Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green

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