My rating
Blurb
Nearly a quarter-century after her death, Agatha Christie remains the most popular mystery writer of all time. Now, in a celebrated publishing event, fans and newcomers alike are treated to another Christie novel. Created in 1930 as a stage play and faithfully adapted by Charles Osborne, Black Coffee brings back beloved detective Hercule Poirot to exercise his "little grey cells" one more deliciously deductive time... An urgent call from physicist Sir Claud Amory sends famed detective Hercule Poirot rushing from London to a sprawling country estate. Sir Claud fears a member of his own household wants to steal a secret formula destined for the Ministry of Defense. But Poirot arrives too late. The formula is missing. Worse, Sir Claud has been poisoned by his after-dinner coffee. Poirot soon identifies a potent brew of despair, treachery, and deception amid the mansion's occupants. Now he must find the formula and the killer...while letting no poison slip 'twix his low lips.
Black Coffee is a novelisation by the Australian-born writer and Charles Osborn of the 1930 play by crime fiction author Agatha Christie
The play first opened at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage (now London's Central School of Speech and Drama) on December 8, 1930, but ran only until December 20. On April 9, 1931 it re-opened at the St Martin's Theatre, where it ran until May 1 before transferring to the Wimbledon Theatre on May 4. It then went to the Little Theatre on May 11, finally closing there on June 13, 1931.The story concerns a physicist named Sir Claude Amory who has come up with a formula for an atom bomb (Black Coffee was written in 1934!). In the first act, Sir Claude is poisoned (in his coffee, naturally) and Hercule Poirot is called in to solve the case. He does so after many wonderful twists and turns in true Christie tradition.
It reads like a novel that Agatha Christie would have wriiten herself. Osborne did a good job of adapting her play into a readable book.I enjoyed that characters and plot and it was hard to figure out who did the deed. A mystery book isn't any fun if you figure out who did it too early in the story.
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