In 1930, Poirot had been played by Francis L. Sullivan, with John Boxer as Captain Hastings, Joyce Bland as Lucia Amory, and Donald Wolfit as Dr Carelli.3 In the West End production, Francis L. Sullivan was still Poirot, but Hastings was now played by Roland Culver, and Dr Carelli by Dino Galvani. The London Daily Telegraph thought the play a ‘sound piece of detective-story writing’, and preferred Sullivan’s rendering of the part of Poirot ‘to the one which Mr Charles Laughton gave us in Alibi. Mr Laughton’s Poirot was a diabolically clever oddity. Mr Sullivan’s is a lovable human being.’4 Agatha Christie did not see the production. ‘I believe it came on for a short run in London,’ she wrote in 1972, ‘but I didn’t see it because I was abroad in Mesopotamia.’5
The play, which is in three acts, is set in the library of Sir Claud Amory’s house at Abbot’s Cleve, about twenty-five miles from London. Sir Claud is a scientist engaged in atomic research and had just discovered the formula for Amorite, whose force ‘is such that where we have hitherto killed by thousands, we can now kill by hundreds of thousands.’ Unfortunately, the formula is stolen by one of Sir Claud’s household, and the scientist foolishly offers the thief a chance to replace the formula with no questions asked. The lights in the library are switched off to enable this to happen, but when the lights come on again, the formula is still missing, Sir Claud is dead, and Hercule Poirot has arrived. By the end of the evening, with a certain amount of assistance from Hastings and Inspector Japp, Poirot has unmasked the murderer and retrieved the formula. However, the way is not thus paved for Hiroshima fifteen years later, and the horror of nuclear war, for something else happens just before the end of the play.
Sir Claud’s butler is called Tredwell, but whether he is related to the Tredwell who was the butler at Chimneys in The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery is not known. He cannot be the same man, for Lord Caterham would surely not have let his treasure of a butler go. Sir Claud’s family are an impressively dubious collection of characters, and the suspects also include the scientist’s secretary, Edward Raynor, and a sinister Italian, Dr Carelli.
Black Coffee, which was successfully revived some years after its first production, has remained a favourite with repertory companies and amateurs throughout the world, as have so many plays either by or adapted from Agatha Christie. Though Black Coffee lacks the complexity and fiendish cunning of Agatha Christie’s later plays, it would probably repay major revival not only as a period piece but, if impressively enough cast, as a highly entertaining murder mystery. The casting of Poirot would, however, have to be very carefully undertaken.6 Agatha Christie used to complain that, although a number of very fine actors had played Poirot, none was physically very like the character she had created. Charles Laughton, she pointed out, had too much avoirdupois, and so had Francis L. Sullivan who was ‘broad, thick, and about 6 feet 2 inches tall’. Austin Trevor, in three Poirot movies, did not even attempt physically to represent the character. A publicist for the film company actually announced that ‘the detective is described by the authoress as an elderly man with an egg-shaped head and bristling moustache’, whereas ‘Austin Trevor is a good-looking young man and clean-shaven into the bargain!’
In 1931, Black Coffee was filmed at the Twickenham Studios, with Austin Trevor (who had already played Poirot in the film, Alibi) replacing Francis L. Sullivan, Richard Cooper as Hastings, Dino Galvani as Dr Carelli, Melville Cooper as Inspector Japp, Adrienne Allen as Lucia Amory, Philip Strange as Richard Amory, and C. V. France as Sir Claud. The film was directed by Leslie Hiscott, but was generally considered to be inferior to the same director’s Alibi.
Adapted by Charles Osborne as a novel, Black Coffee was first published in England and the USA in 1998. It was simultaneously translated and published in several other languages. (The Finnish edition was actually the first of all to appear, in 1997.)
Giant’s Bread MARY WESTMACOTT (1930)
It is no longer a secret that, between 1930 and 1956, Agatha Christie published six non-crime novels under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. (It was, however, a well-kept secret until 1949.) As these novels are often referred to as ‘romantic’ or ‘women’s fiction’, it is important to state that they are not examples of what is generally thought of as the genre of the romantic novel (they are, for instance, much closer to Daphne du Maurier than to Barbara Cartland), and that they are ‘women’s fiction’ only in the sense that they can share that description with the works of Jane Austen or Iris Murdoch. The six Mary Westmacott titles belong to no genre: they are simply novels.
In her autobiography Agatha Christie described how she came to write these books:
It had been exciting, to begin with, to be writing books – partly because, as I did not feel I was a real author, it was each time astonishing that I should be able to write books that were actually published. Now I wrote books as a matter of course. It was my business to do so. People would not only publish them – they would urge me to get on with writing them. But the eternal longing to do something that is not my proper job, was sure to unsettle me; in fact it would be a dull life if it didn’t.
What I wanted to do now was to write something other than a detective story. So, with a rather guilty feeling, I enjoyed myself writing a straight novel called Giant’s Bread. It was mainly about music, and betrayed here and there that I knew little about the subject from the technical point of view. It was well reviewed and sold reasonably for what was thought to be a ‘first novel’. I used the name of Mary Westmacott, and nobody knew that it was written by me. I managed to keep that fact a secret for fifteen years.7
Published in March, 1930 and dedicated ‘to the memory of my best and truest friend, my mother’, Giant’s Bread is a long novel of 438 pages (approximately 140,000 words), which is about twice as long as a Christie murder mystery.8 It is also a rather remarkable novel, which is ostensibly about music, as its author claimed it was, but which is really about obsession, friendship, genius, childhood and identity. In other words, it is a novel about real people, in which the author is freed of the requirement to steer her characters along certain paths so that they can be manipulated into making the right moves to establish the necessary pattern that a crime novel must have. She could allow her characters to develop freely, could write about those aspects of them that moved and excited her, and could, in the process, explore and come closer to understanding her own nature and desires.
Without the self-imposed restraints of the mystery novel, Mrs Christie might easily have found herself floundering and confused, but she did not. She found, instead, that she was not only a brilliant creator of puzzles but also a real novelist, with an ability to create fully rounded characters and with the confidence not to worry about the exigencies of plot. Giant’s Bread is, in a sense, autobiographical, as is all good fiction. And, for that matter, all bad fiction. Human beings are condemned to tell the truth about themselves, though some find oddly devious ways of doing so. Later Mary Westmacott novels will wear their autobiographical aspects on their sleeves, but those truths about Agatha Christie which exist in Giant’s Bread are very deeply embedded within the novel, and are not so much factual as psychological or spiritual. The novel examines a number of characters, but concentrates upon its hero, or anti-hero. Vernon Deyre, whom we meet first as a sensitive child in a sheltered, upperclass environment in Edwardian England, and whose development we follow into adult life.
Vernon becomes a composer, and what is most remarkable about Giant’s Bread is the understanding with which Mrs Christie, despite her disclaiming ‘technical knowledge’, describes the total possession of Vernon’s personality by music. She has created a totally believable composer, believable not simply because Vernon flings the right names about – Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, even ‘Feinberg’