Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations (13 page)

A theatre critic famed for his vitriolic reviews in the same mould as Kenneth Tynan, is the central character in another work that shamelessly exploited the reputation of the recently deceased ‘Queen of Crime’. First produced in 1978,
Who Killed ‘Agatha’ Christie?
, a play by Tudor Gates, toured the provinces before opening in October at the Ambassadors Theatre, London. As reviewer Ned Chaillet wryly observed in
The Times
: ‘Of course, the Agatha Christie referred to is not the sweet old lady who wrote fantasies of murder, but really Arthur Christie, the dramatic critic who butchered plays and players with his criticism and had a secret homosexual life. Agatha is a term of endearment’. In the story, playwright John Terry (originally played by James Bolam), whose productions have been malevolently savaged by the critic, lures Arthur, aka Agatha, (Gerald Flood) to a rented flat to listen to recorded sex acts between the critic’s boyfriend and the playwright’s wife. John Terry’s intent is to have his revenge by killing the love cheats and his poison pen friend in this ‘thrilling psychological drama with a devilish dash of macabre humour’.

In Kathleen Tynan’s
Agatha
, a highly imaginative reconstruction of the famous author’s disappearance, the missing woman is not suffering from amnesia but, distraught over her husband’s other woman, plans to commit suicide at a hotel by means of electrocution in the hydro-bath. By utilising her crime writing skills, the death is to be staged to appear like murder at the hands of Archie’s ‘other woman’. Starring in the title role of the film version
Agatha
(1979) was Oscar-winning actress Vanessa Redgrave (b. 1937), who five years earlier had appeared as governess Mary Debenham in
Murder on the Orient Express
.

A prominent political activist, Redgrave donated her £40,000 fee for the part of ‘Agatha’ to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. In 2003, she hit the headlines by providing a £50,000 surety to support Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen separatist campaigner. He was fighting a legal action to extradite him to Russia, where he was accused of thirteen serious offences including: armed rebellion, kidnapping two priests, torturing a suspected informer, taking part in a firing squad, and the murder of 300 troops and twelve civilians. The former Culture Minister and actor was likened to Islamic terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden and said to be implicated in the 2002 Moscow theatre siege. This tragic episode resulted in the death of 130 people when armed Chechen rebels, with explosives strapped to their waists, held a theatre audience of 800 people to ransom, demanding that Russian forces be withdrawn from their homeland. Three days later, when negotiations had failed to bring about a peaceful solution to the crisis, Russian troops stormed the building after sedative gas was pumped into the theatre in an attempt to render the terrorists unconscious. The military intervention resulted in the deaths of eighty members of the public and all fifty of the suicide bombers. At a hearing at Bow Street Court, a judge rejected Russia’s request for extradition on the grounds of fears that Zakeyev faced torture if he was forced to return to face questioning and because the crimes allegedly involving the defendant were committed during an ‘internal armed conflict’. Vanessa Redgrave pronounced that the political asylum seeker was a highly respected actor in his home state, ‘not a warlord and not a terrorist’.

Mass murder in a theatre had previously been attempted in South Africa during the showing of Agatha Christie’s play
The Hollow
, in which glamorous actress Veronica Crane attempts to rekindle a romance with former fiancé Dr John Christow. When the ex-lovers meet at a secret rendezvous, the physician is shot dead and the killer later dies drinking tea laced with poison. Under the headline, ‘A Real Life Whodunnit’, the
Sunday Express
reported in March 1984:

A stage hand has been charged with attempted murder in a real-life ‘whodunnit’ backstage at a Johannesburg theatre where an Agatha Christie play was showing. The man was charged after poison was found in the cast’s kettle only fifteen minutes before the villain in
The Hollow
‘died’ on stage… of poisoning.

It is a case where the innocent suffer most horribly for sins they have never committed. They live in a haze of publicity, acquaintances and friends look at them curiously; there are continually autograph hunters, curious idle crowds. Any decent happy private life is made impossible for them.

Agatha Christie on the Croydon Murders (The
Sunday Chronicle
1929)

Throughout her long writing career, Agatha Christie had an ongoing fascination with the Bravo Case and the Croydon Murders – unsolved true crimes that formed the premise of one of her best detective novels,
Ordeal by Innocence
(1958), the story of a family thrown into turmoil when they are forced to consider which one of them might be a murderer.

The first mystery that took the author’s interest was the case of barrister Charles Bravo, who married wealthy young widow Florence Ricardo after a whirlwind courtship in December 1875. The newlyweds lived at The Priory in Balham with Florence’s companion, widow Jane Cox, who witnessed arguments between the couple over her mistress’s association with a former lover, Dr James Gully. After four months of married life, Charles was taken ill after eating dinner with the two women. He died three days later after being attended by his love rival, Dr Gully. A post-mortem concluded that he had been poisoned by a single dose of antimony and an inquest returned an open verdict, although it was widely believed that the victim had committed suicide as Jane Cox testified that he had told her, ‘I have taken poison for Dr Gully. Don’t tell Florence’. However, revelations in the press about the widow’s relationship with the family doctor and the fact that Jane Cox had been on bad terms with the deceased resulted in a second inquest being held, which virtually developed into a trial of the two women. This time, the verdict was ‘wilful murder’, although there was insufficient evidence to place the blame against anyone. By this time, Florence and Jane were no longer friends and a contemporary broadsheet ballad summed up the popular belief that a cunning wife had laced her husband’s wine and cast suspicion on her companion:

When lovely woman stoops to folly

And finds her husband in the way,

What charm can soothe her melancholy?

What art can turn him into clay?

The only means her aim to cover,

And save herself from prison locks,

And repossess her ancient lover

Are Burgundy and Mrs Cox!

A character in
Ordeal by Innocence
comments on the unresolved aspects of the case:

And so Florence Bravo, abandoned by her family, died alone of drink, and Mrs Cox, ostracised, and with three little boys, lived to be an old woman with most of the people she knew believing her to be a murderer, and Dr Gully was ruined professionally and socially. Someone was guilty – and got away with it. But the others were innocent – and didn’t get away with anything.

In a letter to Francis Wyndham, editor of the
Sunday Times Magazine
, written in 1968, Agatha dismissed the case against the two women as Florence Bravo ‘had the money’, whilst Mrs Cox was ‘an obvious suspect at first hand, but not when you look into it’. The crime writer firmly believed it was Dr Gully who killed Charles Bravo: ‘I’ve always felt that he was the only person who had an overwhelming motive and who was the right type: exceedingly competent, successful, and always considered above suspicion’.

In the second case that attracted Agatha Christie’s interest, a serial murderer escaped detection in Croydon when three members of the same family died of poisoning between April 1928 and March 1929. Retired colonial civil servant Edmund Duff passed away after a brief illness, considered to be caused by a heart condition. Suspicions about his death were only aroused when his daughter-in-law Vera Sidney and her mother, Violet Sidney, died within a month of each other. All three bodies were then exhumed and found to contain arsenic. It was thought that poison had been administered to the victims in food or medicine by a close family member. Although there was insufficient evidence to bring a prosecution, the chief suspect was Grace Duff, widow of Edmund, who was alleged to have wanted rid of her husband as she was having an affair with a doctor, while the female relatives were murdered for financial gain.

In her letter published by the
Sunday Times
in 1968, Agatha Christie revealed that she was unable to offer a solution to the mystery but would continue her investigation into ‘whodunnit’ beyond the grave: ‘All I can say is, dear Francis Wyndham, that if I die and go to heaven, or the other place, and so it happens that the Public Prosecutor of that time is also there, I shall beg him to reveal the secret to me’.