of buildings and improvements and thereâs your ground rent.
       ROCKHAVEN: You wouldnât collect enough from this one source to run the country.
       JUNIUS: The rent roll of England is roughly four millions. It ought to be enough if the government only stuck to essentials.
       ROCKHAVEN: Essentials?
       JUNIUS: The Army, the Navy and the Administration of Justice. Now we pay for a grandmother not a government!
       ROCKHAVEN: The incapables would loathe to lose their grandmother.
       . . .
       ROCKHAVEN: I suppose you believe that all men are born equal?
       JUNIUS: No. But there is a chance they might be bred equal if they had an equal chance.
       ROCKHAVEN: Youâll never eliminate human nature.
       JUNIUS: I want to eliminate poverty. Now weâre taxing wealth. What harm does wealth do a country? If there is a man capable of making money, for Heavenâs sake encourage him to make more!
This is hardly the stuff of gripping drama, but neither is it what immediately springs to mind as the likely subject of breakfast conversation in the Miller/Watts/Christie households. Oranges and Lemons does not appear to have been performed. Agatha says in her autobiography that after The Claimant Madge âwrote one or two other plays, but they did not receive London productionsâ, 46 which does not rule out the possibility that they were performed at regional repertory theatres in productions listed in the Lord Chamberlainâs plays card index (which Oranges and Lemons isnât), or indeed by amateurs. We are told by Agatha that Madge was âquite a good amateur actress herself, and acted with the Manchester Amateur Dramaticâ so, after her brief spell as a West End playwright, we must assume that this is where she focused her theatrical energies.
Amongst Agathaâs own unpublished and unperformed early works are two very different full-length plays, The Clutching Hand and The Lie. The first of these, âA Play in Four Acts by A. Christieâ, states on the title page that it is âAdapted from the novel The Exploits of Elaine by Arthur B. Reeveâ. Significantly, this is undoubtedly her first dramatic adaptation of a novel, albeit not one of her own. 47
Arthur B. Reeve was a journalist who became Americaâs most popular writer of detective fiction in the second decade of the twentieth century. His recurring character, âscientific detectiveâ Craig Kennedy, was billed as âThe American SherlockHolmesâ, and Kennedyâs investigations are characterised by the use of pioneering forensic techniques and bizarre gadgets created by him in his lab. In fact he would probably have had more success than me in dating some of Agathaâs manuscripts and correspondence. Of course this particular detectiveâs investigative techniques may well have appealed to Agatha the chemist, although it is notable that her own sleuths tend to treat forensic evidence as secondary to an analysis of character and an understanding of motive.
The Exploits of Elaine itself is an odd hybrid. Conceived by Pathé in 1914 as a fourteen-part film serial, it was primarily a vehicle for their star Pearl White, who had been a huge success in the Perils of Pauline series. Arthur B. Reeve was employed to create the storyline, and included the character of Craig Kennedy. This meant that the syndicated newspaper instalments of the story, when compiled into a book the following year, effectively became both the next Craig Kennedy novel and the âbook of the filmâ of The Exploits of Elaine. It has to be said that the result is far from being a literary masterpiece; Reeve is no Raymond Chandler, and the disjointed ânovelâ, the
       ROCKHAVEN: You wouldnât collect enough from this one source to run the country.
       JUNIUS: The rent roll of England is roughly four millions. It ought to be enough if the government only stuck to essentials.
       ROCKHAVEN: Essentials?
       JUNIUS: The Army, the Navy and the Administration of Justice. Now we pay for a grandmother not a government!
       ROCKHAVEN: The incapables would loathe to lose their grandmother.
       . . .
       ROCKHAVEN: I suppose you believe that all men are born equal?
       JUNIUS: No. But there is a chance they might be bred equal if they had an equal chance.
       ROCKHAVEN: Youâll never eliminate human nature.
       JUNIUS: I want to eliminate poverty. Now weâre taxing wealth. What harm does wealth do a country? If there is a man capable of making money, for Heavenâs sake encourage him to make more!
This is hardly the stuff of gripping drama, but neither is it what immediately springs to mind as the likely subject of breakfast conversation in the Miller/Watts/Christie households. Oranges and Lemons does not appear to have been performed. Agatha says in her autobiography that after The Claimant Madge âwrote one or two other plays, but they did not receive London productionsâ, 46 which does not rule out the possibility that they were performed at regional repertory theatres in productions listed in the Lord Chamberlainâs plays card index (which Oranges and Lemons isnât), or indeed by amateurs. We are told by Agatha that Madge was âquite a good amateur actress herself, and acted with the Manchester Amateur Dramaticâ so, after her brief spell as a West End playwright, we must assume that this is where she focused her theatrical energies.
Amongst Agathaâs own unpublished and unperformed early works are two very different full-length plays, The Clutching Hand and The Lie. The first of these, âA Play in Four Acts by A. Christieâ, states on the title page that it is âAdapted from the novel The Exploits of Elaine by Arthur B. Reeveâ. Significantly, this is undoubtedly her first dramatic adaptation of a novel, albeit not one of her own. 47
Arthur B. Reeve was a journalist who became Americaâs most popular writer of detective fiction in the second decade of the twentieth century. His recurring character, âscientific detectiveâ Craig Kennedy, was billed as âThe American SherlockHolmesâ, and Kennedyâs investigations are characterised by the use of pioneering forensic techniques and bizarre gadgets created by him in his lab. In fact he would probably have had more success than me in dating some of Agathaâs manuscripts and correspondence. Of course this particular detectiveâs investigative techniques may well have appealed to Agatha the chemist, although it is notable that her own sleuths tend to treat forensic evidence as secondary to an analysis of character and an understanding of motive.
The Exploits of Elaine itself is an odd hybrid. Conceived by Pathé in 1914 as a fourteen-part film serial, it was primarily a vehicle for their star Pearl White, who had been a huge success in the Perils of Pauline series. Arthur B. Reeve was employed to create the storyline, and included the character of Craig Kennedy. This meant that the syndicated newspaper instalments of the story, when compiled into a book the following year, effectively became both the next Craig Kennedy novel and the âbook of the filmâ of The Exploits of Elaine. It has to be said that the result is far from being a literary masterpiece; Reeve is no Raymond Chandler, and the disjointed ânovelâ, the
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