Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories.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

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      A ‘Ruth Ellis’…idea?

      Shoots man—not fatally—other man (or woman) eggs her on

      Say this 2nd person was—

      A. Sister in law? Brother’s wife—her son or child would get this money and not be sent to boarding school away from her influence—a gentle soft motherly creature

      B. A mannish sister determined brother should not marry Ruby

      C. Man (with influence over Ruby) works her up while pretending to calm her. X has some knowledge concerning him. He wants to marry X’s sister

      D. Man formerly Ruby’s lover/husband—has it in for her and X

      Unfortunately, she did not pursue this idea and no story resulted; she returned, four pages later, to plotting the play The Unexpected Guest, so the extract probably dates from the mid-1950s. (Ruth Ellis was the last woman to hang in the UK, in July 1955 after her conviction for the shooting of her lover David Blakely.)

       Destinations Unknown

      When she sat down to consider her next book, even before she got as far as plotting, Christie would rattle off possible settings. The next extract appears in Notebook 47 a few pages before notes for Four-Fifty from Paddington (and this list contains the germ of that book) and so would seem to date from the mid-1950s:

      Book

      Scene

      Baghdad?

      Hospital

      Hotel [At Bertram’s Hotel]

      Flat Third Floor Flat idea

      Baghdad Chest idea [‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’ and The Rats]

      Small house in London husband and wife, children etc.

      Park Regent’s Park

      School Girl’s school [Cat among the Pigeons]

      Boat Queen Emma? Western Lady

      Train seen from a train? Through window of house or vice versa? [Four-Fifty from Paddington]

      Beach And Boarding house [possibly Afternoon at the Seaside]

      Although difficult to date exactly, the following extract would seem to date from the very late 1940s. It is just after notes for Mrs McGinty’s Dead (although with a totally different plot outline) and They Do It with Mirrors (also with a completely different plot) and is followed by a list of her books in her own handwriting, the latest title of which is The Hollow (1946).

      Ideas for Mise-en-scene?

      Conditions like The White Crow. Start with the murder—a prominent person—such as a minister—

      (Aneurin Bevan type?)—on holiday? Interrogation of his personnel—His wife—Female secretary

      Male [secretary]—Difficulties as I don’t know about Ministers

      Chief pharmacist in a Hospital? Young medical man doing research on Penicillin?

      A brains trust? Local one? BBC Mrs AC arrives to broadcast—Dies—not the real Mrs AC?

      A big hotel? Imperial? No—done Shop?

      Worth’s during mannequin parade—Selfridges—in a cubicle during Sale

      Some of the references in this extract may need clarification. The White Crow is a 1928 novel by Crime Club writer Philip MacDonald; it concerns the murder of an influential businessman in his own office (as in A Pocket Full of Rye). Aneurin Bevan was UK Minister of Health, 1945-51. The position of chief pharmacist was one with which Christie would have been familiar both from her early life and from her experience in the Second World War (The Pale Horse contains a gesture in this direction). ‘Imperial’ is a reference to Peril at End House, although the hotel is disguised as the Majestic. And Worth’s, like Selfridge’s, is a famous department store.

      ‘Mrs AC arrives to broadcast’ reminds us that although Christie refused countless requests throughout her career to broadcast on either radio or television, she did, at least once, take part in a Desert Island Discs type programme, In the Gramophone Library, broadcast in August 1946. And the rueful remark ‘Difficulties as I don’t know about Ministers’—my favourite comment from the entire Notebooks—shows that she abided by the old maxim—‘Write about what you know’.

       Surprise, Surprise!

      But the most unexpected element in the Notebooks was, to me, the fact that many of Christie’s best plots did not necessarily spring from a single devastating idea. She considered all possibilities when she plotted and did not confine herself to one idea, no matter how good it may have seemed. In very few cases is the identity of the murderer a given from the start of the plotting.

      The most dramatic example is Crooked House (see also Chapter 4). With its startling revelation that the killer is a child, it remains one of the great Christie surprises, in the same class as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, Curtain and Endless Night. (To be entirely fair, at least two other writers, Ellery Queen in The Tragedy of Y and Margery Allingham in The White Cottage Mystery had already exploited this idea but far less effectively.) At that stage she had already used the narrator-murderer gambit, the police-man-murderer gambit, the everybody-did-it gambit, the every-body-as-victim gambit. Before reading the Notebooks, I had visualised Agatha Christie at her typewriter smiling craftily as she sat down in 1948 to write the next ‘Christie for Christmas’ and weaving a novel around the device of an 11-year-old girl as a cold-blooded murderer. Not so, however. Even a cursory glance at Notebook 14 shows that Christie considered Sophia, Clemency and Edith as well as Josephine when it came to potential murderers. It was not a case of arranging the entire plot around Josephine as the one unalterable fact. It was not the raison d’être of this novel; the shattering identity of the murderer was only one element under consideration and not necessarily the key element.

      Again, at no point in the notes for her last devastating surprise, Endless Night (see Chapter 12), is there mention of the narrator-killer. It was not a case of thinking ‘I’ll try the Ackroyd trick again but this time with a working-class narrator. And I’ll begin with the meeting and courtship, which is all part of the plot, rather than after the marriage.’ Indeed, there is brief mention in Notebook 50 of one of the characters being a friend of Poirot, who was, presumably, to investigate the case; and at only one point is there mention of telling the story in the first person. The inspiration for the shock ending came to her as she plotted rather than the other way round.

      Arguably the last of the ingeniously clued detective novels, A Murder is Announced (see Chapter 5), would seem to allow of only one solution, and yet at one stage Letitia Blacklock is pencilled in as the second victim of Mitzi, who has already murdered her own husband Rudi Sherz. It was not a case of deciding to write a novel featuring a supposed victim actually murdering her blackmailer during a carefully devised game. Nor did Murder in Mesopotamia (see Chapter 8) begin life featuring СКАЧАТЬ