Yep! The GAME is obviously a reference to Miss Springer, the GEM is the famous jewel hidden in the tennis racquet, the SPY is the person said to have killed Miss Springer and the CRASH is the death of the pilot in the exposition of the novel.
There are a group of Friends at a Dinner Party and one of them thinks his wife is having an affair and he tells a friend of his fears who suggests he hide in a rug to catch the wife out, so he hides in a chest and his friend stabs him and the rug gets blood on it, I don't know my Shakespeare so don't know how Othello comes into it
I think I can tell you that part! The killer is called an Iago by Christie (a device later used one of her murder mystery novels, and an appropriate comparison)
Until GKCFan provides his set of clues for us to guess, I wanted to mention that The Mystery of the Spanish Chest is one of my favorite short stories. And the concept of a man hiding in a chest --very macabre I must say -- reminded me a lot of the play, Rope, where two young university students hide a body in the chest. The difference? In Spanish Chest, the man in the chest is alive and is later killed and in Rope, a young man is already dead when his body lies in the chest. But the idea of a dead body lying in the chest is the similarity between the two works. Rope was made into a play in 1929 (later made into a film by the great Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock). Spanish Chest is the expanded version of the The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest, which was written in 1932 so the idea was first conceived 3 years after Rope made it to Broadway. Not only was Agatha Christie well-read but she was an avid goer of and well acquainted with the theatre. I think she was well aware of the play and watched it at some point . . . . or was at least acquainted with the plot by reading about it somewhere or told by someone. Either way, it planted a seed of a story in her mind . . . first starting with the image of a chest. She used the chest prop in another story, this time in The Rats, one in a series of three plays with the main title The Rule of Three.What say you?
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Chest, Evening Party, Othello, Bloodstained rug