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I think I’m out of my troubles. By the way, if she tells you tomorrow that I’m an ardent spiritualist and put her into a trance tonight, don’t show open incredulity. How? Knock-out drops in the coffee, followed by scientific passes! After that I painted her face with purple grease paint and put a tourniquet on her left arm! Mystified? Well, you must stay mystified until tomorrow. I haven’t time to explain now. I must get out of the cap and apron before my faithful Maud returns from the pictures. There was a “beautiful drama” on tonight, she told me. But she missed the best drama of all. I played my best part tonight, Danny. The mittens won! Jake Levitt is a coward all right, and oh, Danny, Danny–I’m an actress!’

Afterword
    â€˜The Actress’ was first published in the Novel Magazine in May 1923 as ‘A Trap for the Unwary’, the title under which it was re-published in the booklet issued in 1990 to mark the centenary of Christie’s birth.
    This story illustrates Christie’s great skill at taking a particular plot device and presenting it again, perhaps in the same form but from a different perspective or with subtle but significant variations to conceal it from the reader. The simple piece of legerdemain in ‘The Actress’ appears in several other stories, most obviously in the intriguing Miss Marple story ‘The Affair at the Bungalow’, collected in The Thirteen Problems (1932), and in the Poirot novel Evil Under the Sun (1941).
    This story reminds us that Christie is also one of Britain’s most successful playwrights, even though her first play–which she described as ‘an enormously gloomy play which, if my memory serves me correct,was about incest’–was never performed. Her own favourite was Witness for the Prosecution (1953) but the most famous is undoubtedly The Mousetrap (1952), which is still running in London after nearly 50 years. While the plot of The Mousetrap centres on a murderer’s ability to deceive his potential victims, it depends as a piece of theatre on Christie’s awareness of how people in an audience respond to what they see and hear and her supreme ability to manipulate what they then understand to be happening. After The Mousetrap opened in London, the reviewer in The Times commented that ‘the piece admirably fulfils the special requirements of the theatre’ and, as anyone who has been associated with the play or has studied it carefully knows well, there is a secret to its success, or rather to the success of why so few are able to foresee its astounding denouement.

The Edge
    I
    Clare Halliwell walked down the short path that led from her cottage door to the gate. On her arm was a basket, and in the basket was a bottle of soup, some homemade jelly and a few grapes. There were not many poor people in the small village of Daymer’s End, but such as there were were assiduously looked after, and Clare was one of the most efficient of the parish workers.
    Clare Halliwell was thirty-two. She had an upright carriage, a healthy colour and nice brown eyes. She was not beautiful, but she looked fresh and pleasant and very English. Everybody liked her, and said she was a good sort. Since her mother’s death, two years ago, she had lived alone in the cottage with her dog, Rover. She kept poultry and was fond of animals and of a healthy outdoor life.
    As she unlatched the gate, a two-seater car sweptpast, and the driver, a girl in a red hat, waved a greeting. Clare responded, but for a moment her lips tightened. She felt that pang at her heart which always came when she saw Vivien Lee. Gerald’s wife!
    Medenham Grange, which lay just a mile outside the village, had belonged to the Lees for many generations. Sir Gerald Lee, the present owner of the Grange, was a man old for his years and considered by many stiff in manner. His pomposity really covered a good deal of shyness. He and