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Scenery: 2 Interiors
Only Agatha Christie could have conceived such a suspenseful thriller and then capped it with an uncanny triple flip ending. A young married man spends many evenings with a rich old woman. When she is found murdered, the naive young man is the chief suspect. The testimony of his wife is expected to result in an acquittal, but she is a shrew who damages his case and all but hangs him before a vindictive mystery woman appears with letters against the wife. After the man is freed, it is revealed that mystery woman is actually the wife. She discredited and perjured herself because she felt that direct testimony on her husband's behalf would not have been sufficient to free him. When he turns his back on his wife and goes off with another woman, we realize that he was the murderer. He does not get away it, for there is one turn of plot remaining.
"A walloping success."-Herald Tribune
"Packs plenty of surprise in its cargo of suspense."-Daily Mirror
Winner of the New York Critics Circle Award
From the Back Cover
Headlining this book is Witness for the Prosecution – Christie’s highly successful stage play which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play. A stunning courtroom drama, it tells the story of a scheming wife testifying against her husband in a shocking murder trial.
The wild beauty of a seaside house perched high on The Devonshire River Tern provides a stunning back-drop in Towards Zero – as a psychopathic murderer homes in on the unsuspecting victims.
Passion, murder and love are the deadly ingredients in Verdict, making it one of Christie’s more unusual thrillers and prompting her to label it ‘the best play I have written with the exception of Witness for The Prosecution’.
Go Back for Murder tells the story of the young and feisty Carla who, orphaned at the tender age of five, discovers her mother was imprisioned for murdering her father and determines to prove her innocence.
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Customer Reviews
Based on a short story originally known as "Traitors Hands," WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION differs from most Christie works in that it is more of a courtroom drama than a mystery per se. The play opens in the offices of Sir Wilfred Robarts, who is asked to defend Leonard Vole from a pending murder charge. Leonard's situation is extremely unfortunate. Himself a poor man, he became friendly with a rich and elderly woman. He visited her the same night she was murdered, and her will makes him heir to her estate. Leonard swears he was at home with his wife, German-born Romaine, at the time of the murder. But when Sir Wilfred interviews Romaine, he finds her an extremely unsatisfactory witness. She does not seem to care very much whether Leonard is convicted or not, and she shocks Sir Wilfred when she agrees to appear as a witness--not for Leonard's defense, but for the prosecution.
The first act sets up the basic circumstances; the second act plays out the trial itself, with Romaine giving damning evidence against her husband. Both are meticulously constructed, beautifully written, and abounding with intelligent and witty dialogue and interesting characters. But the great talent of a truly gifted mystery writer is the ability to suddenly gather up the various details of the a story and pull them to an entirely logical but unforeseen and extremely sharp point. This is precisely the case with WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION. Having received new evidence, Sir Wilfred is able to discredit Romaine's testimony, and this would seem the end of the play--but not so. In the final minutes of the play, indeed in slightly less than two pages of dialogue, Christie twists the material with a master hand, turning our perceptions inside out twice and then suddenly concluding the play in a manner that has left audiences gasping ever since.
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION had tremendously successful runs on the London and New York stage; it also received a very fine screen adaptation in 1957. And therein a certain problem lies: it is so widely seen that many know the way in which the play concludes. This, along with the fact that it requires a very large cast and extremely complex series of sets, has tended to put a damper on the play's production ever since. Even so, WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION remains a masterpiece of the genre, a piece that even those who aren't particularly fond of mysteries will find fascinating to the end. Recommended.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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