A collection of eight plays, which are notable as it is very rare for a professional mystery writer to write for the stage, either with original plots or adaptations of novels and short stories.. They were all very popular (especially 'The Mousetrap' -- which is in fact rather bad, but played for years and years!), although not as much as movie and television adaptations by other authors of Christie's works. Of the latter, only a few are really good -- for example, 'Witness for the Prosecution' and 'Murder on the Orient Express' in the cinema, and the Joan Hickson Miss Marples and David Suchet Hercule Poirots on TV.
What is interesting about the plays, as Ira Levin points out, is that Christie realized that traditional mystery stories do not transfer well into the medium of live drama -- much too complicated and cerebral unless drastically simplified, even to the extent of dropping the traditional detective. Hence three plays are based on Poirot novels, and he is eliminated from all of them, because 'deduction' and clues are pretty much irrelevant to dramatic suspense and slow down the action -- just observe how ineffective Hollywood versions of Philo Vance and Ellery Queen, for example, are when they end up with a 20-minute explication of how the detective solved the mystery.
Another point he makes is: 'Don't worry too much about the chairs and tables. It rarely matters whether they're at stage right or stage left, or whether the doors are upstage or down. What does matter is the dialogue.' I agree entirely; while stage directions are important for the production, they are very distracting in the print medium (and in fact make little sense to me, as I am ignorant as to whether stage right is to the right of the audience or of the actors facing forward, and there is too much 'crosses down L.' -- I much prefer the Shakespearean type simplified direction such as 'exit, pursued by bear').
The plays, from worst to best (in my own opinion): (1) 'Verdict' (original play, not based on a story or novel) has an illogical plot and an extremely naive protagonist who does not deserve being treated as well as he is; (2) 'Appointment with Death' has a really nasty victim, with milksopish grown children under her thumb, and deserves what's coming to her -- but it turns out not quite to be a murder after all: a cop-out; (3)'The Mousetrap' has an easily spotted gimmick, and the killer is a competent person one moment and a raving madman the next -- coincidences and false identities are egregious, not convincing; and (4) 'Go Back for Murder' is one of those rehashes of an 'ancient' murder, and again the solution is illogical and somewhat unfair. Those are the relatively disappointing ones. (5) 'The Hollow' has a nice surprise ending and some very effective characters, and the sexual theme is very well handled; (6) 'Towards Zero', takes place in a typical A.C. country house, on a Cornish bay, with a cast of several houseguests at odds with each other, all of whom are quite interesting and distinctive -- good mystery; (7) 'Ten Little Indians', based on the famous mystery novel 'And Then There Were None', is in many ways better than the book, in any case, far more concise in following the classic 17th Century French dramatic 'unities' (all taking place in one room during a 48-hour period) and sticking with the common mystery thread of a small group of people stranded in an isolated house with a mass murderer; and (8) 'Witness for the Prosecution', undoubtedly Christie's masterpiece for the stage, the play is dominated by Romaine, the German wife of the defendant Leonard Vole (wonderful Dickensian name) who is on trial for murder -- a role brilliantly acted on screen by Marlene Dietrich -- one cannot praise this story enough.
PS. The murderer at the premiere of 'The Mousetrap' in 1952 was played by an unknown young actor named Richard Attenborough. Attenborough also played the movie role of Christie the mass murderer in '10 Rillington Place' -- quite a coincidence, eh?
Grobius, Sept 2003