Until recently, I was not aware that Agatha Christie had written a lot of plays. I only knew of a few. Everyone knows about Mousetrap, the long running play in London’s West End. I saw it at St Martin’s Theatre in 1997. And I’ve seen the film version of Witness for the Prosecution, which was originally written as a play. But Black Coffee, and the two other plays, also adapted by Charles Osborne, were unknown to me until recently. I did think it was odd that this book was included in the Christie reading challenge this year, and the challenge page admits that it is a contentious choice. But looking up its history, I’ve found that the play was first performed in 1930, and it really is the next appearance of Poirot after The Mystery of the Blue Train.

This was the first play Christie wrote for the stage. But it wasn’t the first theatrical appearance of Poirot. That came in 1928, in Alibi, written by Michael Morton and based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Although Alibi received good reviews, Christie wasn’t happy with the adaptation and started writing plays specifically for the theatre, herself. Christie says of Black Coffee in her autobiography that, “it was a conventional spy thriller, and although full of clichés, it was not, I think, at all bad”. Her literary agents, Hughes Massie, obviously weren’t impressed with it. They suggested she should forget about it entirely. Her grandson, Mathew Pritchard, puts it more bluntly in his introduction to my edition. He says the agent, “advised her not to bother submitting it to any theatre as, in his opinion, it was not good enough to be staged”. A friend with theatrical connections later suggested it should be produced and it had its first run in December 1930 at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage London. The play itself was published in 1934. Charles Osborne, who had played one of the characters in a production forty years earlier, suggested to the Christie Estate that, “it would be marvellous to give the world a new Agatha Christie crime novel”. The Christie Estate agreed, and in 1998 this novelisation was published. He then followed with The Unexpected Guest (1999) and Spider’s Web (2000), based on plays Christie wrote in 1958 and 1954, respectively.

The story basically centres on the family and guests of Sir Claud Amory, a wealthy scientist who has developed a formula for a new weapon. He asks Poirot to come to his house, to collect the formula and deliver it safely to the Ministry of Defence. But before Poirot arrives, Sir Claud discovers his formula has been stolen and believes, thanks to the isolation and security of his house, that it can only have been stolen by someone in the house. He locks everyone in the library. He says he will turn out the lights for a minute, and that if the formula is returned to him in the darkness, he will take no further action. The lights go out and come back on again, but instead of a returned formula, we have a dead Sir Claud. Poirot arrives just as this is discovered. The six people in the room with the body are the only suspects.

The novel very much reads like a converted play. The plot is very simplistic compared to most of Christie novels and most of the action takes place in one room. It is also dialogue heavy. While all this is understandable in a play, it shows that Osborne very much did a straight translation without making changes to make this read like an actual novel. Action in a play needs to be quick and easy for an audience to follow, but I expect a Christie novel to have a more complex plot, with several side plots to distract the reader. The little descriptions we get between the dialogue read as if it had been lifted directly from stage directions. Much of the dialogue is used to give us information that really should come to us gradually through the action, so it often feels clunky and disjointed. There is just too much ‘telling’ and not enough ‘showing’.

However, I suspect Osborne did add a few details which were not in the original play, possibly to add some Christie cred to the story, to make sure everyone knew that he’d read his Christie books. I wish I had actually been able to read the original play, to see which elements of the story can be attributed to Christie and which to Osborne. I suspect the nature of Sir Claud’s formula was changed by Osborne (spoiler alert - it’s an atomic weapon, which I don’t think realistically that is something Christie would have had any knowledge of in 1929). And I’m fairly sure the references to Poirot being at the theatre with Mrs Oliver and to the investigation into the murder of Lord Edgware are Osborne additions. Poirot did not meet Ariadne Oliver until Cards on the Table, published 1936, and Lord Edgware Dies was not published until 1933. Osborne did shift the action to 1934, so perhaps he can be excused for adding the Lord Edgware detail, but adding the Mrs Oliver reference is just careless. Is that inconsistent? That I don’t like how Osborne just did a simple translation of the play without adding to the story, but then I don’t like the small changes he did make? Perhaps, but what I really didn’t like about Osborne’s changes was that they were careless with the details that were wrong.

I did not enjoy this book much and struggled to finish it. None of the regular characters felt quite right. Poirot is noticeably different in his behaviour and in his flashbacks to other cases. Hastings puts aside his absolute loyalty to Poirot, established in every previous story, to come across as disloyal and useless and even more lecherous than Christie generally portrayed him. I never got to feel like I was really reading a Poirot novel. I even felt disappointed that a major plot element from one of Christie’s earlier books was reused. This is just me being grumpy, as Christie did frequently reuse parts of her plots and I generally have no objection to that when I come across something familiar in a story. But I never felt like this was a real Christie story, hence the disappointment. None of the regular characters felt quite right.