the wicked woman called Lady Winifred, and there was a beautiful girl who had been done out of a fortune. Revolvers were fired, and I clearly remember the last scene, when a young man hanging from a rope from the Alps cut the rope and died heroically to save either the girl he loved or the man whom the girl loved.

I remember going through this story point by point. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that the really bad ones were Spades’ – father being a great whist player, I was always hearing talk of cards – ‘and the ones who weren’t quite so bad were Clubs. I think perhaps Lady Winifred was a Club – because she repented – and so did the man who cut the rope on the mountain. And the Diamonds’ – I reflected. ‘Just worldly,’ I said, in my Victorian tone of disapproval.²

The first story Agatha ever wrote took the form of a play, a melodrama concerning ‘the bloody Lady Agatha (bad) and the noble Lady Madge (good) and a plot that involved the inheritance of a castle’. Madge only agreed to take part in the production on condition the epithets were switched round. It was very short, ‘since both writing and spelling were a pain to me’, and amused her father greatly.³ Agatha’s parents often travelled, and when they did so she would stay in Ealing with great-aunt Margaret, who had been responsible for the upbringing of Agatha’s mother and was thus referred to by her as ‘Auntie-Grannie’. Even when Agatha was away from home, theatre ‘never stopped being a regular part of my life’, she recalls. ‘When staying at Ealing, Grannie used to take me to the theatre at least once a week, sometimes twice. We went to all the musical comedies, and she used to buy me the score afterwards. Those scores – how I enjoyed playing them!’⁴

The family spent some time in France during her childhood, and seven-year-old Agatha, inspired by the local pantomime in Torquay, began staging her own work for the enjoyment of her parents, using the window alcove in their bedroom as a stage, and assisted by her long-suffering young French chaperone, Marie. ‘Looking back, I am filled with gratitude for the extraordinary kindness of my father and mother. I can imagine nothing more boring than to come up every evening after dinner and sit for half an hour laughing and applauding whilst Marie and I strutted and postured in our home-improvised costumes. We went through the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and so forth.’⁵ Although young Agatha studied piano, dance and singing, and at one point had aspirations to become an opera singer, she appears to have gained the greatest fulfilment from her various youthful theatrical ventures, a natural progression from the dreamy childhood role-play games that, as a home-educated child, she created to pass the time.

The Christie archive contains a delightfully witty, meticulously handwritten twenty-six-page ‘acting charade in three acts’ called Antoinette’s Mistake, with a colourful hand-drawn cover that is clearly the work of a child. The play concerns the exploits of a French maid in the house of one Miss Letitia Dangerfield and her niece Rosy, and features characters called Colonel Mangoe and Major Chutnee. The closest handwriting match with that of family members is to Frederick’s, and I like to think that this piece was perhaps penned by Agatha’s father as a tribute to the long-suffering Marie (Antoinette?), whose performance in one of Agatha’s fairy tale dramatisations ‘convulsed my father with mirth’. Agatha’s father was a leading light of the local amateur dramatics, and it was perhaps in recognition of the enjoyment which this brought the family that she agreed, in later life, to become president of the Sinodun Players, an amateur group based in Wallingford where she owned a house. She received numerous such requests throughout her life, but the local amateur dramatics and the Detection Club were the only societies of which she accepted the presidency.

Frederick died aged fifty-five, when Agatha was eleven and both of her siblings had already left Ashfield, the family home in Torquay; but her mother continued to nourish young Agatha’s enthusiasm for theatre, whisking her off to see Irving perform in Exeter. ‘He may not live much longer, and you must see him,’ she insisted.⁶ Agatha herself, notoriously averse to public speaking in later life, enjoyed venturing onto the stage in her youth, and an ambitious production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard, produced by a group of young friends at the Parish Rooms in Torquay, gave her the opportunity to show off her singing voice in the role of Colonel Fairfax. ‘As far as I remember I felt no stage fright … There is no doubt that The Yeomen of the Guard was one of the highlights of my existence.’⁷

Finishing school in Paris at the age of sixteen was an opportunity to sample the French capital’s theatrical delights. She enjoyed herself in drama class, and had a remarkable ability to appreciate a fine theatrical performance:

We were taken to the Comedie Francaise and I saw the classic dramas and several modern plays as well. I saw Sarah Bernhardt in what must have been one of the last roles of her career, as the golden pheasant in Rostand’s Chantecler. She was old, lame, feeble, and her golden voice was cracked but she was certainly a great actress – she held you with her impassioned emotion. Even more exciting than Sarah Bernhardt did I find Rejane. I saw her in a modern play, La Course aux Flambeaux. She had a wonderful power of making you feel, behind a hard repressed manner, the existence of a tide of feeling and emotion which she would never allow to come out in the open. I can still hear now, if I sit quiet a minute or two with my eyes closed, her voice, and see her face in the last words of the play: ‘Pour sauver ma fille, j’ai tué ma mere,’ and the deep thrill this sent through one as the curtain came down.⁸

After spending a ‘season’ as a seventeen year old in Cairo with her mother, Agatha found herself a regular guest on the house party circuit. This served its purpose of introducing her to a number of eligible young bachelors, and she also became friends with the colourful theatrical impresario C.B. Cochran and his devoted and long-suffering wife, Evelyn. Charles Cochran was indisputably the greatest showman of his generation, in a career that included productions of Ibsen alongside the promotion of boxing, circus and rodeo as well as the management of Houdini. He was also to be instrumental in launching the career of Noël Coward. That was still ahead of him when he met the young Agatha, but for one thing he could take credit. Cochran was responsible for introducing the rollerskating craze which swept the country in the early 1900s, and a famous photograph shows Agatha and her friends enjoying some skating on Torquay’s Princess Pier. The Cochrans eventually invited her to their house in London, where she was ‘thrilled by hearing so much theatrical gossip’.

As a young woman, Agatha continued her own forays onto the stage. Photographs show her and her friends gloriously costumed for The Blue Beard of Unhappiness, which the programme (printed on blue paper of course) reveals to be ‘A drama of Eastern domestic life in two acts’.⁹ An open air production with a dozen in the cast, it is, we are told, set on a part of the terrace in Blue Beard’s castle in ‘Bagdad’. The folktale of wife-murderer Bluebeard was to provide Agatha with inspiration on more than one later occasion. In the ‘Confessions Album’, in which members of the Miller family regularly made light-hearted entries listing their current likes and dislikes, a 1910 entry from Agatha nominates Bluebeard as one of two characters from history whom she most dislikes.¹⁰ The other is nineteenth-century Mormon leader Brigham Young, the founder of Salt Lake City: another extravagantly bearded polygamist, though in this case not a serial killer. ‘Why did they Bag-dad?’ asks The Blue Beard of Unhappiness’s programme, and goes on to state ‘Eggs, fruit and other Missiles are to be left with the Cloak Room Attendant’. No playwright is credited and, sadly, no script survives.

