| Why Didn't They Ask Evans? | |
| Author: | Agatha Christie |
| Cover Artist: | Gilbert Cousland |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Crime novel |
| Publisher: | Collins Crime Club |
| Release Date: | September 1934 |
| Media Type: | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages: | 256 (first edition, hardcover) |
| Preceded By: | The Listerdale Mystery |
| Followed By: | Parker Pyne Investigates |
Why Didn't They Ask Evans? is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie, first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club in September 1934[1] [2] and in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1935 under the title of The Boomerang Clue.[2] [3] [4] The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6)[1] and the US edition at $2.00.[4]
The novel is set in Wales and Hampshire. Bobby Jones finds a man dying at his local golf course. A photo he saw in the man's pocket is replaced, as police seek his identity. Bobby and his friend Lady Frances Derwent have adventures as they solve the mystery of the man's last words: "Why didn't they ask Evans?"
The novel was praised at first publication as "a story that tickles and tantalises", and that the reader is sure to like the amateur detectives and forgive the absence of Poirot. It had a lively narrative, full of action, with two amateur detectives who "blend charm and irresponsibility with shrewdness and good luck". Robert Barnard, writing in 1990, called it "Lively" but compared it to Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and felt that the detectives were too much the amateurs.
Bobby Jones is playing golf with Dr Thomas in the Welsh seaside town of Marchbolt. Seeking the golf ball he hit over the cliff edge, he sees a man lying on the rocks below. The doctor says the man is fatally injured and seeks help. Bobby stays with the man, who briefly regains consciousness, and says "Why didn't they ask Evans?" before dying. Bobby finds a photograph of a beautiful woman in the man's coat pocket, but no identification. Roger, a stranger wearing plus fours, offers to stay with the body so Bobby can play the organ at his father's church.
The dead man is identified at the inquest as Alex Pritchard by his sister, Amelia Cayman. She is said to be the woman in the photograph; Bobby wonders how such a beautiful girl could become such a coarse older woman. After the inquest, Mrs Cayman and her husband ask if Pritchard had any last words. Bobby says no, but later, when talking with his friend Lady Frances "Frankie" Derwent, Bobby remembers Pritchard's final words and writes to the Caymans to tell them.
Bobby receives and rejects an unexpected job offer from a firm in Buenos Aires. Soon afterwards he nearly dies after drinking from a poisoned bottle of beer. The local police do not pursue this. Frankie thinks Bobby is targeted for murder. When Bobby sees the issue of the local paper with the photograph used to find Pritchard's sister, he sees that it is not the one he found in the dead man's pocket. He and Frankie realise that swapped the photographs and that Mrs Cayman is not related to the dead man. Bobby and Frankie trace to Merroway Court in Hampshire, owned by Roger's brother and sister-in-law, Henry and Sylvia. They stage a car accident outside the house with the help of a doctor friend so that Frankie, feigning injury, will be invited to stay to recover. Frankie produces a newspaper cutting about the mysterious dead man; Sylvia remarks that he looks like Alan Carstairs, a traveller and big-game hunter who was a friend of John Savage, a millionaire who killed himself after learning he had terminal cancer.
Frankie meets two neighbours of the – Dr Nicholson, who runs a local sanatorium, and his younger wife, Moira. Investigating in the grounds at night, Bobby encounters a woman who says that she fears for her life; she is the woman whose photograph Bobby found in the dead man's pocket. Several days later, Moira Nicholson turns up at the local inn where Bobby stays in his disguise as Frankie's chauffeur. She says her husband is trying to kill her and says she knew Alan Carstairs before her marriage to the doctor. Moira suggests that Bobby and Frankie ask Roger if he took the photograph from the body of the dead man. Roger admits that he took the photo, recognising Moira and wanting to avoid scandal for her. Frankie leaves after Henry is found dead in his home, an apparent suicide.
Interested in the will of the late John Savage, Frankie consults her family's solicitor in London and learns that Carstairs consulted him too. Savage was staying with Mr and Mrs Templeton when he became convinced he had cancer, although one specialist told him he was perfectly well. When he died by suicide, his will left seven hundred thousand pounds to the Templetons, who have apparently since left Britain. Carstairs was on their trail when he was killed. Bobby is kidnapped and Frankie is lured to the same isolated cottage by Roger disguised as Dr Nicholson. They turn the tables on him with the timely arrival of Badger Beadon and find a drugged Moira in the house. When the police arrive, Roger has escaped.
