by Julius Green
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. 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, a number of its ideas re-emerge in Christie’s early adventure fiction, particularly the character of an adventurous young heroine and the pursuit of an enigmatic master criminal, both of which are central to 1922’s The Secret Adversary. In The Secret of Chimneys (1925), the Comrades of the Red Hand clearly take their cue from The Clutching Hand, whilst fingerprinting, as adopted by the police at the turn of the century and explained at length by Craig Kennedy in The Exploits of Elaine, provides vital evidence. As Agatha 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 the Master Criminal wanting world supremacy is always with us.’48 For good measure, the original Exploits of Elaine also includes Chinese devil worshippers and even a medium performing a séance, none of whom, perhaps thankfully, make it into the stage adaptation. There can be no doubt, however, that Agatha was drawn to its sense of adventure and in particular to the central figure of the feisty heroine. Here, to cherish, is Arthur B. Reeve’s own description of Elaine: ‘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.’49
When, in 1922, Christie was writing notes for the novel The Man in the Brown Suit in Notebook 34, while on the Grand Tour, they appear under the heading ‘Adventurous Anne Episode 1’.50 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’.51 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.’52 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!53
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.54
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 1955, 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’. 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 gleefully 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 the most extraordinary 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.