Many of Agatha’s earliest writings were in verse, and her first published dramatic work took this form. A Masque from Italy, originally written in her late teens, was later included (with the subtitle ‘The Comedy of the Arts’) in the 1925 self-published poetry volume Road of Dreams, and has thus been overlooked as a playscript. Although it is structured as a series of solo songs (which she set to music shortly before the book was published), the piece is clearly intended as a short theatrical presentation, as indicated by, the word ‘masque’ in its title, and may have been written as a puppet show. There is a cast list, consisting of six characters from Italian commedia dell’arte; and a clear dramatic through-line based on the love triangle between Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine, delivered in a prologue, seven songs and an epilogue. Punchinello serves as a master of ceremonies and is here envisaged as a marionette rather than as the ‘Mr Punch’ glove puppet. We know that Agatha was intrigued by a Dresden China collection of these characters owned by her family, but the piece shows a thorough understanding of their traditional dramatic functions and motivations (apart from some ambiguity over a female counterpart of Punchinello), and it is more than possible that local pantomimes were still including a traditional Harlequinade sequence featuring them when she was in the audience as a child at the turn of the century. Her lifelong interest in the Harlequin figure, later to manifest itself in the Harley Quin short stories, is here informed by his role as the dangerous and exciting stranger stealing women’s hearts, which was to be a recurring theme in her early plays.

And when the fire burns low at night, and

Lightning flashes high!

Then guard your hearth, and hold your love,

For Harlequin goes by.¹¹

The pain of lost love and the tensions between these passionate and flamboyant characters are well drawn, and with Harlequin in his ‘motley array’ and Punchinello inviting the audience to ‘touch my hump for luck’, the whole effect is deeply theatrical. Whether performed by puppets or people, it would have been fun to watch.

Encouraged by her mother, and perhaps in the hope of emulating her sister who had had some success with the publication of short stories in Vanity Fair, Agatha began writing stories in her late teens. ‘I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts and there’s nothing like boredom to make you write.’¹² Adopting the pseudonyms Mac Miller, Nathaniel Miller and Sydney West, Agatha set about composing a number of short stories on her sister’s typewriter, but they failed to impress the editors of the magazines she sent them to.

‘Sydney West’ had a particularly idiosyncratic style, and was responsible for a short one-act play entitled The Conqueror which, like the short story ‘In the Market Place’, also authored by West, is a parable with a mythological flavour. The Ealing address of Agatha’s great-aunt is inked on the script, which does not list a dramatis personae. Subtitled ‘A Fantasy’, the scene is ‘a great Mountain overlooking the Earth. On a throne sits a huge, grey Sphinx like figure, veiled and motionless. Around her are Messengers of Fate, and the air is full of winged Destinies who come and go ceaselessly.’¹³ A blind youth ascends the mountain and exposes the Sphinx, who appears to represent Fate, as a sham. Like ‘In the Market Place’, the whole thing is rather baffling and appears to be some sort of morality tale. It is intriguing to imagine what future Agatha envisaged for this play, particularly given the practicalities of ‘winged destinies’. Though atmospheric, and not without its interest as a stylistic experiment, it is hard to imagine that it would have proved particularly popular with the local teams responsible for putting together Antoinette’s Mistake and The Blue Beard of Unhappiness. What this odd little offering does do, though, is once again confirm the broad range of Agatha’s theatrical vocabulary.

When eighteen-year-old Agatha produced her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, her mother suggested that she send it to local author Eden Phillpotts for his comment. Phillpotts became Agatha’s valued mentor, and it was his literary agent Hughes Massie & Co. which, having rejected Snow Upon the Desert, would eventually take her under their wing fifteen years later, the imposing Massie himself having by then been succeeded by the more affable Edmund Cork.

A long-time neighbour of the Millers in Torquay – his daughter Adelaide attended the same ballet class as Agatha Eden Phillpotts was forty-six when he started advising Agatha, and already a successful novelist. A sort of Thomas Hardy of Dartmoor, specialising in work written in Devon dialect and set in Devon locations, his prolific output would eventually exceed even Agatha’s, and he enjoyed some success latterly with detective fiction. Well connected in literary circles – he had undertaken collaborations with Arnold Bennett and Jerome K. Jerome – Phillpotts had originally trained as an actor in London but had been forced to abandon his thespian aspirations due to a recurring illness that made him unable to control his legs. His love of the theatre never left him, though, and although he had experienced no great success as a playwright by the time he counselled Agatha, he went on to write some thirty plays, a number of which were notable and long-running West End successes.

In 1912 Phillpotts famously refused to concede to the request of the Lord Chamberlain’s office that he alter two lines in his play The Secret Woman, about a man who starts a relationship with his son’s lover, with the result that they refused to issue it with a licence. The ensuing furore saw many of the great writers of the day sign a letter to The Times in his support and contribute to a fund to enable performances to take place in a ‘club’ theatre where a licence was not required. Amongst the signatories was Bernard Shaw, whose work ‘in its massive and glittering magnificence’ Phillpotts admired greatly, in particular ‘the thousand challenges he offers to humanity on burning and still living questions’.¹⁴ Phillpotts and Shaw would later meet at Birmingham Repertory Theatre which, under its legendary founder Barry Jackson, regularly produced the work of both men. There can be no doubt that Phillpotts shared his enthusiasm for Shaw with the young Agatha and that this informed some of her early, unpublished playwriting ventures, which deal with such Shavian preoccupations as variations on the marriage contract, grounds for divorce and eugenics. The lengthy and witty preface to Shaw’s 1908 Getting Married has particular resonances in some of Christie’s early work.

In any event, contact with Phillpotts would have broadened young Agatha’s mind when it came to the issue of human relations, as is evidenced by his recommended reading for her. In a letter to her he suggests that she try ‘a few of the Frenchmen’, including Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. ‘But this last is very strong meat and perhaps you had better wait till you have taken some lighter dose first of the more modern men. When you come to it, remember that Madame Bovary is one of the greatest works in the world.’¹⁵ Although one may concur with his literary appraisal, Madame Bovary seems a particularly daring recommendation for an eighteen-year-old Edwardian girl, given its subject matter and the lifestyle of its author, who stood trial in France for obscenity in 1857 after it was published in a magazine.

Sadly, Phillpotts’ advocacy of unconventional human relations extended beyond literature and into his family life. His daughter Adelaide, who collaborated with him on a number of books and plays, including the 1926 Theatre Royal Haymarket success Yellow Sands – and whose literary career was to cross paths with Agatha’s in the future – was the long-term victim of his incestuous attentions, as is apparent from his correspondence with her and, indeed, her own autobiography.¹⁶ This bizarre obsession was confined to the one relationship, and there is no indication of any impropriety as far as the young Agatha was concerned. There can be no doubt that Phillpotts’ advice and input, and his role as a sounding board for her early work, was critical to Agatha’s blossoming as a writer, enabling her to gain confidence in her writing and widen her horizons. Indeed, her 1932 novel Peril at End House was dedicated to Phillpotts ‘for his friendship and the encouragement he gave me many years ago’. He doubtless, too, encouraged her interest in theatre, and they maintained a sporadic correspondence until the 1950s. In 1928 Phillpotts’ wife died and the following year he married a young cousin. We will hear more of Adelaide later.

Nobody would publish Agatha’s novel Snow Upon the Desert, but she carried on producing short stories and one-act plays. Amongst these, Teddy Bear is an endearing and performable comedy for two male and two female actors, written under the pseudonym of George Miller. A well-constructed but lightweight romp, it centres around young Virginia’s attempts to attract the attention of Ambrose Seaton, a fellow who is involved in an impressive array of charitable ventures:

VIRGINIA: He’s so good looking and – and so splendid. Look at all his philanthropic schemes, the Dustmen’s Christian Knowledge, and the Converted Convicts Club, and the Society for the Amelioration of Juvenile Criminals.¹⁷

Virginia eventually adopts a strategy of attracting Ambrose’s attention by herself becoming a ‘juvenile criminal’. Needless to say, things do not go according to plan, and after the farcical unravelling of her scheme she abandons her attempts to ensnare the virtuous but elusive (and possibly gay) Ambrose and settles instead for her long-suffering admirer, Edward:

EDWARD: You heard me say I wasn’t going to propose again?

