Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories

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Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories
John Curran

A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie’s 73 recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories.When Agatha Christie died in 1976, aged 85, she had become the world's most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide in more than 100 countries, she had achieved the impossible - more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one a bestseller.So prolific was Agatha Christie's output - 66 crime novels, 20 plays, 6 romance books under a pseudonym and over 150 short stories - it was often claimed that she had a photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over those 55 years to more mundane methods of working out her ingenious crimes?Following the death of Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable secret was revealed. Unearthed among her affairs at the family home of Greenway were Agatha Christie's private notebooks, 73 handwritten volumes of notes, lists and drafts outlining all her plans for her many books, plays and stories. Buried in this treasure trove, all in her unmistakable handwriting, are revelations about her famous books that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story.What is the 'deleted scene' in her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles? How did the infamous twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, really come about? Which very famous Poirot novel started life as an adventure for Miss Marple? Which books were designed to have completely different endings, and what were they?Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her own Autobiography, this remarkable new book includes a wealth of extracts and pages reproduced directly from the notebooks and her letters, plus for the first time two newly discovered complete Hercule Poirot short stories never before published.

Agatha Christie’s

Secret Notebooks

Fifty Years of Mysteriesin the Making

John Curran

For

Joseph, Conor,

Francis, Oisin and Lorcan

Notes dated 1965 in Notebook 27 summarising the early chapters of An Autobiography, eventually published in 1977.

Cover Page (#uceb569d7-86c3-5625-8ead-e4ae62c814e8)

Title Page (#uc1cb5185-88ce-585b-b513-1ebe9202423d)

Dedication (#u7e3b7e86-74c2-5cd5-a96d-15fd147c50e3)

Excerpt (#ub60835d2-4880-5fb7-b3b7-64809032e1fb)

Notes (#u11b2096d-5e21-5a3b-92f1-aa73b2b3d71d)

Foreword (#u8e443e01-8513-5416-ae45-e3dc6480f991)

Preface (#u116991cc-9d92-5334-a4af-273a134b543f)

Introduction (#u1cf9df5b-6c7d-5410-821a-2962839cd96a)

1 A Murder is Announced: The Beginning of a Career (#u3a666a04-257d-52f6-8cfb-8a0495c344e1)

2 Dumb Witness: The Evidence of the Notebooks (#u9efdb0f3-96e3-5ae0-8c74-ef3b781d1897)

3 The Moving Finger: Agatha Christie at Work (#uaf256456-072e-5869-aa41-9d6af9cb207f)

4 Cat among the Pigeons: The Nursery Rhyme Murders (#uafbcac8b-f443-56aa-9045-315aa010c708)

5 Blind Man’s Buff: A Game of Murder (#u88402cfb-4250-5890-92e6-629e5d8dbd67)

6 The Girl in the Train: Murder Aboard (#ue55d4670-a315-53e7-8fa6-18a8c1d60045)

7 Elephants Can Remember: Murder in Retrospect (#ud62ff8b3-d181-5493-bcb9-23dcc758b934)

8 Destination Unknown: Murder Abroad (#u480d7b4d-535f-5282-9e88-67df676c33cf)

9 In a Glass Darkly: The Unknown Christie (#u5ea80fe0-e0fd-5246-8487-c9890b7c28a9)

10 Sanctuary: A Holiday for Murder (#u607185c4-515d-5a9d-806f-96a23bf019e4)

11 Poirot Investigates: The Labours of Hercules (#u836439dd-9fd2-5a99-a886-44b4e9d3d80c)

12 The Body in the Library: Murder by Quotation (#u7764408b-b068-5916-b463-d3b1c115dc61)

APPENDIX Swan Song—Two Last Stories (#u637f2d67-777d-56c0-8213-4496ec83918b)

THE CAPTURE OF CERBERUS (#ub00c3283-9ed3-5834-8f19-76b0135e2729)

THE INCIDENT OF THE DOG’s BALL (#uf0b05703-716c-5f73-aa84-c20085d6a593)

Select Bibliography (#udcaa4b7f-814c-5bb9-8318-cf8b5807d77f)

Index of Titles (#u0593e7b4-8a21-5845-9846-4e4e94e9d39d)

The Complete Miss Marple (#u9d2880cd-2acd-574b-a120-3aa68502a8b1)

Acknowledgements (#u04eee61d-ca2e-506e-9eec-f9ff2fa1f3c4)

