Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories.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

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       Two examples of Agatha Christie, the housekeeper. The heading ‘Wallingford’ on the lower one confirms that they are both lists of items to bring to or from her various homes.

      any further than the pages of the Notebooks (see ‘The House of Dreams’, page 303).

      There are notes on most of her stage work, including unknown, unperformed and uncompleted plays. There are only two pages each of notes for her most famous and her greatest play, Three Blind Mice (as it still was at the time of writing the notes) and Witness for the Prosecution respectively. But these are disappointingly uninformative, as they contain no detail of the adaptation, merely a draft of scenes without any of the usual speculation.

      And there are many pages devoted to her Autobiography, her poetry and her Westmacott novels. Most of the poetry is of a personal nature as she often wrote a poem as a birthday present for family members. And, in the case of these poems, having little prior knowledge of the subject matter does not help when deciphering near-illegible handwriting. There are only 40 pages in total devoted to the Westmacott titles and no detailed planning. Of that relatively small number many are taken up with quotations that included possible titles. Many of these were not used but make for fascinating reading. And the notes for the Autobiography are, for the most part, diffuse and disconnected, consisting of what are, in effect, reminders to herself.

       …I usually have about half a dozen on hand…

      It could reasonably be supposed that each Agatha Christie title has its own Notebook. This is emphatically not the case. In only five instances is a Notebook devoted to a single title. Notebooks 26 and 42 are entirely dedicated to Third Girl; Notebook 68 concerns only Peril at End House; Notebook 2 is A Caribbean Mystery; Notebook 46 contains nothing but extensive historical background and a rough outline for Death Comes as the End. Otherwise, every Notebook is a fascinating record of a productive brain and an industrious professional. Some examples should make this clear.

      Notebook 53 contains:

      Fifty pages of detailed notes for After the Funeral and A Pocket Full of Rye alternating with each other every few pages

      Rough notes for Destination Unknown

      A short outline of an unwritten novel

      Three separate and different attempts at the radio play Personal Call

      Notes for a new Mary Westmacott

      Preliminary notes for Witness for the Prosecution and The Unexpected Guest

      An outline for an unpublished and unperformed play, Miss Perry

      Some poetry

      Notebook 13 contains:

      Death Comes as the End—38 pages

      Taken at the Flood—20 pages

      Sparkling Cyanide—20 pages

      Mary Westmacott—6 pages

      Foreign Travel Diary—30 pages

      The Hollow, Curtain, N or M?—4 pages each

      Notebook 35 contains:

      Five Little Pigs—75 pages

      One, Two, Buckle my Shoe—75 pages

      N or M?—8 pages

      The Body in the Library—4 pages

      25 pages of ideas

       …if I had kept all these things neatly sorted…

      One of the most appealing yet frustrating aspects of the Notebooks is the lack of order, especially dates. Although there are 73 Notebooks, we have only 77 examples of dates. And in many cases what dates we do have are incomplete. A page can be headed ‘October 20th’ or ‘September 28th’ or just ‘1948’. There are only six examples of complete (day/month/year) dates and they are all from the last ten years. In the case of incomplete dates it is sometimes possible to work out the year from the publication date of the title in question, but in the case of notes for an unpublished or undeveloped idea, this is almost impossible. This uncertainty is compounded for a variety of reasons.

      First, use of the Notebooks was utterly random. Christie opened a Notebook (or, as she says herself, any of half a dozen contemporaneous ones), found the next blank page and began to write. It was simply a case of finding an empty page, even one between two already filled pages. And, as if that wasn’t complicated enough, in almost all cases she turned the Notebook over and, with admirable economy, wrote from the back also. In one extreme case, during the plotting of ‘Manx Gold’ she even wrote sideways on the page! (Remember that many of these pages were filled during the days of rationing in the Second World War.) In compiling this book I had to devise a system to enable me to identify whether or not the page was an ‘upsidedown’ one.

      Second, because many of the pages are filled with notes for stories that were never completed, there are no publication dates as a guideline. Deductions can sometimes be made from the notes immediately preceding and following, but this method is not entirely flawless. A closer look at the contents of Notebook 13 (listed above) illustrates an aspect of this

      This page, in Notebook 66, is from Christie’s most prolific and ingenious period and list ideas that became Sad Cypress, ‘Problem at Sea’ and They Do It With Mirrors. It was one of very few pages in the Notebooks to bear a date, and the stories were published between 1936 and 1952.

      Another rare page with a date, demonstrating a marked change in handwriting, these are among the last notes that Christie wrote and appear in Notebook 7. Although she continued making notes, no new material appeared later than Postern of Fate, published in October 1973.

      random chronology. Leaving aside Curtain, the earliest novel listed here is N or M? published in 1941 and the latest is Taken at the Flood published in 1948. But many of the intervening titles are missing from this Notebook—Five Little Pigs is in Notebook 35, Evil under the Sun in Notebook 39 and Towards Zero in Notebook 32.

      Third, in many cases jottings for a book may have preceded publication by many years. The earliest notes for The Unexpected Guest are headed ‘1951’ in Notebook 31, i.e. seven years before its first performance; the germ of Endless Night first appears, six years before publication, on a page of Notebook 4 dated 1961.

      The pages following a clearly dated page cannot be assumed to have been written at the same time. For example:

      page 1 of Notebook 3 reads ‘General Projects 1955’

      page 9 reads ‘Nov. 5th 1965’ (and there were ten books in the intervening period)

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