A rare interview with Agatha Christie

While Christie believed the book could be polished in three months, she said the plays were “better written quickly.” At the time of the BBC’s report on Christie in 1955, three of her plays were running in London’s West End. The Mousetrap had already broken box office records, just three years after its premiere. The play began as a BBC radio drama entitled Three Blind Mice, broadcast in 1947 as part of an evening of programs celebrating Queen Mary’s 80th birthday.

Writing plays was “more fun than writing books,” according to Christie. “You don’t have to bother with long descriptions of places and people, or decide how to distribute your material,” she said. “You have to write very quickly to maintain the mood and keep the conversation flowing naturally.”

The longest running play in the UK

In 1973, Christie attended a 21st birthday celebration for The Mousetrap at the Savoy Hotel in London. Also in attendance was its original man Richard Attenborough, who predicted it “could go on for another 21 years”. He added: “I wouldn’t put it in the same category as St Paul’s Cathedral, but certainly the Americans decided that the thing to do if they came to London was to go see The Mousetrap.” After becoming 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 a 1955 BBC profile, in which he said that Christie was “the last person in the world you would think of in terms of crime, violence or anything blood-curdling or dramatic”. Summing up her enduring mystery, he said: “We could not get over the fact that this quiet, precise and respectful lady could make our bodies shudder, and mesmerized people all over the world with her mastery of suspense and her talent for creating such an atmosphere of terror on stage and screen.”

While Christie’s interview with the BBC gives us a fascinating glimpse into her writing methods – the lack of strict technique, the reliance on imagination, the joy of plot – the mystery of the woman herself remains.