VIRGINIA: (smiling) Yes.

EDWARD: (with dignity) Well, I’m not going to.

VIRGINIA: (laughing) Don’t.

EDWARD: Not in that sense. I was going to suggest a business arrangement.

VIRGINIA: Business?

EDWARD: You see, you’ve got a lot of money, and I’m badly in need of some. The simplest way for me to get it would be to marry you. See?

VIRGINIA: (still laughing) Quite.

EDWARD: No sentiment about it.

VIRGINIA: Not a scrap.

EDWARD: Well – what do you say?

VIRGINIA: (very softly) I say – yes.

EDWARD: Virginia! (tries to take her in his arms)

VIRGINIA: (springing up) Remember you’re only marrying me for the money …

This is nicely constructed comic banter, although there is already an undercurrent of more serious debates about the nature of the marriage contract. In this case, it all ends happily, although it is clear who the dominant force in the relationship is going to be:

VIRGINIA: (tragically) … a confession of weakness. I’ve fallen from the high pinnacle of my own self esteem. I fancied that I was strong enough to stand apart from the vulgar throng, that I was not as other women (sits upright) but I am beaten, I am but one of the crowd after all, (slowly) I have –

EDWARD: (breathlessly) Fallen in love?

VIRGINIA: (dramatically) No. Bought a Teddy Bear!

Eugenia and Eugenics, another of Agatha’s unpublished and unperformed early one-act plays housed at the Christie Archive, is a more ambitiously constructed comedy which explores a popular theme of the day. We are told that it is set in 1914, which may be either the present or the future, given that it deals with the repercussions of a fictitious piece of legislation. In 1905 Shaw’s Man and Superman had received its London premiere, with a plot that underlined his belief that women are the driving force in human procreation, and that the development of the species is dictated by their success in finding biologically (rather than socially or financially) suitable partners: a quest which essentially constitutes the ‘Life Force’. There can be no doubt that Agatha’s work was also informed by this philosophy, although by what route it reached her is unclear. ‘What are men anyway?’ asks Kait in the 1944 novel Death Comes as the End. ‘They are necessary to breed children, that is all. But the strength of the race is in the women.’¹⁸ This novel is set in ancient Egypt, but time and again we see in Christie’s plays examples of the weak male either dominated or rejected by the superior female.

Shaw’s take on the topic, which challenged received Darwinian theory, was just one aspect of a much wider debate about the subject of eugenics that was current at the time, leading to the first International Eugenics Conference, held in London in 1912. Although there were ethical issues from the outset with a philosophy that advocated the genetic improvement of humanity, this was well before the concept of breeding a ‘master race’ took on a much more sinister aspect. Whilst Christie seems at home with Shaw’s approach to the matter, her comedy both makes merciless fun of the wider philosophy’s advocates and touches on some other burning issues of the day. Faced with an upcoming new law that will enforce eugenic philosophy by allowing only the physically and mentally perfect to marry, Eugenia has taken herself to what she believes to be a eugenics clinic advertising perfect partners. Her maid, Stevens, accompanies her:

EUGENIA: Talking of divorce, Eugenics will revolutionise the divorce laws.

STEVENS: Indeed Ma’am. Well I’ve heard as in Norway and Sweden and such countries you can get rid of your ’usband as easy as asking, with no more reason than just losing your taste for him. Very unfair I calls it. All men is trying at times, but don’t turn them helpless creatures adrift, call ’em your cross and put up with ’em.¹⁹

In the preface to his 1908 play Getting Married, under the heading ‘What does the word marriage mean?’ George Bernard Shaw had written: ‘In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties wish it, without any question of conduct. That is what marriage means in Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the senseless name of free love.’²⁰ The divorce laws were the subject of much debate in the early twentieth century, and it was not until 1923’s Matrimonial Causes Act that women were able to file for divorce on the same basis as men. Prior to that, men had simply to prove infidelity on the part of their spouse, whilst women had to establish further exacerbating circumstances such as rape or incest.

Christie’s play goes on:

EUGENIA: It’s an equal law for men and for women. Men can obtain a divorce with equal ease.

STEVENS: Ah! Ma’am, but a wife’s an ’abit to a man, and we all know how attached a man is to his ’abits, drinking and smoking and such like.

EUGENIA: So you class a wife with drinking and smoking, Stevens!

STEVENS: Well, Ma’am it’s true she comes more expensive sometimes.

EUGENIA: Stevens, you are lamentably behind the spirit of the age …

STEVENS: (thoughtfully) It seems to me M’am, what with the gentlemen being as difficult and scarce to get hold of as they are, that it’s a pity to ask too much of ’em …

EUGENIA: … next week, the Marriage Supervision Bill will become Law. It ensures that only the physically and mentally sound shall marry … I’m sure I don’t know what society is coming to. A few years ago money was everything – like birth used to be, and now nothing counts but notoriety. To be anybody one must have a new religion, or a new pet. My baby kangaroo, in spite of the fuss with the police, kept me in the forefront of society last season. But this year, Hyde Park is a walking menagerie, and an elephant would hardly attract attention. Eugenics, I feel assured, will be the next society craze. Let me then, be the first to take it up … This advertisement caught my eye this morning (reads) ‘Eugenic Institute. Men and Women of England. Protect the Race. Choose mates of physical and mental perfection. Come here and find your mate (Guaranteed with Medical Certificate). Remember the Race and Come. And here we are. What do you think of it, Stevens. Shan’t I be the most talked of woman in society?

STEVENS: It’s my experience, M’am, as anything that mentions racing, is shady.

Even the suffrage movement does not escape Stevens’ wisdom: ‘I holds as votes is very much the same as husbands, they’re a lot of trouble to get, and not much use once you’ve got ’em.’

Women over the age of thirty were finally enfranchised in Britain in 1918, but this play’s 1914 setting places it at the height of the suffrage campaign; the previous year, the Women’s Social and Political Union had mobilised thousands of supporters to march through the streets of London behind the coffin of suffragette Emily Davison, who had thrown herself in front of the king’s horse at Epsom. The characters in a play, of course, all speak with their own voices and without the benefit of authorial comment. Agatha’s writing, as ever, is well considered and fully engaged with the issues of the day, but it is up to the audience whether they believe Stevens to be speaking from a position of ignorance or whether they think her homespun philosophy may contain some pearls of wisdom.

Meanwhile, the ‘Eugenic Institute’ in the play turns out not to be all that Eugenia had hoped. The farcical construction of the piece is not as well handled as the comic dialogue, but suffice to say that Eugenia’s schemes to find the physically perfect partner are frustrated, and she resigns herself to marrying the devoted but self-professedly imperfect Goldberg who, from his name, we may assume to be Jewish. Agatha’s play thus wittily subverts eugenic philosophy and underlines the importance of putting the heart first. They decide to tie the knot immediately, before the new ‘Marriage Supervision Bill’ takes effect:

GOLDBERG: It seems to me, the only solution is for us to get married before next Wednesday.

