Clues to Christie Read Free Page B

well received by the critics, it remains fascinating to fans as each of the three one-act plays, totally different in style and plot, display aspects of Christie not hitherto seen on the stage. The Rats is a claustrophobic will-they-get-away-with-it? play; Afternoon at the Seaside is a very funny sketch involving missing jewelry with a surprise revelation in the last moments; and The Patient is an ingenious whodunit with an artfully concealed central clue. As late as 1972, Christie’s love of the theater is evident in Fiddlers Five , or, as it later became, Fiddlers Three . Although it did not receive a West End production and, compared to her earlier theatrical hits, is, despite its many clever ideas, disappointing, it is clear that her love of playwriting remained with Christie until the end of her life.
    Other Works
    Interspersed with her detective fiction, Christie also experimented with noncrime material, showing an aspect of her imagination not obvious from her crime fiction alone. In 1924, she published Road of Dreams, a poetry collection, and six years later published Giant’s Bread, the first of six Mary Westmacott novels to appear over the next thirty years. Best described as bittersweet love stories, these titles show glimpses of the real Agatha Christie and mirror many situations in her own life. Giant’s Bread centers on the composer Vernon Deyre and reveals Christie’s lifelong love of music; two years later, Unfinished Portrait contains, consciously or otherwise, many elements from Christie’s own life, including a marriage, idyllic at the start but later ruined by infidelity, culminating in divorce; an unhappy wife who takes up writing; and a subsequent mother/daughter relationship. A similar theme is also explored, even more devastatingly, in the 1952 novel, A Daughter’s a Daughter. In her Autobiography , Christie describes how she wrote Absent in the Spring (1934) over a single weekend; in it, Joan Scudamore, trapped by bad weather in a remote area of Turkey, spends four days examining her life and conscience before resolving to transform herself. The Westmacott pseudonym remained a secret for many years and Christie was always very pleased that the books were accepted for publication and reviewed on their merits alone, not because they were written by a famous crime writer. The final Westmacott, The Burden (1956), explores the love between two sisters.
    In 1946, she published Come Tell Me How You Live , a rambling memoir of day-to-day life on an archaeological dig written to answer the innumerable questions of friends and acquaintances. Although her publishers would have preferred a whodunit, her love of this life shines through every page of the book. In 1937, she wrote Akhnaton , a play based on the life of the doomed Egyptian king. Although it has never received a professional performance, the script was published in 1973 and proved to be a well-researched and poignant play; although essentially a noncrime title, it does feature a poisoning and the unmasking of a killer in the final scene. Star Over Bethlehem (1965) is, as the name suggests, a religious-themed collection of very short stories and poems.
    Finally, the year after her death, An Autobiography was published. Christie had worked on this for over fifteen years, beginning in Baghdad in 1950 where, she explains in the foreword, she was suddenly overtaken by the urge to write down the story of her life. After her death, it fell to her daughter and an editor at Collins to reduce the vast amount of material to a manageable size, and the book was published in October 1977 to international acclaim. As easily readable as all of her writing, An Autobiography is a fascinating look at the woman who wrote the world’s bestselling books, but there is little in the way of solid information about the creation of any particular title. She does give an account of the creation of Hercule Poirot and a less detailed one for Miss Marple, but the genesis of