Copyright (#u3a4632b7-70ee-5bca-bcec-08cedf4f1eb7)

About the Publisher (#u42a9ce43-50cd-5329-bfb5-f927ed9b78e5)

Notes (#ulink_fcb6883d-52c3-5734-af39-b0a8e543dcb3)

I have ‘tidied up’ Agatha Christie’s notes as little as possible. Every page of every Notebook is littered with dashes, brackets and question marks; complete sentences are the exception rather than the rule. I have removed some capital letters, brackets and dashes, solely in the interests of legibility. In some cases I have amended a paragraph of words, broken only by dashes, into separate sentences. All remaining question marks, underlining, crossing-out, exclamation marks and dashes, as well as some grammatical errors, are as they appear in the Notebooks. If I have omitted text from within extracts I indicate this by the use of dots.

Spellings have not been corrected but marked as [sic].

Square brackets are used for editorial clarification or remarks.

Dates of publication refer to the UK edition. They have been taken, for the most part, from contemporary catalogues in Collins archives. Traditionally, Crime Club titles were published on the first Monday of the month and in the few instances where actual dates were not available, I have used this guideline.

I have reinstated the title Ten Little Niggers, rather than the more politically correct And Then There Were None, throughout. This accurately reflects both the Notebooks and the book as Agatha Christie first saw it in November 1939.

At the beginning of each chapter I have included a list of titles whose solutions are revealed within. It proved impossible to discuss a title intelligently or to compare it to the Notebooks unless I disclosed some endings, and in many cases the notes mention the vital name or plot device anyway. Christie’s creative ruthlessness in deciding her killer is a vital part of her genius and to try circumventing this with ambiguous verbal gymnastics cannot do her justice.

In deciding which titles to include and which to omit, I intentionally avoided an alphabetical or a chronological listing. The former is meaningless in the context of this book and the latter resulted in all the classic titles appearing together in the middle years of Christie’s career. I decided on a thematic arrangement, thereby incorporating variety and simultaneously illustrating Christie’s exploitation of a motif. The grouping of titles within categories is somewhat arbitrary. Some titles might fit under a few headings, e.g. A Caribbean Mystery could appear in either ‘A Holiday for Murder’ or ‘Murder Abroad’; Five Little Pigs could fit neatly into ‘The Nursery Rhyme Murders’ and ‘Murder in Retrospect’. I selected and arranged them with an eye to variety and balance.

Relatively few short stories have detailed notes. I have chosen those with sufficient notes to make their inclusion worthwhile.

It is not possible in a book of this size to mention every title and if your favourite is missing I apologise; I hope to remedy this situation in a subsequent and expanded edition.

It is important for readers to note that the Notebooks are not available for viewing. It is hoped in a few years to be able to grant limited access to them but at present this is not possible.

Foreword (#ulink_7cb075be-0877-5890-9bce-41ac5763033c)

MATHEW PRICHARD

Quite a few years ago, my first wife, Angela, and I made a trip to Calgary in western Canada to see a world premiere of a very early Agatha Christie play called Chimneys. At the first reception we met a quiet, bespectacled Irishman called John Curran. He took with his customary good humour my opening gambit that he must be mad to travel from Dublin to Calgary to see an Agatha Christie play and we have been friends ever since.

After my parents died at Greenway in Devon, which has recently been taken over by the National Trust (and has just been reopened), John was a frequent visitor. Most people who visit Greenway are transfixed by the gardens and the walks by the river. Not John. He spent all his time in the ‘fax room’, a room on the first floor about ten feet by four in which the Agatha Christie archive was kept. He had to be prised out for meals, sometimes spending 12 hours a day immersed in the history of Agatha Christie’s work.

It was here that John’s love affair with Agatha Christie’s Notebooks blossomed, and neither he nor I could believe our (and your) good fortune when HarperCollins agreed to publish John’s book about them. I think you will find that his fascination and enthusiasm for them emerge very clearly and, as a bonus, he has included two very rare Agatha Christie short stories.

I never cease to be astounded that over 30 years since she died, interest in every aspect of Agatha Christie’s life and work is still at fever pitch. To John’s credit, he has always concentrated on her work, leaving to others more morbid fascination about the person behind the books, and here is a book which deals with the very kernel, the raw material of all this great work. It is highly personal and certainly a piece of literary history. John has produced a treat for us all—I hope you enjoy it.

MATHEW PRICHARD