EUGENIA: (reflectively) After all, if everyone is forced into Eugenics it will be far more chic to have an uneugenic husband …

GOLDBERG: Well, you know man hunting’s quite ousting foxhunting as a sport amongst the fair sex. You can hunt a man all the year round, you see, and English women are so deuced sporting.

Agatha’s own hunt for a husband, which had started in the social whirlwind of colonial Cairo and moved on to the more genteel setting of English house parties, was about to result in her marriage, at the age of twenty-five. Abandoning her fiancé, family friend Reggie Lucy, she opted instead for love from a stranger, and the promise of adventure offered by dashing young airman Archie Christie.

‘Archie and I were poles apart in our reaction to things. I think that from the start that fascinated us. It is the old excitement of “the stranger”.’²¹ Married on Christmas Eve 1914, their early years together were disrupted by war, with Archie gaining distinction for his contribution to the ground-based operations of the Royal Flying Corps, mostly on overseas postings, while Agatha remained in Torquay as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment at the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, completing the examination of the Society of Apothecaries and becoming a dispenser.

At the end of the war Archie, by now a colonel, was stationed at the Air Ministry in London, and after the war ended he found himself a job in the City. The couple divided their time between a flat in St John’s Wood and Ashfield, Agatha’s mother’s house in Torquay, where their daughter Rosalind was born on 5 August 1919.

The following year Agatha enjoyed a successful publishing debut with her novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Written on a break from her hospital work during the war, it was finally accepted for publication by Devon-born John Lane of the idiosyncratic and often controversial publishing house The Bodley Head, which specialised in books of poetry, and whose authors included Eden Phillpotts’ friend Arnold Bennett. The Bodley Head had been responsible at the end of the previous century for the notoriously decadent literary quarterly The Yellow Book. The five-book deal she signed with the firm was to establish her profile as an author, but it was to be another ten years until a play of hers was produced.

In 1922, Archie was engaged to take part in a world tour to promote the forthcoming British Empire exhibition, and Agatha took the opportunity to join her husband on this eye-opening voyage, which took in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada, with a stop for Agatha in New York in November on the way back, while Archie continued his work in Canada. In New York, Agatha stayed with her elderly American godmother Cassie Sullivan, and it is her name and address, along with the date 9 November 1922, that tantalisingly appears in handwriting on the front of the typed one-act playscript The Last Séance. In her autobiography, Agatha remembers this as one of her very first short stories, later rewritten for publication (which occurred in the American magazine Ghost Stories in 1926). The scenario works much better as a short play, however, and I believe that it was in this format that she first envisaged and wrote it, as an exercise in the then popular theatrical genre of Grand Guignol. In a letter to her mother from Melbourne in May 1922, Agatha writes, ‘I’ve been rather idle – but have written a Grand Guignol sketch and a short story.’²² Notes for The Last Séance (titled ‘The Mother’) appear in Notebook 34, along with those for the novel The Man in the Brown Suit (1924). ‘Passed Tenerife last night’ she observes at one point.²³

At the time of Agatha’s stay in Paris as a teenager, the original Parisian Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was under the direction of Max Maurey, and at its height as a ‘horror theatre’ venue, with André de Lorde its celebrated and prolific principal writer. An ever-changing programme of evening entertainments consisting of a collection of graphically bloodthirsty and macabre one-act plays, occasionally interspersed with comedies by way of light relief, were the talk of the town. It was widely advertised that audience members frequently passed out from fear, but the public proved themselves more than happy to rise to the challenge, and flocked to the small theatre in the Quartier Pigalle. It seems unlikely that those responsible for the education of a group of teenage girls would have allowed their charges to sample the delights of the Grand Guignol, but in 1908 the French company made headlines when it toured to London, including in its repertoire a play called L’Angoisse (The Medium).

In the early 1920s the Little Theatre on the Strand hosted London’s own Grand Guignol season, with a poster so horrifying that it was banned from the London Underground. A total of forty-three plays were produced in its rolling repertoire and the Lord Chamberlain’s office added to the publicity by refusing a licence to several more. Rarely out of the newspapers, the regular casts included such stalwarts of the English stage as Sybil Thorndike and her husband Lewis Casson, and a repertoire of work that included translations of some of the original French pieces (including The Medium) along with pieces by several English writers of the day. Noël Coward even contributed a short play, although he opted for a comic interlude rather than a horror piece. The Better Half, which was another play highlighting the inadequacies of the divorce laws, culminates in this heartfelt plea from its heroine:

ALICE: I tried to make him strike me, so that I could divorce him for cruelty – but No. He wouldn’t! He did just twist my arm a teeny bit but not enough even to bruise it … As somebody so very truly remarked the other day, the existing Divorce laws put a premium on perjury and adultery! Therefore I am going to find a lover and live in flaming sin – possibly at Claridges.²⁴

As regards the horror element of the programme, the following review from The Times sums up the sort of evening that audiences could enjoy:

The other new feature of the evening is probably familiar to most visitors to the Paris Grand Guignol, and it has already been seen in both French and English in this country. It is The Medium, the gruesome little play about a sculptor who is filled with strange imaginings on moving into a new studio. His model is a medium and goes off into a trance … during which she reveals the grizzly secrets which the studio holds … Those who like two series of shudder in one evening will probably appreciate The Medium, particularly as it gives Miss Sybil Thorndike another opportunity for a hair-raising performance … but we confess that for us The Hand Of Death is quite enough for one evening.²⁵

There is no record of Agatha having attended a Grand Guignol performance at the Little Theatre, but she was living in London at the time and would have read the numerous press articles and reviews that the season generated. The genre’s preoccupations would certainly have resonated with her interest in the occult and with some of her own literary experimentations, including a few published stories and a number of unpublished ones such as ‘The Green Gate’, ‘The Woman and the Kenite’, ‘Stronger than Death’, ‘Witch Hazel’ and ‘The War Bride’.²⁶

The Last Séance itself is a short, atmospheric and effective shocker in the true Grand Guignol tradition. Written for two male and two female actors, and set of course in Paris, it concerns a medium, Simone Letellier, who is persuaded to communicate with the spirit of a dead child. The outcome is marvellously gory, as a curtain is pulled back to reveal that ‘Simone is lying on the marble floor in a pool of blood which is dripping down the steps.’²⁷ This would be a gripping coup de théâtre, but it does not make for a satisfactory short story. The dialogue, which in the story simply appears to have had speech marks put around it, works well when spoken but not when read, and the highly theatrical denouement, when briefly described on the page, goes for nothing. We don’t know whether the play was submitted for performance, but in these early days Agatha found it a lot easier to get her work published than produced, so this is likely to have accounted for the change of format.²⁸

Agatha also continued to write one-act plays on themes that seem likely to have been suggested by the writings of George Bernard Shaw, but which latterly sound as if they may also have been informed by her own experiences as a wife and mother. Ten Years concerns a couple who have lived together as man and wife on the basis that they will review their relationship after a ten-year trial period. Elliot, the husband, is an author who has begun to enjoy some success, here talking to his lawyer, Rogers:

ROGERS: I fancy your – early views – were rather unpopular.