Bobby and Frankie trace the witnesses to the signing of John Savage's will. They are the former cook and gardener of Mr and Mrs Templeton. Mr Templeton is also known as Mr Leo Cayman. The cook says that Gladys, the parlourmaid, was not asked to witness the will, made the night before Savage died. Frankie realises that the cook and gardener did not see Mr Savage before the signing, while the parlourmaid did and would have realised that it was Roger in the "deathbed" who wrote the will and not Mr Savage. The parlourmaid is Gladys Evans, hence the reason for Carstairs' question, "Why didn't they ask Evans?"
Tracing the parlourmaid, they discover she is now the married housekeeper at Bobby's home. Carstairs was trying to find her. Returning to Wales, they find Moira, who claims she is being followed by Roger and has come to them for help. Frankie is not deceived and foils Moira's attempt to poison their coffee, realising that Moira was Mrs Templeton and is Roger's co-conspirator. Moira then attempts to shoot Frankie and Bobby in the café, but is overpowered and arrested. Several weeks later, Frankie receives a letter from Roger, posted from South America, in which he confesses to murdering Carstairs, murdering his brother, and conspiring in all of Moira's past crimes. Bobby and Frankie realise they are in love and become engaged.
In the introduction of Agatha Christie's book Passenger to Frankfurt (Dodd, Mead hardcover, 1970) she gives examples of how she has come up with ideas for her books. Included is this explanation: "You go to tea with a friend. As you arrive, her brother closes a book he is reading – throws it aside, says: 'Not bad, but why on earth didn't they ask Evans?' So you decide immediately a book of yours shortly to be written will bear the title, Why Didn't They Ask Evans? You don't know yet who Evans is going to be. Never mind. Evans will come in due course – the title is fixed."
The name of the novel's hero – Bobby Jones – is the same as that of the American golfer who was at the height of his fame at the time of publication. The first chapter introduces "Bobby Jones" playing golf; when his stroke scuds disappointingly along the ground, the narrative explains this Bobby is not the American master.
The Times Literary Supplement (27 September 1934) concluded favourably, "Mrs Christie describes the risks (Bobby Jones and Frankie Derwent) ran in her lightest and most sympathetic manner, playing with her characters as a kitten will play with a ball of wool, and imposing no greater strain on her readers than the pleasure of reading at a sitting a story that tickles and tantalises but never exhausts their patience or ingenuity."[5]
Isaac Anderson in The New York Times Book Review (18 September 1935) concluded, "Frankie and Bobby are not nearly so brilliant as amateur detectives usually are in books, but you are sure to like them, and you may even be able to forgive Agatha Christie for leaving out Hercule Poirot just this once."[6]
The Observer (16 September 1934) started off by saying that, "there is an engaging zest about Agatha Christie's latest novel" and concluded that, "the narrative is lively" and "the story is full of action."[7]
Milward Kennedy in his review in The Guardian of 21 September 1934 said after summarising the set-up of the plot that, "Poirot has no part in this book; instead, a young man and a young woman who blend charm and irresponsibility with shrewdness and good luck contrive amusingly and successfully to usurp the functions of the police. The fault which I find is the overimportance of luck. For the villains it was, for example, singular good luck which enabled them to discover and identify an obscure vicar's fourth son asleep on a solitary picnic; it was very bad luck for them that he was able to assimilate a sixteenth times fatal dose of morphia. They were lucky, again, in having always at hand just the properties required to make an extempore murder seem something else; and as for the Bright Young Couple – but these are defects which are little noticeable in the gay stream of Mrs Christie's narrative. Perhaps I should not have noticed them had I not read the book so quickly that, in a secluded village, there was nothing for it next day but to read it again with a sterner eye but no less enjoyment."[8]
Robert Barnard wrote of the book in 1980 that it was "Lively, with occasional glimpses of a Vile Bodies world, though one short on Waugh's anarchic humour and long on snobbery ('Nobody looks at a chauffeur the way they look at a person')." His critique was that the novel was "Weakened by lack of proper detective: the investigating pair are bumbling amateurs, with more than a touch of Tommy and Tuppence"[9]
The novel was first published in the US in the Redbook magazine in a condensed version in the issue for November 1933 (Volume 62, Number 1) under the title The Boomerang Clue with illustrations by Joseph Franké. This version was then published in Six Redbook Novels by The McCall Company in 1933, prior to the publication of the full text by Dodd Mead in 1935. The other five condensed novels in this volume were The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, The Figure in the Fog by Mignon G. Eberhart, The Cross of Peace by Philip Gibbs, White Piracy by James Warner Bellah and Parade Ground by Charles L Clifford.
The dedication of the book reads:
"To Christopher Mallock
in memory of Hinds"
The Mallock family were friends of Christie's from the years before her first marriage. They staged amateur theatricals at their house, Cockington Court, near Torquay in which Christie, managing to overcome her usual crippling shyness, took part.[12] The allusion to Hinds is unknown.
