Agatha Christie’s accomplishments as a novelist have always overshadowed her varied writing for the stage, but Green’s contention that she was even better as a playwright is at least arguable. He covers her dramatic works, first as a wannabe and later as a commercial success, in exhaustive detail. Those who remember Arthur B. Reeve’s Craig Kennedy silent movie serials will be amused and astonished to learn Christie wrote a stage adaptation, never performed or published, of The Clutching Hand. Her early efforts did not always have a crime or mystery slant: subjects included women’s suffrage, eugenics, and the trials of marriage, often viewed satirically and including some sharply pointed dialogue. In fact, she continued to produce non-criminous stage works when she was already renowned as a mystery novelist. In Green’s view, the 1930s play A Daughter’s a Daughter, a “passionate, witty, and cleverly constructed drama about the conflict between mother and daughter,” was “[u]ndoubtedly her finest work for the stage, and compared by surprised critics to the work of Rattigan at its eventual West End premiere 30 years after her death.”
Sometimes the financial and contract details provided are far more than many readers will want, but they are easily skippable. Not so are the many pages of letters between Christie and producer Peter Saunders during the development of Witness for the Prosecution or a piece by Walter Kerr about the difference between American and English playgoing, followed by Saunders’ response. Or a great 1954 feminist quote from actress Margaret Lockwood: “Agatha has the gift of doing what all women want to do, but only men have the chance. She achieves something. Men climb Everest, race fast cars, invent atom bombs, fight wars, become famous surgeons and man lifeboats. In her heart every woman would like to do these things. But all we can do is dream….It’s a man’s world. The only consolation I get is that Agatha kills off a few of you.”
This is undoubtedly among the best and most essential of the many books on Christie. It apparently has had no American edition in print form, but the reasonably priced ebook from which this review was written is highly recommended to anyone interested in her life and work or in 20th century British theater.
