Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories. John Curran
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Young wife recognised by someone who knows she is married already—blackmail?
I can adapt one of the treasure hunts I’ve done for Mathew and work in the Boathouse somehow…and invent Mrs Oliver’s hunt…I could use the Cluedo idea of weapons and suspects…but with a real body instead of a pretend one…
Mrs Oliver’s plan
The Weapons
Revolver—Knife—Clothes Line
Who will I murder? The foreign student…no, she has to be part of the plan…someone very unexpected then…how about the lord of the manor?…no, too clichéd…needs to have impact… what about a stranger?…but who…and that brings a lot of problems…I’ll leave that for next year maybe…How about a child?…needs to be handled carefully but I could make it a not-very-nice child…perhaps the pretend body, could be one of the scouts, turns out to be really dead…or, better again, a girl guide…she could be nosy and have seen something she shouldn’t…Don’t think I’ve had a child victim before…
Points to be decided—Who first chosen for victim?
(?a) ‘Body’ to be Boy Scout in boat house—key of which has to be found by ‘clues’
She gazes abstractedly into the distance, blind to the panoramic view of the river and the wooded hillside opposite. She is Poirot, taking afternoon tea in the drawing room, carefully exiting through the French windows and wandering down through the garden. She is Hattie, intent on preserving her position and money at all costs. She is Mrs Oliver, distractedly plotting, discarding, amending, changing…
Next bits—P at house—wandering up to Folly—Finds?
Hattie goes in as herself—she changes her clothes and emerges (from boathouse? Folly? fortune teller’s tent?) as student from Hostel
Now, I have to provide a few family members…how about an elderly mother…she could live in the Gate Lodge. If I make her mysterious, readers will think she is ‘it’…little old ladies are always good as suspects. Could she know something from years earlier?…perhaps she knew Hattie from somewhere…or thinks she does…or make Poirot think she does, which is almost as good…Let’s see…
Mrs Folliat? suspicious character—really covering up for something she saw. Or an old crime—a wife who ‘ran away’
She stops writing and listens as a voice approaches the Battery calling ‘Nima, Nima.’
‘Here, Mathew,’ she calls and a tousled 12-year-old runs down the steps.
‘I found the treasure, I found the treasure,’ he chants excitedly, clutching a half-crown.
‘Well done. I hope it wasn’t too difficult?’
‘Not really. The clue in the tennis court took me a while but then I spotted the ball at the base of the net.’
‘I thought that one would puzzle you,’ she smiles.
She closes the notebook and puts it away in her bag. Hercule Poirot’s questioning of Mrs Folliat and the identity of a possible second victim will have to wait.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s see if there is anything nice to eat in the house.’
Agatha Christie, Queen of Crime, is finished for the day and Agatha Christie, grandmother, climbs the steps from the Battery in search of ice-cream for her grandson.
And the Christie for Christmas 1956 was Dead Man’s Folly.
Julia leaned back and gasped. She stared and stared and stared…
Cat among the Pigeons, Chapter 17
I first saw the Notebooks of Agatha Christie on Friday 11 November 2005.
Mathew Prichard had invited me to spend the weekend at Greenway to experience it in its current state before the National Trust began the extensive renovations necessary to restore it to its former glory. He collected me at Newton Abbot railway station, scene of the radio play Personal Call, and we drove through the gathering dusk to Galmpton village, past the school of which Dame Agatha had been a governor and the cottage where her friend Robert Graves, the dedicatee of Towards Zero, had lived. We drove up the coal-dark road beyond the village but the panoramic view of the Dart and the sea, enjoyed many years earlier by Hercule Poirot on his way to the fatal murder hunt in Nasse House, was lost to me. By now it was raining heavily and the phrase ‘a dark and stormy night’ was a reality and not mere atmosphere. We passed the entrance to the youth hostel, refuge of the foreign students from Dead Man’s Folly, and eventually drove through the imposing gates of Greenway House, winding our way up the drive to arrive at the house itself. The lights were on and there was a welcoming fire in the library where we had tea. I sat in Agatha Christie’s favourite armchair and forgot my manners enough to gaze avidly at the surrounding bookshelves—at the run of, appropriately, the Greenway Edition of her novels, the foreign language versions, the much thumbed and jacketless first editions; at the crime novels of her contemporaries and the well-read books from her happy childhood in Ashfield, lovingly recalled in Postern of Fate.
Mathew then gave me a guided tour of the house—the imposing entrance hall complete with dinner-gong (‘Dead Man’s Mirror’), brass-bound trunk (‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’) and impressive family portraits (Hercule Poirot’s Christmas); a careless collection of sports equipment in the corner beneath the stairs contained, I like to imagine, a left-handed golf-club (‘Murder in the Mews’), a few tennis racquets (Towards Zero or, less gruesomely, Cat among the Pigeons) and a perfectly innocent cricket bat. The drawing room was dominated by a grand piano (They Do It with Mirrors) and a door that obstinately refused to remain open unless propped with a doorstop (A Murder is Announced); in the china cabinet reposed the set of Harlequin figures that inspired The Mysterious Mr Quin. The window behind the piano was the one from which Hercule Poirot delicately descended following afternoon tea in Dead Man’s Folly.
On the top floor, up a winding wooden staircase, were the bathrooms still with the names of the child refugees (Ordeal by Innocence) from the Second World War taped to the cupboard shelves, while a bookcase contained signed copies from some of her fellow writers (‘To Agatha with blushes—Ngaio Marsh’). The following morning, there were panoramic views of the river and the Devon hills with glimpses of the Boathouse (Dead Man’s Folly) and the Battery (Five Little Pigs).
On the first-floor landing was a revolving bookcase (Curtain) with multiple paperback editions and just down the corridor was Dame Agatha’s bedroom, commandeered by her creation for the duration of Dead Man’s Folly. Around the corner hung the tea-gown worn by Dame Agatha’s mother in a photograph in An Autobiography and further along this corridor were the back stairs, similar to СКАЧАТЬ