Better than Mr Quin

BLACK COFFEE

adapted by Charles Osborne from the play by Agatha Christie

HarperCollins, L15.99, pp. 188

Newly escaped from Brisbane to Britain, the young Charles Osborne became an actor. He discovered that he could give an excellent first reading which thereafter never became deeper: he was admirably suited to weekly rep. But he was too intelligent to remain a rep actor. He grew bored, quit acting, became assistant editor of London Magazine, then literature director of the Arts Council. He wrote books on Verdi, Wagner, Kafka and Auden, and one on Agatha Christie (see above).

He had become addicted to Christie's detective novels as a teenager: it was a solitary vice. In weekly rep he met her plays and they exactly suited his style of acting: they never went deep, and dealt in stereotypes, not character. Raw emotion was eschewed, replaced by cliche, and so was wit. Christie's way of engaging the audience was to keep them guessing who dunnit, and on its own level it worked, as it still does.

In later life one returns to the memories of youth. Osborne remembered his performances in weekly rep, he remembered the Christie plays. Some had been adapted from novel to play, but none from play to novel. He remembered her first play, Black Coffee. That had never been a novel. It should be, must be: there were Christie addicts all over the world who would otherwise never be able to enjoy it. He set to work.

He knew the book, knew it backwards, knew what he must do. No depth, no real emotion, not even landscape: most of the novel is set in a single room in a single house. For a man of his sophistication it must have been torture to write lines of dialogue like, `Why are you telling me all this?' but he forced himself to do it. Black Coffee is a puzzle of the classic Thirties kind - Sir Claud fears that someone is after his secret formula and is poisoned in a locked library with the lights out and all the suspects present. It is not, to be frank, all that difficult to guess the murderer and it is hard to care, but caring is not the point. The puzzle is the point. Osborne has made a worthy addition to the Christie canon, not as fine as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd but much better than The Mysterious Mr Quin.

Puzzles can be addictive. Osborne has also written a novel of his own, The Pink Danube (Bellew, L15.95), and set himself a literary puzzle of extreme difficulty. His protagonist, Nicholas Threlfall, is writing, at the age of 60, a memoir and also a semiautobiographical novel, and has written, off and on during the 60 years, a diary. Three ways of treating the same material - the diary must be immediate, the memoir tidying and glossing, the novel picking up an incident and transforming it into an image. The intention is admirable but the ghost of Agatha Christie is at Osborne's shoulder, wagging her finger. She will not allow naked emotion. When Threlfall has reached the point when there is no avoiding real pain and despair, he commits suicide and Osborne's novel stops.

Copyright Spectator Jan 9, 1999
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