Curtain Up by Julius Green Page A

chapter titles of which exactly reflect the titles of the film serial’s episodes, very much betrays its origins.
    Quite how this ended up on Agatha’s bookshelf, and why she felt drawn to adapt it for the stage, is something of a mystery; it may have been done in response to her sister’s challenge to write a piece of detective fiction, which more famously resulted in her first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles . We know that she had read Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room , Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins; but we can now add Arthur B. Reeve’s brand of pulp fiction to the august roll-call of those who inspired Agatha’s early experiments in crime fiction.
    The book and play concern the efforts of the plucky young Elaine Dodge to track down her father’s murderer, a master criminal known as The Clutching Hand, who leaves ‘a warningletter signed with a mysterious clutching fist’ next to the body of each of his victims. In order to do this, she enlists the help of Craig Kennedy, scientific detective, and his ‘Doctor Watson’, the journalist Walter Jameson. Other characters include the lawyer Perry Bennett and three gangsters named Limpy Red, Dan the Dude and Spike. Whilst the play is an interesting early exercise in the efficient adaptation of a novel for the stage, it would be fair to say that Agatha is no Damon Runyon when it comes to a grasp of New York vernacular. Her leading characters tend to speak in cut-glass English accents and her gangsters endearingly lapse into cockney while referring to ‘drug stores’ and ‘janitors’. Agatha’s father was a New Yorker, but although she was proud of her American ancestry she herself did not travel to America until she was thirty-one, and it seems either that Frederick Miller’s American accent cannot have been a strong one, or that by the time Agatha wrote The Clutching Hand her memory of it was distant.
    Although The Clutching Hand never made it as far as the stage, a number of its ideas re-emerge in Christie’s early adventure fiction, particularly the character of an adventurous young heroine and the pursuit of an enigmatic master criminal, both of which are central to 1922’s The Secret Adversary . In The Secret of Chimneys (1925),the Comrades of the Red Hand clearly take their cue from The Clutching Hand, whilst fingerprinting, as adopted by the police at the turn of the century and explained at length by Craig Kennedy in The Exploits of Elaine , provides vital evidence. As Agatha says in her autobiography, ‘Thriller plays are usually much alike in plot – all that alters is the Enemy. There is an international gang à la Moriarty – provided first by the Germans, the “Huns” of the first war; then the Communists, who in turn were succeeded by the Fascists. We have the Russians, we have the Chinese, we go back to the international gang again, and the Master Criminal wanting world supremacy is always with us.’ 48 For good measure, the original Exploits of Elaine also includes Chinese devil worshippers and even a medium performing aséance, none of whom, perhaps thankfully, make it into the stage adaptation. There can be no doubt, however, that Agatha was drawn to its sense of adventure and in particular to the central figure of the feisty heroine. Here, to cherish, is Arthur B. Reeve’s own description of Elaine: ‘Elaine Dodge was both the ingénue and the athlete – the thoroughly modern type of girl – equally at home with tennis and tango, table talk and tea. Vivacious eyes that hinted at a stunning amber brown sparkled beneath masses of the most wonderful auburn hair. Her pearly teeth, when she smiled, were marvellous. And she smiled often, for her life seemed to be a