Agatha Christie – A Murder Is Announced

One of the characters in the novel, an aspiring young writer named. Edmund Swettenham, succeeds in having one of his plays produced in London. Its title, Elephants Do Forget, is adversely commented upon by another character. More than twenty years later, Mrs Christie was to publish a Poirot novel called Elephants Can Remember.

Published on 5 June 1950, A Murder Is Announced was widely publicized as Agatha Christie’s fiftieth murder mystery (which it was, if one discounts volumes of short stories published only in the U.S.), and a first printing of a record number of 50,000 copies soon sold out. (Sales of her subsequent crime novels were always in excess of that number.) The author’s British and American publishers issued a booklet filled with comments on her work by famous people, including the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who claimed Agatha Christie as his favourite writer.

Reviews of the novel were, not surprisingly, highly laudatory. In The Spectator, A. A. Milne wrote: ‘A new novel by Miss Agatha Christie always deserves to be placed at the head of any list of detective fiction, and her fiftieth book, A Murder Is Announced, establishes firmly her claim to the throne of detection. The plot is as ingenious as ever, the writing more careful, the dialogue both wise and witty…Long may she flourish.’ ‘Breathlessly exciting and entirely original’, ‘a perfect model of construction and enchantingly clever characterization’, ‘artistry and ingenuity’, and ‘a heady wine’ are but a few of the flattering phrases strewn in the novelist’s path by other enthusiastic reviewers. Margery Allingham, one of Agatha Christie’s rivals, writing about the novelist in the New York Times Book Review 43 on the eve of publication of A Murder Is Announced, said that Mrs Christie’s ‘appeal is made directly to the honest human curiosity in all of us. The invitation she gives her readers is to listen to the details surrounding the perfectly horrid screams from the apartment next door…In her own sphere there is no one to touch her, and her millions of readers are going to buy her new story, A Murder Is Announced, and like it.’ They did.

It was not until more than twenty-five years later that A Murder Is Announced was dramatized for the stage. In 1975, not many months before she died, Agatha Christie gave her consent for a stage adaptation to be made by Leslie Darbon and presented by Peter Saunders. In due course, the play was staged first at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, and subsequently at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, where it opened on 21 September 1977. The critic of the Financial Times wrote: ‘There is no reason, intellectual or dramatic, why it shouldn’t run as long as The Mousetrap.’ In the event, however, it did not run as long as The Mousetrap…

About Charles Osborne

This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.

About Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.