Apart from Agatha Christie’s enormous known output there is also a number of works that are largely unknown, except to the most ardent fans. These titles are all scripts, either for the stage or radio, and have all been either performed or published. And all of these titles feature in the Notebooks, some of them to a large degree.
Agatha Christie is still the only crime novelist to have had an equally successful career as a playwright. Indeed, arguably the greatest monument to her success is a play, The Mousetrap. The majority of her plays are well known but there are still a few surprises.
Akhnaton is a non-crime script from 1937 based on the reallife Pharoah Akhnaton of Egypt. The little-known Rule of Three contains three utterly contrasting one-act plays, Christie’s only venture into this form. And the final title in this chapter is the last play that she wrote, Fiddlers Three. Neither play received encouraging reviews, although both contain much interesting material.
For future consideration are the totally unknown radio plays Personal Call and Butter in a Lordly Dish, and Chimneys. The latter is her own adaptation, and reworking with a new villain, of the 1925 novel The Secret of Chimneys; the former two original plays written directly for radio. None of the three is currently available in any form.
Rule of Three 20 December 1962 Over 40 years after her career began Christie was still experimenting when Rule of Three was first presented at the Duchess Theatre, London. Reviews were not good however and apart from Fiddlers Three, which never had a West End run, it lowered the curtain on her golden age of theatre. It is now an unknown Christie because it has seldom been staged since. But Rule of Three shows that, even after a lifetime of hoodwinking her audience, she still had the ability to surprise and entertain. Each of the three plays represents a different aspect of Christie and, moreover, aspects that are very unexpected and atypical. Of the three plays, Afternoon at the Seaside is the most unlikely play ever to have come from the pen of Agatha Christie; The Rats is not a whodunit but a claustrophobic will-they-get-away-with-it; while The Patient is the essence of Christie.
As early as 1955, seven years before its first presentation, in Notebook 3 Christie was including Rule of Three in a list of ‘Projects’. The same list also anticipates what were to become Four-Fifty from Paddington (‘New Book Miss M?’ below) and the next Westmacott novel, eventually titled The Burden. At that stage the three projected plays were to be adaptations of existing, and mutually contrasting, stories; both ‘Accident’ and ‘The Rajah’s Emerald’ are from The Listerdale Mystery and ‘S.O.S.’ is included in The Hound of Death. It is worth noting that ‘The Rajah’s Emerald’ has a thematic connection—the disappearance of jewels on a beach—with the play eventually decided upon, Afternoon at the Seaside; and both are lighthearted in tone. The grim poisoning short story ‘Accident’ had already been adapted in 1939 by Margery Vosper as Tea for Three.
General Projects 1955
Angle of Attack Mary Westmacott
The Unexpected Guest Play 3 Acts
Three Plays (Rule of Three?)
1. Accident?
2. Rajah’s Emerald?
3. S.O.S.?
New Book Miss M? P?-
By Notebook 24, two of the eventual titles, C and B below, were included in the following jotting, ‘S.O.S.’ (although with a question mark) still remaining as the third. Inexplicably, they are listed on the page in reverse alphabetical order; when presented The Rats is performed first, followed by Afternoon at the Seaside, and culminating with The Patient.
Rule of Three 3 1-Act plays for P.S.
C. The Patient
B. Seaside Holiday—I do like to be beside the seaside
A. S.O.S.? [sic]
The Locket
Christmas Roses
Green Paint Or Telephone Call—
‘P.S.’ was Peter Saunders, her long-time producer. Though the remaining references are elusive, the ‘telephone call’ in the second list is probably the seed of The Rats, where the telephone sets the trap into which the rats are lured; and ‘Green Paint’ may be a cryptic reference to the proposed innovation she had in mind for the end of The Patient (see below).
The Rats Adulterous lovers Sandra and David each receive a phone call inviting them to the flat of a mutual acquaintance. When they try to leave they discover that they are locked in—and there is a dead body in the Kuwait Chest.
The Rats is not a whodunit although there are a few mysterious deaths, explained by the end of the play. The most obvious similarity is to the Poirot story ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’, and its later and more elaborate version, ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’. In that story a suspicious husband hides in the chest hoping to catch his wife and her lover in flagrante; in The Rats, when the Sandra and David realise that they have been lured to the flat, they suspect a similar trap. But the play develops in a more macabre fashion. It does retain the clue of the little heap of sawdust beneath the chest that gives Poirot ‘furiously to think’ in the short story. Notebook 24 contains almost five pages of notes:
The Rats
Flat belongs to the Torrances—rather bare—a Kuwait chest is centre—high up into roof- built in cupboards —a dark divan covered with curtains etc.—a long ply wood table— some modern chairs—one or two pieces of Persian pottery—a big Arab long nosed beak nosed coffee pot
Body in cupboard—Baghdad Chest—Oh! My God—It’s Robert—Police will come—girl and man discover body of her husband—Alec arrives—a Mischa like person—says he got phone call
Although there have been gay characters in Christie before this (Mr Pye in The Moving Finger, Murgatroyd and Hinchcliffe in A Murder is Announced and Horace Bundler in ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’), Alec in The Rats is the most unequivocal and stereotypical example and far more sinister than, for example, Christopher Wren in The Mousetrap. He is described in the script as ‘the pansy type, very elegant, amusing, inclined to be spiteful’ and his love for Sandra’s former husband is openly discussed. The Mischa reference, above, is puzzling.
Afternoon at the Seaside A family afternoon on the beach culminates in the capture of a jewel thief and some unexpected revelations—and a resolve to go elsewhere for next year’s holiday.