ELLIOT: Oh! They gained me a sort of notoriety. But unorthodoxy is for the young, Rogers – the young who imagine they’re going to remake the world on their own improved pattern. As we go on in life we find that the old pattern is not so bad after all! …

… I admit that my one aim then was to free the world from many of its existing conventions which I considered hampering and degrading. You may have heard that I met my – that I met Desiree when she was studying art in Paris. She too held unorthodox views. We both agreed in condemning the convention of marriage, which seemed to us then an ignoble bondage. Instead we favoured what is known as the ten years marriage system.²⁹

When the time comes, however, Desiree decides that, despite having been entirely faithful for ten years, she wants to leave Elliot and set up home with another male friend.

DESIREE: I’ve been a good wife and mother – but – I’m still young. Young enough to feel the divine fire, and long for it. I’m only thirty-three, remember. And something cries out in me – for more life! I want romance – passion – fire – the things we had once and can never have again. I want to feel the first exquisite thrill of mingled fear and joy. I want the beginning of love – not its end. I don’t want peace and security, and calm affection. I want to live – to live my life – not yours.

This comes as a shock to Elliot, who believes that the ten-year experiment has been a success. He and Desiree argue over custody of their child and, in a sentimental ending, resolve to stay together for the child’s sake.

Marmalade Moon is another four-hander one-act play, this time a comedy reminiscent of Noël Coward. As usual with most of these early, unpublished works, the typescript is undated, the author’s name is not given, and the researcher has to turn detective, scouring the script for contemporary references, or comparing stylistic traits or even paper quality, typefaces and layouts with other works the dates of which are known. In this case, it seems likely that the play predates Coward’s Private Lives by several years, although the scenario is not dissimilar to his 1930 comedy about a divorced couple reuniting during their honeymoons with their new spouses.

There are two versions of the script in the Christie archive, Marmalade Moon being a slightly amended version of the earlier New Moon. The location is a continental hotel, the second draft rationalising the first’s two settings into a more user-friendly single one. Here we meet two couples, one celebrating their honeymoon and the other the first anniversary of their divorce. In this extract, the divorced man offers some words of wisdom to the female honeymooner:

BRANDON: As a matter of fact, I’m here to commemorate my wife’s divorce.

SYLVIA: Who from?

BRANDON: Regrettably, but inevitably, myself. She didn’t start threatening soon enough. She just went (flicking his fingers)– like that. That’s why I advised you to start threatening now. Then you may not have to leave later.

SYLVIA: Since you seem so frank about it, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me why your wife left you?

BRANDON: (lightly) – You mean why I left my wife. Certainly. We couldn’t agree on how to pronounce ‘Wagner’. She would call him ‘Oo-agner’. She was an American. They said it was incompatibility of temperament. Anyway, I never loved her.

SYLVIA: Oh dear!

BRANDON: Yes, it distressed me greatly, in fact, almost as much as her quite indecent mispronunciation of Wagner! (slight pause, then seriously) But perhaps the real trouble was that neither of us would give in to the other. In married life you have to have a master – or a mistress.³⁰

Again, there are echoes of Shaw’s preface to Getting Married, in which he asserts, ‘the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that they want one’, and indeed to the play Getting Married itself, which involves a couple who are hesitant to marry and another who are divorced. In Agatha’s play, as in Shaw’s, the happy outcome follows a traditional dramatic convention. The newlyweds split up and then reunite, and the divorced couple are eventually reconciled. In the first version, New Moon, Brandon concludes, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – a new moon.’ In the wittily retitled Marmalade Moon he states, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – our second honeymoon! Our Marmalade Moon. That’s it – a little less sweet, perhaps, but a lot less sticky, and a thousand times more satisfying!’

It is not clear for what purpose the four playlets Teddy Bear, Marmalade Moon, Eugenia and Eugenics and Ten Years were intended; it may be that they were designed to be Guignol comic interludes. They appear to have been written over a number of years, but in terms of their subject matter they share a frame of reference informed by Shavian explorations of the theme of marriage. If performed together the effect would not have been dissimilar to Noël Coward’s popular 1936 short play compilations Tonight at 8.30.

Agatha’s early playwriting experiments demonstrate a natural aptitude in a variety of styles, but she had yet to see any of her work reach the stage. Then, in 1924, her sister Madge (or, perhaps, a clever agent working on her behalf) suddenly raised the stakes by somehow persuading impresario Basil Dean to produce her own full-length play, The Claimant, in the West End. Madge’s penning of short stories for magazines had ceased when she married the wealthy and quietly charming businessman James Watts and moved into his impressive Victorian mansion Abney Hall, near Manchester. Meanwhile, Agatha’s career as a writer had been successfully launched with three novels in three years for The Bodley Head. But now, suddenly, it was Madge’s name that was in lights, albeit the non-gender specific name ‘M.F. Watts’ under which she now wrote. ‘Awfully exciting about her play!’ Agatha wrote to her mother from the Grand Tour in May 1922. ‘And I shall be furious if she arrives “on film” before I do! It seems as though there was such a thing as an agent who is some good.’³¹

Basil Dean, who at this time was in his mid-thirties, had abandoned a career on the Stock Exchange in favour of training as an actor in repertory at Manchester, before becoming the first director of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre (later Liverpool Playhouse). During the First World War, in which he became a captain in the Cheshire Regiment, he had been director of the Entertainment Branch of the Navy and Army Canteen Board, supervising fifteen theatres and ten touring companies. Such experience served him well when he set up a theatrical production company in partnership with businessman Alec Rea, one of the principal sponsors of the Liverpool Rep project. As the Theatre Royal Windsor’s Curtain Up magazine commented: ‘One of the great men of the theatre of our time, Basil Dean began his remarkable career as a West End producer and manager in 1919 in partnership with Alec Rea. For the twenty years between 1919 and 1939, which at the beginning saw Galsworthy at his height and later Priestley at his prime, Basil Dean held a position in the West End theatre quite as powerful and influential as any of the big London managements of our post-war days. Under his sure guidance, plays by nearly all the leading dramatists of that period saw the light of day.’³²

A passionate commentator on theatre, and an early advocate of a National Theatre, Dean wrote a highly readable two-part autobiography, in which he remembers Alec Rea’s offer to him to go into business:

had I dreamed for a hundred years I could not have imagined an opportunity more suited to my circumstances … I needed a business manager whom I could trust. My choice fell on E.P. Clift, who was doing an excellent job as manager of the latest garrison theatre at Catterick Camp. He jumped at the chance, and thereafter wove himself in and out of my story with persistent self-interest … Meanwhile Alec [Rea] busied himself with the legal formalities of registering our company, to which he gave the name ReandeaN, always printed with capital letters at either end. People scoffed to see this name at the head of our playbills … Eventually the public came to accept it as the hallmark of an efficient presentation … I felt an urge to replace the ramshackle productions of the wartime theatre by the standards of acting and homogeneity of production in which I had been trained … Inspiring the new company with these ideals would not be easy. Actors trooping back from the battlefields and munitions factories were discomfited, more anxious about future employment than present perfection.³³

Rea paid Dean a salary of £20 per week, and set about looking for a theatre to use as a base for their operations. He settled on the St Martin’s, a small and elegant playhouse and London’s newest theatre, built by theatrical manager Bertie Meyer for Lord Willoughby de Broke and opened in 1916. C.B. Cochran had taken a lease on the building but failed to make a success of it and was keen to dispose of it. Rea eventually paid £20,000 for the remaining nineteen and a half years of the lease – as Dean put it, his ‘enthusiasm overcame his business caution’ – and ReandeaN took over the theatre on 11 February 1920.

