Stage Adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Detective Stories

As the previous chapters have shown, the crime play has developed a set of conventions quite distinct from those governing the genre of detective fiction. In the two final chapters of this study, the question of how the crime play differs from detective fiction and to what extent it is similar shall be approached from a new angle; by examining stage adaptations of detective fiction in comparison with their respective source texts — mostly novels, in some cases detective short stories. Among British detective novelists, Agatha Christie is particularly prominent as an author whose works have proved consistently popular for transformation into stage plays. The present chapter will therefore concern itself with adaptations of Christie’s detective stories, written either by herself or by other playwrights. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.