Verdict

Agatha Christie may be my favorite author, but even the great Christie wrote a few clunkers. This play is one of them. The melodrama reminds me of soap operas. The stage instructions have the actors constantly entering and exiting rooms and moving around rooms. One or another of the characters is constantly making and serving coffee, while the housekeeper keeps announcing they’re out of tea and popping out to the local shop to restock. This may be safely skipped by all but Christie completists.

Paying For What You Want
A review of the Samuel French / Concord Theatricals playscript (January 22, 2014) of the original Samuel French paperback (1958).

The only way you can learn about life is by experience. The Spanish have a proverb*, “‘Take what you want and pay for it,’ says God.” That’s sound, Professor Hendryk, very sound.

Verdict is that rare creature among Agatha Christie playscripts which is not based on an earlier novel or short story. The setup is that a Professor Karl Hendryk is caring for an ailing wife along with a sister-in-law and a scamming and rather treacherous housekeeper. A young student Helen is crushing on the Prof and wants private lessons, which Hendryk refuses. When he eventually relents, Helen show more murders the wife through an overdose, but the sister-in-law is arrested based on faulty evidence by the housekeeper. The reveals come while everyone awaits the verdict from a subsequent court trial.

I did overall enjoy Verdict although it didn't break into 4 or 5 star territory. There is a seemingly abrupt "happy ending," which comes along so quickly that I suspect it might have been forced on Christie by the theatrical producers who wanted to avoid a downer ending.

This playscript counts against my Agatha Christie binge goal, so I now have 22 novels (if I include the 6 published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott), 5 short story collections, 13** theatrical plays (+ several harder to find 1-act radio plays) and 1 autobiography left to go.

Footnotes
* I could not find any trace of an original Spanish proverb of this line, assuming it was something like Toma lo que quieras y paga por ello”, dice Dios.. It is possible that Christie invented the phrase as a way to foreshadow that you will end up paying for things that you take... or murder for.

** The number of theatrical plays might need revision as I've discovered there are two different versions of the play adapted from the novel [book:Towards Zero|12168274] (1944). There is #1 Towards Zero (The Martha's Vineyard or the so-called Outdoor Version) (1945) and #2 [book:Towards Zero: A Stage Play|18053199] (1956) written in cooperation with Gerald Verner.

Trivia and Link
I have found that the most complete source for the theatrical works is online at Concord Theatricals, although they include several adaptations from the novels which were made posthumously without Agatha Christie's participation. I won't count those as part of the official canon. show less

Not really much of a mystery. More of a domestic story.

Not really much of a mystery. More of a domestic story.

Not really much of a mystery. More of a domestic story.

Not really much of a mystery. More of a domestic story.