The new company’s first major success was to be a play by a new female playwright. ‘Still walking the tight-rope between success and failure,’ writes Dean, ‘I decided that my only course was to go forward boldly … so I chose A Bill of Divorcement, a first play by Clemence Dane, a young writer who had already attracted the attention of the literary critics with two early novels. This moving play would have stood no chance of acceptance by a commercial management because the subject of madness was taboo on the London stage.’³⁴ Clemence Dane was the pen name of Winifred Ashton, whose work merits many a chapter in the established histories of female playwriting. The production, directed by Dean himself, was by all accounts an extraordinary one, not least due to the performance of ReandeaN’s ill-fated young starlet Meggie Albanesi, and it ran at the St Martin’s for over four hundred performances. It was also to launch Dane’s career as one of the best known and most prolific women dramatists of the inter-war years. A friend of Noël Coward, who based Blithe Spirit’s Madame Arcati on her, she continued writing plays until her death in 1965.

As with Agatha’s early plays, the issues of the divorce laws and eugenics were primary themes of Dane’s West End debut. Following the First World War the divorce rate in England had quadrupled, fuelled by hurried courtships, enforced separations, wartime adultery (both at home and abroad) and a new-found independence enjoyed by women, not least in the realm of employment. The resulting public and political debate lent renewed urgency to the recommendations of a 1912 Royal Commission, which had suggested a liberalisation of the divorce laws, and Clemence Dane’s 1921 play, set in 1933, controversially considered a future in which some of the proposed reforms had been introduced. As a dramatic exercise, this was not dissimilar to Agatha’s examination of the potential consequences of the fictional ‘Marriage Supervision Bill’ in Eugenia and Eugenics. When, in 1923, the Matrimonial Causes Act removed the additional exacerbating circumstances that women needed to prove in order to obtain a divorce, the immediate result was that the number of cases brought by women rose from 41 per cent to 62 per cent of the total. However, the only grounds for divorce on either side remained proven adultery until the 1937 Matrimonial Causes Act, which additionally allowed for cruelty, desertion or incurable insanity to be cited as reasons. The latter reason, of course, was kept firmly on the agenda by the eugenics movement.³⁵

Dane’s play concerns war veteran Hilary Fairfield, who suddenly returns to his wife and daughter one Christmas Day, having been hospitalised for over seventeen years with mental problems, thought to be shellshock. Citing the ‘incurable insanity’ clause in the fictional new divorce law, his wife Margaret has divorced him and is on the verge of remarriage. His daughter Sydney, meanwhile, is about to marry the son of the local rector. Although he claims to be cured, it comes to light that the mental illness from which Fairfield is suffering is in fact hereditary, and the play’s debate, whilst sympathetic to his predicament, involves a wide-ranging consideration of the issues of women’s rights in the matter of divorce and the ethical implications of knowingly passing on hereditary illness to the next generation. Eventually Sydney, fearful of passing on the illness to her own children, gives up her own aspirations of marriage in order to care for her father, thus liberating her mother to find happiness with a new husband.

Critics and audiences welcomed the play’s bravery and, as Dean’s obituary in The Times summed it up, ‘Basil Dean excelled himself as a director, and his young contract players, Meggie Albanesi and Malcolm Keen, excelled themselves in the roles of the daughter and the father.’³⁶ In Dean’s words, the response to Albanesi’s sensational performance as Sydney was ‘The only instance within my memory of a young actress achieving an international reputation by virtue of her performance in a single play.’³⁷ Three years later the object of Dean’s heartfelt admiration was dead, at the age of twenty-four, most probably as the result of a botched abortion.

Quite what attracted Basil Dean to produce and direct Madge Watts’ The Claimant is unclear. He perhaps hoped to repeat his success promoting the work of a female writer and The Claimant, like A Bill of Divorcement, concerns a man re-entering the family circle after a long absence. But there the similarities end. The play was cleared by the censor on 9 August 1924 for ‘performance at St Martin’s in a few weeks’,³⁸ but actually opened on 9 September at the Queen’s Theatre. It ran for forty-four performances and was not a success, although Madge’s letters from rehearsals to her husband and son are full of theatrical gossip and details of her involvement – clearly encouraged by Dean – in the process of creating the production.³⁹ She stayed in London during rehearsals and frequently visited Agatha and Archie, entertaining them with news of the latest dramas from the rehearsal rooms. Agatha herself attended rehearsals on at least one occasion, and doubtless enjoyed her first experience of the making of professional theatre. She also may well have noted the immaculate work of Marshall’s typing agency in the preparation of her sister’s playscript, and certainly entrusted them with much of her work thereafter.

As for the play itself, it has been said that it is inspired by the notorious case of the ‘Tichborne Claimant’, Roger Tichborne, who having been assumed dead in an 1854 shipwreck, turned up almost twenty years later to claim his inheritance. This resulted in a celebrated 1874 court case, following which the claim was rejected and the ‘claimant’ subsequently imprisoned for perjury. Madge’s play is a relatively light-hearted domestic drama, in which the protagonist abandons his claim and admits his true identity when it is discovered that the man he is impersonating was married, and that if he keeps up the pretence he will thus be unable to marry the young lady with whom he has fallen in love. There is an almost incomprehensible back-story and the central family’s relationships are so labyrinthine that a family tree is included in the script by way of explanation. This relatively trivial affair is a long way from the courtroom drama that gripped the nation in the 1870s. As G.S. Street at the Lord Chamberlain’s office put it, ‘I see no harm in the play. The Tichborne case has inspired many stories; in this case (except for calling the hero Roger) the resemblance is quite remote.’⁴⁰

The Times, which the week before opening had announced a new play by ‘Mr M.F. Watts’,⁴¹ corrected itself with its review headline ‘Woman Dramatist’s new play’ and went on to say

The history of the Tunstall family is a little complicated, even with the aid of a genealogical table kindly issued by the management with the programme … The author, Mrs M.F. Watts is, we take it, new to the stage, and inexperienced dramatists are apt to be over-lavish with their plots. There was, for instance, a first act exhibiting various members of the Tunstall family who were never seen again. You identified them carefully by the aid of the genealogical table, but it was labour wasted; the play got on very well without them … But there is plenty of competent acting from an exceptionally choice cast … And, for an ‘extra’, there was Mrs Lottie Venne, in a yeomanry helmet and Union Jack as Britannia ruling the waves and evidently wondering, as well she might wonder, why she was there.⁴²

The latter is a reference to a fancy dress party scene, which may have inspired a scene in Agatha’s 1930 short story, ‘The Dead Harlequin’, later adapted by her for the stage as Someone at the Window. In The Claimant, a footman comments on seeing the cream of society in fancy dress: ‘To see all these ’Arliquings and Pantomimes and Columbias, and then to think ’oo they are … well, reelly!’

