Unexpected Guest (12 page)

The following chapter is taken from Charles Osborne's
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie
, a biographical companion to the works of the ‘Queen of Crime'. First published in 1982 and fully revised in 1999, it examines chronologically each of Agatha Christie's books and plays in detail, together with the events in her life at the time, and this chapter offers a fascinating insight into the origins of
The Unexpected Guest
.

Play (1958)

On 12 April 1958,
The Mousetrap
reached its 2,239th performance at the Ambassadors Theatre, thereby breaking the record for the longest London run of a play. To commemorate the breaking of the record, Agatha Christie presented to the Ambassadors Theatre a specially designed mousetrap. She was, of course, delighted that her
Mousetrap
had broken all records, and she must have had great hopes for a new play she had written, and of which she thought very highly. This was
Verdict
, which Peter Saunders presented at the Strand Theatre on 22 May. But
Verdict
failed to please, and closed one month later, on 21 June. The resilient Mrs Christie murmured, ‘At least I am glad
The Times
liked it,' and set to work to write another play, which she finished within four weeks, and Peter Saunders immediately put it into production. The new play,
The Unexpected Guest
, played for a week at the
Hippodrome in Bristol, and then moved to the Duchess Theatre in the West End of London, where it opened on 12 August. It played 604 performances there over the following eighteen months.

The Unexpected Guest
could perhaps be described as a murder mystery disguised as a murder non-mystery, for it begins when a stranger, the ‘unexpected guest' of the title, runs his car into a ditch in dense fog in South Wales, near the coast, and makes his way to a house where he finds a woman standing with a gun in her hand over the dead body of her husband, Richard Warwick, whom she admits she has killed. He decides to help her, and together they concoct a story and a plan of action.

The murdered man, a cripple in a wheelchair, appears to have been an unpleasant and sadistic character; apart from members of his own family, there are others who might have murdered him if they had been given the opportunity, among them the father of a child killed two years earlier by Richard Warwick's careless and perhaps drunken driving. As the play progresses, the possibility arises that Laura Warwick may not have killed her husband, but may be shielding someone else. Richard Warwick's young half-brother, mentally retarded and potentially dangerous? Laura's lover, Julian Farrar, who is about to stand for Parliament? Warwick's mother, a strong-minded old matri
arch who knows she has not long to live? Or, of course, the father of the little boy who was killed?

The investigating policemen who turn up in Act I, Scene ii, are a shrewd and sarcastic inspector and a poetically inclined young sergeant who quotes Keats. Towards the end of the play's second and final act, they identify and apprehend the real murderer. Or do they? This being an Agatha Christie mystery, there is a further surprise in the play's last lines. Can it be that Mrs Christie allows a killer to escape punishment? If so, might this be because she thinks of the murder of Richard Warwick as a just retribution?

Through the character of Michael Starkwedder, ‘the unexpected guest', Mrs Christie makes the interesting assertion that:

The character of the murdered man, as described by his wife, was based, at least in part, on someone whom Agatha Christie had known very well. Here is Laura Warwick, describing one of her late husband's nocturnal habits:

And here is Agatha Christie, in her autobiography, describing her brother Monty, as an invalid towards the end of his life:

The Unexpected Guest
was an original Christie, not only in the sense that it was written by the author
herself and not dramatized by someone else from a Christie novel or story, but also in being, like
Spider's Web
but unlike
The Mousetrap
or
Witness for the Prosecution
, completely new and not an adaptation by the author of an earlier work of hers. It is, in fact, one of the best of her plays, its dialogue taut and effective and its plot full of surprises despite being economical and not over-complex. It demonstrates, incidentally, the profound truth that seeing is not believing. The leading roles in 1958 were played by Renee Asherson (Laura Warwick), Nigel Stock (Michael Starkwedder) and Violet Farebrother (Mrs Warwick, senior), with Christopher Sandford (Jan Warwick), Paul Curran (Henry Angell), Roy Purcell (Julian Farrar), Winifred Oughton (Miss Bennett), Michael Golden (Inspector Thomas), Tenniel Evans (Sergeant Cadwallader) and Philip Newman (the corpse). The play was directed by Hubert Gregg.

