Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks by John Curran

Anthony’s motives remain unclear until the final chapter, and the reader, despite the hints contained in the above quotations, is unlikely to divine his true identity and purpose.
    There are references, unconscious or otherwise, to other Christie titles. The rueful comments in Chapter 5 when Anthony remarks, ‘I know all about publishers – they sit on manuscripts and hatch ’em like eggs. It will be at least a year before the thing is published,’ echo Christie’s own experiences with John Lane and the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles five years earlier. The ploy of leaving a dead body in a railway left-luggage office, adopted by Cade in Chapter 9, was used in the 1923 Poirot short story ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’. Lord Caterham’s description of the finding of the body in Chapter 10 distinctly foreshadows a similar scene almost 20 years later in The Body in the Library when Colonel Bantry shares his unwelcome experience. And Virginia Revel’s throwaway comments about governesses and companions in Chapter 22 – ‘It’s awful but I never really look at them properly. Do you?’ – would become the basis of more than a few future Christie plots, among them Death in the Clouds , After the Funeral and Appointment with Death . The same chapter is called ‘The Red Signal’, also the title of a short story from The Hound of Death (see Chapter 3). Both this chapter and the short story share a common theme.
    There are a dozen pages of notes in Notebook 65 for the novel, consisting mainly of a list of chapters and their possible content with no surprises or plot variations. But the other incarnation of The Secret of Chimneys makes for more interesting reading. Until recently this title was one of the few Christies not adapted for stage, screen or radio. Or so it was thought, until it emerged that the novel was actually, very early in her career, Christie’s first stage adaptation. The history of the play is, appropriately, mysterious. It was scheduled to appear at the Embassy Theatre in London in December 1931 but was replaced at the last moment by a play called Mary Broome , a twenty-year-old comedy by one Allan Monkhouse. The Embassy Theatre no longer exists and research has failed to discover a definitive reason for the last-minute cancellation and substitution. Almost a year before the proposed staging of Chimneys , Christie was writing from Ashfield in Torquay to her new husband, Max Mallowan, who was on an archaeological dig. Rather than clarifying the sequence of events, these letters make the cancellation of the play even more mystifying:
     
    Tuesday [16 December 1930] Very exciting – I heard this morning an aged play of mine is going to be done at the Embassy Theatre for a fortnight with a chance of being given West End production by the Reandco [the production company]. Of course nothing may come of it but it’s exciting anyway. Shall have to go to town for a rehearsal or two end of November.
     
    Dec. 23rd [1930] Chimneys is coming on here but nobody will say when. I fancy they want something in Act I altered and didn’t wish to do it themselves.
     
    Dec. 31st [1930] If Chimneys is put on 23rd I shall stay for the first night. If it’s a week later I shan’t wait for it. I don’t want to miss Nineveh and I shall have seen rehearsals, I suppose.
    A copy of the script was lodged with the Lord Chamberlain on 19 November 1931 and approved within the week, and rehearsals were under way. But it was discovered that, due possibly to an administrative oversight, the licence to produce the play had expired on 10 October 1931. Why it was not simply renewed in order to allow the play to proceed is not clear but it may have been due to financial considerations, because at the end of February 1932 the theatre closed, to reopen two months later under new management, the former company Reandco (Alec Rea and Co.) having sold its interest. But it must be admitted that this theory is