The Claimant, which appears to have been the only play by Madge to reach the stage, sank without trace and has never been revived, although forty-five years later the seventy-nine-year-old Agatha would request a copy of it from the Lord Chamberlain’s office; to what purpose we will probably never know.⁴³ The irrepressible Madge, undaunted by the reception of her play, expressed her intentions to write a piece about Warren Hastings, but the only other script of hers that remains is another three-act drama, Oranges and Lemons, in which the widow Octavia has to choose between Junius, the young radical MP, and Rockhaven, the Conservative Prime Minister, both of whom are up against the machinations of a Labour leader of the opposition. The saying ‘Life’s a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel’, usually attributed to seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine, appears on the title page. Yet again, there are shades of eugenics in the play’s debates, as in this conversation between young Junius and the older Octavia:

JUNIUS: We’re not intended to be saints. We’ve got bodies. We’re born into a cruel animal world whose only design is – creation …

… if you deny … frustrate my love, I’ve nothing. Nothing left. It’s all of me.

OCTAVIA: It isn’t natural. You must turn to Spring, not autumn.

JUNIUS: I want no April to freeze me. I want the gold of October. Can’t you see, can’t you understand?⁴⁴

The central political argument, however, is a debate about land value tax, a policy advocated by the American political economist Henry George in the late nineteenth century which found favour with Asquith and Lloyd George, and subsequently the Labour Party, in the early twentieth:

JUNIUS: All that results from unimproved land should be sacred.

ROCKHAVEN: Humph! You differ from the socialists there.

JUNIUS: Land is different from everything else. It’s not for some men, or a few men, but for all men. Man must pay that one tax to mankind, then, for God’s sake leave him alone to work or starve! He’s had his opportunity.

ROCKHAVEN: How are you going to value your land?

JUNIUS: The value of land alters from day to day. But there’s already a rent paid for every plot and field in England. Deduct the value of buildings and improvements and there’s your ground rent.

ROCKHAVEN: You wouldn’t collect enough from this one source to run the country.

JUNIUS: The rent roll of England is roughly four millions. It ought to be enough if the government only stuck to essentials.

ROCKHAVEN: 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 there are two drafts, takes place in a suburban house, located in Wimbledon (amended to Putney) in version one or Hampstead in version two. The house belongs to John, who is married to Nan. Nan’s mother and grandmother live with them, and her younger sister Nell, who is fighting off the attentions of an ineffectual young suitor, shares a flat with a female friend elsewhere.

Nan is disillusioned with the boredom of her marriage to John, whom she married when she was seventeen, and the fact that he lavishes more of his attention on her golf- and tennis-playing younger sister than on her. In an attempt to get some excitement back into her life, she spends a night with an older admirer, Sir Peter (whom we never meet), claiming that she is staying with family friends. But when she returns home the next day she discovers that a friend of John’s has told him that he has seen her dining with Sir Peter, and it is not long before he establishes that she has not in fact been staying with the family friends. As Nan explains to her mother, Hannah:

I suppose he’s a good husband. He’s kind and polite, and feeds and clothes me well, and doesn’t beat me. Oh! A model husband! But I’m outside his life – right outside it. He goes to his business in the morning, and when he comes back in the afternoon, if it’s summertime, he plays golf or tennis with Nell. In the evening there’s music – with Nell. He’d sooner talk to her than to me. He never cares to be with me – he never wants me – I don’t interest him. Although I’m his wife I never dare laugh and joke with him as Nell does. And so it’s gone on from day to day – until I felt I couldn’t bear it any longer! (a pause) And then, Sir Peter came. He wanted to talk to me, he liked to be with me – I was the person to him! What happened? John told me to drop him! Altogether! Told me quite coldly and calmly, not because he cared – not because he was jealous – but because I was his wife, and he disliked having his property talked about!⁵²

As Hannah explains to her own mother, ‘A love not expressed is no love at all to Nan. And a man like John, upright, honourable, and straight as a die, lacks one thing – imagination.’ We are told that Hannah herself followed her dream: ‘I loved him! He was fascinating. His bad qualities were all beneath the surface. I promised to marry him. My people did their best to stop it, they knew him better than I did, but I was young and headstrong, I wouldn’t listen! I went my own way, and shut my eyes to the truth.’ As a result of this experience, she now advises, ‘Love isn’t everything. Marry a man you can respect and admire. Love will come.’

In order to preserve Nan’s marriage, and indeed in order to prevent three generations of her family becoming homeless, Hannah enlists the assistance of Nell, who is asked to lie for her sister and claim that Nan in fact stayed overnight with her after dining with Sir Peter. This is ‘the Lie’ of the title. It is believed that this plan will work, because of John’s apparent affinity with Nell. Hannah persuades Nell with the forceful argument, ‘I believe with all my heart and soul, that in every life there comes a moment, one supreme and all powerful moment, when we hold our fate in our hands, to decide our entire life for good or evil! Nell! Don’t let this moment pass by!’

The whole drama is played out in the course of one evening – ‘one never knows what a day might bring forth’ is a repeated line in the play – and the tension that Agatha builds as the various revelations unfold in a suburban front room over a matter of hours is skilfully sustained. The final scene is brilliantly dramatic as, with the disgraced Nan upstairs in her room, Nell faces her brother-in-law to tell him ‘the Lie’. His astonishing response, having seen through and dismissed Nell’s fiction for the attempt to protect her sister that it is, is to declare his secret love for Nell – which is clearly reciprocated as they embrace and ‘he kisses her long and passionately’.

Rather than John divorcing Nan for her infidelity, Nell and John vow to elope and allow Nan to divorce him, so that the shame of her own indiscretion is thereby not revealed. ‘Let the disgrace be ours,’ says Nell, ‘We’re doing a far worse thing than she has done.’ At this moment Nan walks in and, oblivious to developments between her husband and her sister (of which she continues to remain blissfully ignorant), falls to her knees, confesses her infidelity and begs John to forgive her. In a final twist, Nell fights her sister’s corner and begs John to return to the realities of married life rather than pursuing the fantasy of what might have been, echoing her mother’s words: ‘A moment comes to everyone – a moment when they hold their life in their hands … Sometimes – it’s not only one life there might be three – three lives and we hold them all! It’s our moment!’

John is persuaded to forgive his wife and is reconciled with her, forgoing the possibility of a relationship with the younger Nell, and unwittingly echoing his mother-in-law, ‘We’ll both start again, Nan – together … Someday – who knows? – happiness may come …’ In the final moments of the play Nell is left alone on the stage, repeating John’s words:

Someday – who knows? – happiness may come … Someday … (she stands over the lamp, preparing to blow it out. In a final tone of doubt and wonder.) Someday? (she blows out the lamp. The stage is in darkness. Curtain.)

This play is about many things: infidelity and divorce, sisterly and motherly love, and the familiar Christie theme of choosing between the excitement of dangerous, passionate love and the perceived tedium of steady commitment. One thing it may at first not appear to be about is incest.

