Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories.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

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СКАЧАТЬ Christie who made it her own and exploited it more comprehensively than any other writer. There are numerous references to nursery rhymes scattered throughout the Notebooks. Sometimes the idea went no further than a brief jotting (see ‘Miscellaneous’ on page 129); others provided her with some of her greatest works—Ten Little Niggers, Five Little Pigs and Three Blind Mice/The Mousetrap. In some cases it provides no more than a title, Hickory Dickory Dock and One, Two, Buckle my Shoe; in some cases, Ten Little Niggers and A Pocket Full of Rye, it provides the book with an overall schema; while the use of Crooked House and Three Blind Mice is more symbolic than actual. The most successful are undoubtedly Five Little Pigs and Ten Little Niggers, where the rhyme is convincingly and ingeniously followed. The dramatic impact of an innocent nursery rhyme transforming into a killer’s calling card is irresistible to an imaginative crime writer such as Agatha Christie.

       Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie, When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing, Was not that a dainty dish to set before the king?

       The king was in his counting-house, counting out his money, The queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey, The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.

      The most fruitful nursery rhyme was ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, which provided no less than three titles: the novel A Pocket Full of Rye, and the short stories ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ and ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’. In the case of the short stories, only the title has been inspired by the rhyme, whereas the novel follows the pattern of the rhyme very closely.

      ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ December 1929

      A sixpenny piece helps to solve a brutal murder that has left a family divided with mutual suspicion.

      Although there are no surviving notes for ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’—unsurprisingly, since it made such an early appearance in the Christmas 1929 edition of Holly Leaves—there is a reference to it in Notebook 56. Appearing as it does among the notes for A Pocket Full of Rye, this is unusual in, puzzlingly, also appearing to make reference to the already published Crooked House.

      Sing a Song of Sixpence

      The crooked sixpence found (a Crooked man Crooked wife

      Crooked house)

      An aspect of this short story that has escaped the attention of Christie commentators is its similarity to Ordeal by Innocence (see Chapter 7). ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ features the arrival of an outside investigator, Sir Edward Palliser, at the home of Miss Crabtree, who has been murdered by a blow to the head administered by a member of her own household. Because no one has been arrested for the crime, her family describe how ‘they sit there every day looking at each other surreptitiously and wondering’. In this atmosphere of mutual suspicion he reaches a solution which explicitly foreshadows the 1958 novel.

      ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’ August 1935

      A plea for help to Poirot is too late to save Amelia Barrowby, but he is determined to get to the truth.

       Mary, Mary, quite contrary How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle-shells And pretty maids all in a row.

      This short nursery rhyme features no less than five times throughout the Notebooks, even though its words gave the title of just one short story, ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’. But it seems to have made an impression on Christie’s mind as she often referred to it in the course of plotting other titles. And there are similarities between this short story and a novel she planned but never wrote. The story was first published in the UK in The Strand, having appeared some months earlier in Ladies’ Home Journal in the USA. This story’s connection to the nursery rhyme is stronger than ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ or ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’, as it includes the shells, the garden and the killer’s name. Mary Delafontaine poisons her aunt and hides the shells of the fatal oysters among the other cockle shells used as decoration in her garden. She tries, unsuccessfully, to incriminate the foreign companion:

      The old lady—the foreign girl—Mary—the ‘weak’ husband

      The final plot is encapsulated in Notebook 20:

      Oyster story—Man dies after dinner—strychnine in oyster—swallowed—shells out in garden or in shell box—food analysed—nothing. Possibly some complication about a cachet he took—or someone gave him—if so, unjustly accused

      It is another example of one of Christie’s favourite early plot devices—the summoning of Poirot to the scene of a suspected crime only to discover when he arrives that he is too late. As early as 1923 she first used this idea in The Murder on the Links, and subsequently in ‘The Cornish Mystery’, Dumb Witness and ‘The Incident of the Dog’s Ball’ (see the Appendix). It can be seen why—it has an emotional and a practical impact. The summoner, who has promised to explain the situation in detail, is now unable to do so and Poirot has a moral, as well as a practical, imperative to solve the crime. There is also the plot device of the victim having known ‘too much’, always a good way to start a detective story. In ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, the appearance of a Russian character would have been very unusual in detective fiction of the day. In fact, the appearance of any foreigner (including Poirot) is always viewed with suspicion by the inhabitants of small villages throughout the Christie canon. And, of course—as can be seen in Dumb Witness—this allowed Christie to subvert, yet again, the readers’ prejudices.

      The eponymous main character, Mary Delafontaine, became a byword in Christie’s shorthand, appearing in abbreviated form in the course of plotting Third Girl and Ordeal by Innocence respectively, even though she was used in the final plot of neither novel:

      Mary Del.—Arthur (innocent husband)—Katrina—suspicious, passionate—for money looks after old boy

      Olivia (The Mary Delafontaine wife)

      The name was also used for one of the victims in The Pale Horse; she is a friend of Mrs Oliver in Chapter 1 and she appears on Father Gorman’s doomed list in the following chapter.

      Ten Little Niggers 6 November 1939

      Ten strangers are invited to a weekend on an island off the coast of Devon. Their host fails to appear and a series of deaths among their fellow-guests make them realise that one of them is a killer following the macabre nursery rhyme that hangs in each bedroom.

       Ten little nigger boys went out to dine One choked his little self and then there were nine; Nine little nigger boys sat up very late One overslept himself and then there were eight; Eight little nigger boys travelling in Devon One said he’d stay there and then there were seven; Seven little nigger boys chopping up sticks One chopped himself in half and then there were six; Six little nigger boys playing with a hive A bumble bee stung one and then there were five; Five little nigger boys going in for law One got in Chancery and then there were four; Four little nigger boys going out to sea A red herring swallowed one and then there were three; Three little nigger boys walking in the Zoo A big bear hugged one and then there were two; Two little nigger boys sitting in the sun One got frizzled up and then there was one; One little nigger boy left all alone He went and hanged himself and then there were none.

      Ten Little СКАЧАТЬ