Episode 9 - Cards on the Table

Welcome to another thrilling episode of ABitOfAChristie! This week, we delve into Agatha Christie's classic novel Cards on the Table. Join us as we unravel the intricate plot where the game of bridge becomes a pivotal element in solving a murder mystery.

We are honoured to have Laura Covill, coach of the mixed bridge national team for Sweden, on the show. Laura breaks down the complexities of bridge, helping us understand its crucial role in Christie's narrative. She also shares a fascinating true crime story where a murder occurs during a game of bridge, adding an extra layer of intrigue to our discussion.

Additionally, we chat with Raye Green, an acclaimed author and Agatha Christie super fan. Raye talks about her latest book, Agatha Christie's Doctors, and her Agatha Christie fanzine. She also shares her enthusiasm for local history in Worle, Somerset, providing a rich tapestry of insights into the world that inspired Christie.

Tune in for an episode filled with mystery, expert analysis, and a deep dive into the legacy of the Queen of Crime. Whether you're a Christie aficionado or a bridge enthusiast, this episode promises to be a captivating listen.

Don't miss out on this captivating blend of literary analysis, game strategy, and real-life mystery. Listen now on your favourite podcast platform!

Timestamps

The publication year of 1936 (00:01:32) Cultural highlights of 1936, including music, literature, and film.

Agatha Christie's "Cards on the Table" (00:04:20) Introduction to the novel's plot and characters, focusing on the unique collection of guests at a dinner party.

Ray Green on "Agatha Christie's Doctors" (00:06:01) Author Ray Green discusses the inspiration and process behind her book about medical professionals in Agatha Christie's works.

The game of bridge (00:13:39) An overview of the basics of bridge and its historical and modern context.

Bridge and its competitive nature (00:19:56) The addictive and competitive nature of bridge, including its potential for conflict and the excitement of its ever-changing challenges.

Bridge tournaments and espionage (00:22:35) A public service announcement highlighting the historical intrigue surrounding bridge tournaments during the Cold War.

Doctors in Agatha Christie's Life (00:23:58) Discussion about the societal status of doctors and Agatha Christie's experience working at a hospital.

Pharmacies and Troubles (00:25:17) Mention of troubles in pharmacies and a chemist's unethical behavior in the book.

Writing Fiction and Challenges (00:25:42) The struggle of writing fiction and incorporating characters into a story.

Bridge and Murder in "Cards on the Table" (00:26:20) Connections between the game of bridge and the murder in Agatha Christie's book.

Personality Reflection in Bridge (00:27:42) Observations on how a person's personality reflects in their approach to playing bridge.

International Bridge Tournaments (00:30:08) Description of the scale and rules enforcement at large bridge tournaments.

Bridge-Related Murder Case (00:31:59) Discussion of a murder resulting from a bridge game and the sensationalized mythology around it.

Bridge in James Bond's "Moonraker" (00:34:45) Mention of bridge in the James Bond book "Moonraker."

Preserving Local History (00:38:30) Ray Green's involvement in preserving the local hist

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:40 Thank You
• 1:14 Music, Literature, Cinema from 1936
• 3:15 A Playlist Made For You
• 3:46 Cards On The Table Part 1
• 11:40 Raye Green - Author - Part 1
• 11:40 Cards On The Table Part 2
• 13:16 Laura Covill - Bridge Coach - Part 1
• 22:35 Public Service Announcement
• 22:35 Raye Green - Author - Part 2
• 26:21 Laura Covill - Bridge Coach - Part 2
• 31:33 True Crime Case - Myrtle and John Bennett
• 36:41 Raye Green - Author - Part 3
• 42:12 How can you find out more?

Transcript

**Speaker 1** (00:00:07) - Hello and welcome to ABitOfAChristie. My name is Hazel Jones, and today we have shuffled the deck and are dealing you a royal flush of an episode. We have several aces up our sleeve as we hear from the coach of the Swedish mixed bridge team, Laura Covill, and the lifelong Agatha Christie aficionado, historian and author Rayee Green. I want to thank you immensely for your ongoing support. By listening, you are part of the team, 'ABitOfAChristie' and our podcast is truly flourishing and it's all thanks to you and your continued engagement. If you wouldn't mind liking and subscribing on the ABitOfAChristie YouTube channel or leaving us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, it would mean the world and your feedback really does help us to grow and improve. Now, without further ado, let's dive right back into the show. Today, we're cutting the deck and shuffling our way into the captivating world of the Agatha Christie novel, 'Cards on the Table'. Get ready to step back in time to the publication year of 1936.

