Having the poet’s worst predictions come true is never fun, but over this past weekend, my best-laid plans for a Christie reunion “gang aft very very agley” indeed!

When my pal Christopher Diehl announced a few months ago that he would be directing a Christie double bill for the Riverside Community Players, it felt like the perfect excuse to bring as many West Coast Agatha Christie fans as possible together. And so plans were made for us all to hie on over to Riverside, California to see Chris’ play: that included me and Jeff and Kemper and Linda and Gerry from Canada. But many events conspired against me, and I ended up not driving down. 

I’m happy to say that the plays – a double-bill of Christie’s Wasp Nest and The Yellow Iris – went beautifully, or so I’ve been told. I spent a couple of rainy days feeling as sorry for myself as Mildred Strete (“You love Gina more than me, Mother!”) and as discontented as  Parker Pyne client! But I’m normally a “glass half full” kind of guy, so I thought I would share a couple of good things that happened this weekend, things of the Christie variety. 

In preparation for seeing the plays, I decided to re-read both of the short stories that inspired them and then discuss how well they held up on stage. It’s important to note that both one-acts were early dramatic efforts on the part of the budding playwright and that neither of them was actually written with the stage in mind.

The story “Wasp’s Nest” debuted in the November 20, 1928 issue of the Daily Mail. It did not receive book publication until 1961, when it was included in the collection Double Sin and Other Stories. But in 1937, Christie decided to dramatize the story for television. This was the first attempt the author made in submitting her work to a medium with which she would famously not get on for the rest of her life. The play appeared as an episode of the program Theatre Parade on June 18, 1937. (Curiously, when it aired live at 3:35 in the afternoon, the running time was twenty-five minutes, but when it repeated that evening at 9:40pm, it only lasted twenty! I’m telling you – that Christie woman was shrouded in mystery wherever she went!)

One of my first thoughts on reading the story was how perfectly it could work as a play. Like the story “Accident,” this is more about a duel of wits rather than a traditional whodunit, helped along by a sting of a twist at the end. Frankly “Accident” is superior in every respect, and I can’t help thinking that it would itself have made a smashing one-act play!! Food for thought.

The best thing about “Wasp’s Nest” is that one of our “duellists” is none other than Hercule Poirot. Yes, this is one of only three instances to my knowledge where Christie wrote her famed sleuth into the play. (The others were the full-length play Black Coffee and our second one-act below.) The other main character is a country gentleman named John Harrison (no relation to the fellow of the same name who pens the fantastic Countdown Christie blog). 

Poirot had recently met Harrison at a dinner party and taken a great liking to him. Unfortunately, this is not a social visit. Poirot explains to a bewildered Harrison that he is investigating a murder that, most unusually, hasn’t happened yet. It concerns a young couple who had also been present when Poirot met Harrison. Molly Deane and Claude Langton were once a heavy item, but they had fallen out and Molly had become engaged to John. On this evening, Harrison has invited Claude to his garden to help him get rid of a wasp’s nest. And while the host has insisted that the pests be eliminated with petrol because it is vastly safer for humans than the usual remedy against wasps, potassium of cyanide, it seems that Claude has that very afternoon gone to the local pharmacy and purchased some of the deadly poison. 

Is Claude planning to murder Harrison as vengeance for stealing his woman or, perhaps, in the hopes that he can rekindle his old romance? I think you can probably guess where this tale is heading early on. The problem for me is that the final explanation would make much more sense if Christie hadn’t added this detail (discussed in ROT-13):

Bs pbhefr Uneevfba vf gelvat gb xvyy Pynhqr, abg gur bgure jnl nebhaq, orpnhfr Pynhqr naq Zbyyl unir jbexrq bhg gurve qvssreraprf. Zheqre sbe iratrnapr vf svar jvgu zr, ohg vg orpbzrf zbbg jura Cbvebg gryyf Uneevfba gung ur ZBFG pbairavragyl fnj Wbua pbzvat bhg bs n Uneyrl Fgerrg qbpgbe’f bssvpr. Uneevfba erirnyf ur bayl unf gjb zbaguf yrsg gb yvir. Ur jnf cynaavat gb hfr gur plnavqr ba uvzfrys naq senzr Pynhqr (jubz ur unq nfxrq gb chepunfr gur cbvfba) sbe uvf “zheqre.” V zrna – jul obgure vs lbh’er nobhg gb qvr? Vs lbh gehyl ybir Zbyyl, yrg vg tb, zna!

That annoyance aside, the tale is basically a short, dramatic dialogue set in a lovely garden, and the odds for success of a dramatization are high. Evidently, Claude, who makes the briefest of appearances in the story, is also in the play – as is Molly, a character who is only discussed in the story. One of the perks of the original TV production, which viewers evidently enjoyed,  is that Poirot was played by Francis L. Sullivan, who had taken on that very role in Black Coffee. (As I have mentioned before, Sullivan and Christie became great friends, and in the mid-40’s he begged her to dramatize her hit 1937 novel Death on the Nile and cast him as Poirot again. Christie did dramatize that play but excised the sleuth from the script; as a consolation prize to Sullivan, she created the part of Canon Pennefather to solve the case onstage, and Sullivan got to wear a nice plummy costume in the role!)

