Contemporary newspapers noted:
It's an old-time melodrama, adapted from a best-selling mystery written in the 1890s by Fergus Hume. Adaptor Barry Pree added music and topicality to make it a TV romp. As is fashionable with such melodramas nowadays, the audience was invited to throw peanuts at the villain. It could have done without the topicality and the peanuts. The audience, carried away, apparently, by being on TV, showered the cast indiscriminately with peanuts to the point of being irritating.
Source: 'Desi Loves Lucy Again–on Camera', Australian Women's Weekly~, 23 August 1961, p.19.
First performed from 9 January to 30 January 1961 at Melbourne's Russell Street Theatre.
A recording of the live production aired on Channel Seven in August 1961 as part of General Motors Hour.