Reviews were uniformly enthusiastic, many of them contrasting the success of the new play with the recent failure of
Verdict
. ‘After the failure of her last play,
Verdict
,' wrote the
Daily Telegraph
critic, ‘it was suggested in some quarters that Scotland Yard ought to be called in to discover who killed Agatha Christie. But
The Unexpected Guest
, turning up last night at the Duchess before even the reverberations of her last failure have died away, indicates that the corpse is still very much
alive. Burial of her thriller reputation is certainly premature.' The
Guardian
combined reportage and criticism: ‘Only seven weeks after Agatha Christie's last play was booed off the stage, the old lady of 66 [sic] stumped defiantly back into a London theatre last night. She had a new whodunit ready. She watched from the back of the circle, white-faced and apprehensive…But no boos came this time. No rude interruptions. At the end she heard the kind of applause that has given her
Mousetrap
a record six-year run.'

The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie was the author of over 100 plays, short story collections and novels which have been translated into 103 languages; she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Many have tried to copy her but none has succeeded. Attempts to capture her personality on paper, to discover her motivations or the reasons for her popularity, have usually failed. Charles Osborne, a lifelong student of Agatha Christie, has approached this most private of people above all through her books, and the result is a fascinating companion to her life and work.

 

This ‘professional life' of Agatha Christie provides authoritative information on each book's provenance, on the work itself and on its contemporary critical reception set against the background of the major events in the author's life. Illustrated with many rare photographs, this comprehensive guide to the world of Agatha Christie has been fully updated to include details of all the publications, films and TV adaptations in the 25 years since her death.

 

ISBN: 0 00 257033 5 Hardback

ISBN: 0 00 653097 4 Paperback

The Mousetrap and Selected Plays

 

The first-ever publication in book form of The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the history of London's West End, plus three other Christie thrillers.

 

The Mousetrap

A homicidal maniac terrorizes a group of snowbound guests to the refrain of ‘Three Blind Mice'…

 

And Then There Were None

Ten guilty people, brought together on an island in mysterious circumstances, await their sentence…

 

Appointment With Death

The suffocating heat of an exotic Middle-Eastern setting provides a backdrop for murder…

 

The Hollow

A set of friends convene at a country home where their convoluted relationships mean that any one of them could be a murderer…

 

Christie's plays are as compulsive as her novels. Their colourful characters and ingenious plots provide yet more evidence of her mastery of the detective thriller.

 

ISBN: 0 00 649618 0

Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays

 

The first-ever publication in book form of
Witness for the Prosecution
, Christie's highly successful stage thriller which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play, plus three of her classic mysteries.

 

Witness for the Prosecution

A stunning courtroom drama in which a scheming wife testifies against her husband in a shocking murder trial…

 

Towards Zero

A psychopathic murderer homes in on unsuspecting victims in a seaside house, perched high on a cliff…

 

Go Back For Murder

When the young feity Carla, orphaned at the tender age of five, discovers 16 years later that her mother was imprisoned for murdering her father, she determines to prove her dead mother's innocence…

 

Verdict

Passion, murder and love are the deadly ingredients which combine to make this one of Christie's more unusual thrillers, which she described as ‘the best play I have written with the exception of
Witness for the Prosecution
.'

 

ISBN: 0 00 649045 X

Come, Tell Me How You Live

 

Agatha Christie was already well known as a crime writer when she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s. She took enormous interest in all his excavations, and when friends asked what her strange life was like, she decided to answer their questions in this delightful book.

 

First published in 1946,
Come, Tell Me How You Live
gives a charming picture of Agatha Christie herself, while also giving insight into some of her most popular novels, including
Murder in Mesopotamia
and
Appointment with Death
. It is, as Jacquetta Hawkes concludes in her introduction, ‘a pure pleasure to read'.

 

‘Perfectly delightful…colourful, lively and occasionally touching and thought-provoking.'

CHARLES OSBORNE
,
Books & Bookmen

 

‘Good and enjoyable…she has a delightfully light touch.'

MARGHANITA LASKI
,
Country Life

 

ISBN: 0 00 653114 8

Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English with another billion in 100 foreign countries. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. She is the author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, 19 plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

Agatha Christie's first novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, was written towards the end of the First World War, in which she served as a VAD. In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian detective who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. It was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.

In 1926, after averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was the first of her books to be published by Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship which lasted for 50 years and well over 70 books.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was also the first of Agatha Christie's books to be dramatised–under the name
Alibi
–and to have a successful run in London's West End.
The Mousetrap
, her most famous play of all, opened in 1952 and is the longest-running play in history.

Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of books have been published posthumously: the bestselling novel
Sleeping Murder
appeared later that year, followed by her autobiography and the short story collections
Miss Marple's Final Cases
,
Problem at Pollensa Bay
and
While the Light Lasts
. In 1998
Black Coffee
was the first of her plays to be novelised by another author, Charles Osborne.

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