Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie

 

Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie

published 1934/1935

 

When I was preparing my talk for the recent International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay, I took a closer look at my coverage of the Sainted Agatha on the blog. There has never been a time when she was not the most featured author here, and I have read everything she ever published and a lot of books about her, but even I was surprised to find that I had done more than 90 posts on her works and life. (See tab above) I have done individual entries (sometimes multiple posts) on all but a handful of the full-length novels, along with many short stories, themed entries and podcasts.

For the talk, I re-read a few books to check facts, and chalked up a few more entries, such as Peril at End House and Third Girl, and then decided I should try to complete the list and hook in those last few books.

After my talk a lovely person called Elaine Henderson (I so hope I have got your name right, please tell me if not so I can correct) came up and mentioned a wonderful clothes moment in Three Act Tragedy, one of the missing titles – so that decided me as to what the next book must be, and here it is.

‘Miss Wills was dressed in a limp jumper suit which hung disconsolately on her angular form. Her stockings were slightly wrinkled, and she had on very high-heeled patent leather slippers.’

 

As my new friend pointed out, what excellent character drawing in a couple of sentences. The key to Miss Wills is that she doesn’t want to be noticed  - but she is very observant, and very busy noticing other people.

As it happens, I had mentioned jumper suits in my talk: Midge in The Hollow works in a dress shop, and in the window there are some ‘rakish looking skimpy jumper suits’.  I pointed out that a jumper suit was a sweater and skirt co-ord, as we would call it (not jumpsuits which could be the modern version).

On re-reading Three Act Tragedy, the surprise was that I had never posted on it before. This is the opening page, a form of epigraph:

-       An unprecedented credit for the clothes and I have never featured it? What was I thinking….

There is a whole scene set in Ambrosine’s showroom (another favourite trope I featured in my talk), with clothes described as ‘simple and penetrating and just faintly visible.’

Ambrosine – real name Mrs Dacres -  tells her potential young client, Egg Lytton Gore,

‘It’s so important that girls shouldn’t look raw’.

‘Nothing raw about you’ Egg thought ungratefully. ‘Cooked to a turn, you are.’

Mrs Dacres also has the mysterious ‘greenish bronze hair’, which featured in The Secret of Chimneys ten years earlier. I said in my post on that book:

 

Virginia’s hair ‘was of real bronze, with the greenish tint in its gold’ - the reference to green in her hair is repeated later on (‘the green gold of her hair’), so is deliberate, but it does sound weird - usually a greenish tint in hair is a sign that something has gone badly wrong with a dye-job.

Mrs D is also wearing an evening gown of a deep and unusual blue, dull but with hidden lights in it. It appears to have a simple cut, but that is ‘ludicrously far from the case’ – this is a side aspect of one of the tropes I looked at in my talk, one that might be called ‘clothes that men can’t understand and of which they would be shocked to find out the cost’. (picture from NYPL). Someone else is in ‘limp green chiffon’.

There is plenty of other interesting detail too: everyone is very impressed by the supersmart, expensive new house which has ‘three bathrooms’ – mentioned twice. And Egg, the young heroine, says “I like men to have affairs. It shows they’re not queer or anything.” – the earliest mention I can recall of such matters in the oeuvre. Typically crass: ‘Mr Satterthwaite’s Victorianism suffered a further pang’ and we might know how he feels, although we can’t be sure exactly what aspect of this he objects to. Romance in general is a difficult subject in this book.

NOTE ADDED LATER: Marty in the comments below, and GA expert Martin Edwards, both reminded me that the motive for the murder was changed in the US edition of this book, because of a difference in the laws of the two countries. To say more would be to spoiler - but also, I do not know exactly how the US version plays out. Would love to hear about it if anyone knows.

ALSO ADDED LATER: Somewhere I have seen a reference to Miss Wills in this book, the droopy playwright above, suggesting that Christie intended her to represent blog favourite Josephine Tey. Very surprising if true - I wish I could track down the reference, and find out more... 

Three Act Tragedy is one of those where you remember the plot when you start re-reading, and it is clever but ultimately lightweight. I don’t suppose anyone ever said it was their favourite Christie, but it is short and enjoyable. And it contains a classic impersonation – something I do like to feature on the blog, and another item discussed in my Festival talk. I think I'm right in saying this is the only full-length book where Mr Satterthwaite appears - he features in the Harley Quin short stories.  

There is, of course, a slightly hilarious issue with illustrating the jumper suit: photos and illos preserved down the ages tend to be ones where the model looks lovely, not disconsolate. So the fashion examples of jumper suits show them at their best, not really as Miss Wills would have looked… The artwork is by Modigliani.

Thanks very much to Elaine – lovely to meet you, and that was a great tipoff.