It was almost certainly because of her dissatisfaction with Alibi, someone else’s stage adaption in 1928 of her novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that my grandmother Agatha Christie decided to write a play of her own, which is something she had not previously attempted.
Black Coffee, featuring her favourite detective, Hercule Poirot, was finished by the summer of 1929. But when Agatha showed it to her agent, he advised her not to bother submitting it to any theatre as, in his opinion, it was not good enough to be staged. Fortunately, a friend who was connected with theatrical management persuaded her to ignore such a negative advice, and the play was accepted for production in 1930 at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, London.
Black Coffee was favourable received, and in April of the following year transferred to the West End, where it had a successful run of several months at the St Martin’s Theatre (where a later Christie play, The Mousetrap, began a much longer run in 1952). In 1930, Poirot had been played by a popular actor of the time, Francis L. Sullivan, with John Boxer as his associate Captain Hastings; Joyce Bland played Lucia Amory, and Shakespearian actor Donald Wolfit was Dr Carelli. In the West End production, Francis L. Sullivan was still Poirot, but Hastings was now played by Roland Culver, and Dr Carelli by Dino Galvani.
Some months later, Black Coffee was filmed in England at the Twickenham Studios, directed by Leslie Hiscott and starring Austin Trevor, who had already played Poirot in the film version of Alibi. The play remained a favourite with repertory companies for some years, and in 1956 Charles Osborne, then earning his living as a young actor, found himself playing Dr Carelli in Black Coffee in a summer season at Tunbridge Wells.
Nearly forty years later, after he had in the intervening years not only become a world authority on opera but had also written a splendid book entitled The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, Osborne remembered the play. He suggested to Agatha Christie Limited (who control the copyright of her works) that, twenty years after the author’s death, it would be marvellous to give the world a new Agatha Christie crime novel. We agreed enthusiastically, and the result is this Hercule Poirot murder mystery, which to me reads like authentic, vintage Christie. I feel sure Agatha would be proud to have written it.
Mathew Prichard
[Black Coffee -Agatha Christie] Foreword