However, as with all things Christie it is important to set the subject matter in context. In 1907, the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act had ended decades of controversy by allowing widowers to marry the sister of their deceased spouse. This form of marital union had been made illegal in 1835, and remained a topic of lively debate, both inside and outside Parliament, throughout the Victorian period. The controversy centred around the effects of sexual desire on the purity of the English family, not to mention the ability of government to legislate on issues of morality, control individual behaviour and regulate the family. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the relationship between sisters was used to make the domestic sphere part of the public, political world. The sisterly bond was used by politicians as the catalyst for discussions about marriage, the sanctity of family life and even threats to the authority of the Church of England. The issue even merits a mention in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe (1882); when Strephon is sent by the Queen of the Fairies to stir up Parliament, one of his tasks is to ‘prick that annual blister, Marriage with deceased wife’s sister’. In the end, the change in law was to an extent an acknowledgement of the status quo. It was common in the nineteenth century for single women to move in with a sister’s family and assist with the raising of the children; and it was a small logical step, at least in nineteenth-century terms, for that role to be formalised in the event of the married sister’s death.⁵³

The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act, however, permitted only what was referred to in its somewhat convoluted title. It was not until the 1960 Marriage (Enabling) Act that a man could marry his former wife’s sister whether that wife was ‘living or not’. So, when Christie started writing her autobiography in 1950, she might well still have regarded the relationship between John and Nell as ‘incestuous’ (although there are wider theological issues here that we need not concern ourselves with). Readers who have been paying close attention to the intricate legislative subplot of this chapter will note that, prior to 1923, the ‘incestuous’ nature of John’s relationship with Nell may well have assisted Nan in obtaining a divorce from him. Meanwhile, John and Nell discuss fleeing the country, perhaps not only in order to escape the scandal but possibly also so that they can marry, once his divorce comes through, without the requirement for Nan to be ‘deceased’.

Christie underlines this theme in the play when John declares to Nell, ‘I love you – and you love me – Oh! Why did I marry Nan? Nan – when you were there, growing up day by day, from childhood to womanhood … You! My Nell!’ He goes on to refer to her as his ‘little sister’, asserting ‘I look upon you as my sister’ and ‘Haven’t I always been a brother to you?’ Further emphasis is given to the relationship between John and his sister-in-law by a change in title in the second draft from The Lie to The Sister-In-Law.⁵⁴ I prefer the original. All of this, I am sure, was done in ignorance of the darker side of life in the Phillpotts household.

The fact that ‘The scene represents a typical suburban drawing room’ and not some distant, imagined country house, only serves to add to our discomfort, and gives the astonishing subject matter of this relentlessly unfolding drama even more impact. This could happen to any of us, Christie seems to be saying. John sums up the frustrations of the daily grind that have led both his wife and himself to seek illicit adventure elsewhere: ‘Oh! I know! I was keen on my work – that dull, plodding work, the same day after day! It seems incredible now to think of it! I meant to wear the collar steadily year after year. I never dreamed of any other life. The 8.16 train up to town every morning, the 5.10 back, the annual holiday to the sea side – I thought all that was life! How narrow and paltry it all seems now! Why did I do it? Because everyone does. There’s a reason for you!’

But, however enticing the forbidden fruit, as Nell reminds us, ‘It’s the dull brown earth that endures, not the gay flowers that grow there.’ Feminist writers would no doubt consider the play’s resolution as somehow involving ‘an underlying collusion with patriarchy’, but I believe there is a far more complex appraisal of human emotions going on here than there is in Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement.

The circumstances of Christie’s own 1928 divorce were, as it happens, every bit as dramatic as something on the West End stage. Following their return from the Grand Tour at the end of 1922, and reunited with Rosalind (who had been left in the care of her grandmother and aunt), Agatha and Archie settled in Sunningdale in Berkshire, eventually moving into a house they bought together, which they named Styles. Agatha bought a two-seater Morris Cowley coupé and took on a secretary, Charlotte Fisher (‘Carlo’), who made a substantial contribution to her employer’s wellbeing in the following years, and whose arrival, amongst other things, coincided with a vast improvement in the typing of Agatha’s draft playscripts.

Agatha’s six-book deal with The Bodley Head ended with The Secret of Chimneys in 1925, and her new agent, Edmund Cork of Hughes Massie, negotiated much-improved terms for her with her new publisher, Collins. The following year Collins published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which proved to be her biggest success to date. Archie, meanwhile, resumed work in the City. Perhaps the excitement of their round-the-world adventure underlined the relative dullness of the return to normality, or perhaps their wartime separation and lengthy travels in the company of others meant that they had never really got to know each other properly, but in any event Archie the City commuter was no longer Archie the dashing young airman and adventurer. In 1926, following the death of her beloved mother, Agatha spent time at Ashfield in Torquay, where she found the process of clearing out her mother’s belongings enormously stressful. This was exacerbated when Archie arrived and announced that he was in love with Nancy Neele, a younger woman with whom he shared an interest in golf, and wanted Agatha to divorce him. Agatha’s autobiography describes this distressing period of her life with moving sincerity and economy. Clearly to the frustration of many, she offers no detail at all about what happened next. I will keep it brief.

We will never know what exactly motivated Agatha’s sudden decision to abandon her cherished car, take a train to Harrogate and there book into a hotel, in a name similar to that of her husband’s mistress, between 4 and 14 December 1926. Whether it was the result of some sort of stress-induced anxiety attack, or the botched playing-out of a scenario intended to win back her husband, or – as seems most likely – a combination of the two, the only winners at the time were the press, who succeeded in boosting their circulations by drumming up one of the first celebrity media frenzies; an outcome which appears to have surprised and distressed the very private Agatha in equal measure. One of the many who has subsequently perpetuated this intrusive reportage by claiming to ‘provide the answers to the mystery’ is Jared Cade who, in his book Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (1998), bases his claims on information received from Judith Gardner, the daughter of Agatha’s close friend Nan Kon. Cade incorrectly describes Nan as Agatha’s ‘sister-in-law’, when she was not in fact a relation, but simply Agatha’s sister’s husband’s sister. Cade informs us that Nan told her daughter, amongst other things, that Agatha stayed with her on 3 December, the one night on which her whereabouts is unaccounted for. Biographer Laura Thompson painstakingly employs antique train timetables to disprove this theory and goes on to berate Cade for describing scenes that ‘he cannot possibly know about’, having herself given a detailed and lengthy fictionalised account of events. Surely the biggest flaw in Cade’s theory is that we are asked to assume that the ‘sister-in-law’, Nan, if she did indeed claim that Agatha stayed with her on the night in question, was actually telling the truth.

Following a recuperative sojourn in the Canary Islands with Rosalind and Carlo, Agatha attended a court hearing in April 1928, at which, in order to avoid embarrassment to Nancy Neele, falsified evidence of Archie’s adultery with an unknown party was offered. Agatha was granted the divorce that Archie wanted in October of that year. Unlike in Ten Years, the fact that the couple had a young child proved insufficient to keep them together; Agatha was granted custody of Rosalind. And Archie was never to speak John’s line from The Lie, ‘We’ll both start again – together … Someday – who knows? – happiness may come …’ Archie stuck to his own script, and life on this occasion failed to imitate art.

Christie’s early, unpublished playwriting, much of it very accomplished, takes an often witty and always idiosyncratic look at many of the burning social issues of the day, particularly as they affected women. As Christie herself implies, in the mid-1920s The Lie was undoubtedly ahead of its time, not only in terms of its themes but also of its setting and characters. If a producer had been brave enough to accept it, then the Lord Chamberlain’s office may well have raised objections. The script is perhaps too short, and is by no means perfect in its construction, but with the benefit of a little dramaturgy from an experienced director it could have made for a highly impactful evening of theatre. Had it been performed when it was written, and been presented to the public as Christie’s first play, then the history of Agatha Christie, playwright might have been very different.

As it turned out, though, all her early playwriting efforts were to be upstaged by a moustachioed French detective, who inevitably stole the show as soon as he set foot in front of an audience. Yes, French.