While Christie believed that a book could be polished off in three months, she said that plays were “better written quickly”. At the time of the BBC’s 1955 profile of Christie, three of her plays were running in London’s West End. The Mousetrap was already breaking box-office records, just three years after its premiere. The play began as a BBC radio drama titled Three Blind Mice, broadcast in 1947 as part of an evening of programmes celebrating Queen Mary’s 80th birthday.
Writing plays was “much more fun than writing books”, according to Christie. She said: “You haven’t got to bother about long descriptions of places and people, or about deciding how to space out your material. And you must write pretty fast to keep in the mood and to keep the talk flowing naturally.”
The UK’s longest-running play
In 1973, Christie attended a 21st birthday celebration for The Mousetrap at London’s Savoy Hotel. Also in attendance was its original leading man Richard Attenborough, who predicted it “could run another 21 years”. He added: “I won’t put it in the same class as St Paul’s Cathedral, but certainly the Americans decide that the thing to do if they come to London is to go and see The Mousetrap.” Having become the UK’s longest-running play in 1957, the only thing that could stop it was the Covid pandemic in 2020. In March 2025, it celebrated its 30,000th performance, and is still running today.
Attenborough was also interviewed in the 1955 BBC profile, where he said that Christie was “just about the last person in the world you would ever think of in connection with crime or violence or anything blood-curdling or dramatic”. Summing up her enduring mystery, he said: “We just couldn’t get over the fact that this quite quiet, precise, dignified lady could possibly have made our flesh creep, and fascinated people all over the world with her mastery of suspense and her gift for creating on the stage and the screen such an atmosphere of terror.”
While Christie’s BBC interview gives us a fascinating glimpse of her writing methods – the lack of rigid technique, the reliance on imagination, the joy of plotting – the enigma of the woman herself lives on.