The second one-act on the double bill, The Yellow Iris, also debuted in 1937, on November 2, not onstage or on TV but on BBC Radio. It was based on the short story “Yellow Iris,” which had appeared in The Strand in July of that same year and would go on to be published in The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories in 1939. The story has the distinction of being one of several short works which Christie later expanded into a novel, although that book, Sparkling Cyanide (1945), does not feature Poirot.

“Yellow Iris” has a meatier central mystery than “Wasp’s Nest,” and its complexities of character and setting suggest that a radio adaptation might be easier to put together than a stage drama. The story begins with Poirot receiving a mysterious phone call at home, telling him to hurry to a restaurant called Le Jardin des Cygnes to save the anonymous speaker from “great danger.” 

Poirot arrives at the restaurant and crashes a dinner party in progress hosted by American financier Barton Russell. Also present is his sister-in-law Pauline Weatherby, a beautiful heiress; Senora Lola Valdez, a walking cliché; and two young men – the mopey Tony Chapell and the political Stephen Carter. Russell explains the purpose of the gathering: four years earlier, the same cast of characters was sitting at a posh restaurant in New York. Also in attendance was Barton’s wife, Iris. At the end of the dinner show, the lights came up and Iris was found sprawled across the table. In her purse was an empty packet of . . . potassium of cyanide. (No, I assure you that Claude Langton did not purchase this!) The authorities deemed this a case of suicide, but Barton has always suspected that Iris was murdered. And now he has gathered the group together again to test a theory. 

The lights go down and the dinner show begins. And when they come up, another person is found sprawled across the table . . . 

Once again, Poirot manages to solve . . . well, some of what I just described. There are way too many loose ends to this tale, from the truth about the past death, to the reasons for the anonymous call, to the ultimate fate of the culprit. Still, the restaurant setting is fun, the dialogue zings, and there is the added bonus of Christie writing and inserting two parodies of popular songs into the text. 

In keeping with that musical theme, when the story was adapted to radio, the producer insisted on incorporating songs into the script to make it seem that the suspects were actually watching a cabaret. The numbers were composed specifically for the play, and their inclusion did not make for a happy experience. One critic of the day called the program “a ten minute sketch padded with cabaret and dance music, and made to spread over forty minutes.” I have seen mystery and music combined to both positive and negative effect, and I can only imagine that people tuning in to enjoy a nice juicy Agatha Christie mystery must have been disappointed.

This must have been a challenge for Chris in staging the play, although – for good or ill – the original music was not available. I say “ill,” because it left Chris with the problem of providing music for the interludes, and “good” because now the director had some flexibility in how he incorporated the music. 

Here’s where I wanted to tell you how it all shook out! But never fear: our friend Kemper Donovan was also present, and he will dedicate an episode to a long discussion with Chris as well as some thoughts on the production. Stay tuned to All About Agatha – I can’t wait!

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My itinerary for this sadly curtailed trip had also included a first-time meeting with another lifelong Christie fan and friend of this blog, Scott K. Ratner. We had it all timed out, and I was heartbroken to lose the opportunity to meet my “brother from another mother” (honestly, sometimes we fight as much as I did with my brother growing up!) But I discovered that Scott and his girlfriend were actually driving up to my neck of the woods this very weekend to see his favorite Ernst Lubitch film on the big screen; they were, in fact, going to be staying a mere fifteen minutes or so from my house!!

And so we made plans to meet outside the theatre and engage in our own Trouble in Paradise!! Thanks to The Infinite Patience of April (that sounds like the title of a 19^th century comedy!), we were even allowed to talk about Christie at dinner!!! We talked movies and politics as well, but when two Agatha-ologists come together, there is a definite chemical reaction that cannot be avoided or denied. And why would you want to?!?

I can’t begin to regale you with all the things we discussed, although I know that the following came up in our conversation: our shared opinion of the underrated After the Funeral, our difference of opinion concerning Endless Nightand Curtain, the fact that spotting the ending too early of a great Christie (Scott’s experience with A Murder Is Announced) and a not-so-great one (my own travails with They Do It with Mirrors) pretty much amounts to the same disappointment. And while I often kid Scott about his parade of theories, especially the concept of sudden retrospective inevitability, (he only said it twice!) it turns out that we both agree that nobody does that . . . thing as well as Christie (except for maybe Brand and Carr and Queen and . . . . oh, that’s food for another long discussion.) 

I can’t tell you how much a live one-on-one with a fellow Christie nut can improve your spirits. If it couldn’t happen in L.A., I’m glad I could meet Scott on my own stomping grounds. And I’m forever grateful to April for putting up with our long-winded back-and-forth. Way back in 2020, I advised those who were awash in fear and uncertainty over the pandemic to pick up a mystery and read it. Let me tell you – talking with others about the mysteries you read is as much a cure for what ails you as reading them.

I know that another reunion is in the cards (on the table) for me in the future. The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go exactly as arranged! For now, I’ll just express my gratitude for what I’ve got: a far-flung group of friends around the world who share the same passion for a long-ago world of sealed libraries and bodies sprawled on a pristine patch of sandy beach, of mustachioed Belgians and wise old spinsters. When you need a mystery fan in your corner, they’re here for you!