**Speaker 1** (00:01:32) - While we usually kick off with a timeline of world events. Today, we're shaking things up and instead we're going to look at music, literature, and films that shaped the cultural landscape of that year. We start with the song 'Pennies from Heaven' by Bing Crosby. With its dreamy melody and optimistic lyrics, this tune became an anthem of hope during the midst of the Great Depression, helping listeners to look for the silver lining even in the darkest of times. Now turning the page to the literary world. Apart from cards on the table, of course, another book which stood out amongst the rest in 1936 was 'Gone with the Wind' by Margaret Mitchell. This sweeping epic of love and loss, set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, became an instant classic, captivating readers with its vivid characters and epic storytelling. And it also gave us these classic quotes. "After all, tomorrow is another day." "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn". Finally, into the world of cinema, 1936 saw the release of one of the most iconic films of all time.

**Speaker 1** (00:02:53) - 'Modern Times', directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin. This timeless masterpiece of comedy not only entertained audiences with Chaplin's trademark physical humour, but also offered a poignant commentary on the changing effects of industrialization. Now, I told you we'd shuffled the cards, and we're trying something a little bit new. To help immerse you in the past, we have created a playlist on Spotify with some of the music which was popular during the day. We wanted to make sure that the songs were worldwide, so we have included songs from Japan, the USA, Brazil, Hungary, Cuba and Canada. Just search for 'Cards on the playlist' on Spotify. On now to the main event. Agatha Christie's cards on the table. Have you ever delved into the world of collecting? From books to cars to figurines. The objects vary, but for some it's more than a mere hobby. In fact, it's an obsession. There is a certain allure in amassing the rarest and most exquisite pieces. But in our tale, our protagonist’s collection is far from ordinary.

**Speaker 1** (00:04:20) - In fact, it's sinister. Picture a collector with a penchant for the macabre. Hoarding, not trinkets, but something far more chilling. Murderers. Mr. Shaitana invites Hercule Poirot to view his collection for himself at a dinner party. But as well as collecting murderers, he also invites a collection of detectives, with Poirot being joined by Colonel Race, Superintendent Battle, and the crime writer and favourite Ariadne Oliver. The other guests seems to represent both the potential victims and suspects. On the list are Anne Meredith, Doctor Roberts, Major Despard, Mrs. Lorimer and Miss Burgess. As the guests play bridge, it seems as though Mr. Shaitana has compiled the perfect collection to make a killer evening. Our next guest is Raye Green, the author of a new book, Agatha Christie's Doctors. Raye previously held the position of senior lecturer in English, history and archaeology. She is a lifelong Agatha Christie fan with a knowledge of her works which cannot be surpassed. Her passion led her to the co editorship of the ‘Agatha Christie - The Legacy’ fanzine, which saw a successful publication in March 2020 amidst the throes of the Covid 19 pandemic.

**Speaker 1** (00:06:01) - The fanzine quickly sold out and back copies are highly sought after. Outside of her academic and Agatha pursuits, she established the Worle History Society, a testament to her commitment to preserving local history where she lives. So, without further ado, let's meet Raye. Hello and welcome Raye, to ABitOfAChristie to start us off, Raye, would you mind explaining how the idea for this new and exciting book Agatha Christie's Doctors, first came about?

**Speaker 2** (00:06:36) - Yes, I think I can. I've, I've got two, 2 or 3 books which, triggered off some of the ideas. One of them's the Christie A-to-z. And, there's the new, which, which has riches and Sova and Toy and at the Sova and Toy ones both have individual books at all people in alphabetical order and there they are. And then one day and I don't know where this bit came from, I came up with the little thought where there's a murder, there has to have been a death. And where there's a death, there has to have been a doctor.

**Speaker 2** (00:07:18) - And I thought, oh, I don't think anybody's written up all the doctors. And I just started doing it. And I started with Styles (Mysterious Affair at Styles) and was mortified to find how many medics she'd managed to get in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. And, and she's done that more than once. I mean, another one that that's absolutely packed with medics is ‘A Pocket Full of Rye’ and, and, and I just got completely gripped by it. But I just went on and on and on with it, and there it was.

**Speaker 1** (00:07:54) - You've got this idea. What steps do you take next to push the idea along?

**Speaker 2** (00:08:00) - The next thing that I did was I signed on for a course with Oxford University, who was doing a History of Medicine course, and although I taught the history of medicine, I'd been retired for some time and I thought, let's just get a refresher course in. So, I did that and that was that was helpful. I then I started dividing my, my doctors up into categories and putting them in categories was really interesting and I enjoyed that very much.

**Speaker 1** (00:08:31) - How did you decide to structure the book? How is it split up?

**Speaker 2** (00:08:36) - There are 15 chapters and, different sorts of categories, some of which I'm going to miss out because I don't want to give too much away. But general practitioners, pharmacists, nurses, Harley Street, hospital medics, police surgeons, suspects, sleuths, fakes and so on.

**Speaker 1** (00:08:58) - Raye, in writing this book, you looked at 184 medical professionals which are mentioned in these books. Were there any surprises?

**Speaker 2** (00:09:08) - I was shocked that, I mean, I didn't expect that I would have to include her.

**Speaker 1** (00:09:13) - So we will have to look out for that in the book. Were there any major challenges when writing this? Obviously, you've got the reading and the research and the sheer weight of the, the word count and all of those things that authors will, will face. But was there anything in particular with this, with this subject that you found challenging?

**Speaker 2** (00:09:39) - Yes, definitely. I mean, one of the one of the things is that there was so many of the medics and trying to keep tabs on whom I had already written a mini chapter about on the way through, and then I'd go out to a different perhaps I'd perhaps I'd talked about this person when what they'd been a suspect and, and then I would be doing Harley Street and I'm thinking, oh dear, now I need to do them for Harley Street as well.

**Speaker 2** (00:10:05) - And I had to work all that out, that sort of stuff. And it did drive me nuts for a bit, but I sorted it. In the end, you've got to try and recognize the fact that medicine changes down the years. And so, I had to have something that was in detailed, and the major chapters are all in date order. But then I get to the end, and there are some doctors who have such short pieces to say or do within the book, where they feature that you can't really write a chapter about it, but you have to keep them there. So, you have to have what any really bad secretary has in a filing system, which is miscellaneous. You should never do it, of course, because you lose it all then. But I called the extras just and, and those are actually in alphabetical order. It was murder, mind you. It really was murder. Sometimes there's so many of them.

**Speaker 1** (00:11:00) - After all this research, is there one of them that you think we should all really look out for that? Maybe you found something out about them that you didn't know before, and you think other people may find that interesting?

**Speaker 2** (00:11:14) - There's one that I've discovered only in the last week, but that only gets mentioned at the very end of one of her books.

**Speaker 2** (00:11:23) - And none of the people who've done A-Z, or all of the books have ever mentioned that one. They've missed it out completely. Well, that's quite an interesting one for everyone to try. And guess which one that is as well.

**Speaker 1** (00:11:38) - And we'll be back with Raye for part two of her interview slightly later in the show. Back to our story ‘Cards on the Table’. Mr. Shaitana has gathered a lethal combination of murderers, victims and detectives to his dinner party and bridge night. As the guests settle down to play a few hands, Mr. Shaitana sits out the games, instead, opting for a solitary place near the fire. When the fun and games are over, Shaitana is discovered to have been murdered with a thin dagger called a stiletto. But who has committed this crime? Poirot believes the answers lie in the cards and begins to examine the guests bridge scores. His analysis provides us, dear listeners, with the following clues. Doctor Roberts, a bluffer and overbid of his hand, a man with complete confidence in his own powers to pull off a risky thing.

**Speaker 1** (00:12:51) - Anne Meredith, quite a safe player. She doesn't make mistakes, but she isn't brilliant. Major Despard a good player to what you might call a long headed chap. Mrs. Lorimer a damned good player. She's got an amount of nerve as well, and she is the sort of woman who may have a secret in her life. But is it possible to know about somebody's personality from a game of bridge? And how else does this card game help to reveal the murderer? We now speak to coach of the mixed Swedish bridge team, Laura Covill. For those people that who may not have heard of bridge before, let's start with the very, very basics. What is

**Speaker 2** (00:13:39) - Bridge?

**Speaker 3** (00:13:39) - So bridge is a card game. It's played by four people. And I'll keep the description of the rules a little bit simple because we like to say it's, you know, an hour to learn and a lifetime to get better. But it is a trick taking game. So, there will first be an auction where you determine how many tricks your side needs to get and with which suit is trump.

**Speaker 3** (00:14:01) - So there might be no trump suit at all. And then you have to try and fulfil that contract by taking between 0 and 13 tricks. 13 is the number obtained by this 52 cards in a deck of cards. And if you divide that by the four people, it's 13.

**Speaker 1** (00:14:16) - It does sound to me when I've seen bits of it or sort of read like in the book that we're looking at the moment, cards on the table. I can hear the language of bidding and things like that. Is it a bit of a gambling game?

**Speaker 3** (00:14:29) - It definitely was at the time that they were playing it. So, they're playing rubber bridge and they are playing for money. I looked up, I so I love this book. So, I looked up how much money Mrs. Oliver loses at the beginning, and she's lost more than £300 in today's money. So, they are gambling. They're gambling for a lot these days. We have structured our tournaments and games a little bit differently, so there's much less of a gambling element involved.

**Speaker 3** (00:14:53) - And we've also structured the tournaments to try and actually remove some of the elements of luck, of who holds the best hands. Is the landscape of bridge is pretty different now than it was in 1937, is it?

**Speaker 1** (00:15:04) - Obviously we're talking now. It's a card game, so card games themselves seem pretty cheap. You just need a pack of cards. But as I was doing a bit of research on bridge, there did seem to be some other equipment and things that you might need. Is, is that true or is it mainly the cards?

**Speaker 3** (00:15:22) - So absolutely, you can play just with a deck of cards and four people, that is how the game started. And you can still do that today. But if you were to go and play in a club or at a tournament, then probably you would be confronted by some slightly strange looking equipment. You might be given a bidding box which holds the range of bids available to you, which you can make if you are playing at a really high level. You might even have a screen involved.

**Speaker 3** (00:15:46) - And this screen goes between you and your partner so that it minimizes the amount of inference you're allowed to make by looking at your partner's facial expression and their body language to remove those cues, and also to reduce the amount of cheating. Unfortunately. So, there was

**Speaker 1** (00:16:03) - quite a culture of cheating that's kind of had to be stamped out?

**Speaker 3** (00:16:08) - Yes. The first big case was a British pair, Reese and Shapiro, who were cheating in the World Championships by holding up the number of fingers as the number of hearts that they had in their hand. There was, subsequently, it has been alleged and not proved, that the Italian blue team in the 1980s were cheating in a number of different ways. And then recently, we're now in in the information era. So now that there is bridge available to play online, people can cheat and online bridge games in much the same way as they could cheat in an online chess game, which has also been pretty common. And during the pandemic, when so many more people were playing online more than ever before.

**Speaker 3** (00:16:51) - There was some cheating, unfortunately happening which had to be addressed. So, we've seen enormous leaps forward in AI being able to now beat humans at chess, and at other games. Actually, this is not yet the case in the bridge. And it's partly because of this hidden information in chess. You can literally just calculate every possible move. And in bridge it's not quite like that because you can only see your hand, you can't see the hand held by the other three people. And those cards can be arranged in a different number of ways. So that is one aspect of why computers are not that good at bridge. A second aspect is, because you are communicating in set ways with your partner. You have to explain to the opponents a little bit of the agreements that you have and what you're doing. And computers are really bad at explaining that in a legal way. So, it's sometimes it's the case that they can play perfectly well, but they're disobeying the laws of bridge by not explaining what they're doing perfectly to their opponents.

**Speaker 1** (00:17:52) - What do you think would get more people involved with bridge?

**Speaker 3** (00:17:55) - This is a really good question, and I guess the answering it also depends a little bit on what kind of bridge you want to promote. So, I grew up playing bridge and I loved the community aspect of the game. And I do think it would be a pity to lose that social aspect, which is the reason that they loved playing it so much in the 1930s, in the age of that of Agatha Christie. It was absolutely the thing that you did after dinner, in order to still be socializing with everyone there in a kind of structured way which was conforming to, sort of social cues that they could easily read. So, I would love to see more build up in schools and in communities to get more people playing realistically. Actually, the easiest way to get lots of people playing probably would be if you had a really, good and addictive app. But I do think it would be a pity to, to lose the social aspect.

**Speaker 1** (00:18:48) - So Mrs. Lorimer, in the book, she describes herself as a bridge fiend, and she's, she's thrilled to to hear this is not just a dinner party.

**Speaker 1** (00:18:57) - It's not just going to be drinks, there's going to be bridge after. It's almost like all the things that came before is not important now, because bridge is there, and she's obviously someone who's very passionate about the game, very dedicated to the game. Is it something that can become very addictive?

**Speaker 3** (00:19:14) - Absolutely. And people make careers out of bridge. I have also found it very addictive myself. I do have a career which is not in bridge, but many people find that it is so addictive that actually all that they do is play bridge. If they are at work, they're playing bridge, and if they're in their leisure time, they're also playing bridge. I think the puzzle part is a huge aspect. So, there are you're never going to play the same hand of bridge twice. Essentially, the cards are going to be in a different conformation every time. So, you can play as much as you like and never face the same problem again, or not in the exact same variant. And that's just hugely exciting.

**Speaker 1** (00:19:54) - Does it get overly competitive?

**Speaker 3** (00:19:56) - It gets incredibly competitive, actually. I think that the worst rows I've seen have been between partners. And this is I don't want to stereotype too much, but you can have really horrible rules break out at the table when somebody has misinterpreted the bid of their partner, or they've played something just really, really poorly, but also the tradition that maybe it's not a good idea to play with your life partner because you don't want to be taking that argument home with you at the end of the night.

**Speaker 1** (00:20:24) - Well, that's actually what happens in the book, isn't it? It's kind of random how they are. They're, they're paired up. I think Mr. Shaitana has a plan there, but he, you know, they split off into their, into their pairs. And then is it the case that you swap partners as the game develops, so you almost like, play around and then you can swap and you play another round and you can swap. Or do people tend to keep the same partner.

**Speaker 3** (00:20:49) - So they're playing a variant of the game, which is not as common anymore, called rubber bridge, which is a really strictly defined set of hands. you want to keep playing until one of the pairs has made two games, and after that the rubber is finished and you can switch to a new partner. And Doctor Roberts says that they'd been cutting for partners. So that means that they've been using the deck of cards to determine who would be partners in each rubber. Probably the two higher cards which are drawn, our partners and the two lower cards are also partners.

**Speaker 4** (00:21:26) - And now, in a change to your scheduled broadcast, a public service announcement about the dangers of playing bridge. Did you know that bridge, the beloved card game of strategy and wit, has been known to cause quite a stir in some circles. In the 1950s, bridge tournaments were about more than just friendly competition. They were also a battleground for international espionage. That's right, at the height of the Cold War, cunning spies disguised as innocent British enthusiasts used these tournaments as cover for exchanging top secret information.

**Speaker 4** (00:22:09) - Imagine, under the guise of a simple card game, spies from rival nations engaged in a high stakes cat and mouse game, with the fate of nations hanging in the balance. So next time you gather around the bridge table, remember that behind the innocent facade lies a rich history of intrigue that would make even James Bond raise an eyebrow.

**Speaker 1** (00:22:35) - We return now to our interview with Raye Green, and we rejoined the conversation as I ask her why, in chapter three, entitled murderers, she breaks with whodunit tradition and reveals the name of the killers up front.

**Speaker 2** (00:22:52) - Because I felt that I, I've read an awful lot of whodunit books like Dorothy Sayer and Clinton Doyle and, and Edmund Crispin and, and loads and loads of them and all those books and all those authors and their work, analyzed and parsed all the time, and nobody takes any exception to them discussing the murderer. Not at all. And I thought, no, it's now been over a hundred years that this has been going on, and I've never been very good at doing as I'm told and fact I'm very weak, I think, in that area with like my plenty.

**Speaker 2** (00:23:36) - I was brought up by a father who said, “Don't do as people tell you to do. You think it out for yourself!” I think the time has come and it may create mayhem. I am doing a chapter on Agatha Christie's doctor's murderers.

**Speaker 1** (00:23:50) - Did you feel the pressure to make sure you hadn't missed a single medical professional mentioned in Agatha Christie's works?

**Speaker 2** (00:23:58) - I'm quite sure that there will be people who will say, but you haven't done this, and you haven't done that, you haven't done the other. I've tried to make it clear at the beginning that I have only worked on full length novels, not short stories. I have done a chapter at the beginning about doctors in Agatha Christie's own life, just because I felt that needed to be there. And she's one of the things that she says is that when she first, went to work in a hospital as a young woman, shortly before she married Archie, she was shocked to find that the doctors were held in in such high regard because the society that she'd moved in in Torquay, her family would have been on a par with the sorts of doctors and dentists and people like that.

**Speaker 2** (00:24:45) – Not, not real high ups, but people respected in the community. And, and she expected the doctors to treat her as an equal because of this and found that this was not going down very well. And she loved it she thought it was very funny.

**Speaker 1** (00:25:02) - As many people will know, during the First World War in 1917, Agatha Christie worked as a dispenser at the Red Cross Hospital in Torquay. Have you managed to mention the pharmacies at all?

**Speaker 2** (00:25:17) - Then there's quite a lot of trouble in pharmacies throughout the thing. It makes you very concerned. And there's one chemist who's, who's a really nasty person doing very nasty things, very deliberately.

**Speaker 1** (00:25:32) - The book flits between fiction and non-fiction, but in the last chapter you've written some of the characters into a story of your own. Is that right?

**Speaker 2** (00:25:42) - Purely fiction. Just, I've just bought some. I just didn't want to stop and just say thank you. That's it at the end. So, I did a chapter, which, God, yeah. Don't ever try and write fiction. It's so much harder!

**Speaker 2** (00:25:57) - Yeah, I had 3 or 4 sleepless nights over it, and it was only going to be a short, a short sort of chapter. And I thought, well, this is not easy. A dozen doctors and medics into a room having conversations.

**Speaker 1** (00:26:20) - Our journey takes us back to Sweden, where Laura Covill, the national coach of the mixed bridge team, has been unraveling the intricacies of the game. Now we delve into the eerie connections between bridge and the chilling murder in Agatha Christie's Cards on the table, a tale disturbingly similar to a real life crime, as Laura will explain. We also explore the high stakes world of international tournaments, where players risk facing decade long bans, and how Agatha Christie left plenty of clues for seasoned bridge players to help them solve the murder. 

In the book, When the Murder occurs, Poirot. One of the things that he sort of jumps to straightaway is, is looking at the bridge scores. And, you know, this is question like, what do you what are you doing, man kind of thing? Why are you looking at these bridge scores? That's ridiculous.

**Speaker 1** (00:27:18) - We should be getting on with solving the murder. And Poirot makes it very clear. Well, actually, I can tell a lot from this, from how this has been scored and how this person has chosen to play a game, I can tell a lot about their personality. Would you say that's true? Or would you say that's just something that's perhaps been used as a quirky, like all that solve the murder through bridge, or is that something that you would actually see?

**Speaker 3** (00:27:42) - I actually think it's quite true. I think that it holds a lot of, a lot of maybe genuine observation by Agatha Christie, who was herself a bridge player. that if you are a more timid person generally, you're probably also going to be timid at bridge if you are, a bit self-aggrandizing, like some of the other players in the book, that's also going to reflect itself in your bridge. I'm not sure that I'd be able to sell solve a murder based on it, but there were particular aspects which really stood out, and particularly because they were playing for money, maybe.

**Speaker 3** (00:28:20) - actually, there's, there's aspects there that come into really sharp relief, the fact that the murderer has left the table during the most exciting hand of the evening to a bridge player is really, really weird that he's bid a grand slam. It's been doubled, and then he's not stayed to watch. You can tell immediately that something is wrong there. So, so much of the play really rings true. And I think that there's been some effort put into making sure that, there's consistency and accuracy in the bridge as well.

**Speaker 1** (00:28:56) - For bridge player reading that book, there are hidden clues that Agatha Christie's put in there that perhaps only bridge players would pick up on.

**Speaker 3** (00:29:04) - Pretty much that that does happen. People do stand up when they are the dummy, and they will go and stretch their legs or get to drink or do anything, but not during a grand slam. That's so weird. So, a grand slam is where they have committed to trying to win all 13 tricks. They cannot lose a single trick. And then it's been doubled.

**Speaker 3** (00:29:23) – We’re up to double points. And we've seen how much money they were playing for in the other room. They're probably playing for similar amounts in this room. So, it's not only that this is exciting. So, in a more abstract sense, there's a lot of money riding on this hand.

**Speaker 1** (00:29:38) - When you go to these international tournaments and these big, big competitions. The thing for me in pitching it is that obviously there's four of you. It's quite intimate in that way that it's, it's everything is happening in this small space here between four people. But obviously because it is a tournament, there has to be a large scale to it. So, are people literally playing table, table, table, table next to each other? And is there a referee or somebody that goes around sort of monitoring and making sure that the rules are being adhered to?

**Speaker 3** (00:30:08) - Absolutely. So, the bigger tournaments are likely to have maybe 300 tables, sets of four people, and you need to rent a pretty big sports hall in order to facilitate that.

**Speaker 3** (00:30:22) - You'll also have hired a number of directors, and the director is the person who will go around, usually because there's four of you, someone will notice if there is a problem, if a rule has not been adhered to, and then you call for the director and their attention is directed to you. Usually, it's honest mistakes that somebody has led when it wasn't their turn to lead, or they have made a bid which wasn't high enough, which is against the rules. And this just needs to be corrected in a way which minimizes the damage to the board as much as possible, like the damage to the play as much as possible. but yes, it is also the case that some people are indulging in unethical behavior and doing it on purpose. It is quite a challenging thing for a director to out and out accuse somebody of cheating. This is a huge accusation, and it can result in very long bans. It is possible to get a ban of ten or more years from playing bridge with your respective federation. So, these are allegations which you want to be careful about making and accumulate evidence over.

**Speaker 3** (00:31:22) - Actually quite a large number of boards. If you think that somebody is making the same sorts of efforts consistently.

**Speaker 1** (00:31:29) - You were talking to me a little bit before about how, bridge is a very exciting game. And sometimes this can lead to tensions between people and arguments. And I think your advice was one of the, people you probably don't want to play bridge with is your life partner. And I believe you have got a bit of a story where that is taken to the absolute extreme and something quite bad happens.

**Speaker 3** (00:31:59) - Absolutely. So, there is a case where a friendly game of kitchen bridge actually resulted in a murder, and this happened in 1929. And the so there's two parts of this case because there's what actually happened. And then there's the sensationalized bridge mythology, which has grown up around it because we, we love a bit of drama. So, the bare bones of the case, I believe, were actually that a woman called Myrtle Bennett, who is in her mid 30s, was playing bridge with her husband and they were playing against two of their neighbours.

**Speaker 3** (00:32:37) - And it seems to be consensus that her husband, John, was playing a false spade contract, which is a game contract, and he played it really, really badly and he went down. And Myrtle was so frustrated by his poor play that she called him a “bum bridge player”, and he essentially assaulted her for saying this. And then she went and got a gun and shot him. And he died. And the more remarkable facets of this case are, first of all, that she was acquitted. And I like the quote of the prosecution assistant who said, it looks like an open season on husbands. But then at this point we also have enter Elie Culbertson. Elie Culbertson was a professional bridge player in the 1920s. he was an American, and he was, they call him the P.T. Barnum of Bridge. He really popularized bridge in America, and he sort of saw all of the potential of this case to hook the public and the media on bridge rather than, on the details of the murder, which were maybe more, explanatory, such as the domestic abuse.

**Speaker 3** (00:33:55) - so instead he sort of popularized the myth that, so, for example, that the play of this force paid contract had been presented to the jury as evidence and that this was why Myrtle had gone off, that the jury agreed that his play was so poor that he deserved to be killed. And there was also a great deal of speculation about what the hand might have been, and if he had bid it differently or played it differently, might still be alive and still, almost a hundred years later. Bridge players still tell that story as, as a cautionary tale about being nice to one's partner and playing with one's, spouse.

**Speaker 1** (00:34:37) - Bridge is obviously very popular and has featured in several books and films, and it's the star of a James Bond book, too, isn't it?

**Speaker 3** (00:34:45) - Yeah. So in the book, this is Moonraker, the baddie is a big gambler, and he gambles on bridge, and James Bond and M have to sort of go undercover and, manipulate the cards in such a way that this guy is going to be so hoodwinked into betting a large amount of money again on a grand slam.

**Speaker 3** (00:35:05) - We love Grand Slams. They're so dramatic. Actually. They have manipulated the cards and they've substituted in a dummy deck so that James Bond is going to make his grand slam, even though the bidding was completely ridiculous. He has overbid his hand in a (Dr) Robertson way. But he makes the contract and they win a lot of money.

**Speaker 1** (00:35:23) - Well, thank you very much for that, Laura. That has certainly given me something to think about, especially if I ever want to play bridge with my partner. If people want to learn more about bridge or get in contact with, yourself, or a bridge club or an organization, what's the best way for them to go about that?

**Speaker 3** (00:35:41) - So if you are in the UK, then you can go to the English Bridge Union website and find out who your local club is and where they meet and when. if you're interested in playing online, then you can, go to Bridge Base Online, which is the largest website where you can get a pickup game really quickly. And I'm also gonna plug Cuebids I'm part of the Cuebids 's Team, and Cuebids is an app which allows you to practice bidding, with your partner.

**Speaker 3** (00:36:09) - But you don't have to be in the room with them, so maybe it's a safer option. And this is available for iPhone and Android, as I'm currently coach of the Swedish mixed bridge team and you can follow our progress at the European Championships in June.

**Speaker 1** (00:36:24) - And I, for one, will certainly be cheering on Sweden even though I'm English. Just because you're such a fantastic coach and someone who's introduced me to this very dangerous and thrilling game. 

Well, friends, we've almost scored 100 or more trick points below the line for this episode, but we have one more card up our sleeve as we return to author Rey Green, who explains her motivation behind her Agatha Christie fanzine and her wider works to preserve local history. You co-edited an Agatha Christie fanzine called Agatha Christie The Legacy. Who did you do that project with?

**Speaker 2** (00:37:08) - My son Nick.

**Speaker 5** (00:37:09) – Nick Smart.

**Speaker 2** (00:37:09) - Who also co-edited, David Bowie Glamour with my brother. He and my brother do that. They've been doing that one for years. And he said to me one day.

**Speaker 2** (00:37:20) - Could we do an Agatha Christie version? And I said, oh, that would be fun. Yes. So, we did. And it came out on the first day of the first lockdown, which was very interesting.

**Speaker 1** (00:37:29) - Your future projects may contain a few more books, possibly Agatha Christie's victims and Agatha Christie's murderers. What can you tell us about that?

**Speaker 2** (00:37:41) - Well, it keeps changing because I thought it would be a good idea to do the victims first. And now my son takes an interest in this. He says, I think you ought to do the murderers first. And I'm thinking, I disagree, I think. I think I ought to do the victims first. I don't want it to mean I mean, how do people become the victims of murder, you see?

**Speaker 6** (00:38:15) - I've been doing a

**Speaker 2** (00:38:15) - lot of work on that and it's very interesting. I don't want to say too much. Yeah.

**Speaker 1** (00:38:22) - Away from Agatha Christie. You're actively involved with preserving the local history of where you live in Worle in Somerset.

**Speaker 1** (00:38:30) - Can you tell us about some of the work that you do as part of that project?

**Speaker 2** (00:38:36) - Right. Well, the first thing is that I came to live on Worle High Street when I was three so, I had I grew up with, all my grandparents around me and aunts and uncles and all the rest of it. So, it's lovely, really. And I was the only child, so I was spoilt rotton, so, that was great. I loved the village, always loved it. My mother once said to me when I was about nine years old, I was wondering what you’d think about it if we might move to Hutton, Hutton is another village about 3-4 miles away. And she was teaching there at the time and I said, I'm not going to Hutton. She said, why not? I said, because it's not Worle, and I was I just loved the place. And you see, it was the high street that we moved into and compared with Welsh Valleys, which I loved as well, because I went back visiting then all your time.

**Speaker 2** (00:39:21) - Loved that as well. But it was completely different because, Worle High Street to me as a little tiny was like Las Vegas. You have street lights and all sorts of wonderful things, windows in the shops and things like that. It's lovely. so, I've lived here more or less all my life, but only very short breaks. So, I've been here all my life. I know an awful lot about the village, and I know people in it, but when I retired, I thought, oh, well, now what am I going to do now then? So, after a few years, I kept on doing the archaeology club that I'd started at the college, and then my knees started objecting to that. Knees are terrible things when they start getting to be a nuisance. Yes, you've got to be careful of them. and so we closed down the archaeology club, and I said to a friend of mine who'd been doing it with me, Frank Gosden and his wife, Jenny who I’d know since I was three and she was four.

**Speaker 2** (00:40:19) - I said, I don't I think the only thing we should do, Frank, is to do a history society instead, because that would be all right for our knees. So, we did, and we started it in their dining room. And I put one photograph in the local paper of, the Methodist Chapel Youth Club in the 1960s and was inundated with people wanting copies of it and this, that and the other. And we had we said, well, we'll have to have a meeting or something. So, we had a we had a meeting, what used to be the Methodist Chapel, and it was full. And people insisted and said, how often can we have these meetings then and what are we going to do? One so we just did it because they told us to, essentially. And it's been running ever since. And we meet every month on the first Thursday at 7:00 in the Methodist chapel. And we've always got about between 80 and 100 members. And with and I said, I thought it would be a good idea if

**Speaker 2** (00:41:19) - we did a snapshot year, we chose one year that we could all look into and find out about it. and, and we could make it our snapshot. You and I said I'd be able to do 1953 because it was coronation year, and we all remembered it as a consequence because it was a bit unusual. And so, I just started researching 1953 and, and, and I loved it. It was, it was so yeah. Really good. And so, I wrote the book, and I took it to a local printer and they printed it for me. And I only had 50 copies done. And I just sold them. And now it's free to download on the website Worle History Society dot net slash publications and all the books are on there.

**Speaker 1** (00:42:09) - As part of her work for the society, Raye has written books on whorl in the First and Second World Wars, and also a book about the local football club, which, as Raye has said, she's very glad, play in the colour of her own name.

**Speaker 1** (00:42:28) - Green links to all of Raye's works can be found on our website at: https://abitpod.my.canva.site/ . And of course, we will update our social media pages and website when Raye's book hits the shops. And don't forget to watch out for the Swedish Mixed bridge team in this summer's tournaments. We'd love it if you join in the conversation on our social media handles, @ABitOfAChristie, you can check us out on Instagram, X and even Facebook. If you could like, subscribe or leave a review to support the podcast and stay updated on all things ABitOfAChristie, that would be fantastic. Your engagement helps us to grow and bring you more intriguing content. I've been Hazel Jones and this has been ABitOfAChristie.