Discussions took place until October as Christie was tired of the character of Poirot and wanted to exclude him from the drama altogether.

[2] Once backing had been found, rehearsals for the play began in January 1944 in Dundee in which Christie enthusiastically joined, now that she was thoroughly enamoured of the theatre and its people.

It premiered there on 17 January at the Dundee Repertory Theatre[3] and the title of the play had also been changed to Hidden Horizon.

For reasons not specified in her biography, these rehearsals and the plans to stage the play appear to have suffered delays to find a London theatre to take the show, once it had been tried out in the provinces.

William Smith is a combination of Mr. Ferguson and Tim Allerton and the three characters of Hercule Poriot, Andrew Pennington and Jim Fanthorp become Canon Ambrose Pennefather.

But Egypt offers the scene-painter a better chance (nicely taken by Danae Gaylen) and the off-stage tattoo of African percussion-music.

The piece has the proper excitements of its hard-worked kind; a weakness lies in its blending of the usual mystery-mechanism with unusual human emotion.