Three Act Tragedy - Agatha Christie [92]
Though it is no longer likely to be thought one of the best of Agatha Christie’s crime novels of the thirties, Three-Act Tragedy was initially very favourably received, and became the first Christie novel to sell more than 10,000 copies within a year of publication.
The New English Weekly thought Three-Act Tragedy ‘her writtiest novel so far’, The Times Literary Supplement was of the opinion that ‘very few readers will guess the murderer before Mr Hercule Poirot reveals the secret’, the Manchester Guardian thought the author ‘in great form’ and found ‘the characters (as always with Mrs Christie)…lifelike and lively’, and Ralph Partridge in the New Statesman was enormously impressed:
Mrs Christie can be trusted to turn out at least one book a year up to her own impeccable standard. Three-Act Tragedy has given scope for all her art. The power to wrap up clues in the easiest and most natural conversation; the choice of contrasting characters, each outlined with just sufficient sharpness to give them all individuality; the steady pulse of events in chapter after chapter; the originality of the murder plot itself, and the dramatic suspense of the solution hold you until the latest possible minute. These are the characteristics of a Christie novel in the Roger Ackroyd tradition, and it is here that Three-Act Tragedy takes its place in the succession, a worthy descendant of Lord Edgware Dics… Nothing could be more baffling to any reader or detective than the opening crime. Even Poirot could find nothing to suggest foul play.
And even the famous drama critic, James Agate, writing in the Daily Express, succumbed to Mrs Christie’s ‘tender strokes of art’:
In my opinion, Three-Act Tragedy succeeds, because as a hardened reader of crime stories I have ceased to care who murders anybody so long as up to the last chapter the story has held me. Here Mrs Christie succeeds abundantly for the simple reason that she is an amusing writer.
The ending of Three-Act Tragedy is certainly an amusing example of Poirot’s endearingly childlike egotism. When Mr Satterthwaite remarks that he might accidentally have drunk the poisoned cocktail, ‘There is an even more terrible possibility that you have not considered,’ said Poirot. ‘Eh?’ ‘It might have been me,’ said Hercule Poirot.
About Charles Osborne
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.
About Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime