1934: Why Didn't They Ask Evans? / The Boomerang Clue

Publishers: William Collins & Sons, 1934 (UK); Dodd, Mead & Co., 1935 (US)

Series: Stand alone

Category: Novel

Cross references: The Secret Adversary; The Secret of Chimneys; Partners in Crime; The Seven Dials Mystery

Warning, spoilers!

The first question put to an author … is: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ … 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.[1]   

Thus Agatha Christie began to cogitate on this new project; to ‘work it up, tone it down, and gradually get it into shape’.[2]  

With Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, Christie brings us back to a jolly, light-hearted mystery, reminiscent of the Tommy and Tuppence, or Bill and Bundle series. It is a 1930s ‘caper’, set in the fictional Welsh seaside town of Marchbolt. Here the protagonists include Bobby Jones – named after the American golfer (1902–1971) who was at the height of his fame at the time of publication, though our hero lacks the golfing skills of his namesake, and, much like Bill Everseligh in The Secret of Chimneys (1925), Bobby immediately strikes us as a likeable ass. Bobby is joined by the aristocratic Lady Frances Derwent (Frankie) – who leans heavily on her position as an Earl’s daughter, though not through snobbery or pretention (as Christie is quick to note), but as a means of purloining information from the deferential lower classes. As with Lady Bundle Brent in The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), not an eyebrow is raised when Frankie sashays, in turn, into the house agents, solicitor’s office and police station to ask questions, ‘out of sheer curiosity’, and is furnished readily with names, addresses and other confidential information. Meanwhile, we see the inspector veritably swell with gratification to have been asked such prying questions by ‘an Earl’s daughter. Nothing stuck up or snobbish about Lady Frances’. Still, it is perhaps telling of her class that Frankie later declares: ‘Nobody looks at a chauffeur in the way they look at a person.’ This is a premise that recurs across Christie’s novels, in which some of the greatest disguises rely on the fact that nobody really looks at the staff.

The childhood friendship between Bobby and Frankie allows their camaraderie to cross the class divide, although, as Christie observes:

The Derwents were, perhaps, a shade more friendly than they need have been as though to show that ‘there was no difference’. The Jones, on their side, were a shade formal, as though determined not to claim more friendship than was offered them.

As well as themes of class running through the novel, Christie also explores the relationship (and tensions) between generations. An early exchange between Bobby and his father highlights this, with Bobby concluding that ‘nobody over fifty has got any sense’. Yet while he believes that ‘his life at home [is] … one long sacrifice to his father’s peculiar ideas’, his father likewise feels that the sacrifice is on his part, and that he is ‘ill understood or appreciated by the younger generation’.

This generational divide was perhaps all the more poignant during the interwar period, with older figures having experienced the horrors of the First World War at first hand, while the younger generations suffered a passive trauma fed by the conspiracy of silence and the experience of parental detachment. The infamous ‘stiff upper lip’ was passed between generations, though its manifestation varied:  

If his father couldn’t see that, of course, you joked about a thing because you had felt badly about it – well, he couldn’t see it! It wasn’t the sort of thing you could explain. With death and tragedy about you had to keep a stiff upper lip.

Other elements of the cultural climate of the 1930s that feed into this novel include the contemporary prevalence of morphine addiction and the ubiquity (and, at times, looming spectre) of nursing homes. The passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920 allowed for the extent of drug taking among the general populus to be better quantified. While cocaine was the recreational drug of choice, and opium, popular in the nineteenth century, remained in use, statistics of those prosecuted under the Act indicate a distinct category of drug users that was a ‘generally older, more medically oriented morphine-taking group (often prescribed the drug initially for a medical condition, or with some medical connexion)’ – and it is to this group that we learn Henry Bassington-ffrench belongs.[3] The extensive medical use of morphine, and the development of the hypodermic syringe in the 1860s, meant that, by the early twentieth century, morphine addiction was a visible social issue. Such was the extent of the problem that, in 1924, the Ministry of Health formed the Rolleston Committee to assess and manage it. The conclusions of the Committee included allowing for the continued prescription of opiate drugs to addicts as an acceptable method of treatment if all other attempts to withdraw the patient from the drug had failed. ‘This practice … was legitimated by the patient population, who were largely middle-aged, middle-class and had often become addicted as the result of treatment for another condition.’[4]   

Meanwhile, the sinister nature of Dr Nicholson’s nursing home, and talk of the ‘queer goings on’ there, was bolstered by the popular imagination surrounding such institutions in the early twentieth century. While the use of the term ‘home’, ‘rather than hospital, clinic or sanatorium’, implied a setting with the comforts and appearance of the domestic sphere, ‘whilst, when required, providing … medical care’, the truth was that throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the demand for private nursing facilities greatly outstripping their supply, running a nursing home had become a lucrative venture, complete with the heady mix of genuine practitioners and charlatans that come with the promise of monetary gain.[5] ‘From this vacuum of need emerged a hugely diverse, largely for profit, unregulated “nursing home” sector. Quite literally anyone could set up, advertise and run a nursing home.’[6] And while the Nursing Homes Registration Act of 1927 worked to regulate this previously unregulated sector, it took time for the reforms and requirements of the act to filter through into the system at large. Thus it was not difficult for Christie to create, in the minds of contemporary readers, an immediate question mark over the legitimacy and efficacy of Dr Nicholson and his institution.  

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is also littered with contemporary references, possibly unfamiliar to a modern-day reader. If, like me, you are intrigued by the allusions to true-crime cases dropped by Frankie, you may be interested to learn that the ‘Smith and his wives’ likely refers to George Joseph Smith (1872–1915), a thief, serial killer and bigamist who was convicted, and subsequently hanged, for the murders of three women in 1915. The case became known as the ‘Brides in the Bath Murders’ on account of how his victims were found. The other case, that of ‘Armstrong’, probably refers to Herbert Rowse Armstrong (1869–1922) the solicitor and convicted murderer who was arrested in 1921 for the attempted murder of a professional rival by arsenic poisoning. He was later also charged with, and convicted of, the murder of his wife.

Discussions of drug addiction, sinister nursing homes and serial killers aside, this book is, at its heart, a jolly romp. When it seems like the game is up for the killer, he readily hands over his pistol – the ‘honours of the situation’ now lying with Frankie and Bobby. Despite his plotting her untimely demise, when the shoe is on the other foot, Frankie describes Roger as a ‘Damn good loser’. Later, Roger also writes to Frankie, revealing, in detail, how the plot unfolded, with little remorse and a good dollop of charm. It is more than the romping nature of this book, and the plucky, crime-solving duo, that gives it the feel of a Tommy and Tuppence thriller. The enigmatic figure in the photograph that so enchants Bobby brings back memories of the image of Jane Finn that captured the imagination (and heart) of Julius B. Hersheimmer in The Secret Adversary (1922). Meanwhile, the scene of Bobby snooping around the nursing home on the hunt for said mystery female, and falling out of a tree, again echoes a similar scene in The Secret Adversary.  

Just as Bobby and Frankie return to the vicarage at the end of the novel, we finish here where we started, with the title: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Though published as this in the UK, the American publishers worried that the US usage of ‘to ask’, meaning ‘to invite’, might confuse readers, so Dodd, Mead and Co. instead went with the (not very Agatha Christie) title The Boomerang Clue. This references the twisting nature of the narrative, which sees our sleuths concluding their investigation right back where it began.

[1] Agatha Christie, Passenger to Frankfurt (New York, 1970), Introduction, ‘The author speaks’.

[2] Christie 1970, Introduction.

[3] Virginia Berridge, ‘The Origins of the English Drug “Scene”’, Medical History 32 (1988), pp. 51–64,

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/11E40BC8BF639029A787B595709BB5AC/S0025727300047608a.pdf/origins_of_the_english_drug_scene_18901930.pdf [accessed 17 May 2026].

[4] Virginia Berridge, Susanne MacGregor and Alex Mold, ‘Written Evidence from the Centre for History in Public Health’, UK Parliament, n.d., https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/100371/pdf/ [accessed 19 May 2026].

[5] Janet Hargreaves, ‘“In the nursing homes, nurses really nurse”: Nursing in private nursing homes in 1930s Britain’, UKAHN Bulletin 10, 1 (2022), n.p., https://bulletin.ukahn.org/in-the-nursing-homes-nurses-really-nurse-nursing-in-private-nursing-homes-in-1930s-britain-1/ [accessed 17 May 2026].

[6] Hargreaves 2022, n.p.