The blurb on the inside flap of the dustjacket of the first UK edition (which is also repeated opposite the title page) reads:
"Believe it or not, Bobby Jones had topped his drive! He was badly bunkered. There were no eager crowds to groan with dismay. That is easily explained – for Bobby was merely the fourth son of the Vicar of Marchbolt, a small golfing resort on the Welsh coast. And Bobby, in spite of his name, was not much of a golfer. Still, that game was destined to be a memorable one. On going to play his ball, Bobby suddenly came upon the body of a man. He bent over him. The man was not yet dead. "Why didn't they ask Evans?" he said, and then the eyelids dropped, the jaw fell...
It was the beginning of a most baffling mystery. That strange question of the dying man is the recurring theme of Agatha Christie's magnificent story. Read it and enjoy it."
This novel has been translated into various languages other than its original English. Twenty-six are listed here, some published as recently as 2014. This is in keeping with the author's reputation for being the most translated author.[13] [14]
Why Didn't They Ask Evans was adapted by London Weekend Television and transmitted on 30 March 1980. Before this production, there had been relatively few adaptations of Christie's work on the small screen as it was a medium she disliked[15] and she had not been impressed with previous efforts, in particular a transmission of And Then There Were None on 20 August 1949 when several noticeable errors went out live, including one of the "corpses" standing up and walking off set in full view of the cameras. By the 1960s she was emphatically refusing to grant television rights to her works.
After Christie's death in 1976, her estate, principally managed by her daughter Rosalind Hicks, relaxed this ruling and Why Didn't They Ask Evans was the first major production that resulted. Evans attracted large audiences and satisfactory reviews, but more importantly, it demonstrated to television executives that Christie's work could be successful for the small screen given the right budgets, stars and attention to detail – Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime, Miss Marple with Joan Hickson (who had a minor role in Evans), Agatha Christie's Poirot with David Suchet and Marple with Geraldine McEwan, until her retirement, and then with Julia Mackenzie, can all trace their style and successes back to this 1980 adaptation.
Given a generous budget of £1 million, a large sum for the time, it had an all-star cast and a three-month shooting and videotaping schedule.[16] Problems were encountered during the 1979 ITV strike which lasted three months and led to replacement production personnel when the strike ended, including a change of director. The original intention was that the 180-minute teleplay would be transmitted as a three-part "mini-serial", but ITV then decided to show it as a three-hour special with maximum publicity, especially for Francesca Annis in the role of Frankie.
Much of the film was taped on location in Cuddington and Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire. Hall Barn, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire doubled as the Bassington-ffrench residence and Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire was used as Lady Derwent's home.[17]
The production was faithful to the plot and dialogue of the book. Two notable changes were made. The first is the recognition in the isolated cottage that Dr Nicholson is Roger Bassington-ffrench in disguise. In the novel, it is Bobby who recognises the deception as the man's ear-lobes are different from those of the doctor whom he had glimpsed previously. In the adaptation, Frankie witnesses one of Nicholson's patients attacking him in the sanatorium when his face is badly scratched. In the cottage, she realises the scratches have disappeared. The second change comes at the end when, instead of writing to Frankie from South America, Roger lures her to a deserted Merroway Court, makes much the same confession as appears in the book's letter and tells her he loves her, asking her to join him. When she refuses, he locks her in a room of the house (to be freed by Bobby the next day) but does not harm her as he makes his escape abroad. The production was first screened on US television as part of Mobil Showcase on 21 May 1981, introduced by Peter Ustinov.
Adaptor: Pat Sandys
Executive Producer: Tony Wharmby
Producer: Jack Williams
Directors: John Davies and Tony Wharmby
Artwork: John Tribe
Principal cast:
Patrick Barlow loosely reworked Christie's novel as a two-hour television film starring Julia McKenzie as Miss Marple, a Christie character who does not appear in the original novel. It was first transmitted on Wednesday, 15 June 2011, on ITV.[18] Among the major changes to the plot:
The Castle Savage scenes were largely filmed at Loseley Park near Guildford – a 16th-century stately home in Surrey belonging to the More-Molyneux family.[19]
The cast for this adaptation included:
It was adapted as a 2013 episode of the French television series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie.
See main article: Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (2022 TV series). In April 2021, it was announced that Hugh Laurie would be adapting the novel for BritBox in 2022.[20] The filming took place in Surrey, mainly in the villages of Shere and Albury, between June and August 2021,[21] [22] and at Three Cliffs Bay in Swansea.[23] The three-part series became available on BritBox on 14 April 2022. It was then shown on ITVX and ITV in April 2023.[24]