Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

Although mentioned by both of her biographers, Janet Morgan and Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie’s Notebooks remain a closely protected, and largely unknown, treasure. After the death of her mother, Rosalind Hicks ensured their safety in Greenway House and, with the exception of Torquay Museum, they have never been publicly displayed. But Christie does briefly mention them in her Autobiography:

Of course, all the practical details are still to be worked out, and the people have to creep slowly into my consciousness, but I jot down my splendid idea in an exercise book. So far so good—but what I invariably do is lose the exercise book. I usually have about half a dozen on hand, and I used to make notes in them of ideas that had struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper. Of course, if I had kept all these things neatly sorted and filed and labelled, it would save me a lot of trouble. However, it is a pleasure sometimes, when looking vaguely through a pile of old note-books to find something scribbled down, as: Possible plot—do it yourself—girl and not really sister—August—with a kind of sketch of a plot. What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else.

A closer examination of some of these remarks will give a clearer idea of what she meant. Using Christie’s own words as a guide, we can begin to see the part these Notebooks played in her creative process.

Considered as the notes, drafts and outlines for the greatest body of detective fiction ever written (and in many cases, unwritten) these Notebooks are unique and priceless literary artefacts. Viewed as physical objects they are somewhat less impressive. They are before me as I write these words and, at a passing glance, look like the piles of exercise books gathered by teachers at the end of class in schools the world over. Because most of them are just that—exercise books. Red and blue and green and grey exercise books, coverless copybooks ruled with wide-spaced blue lines, small black pocket-sized notebooks: The Minerva, The Marvel, The Kingsway, The Victoria, The Lion Brand, The Challenge, The Mayfair exercise books, ranging in price from The Kingsway (Notebook 72) for 2d to The Marvel (Notebook 28) for a shilling (5p); Notebook 5 represented particularly good value at 4 for 71/2d (3p). Inside covers often have ‘useful’ information—a map of the UK, capitals of the world, decimal conversion rates (obviously bought just before or after the introduction of decimal coinage in February 1971). There are covers illustrated by the New York skyline (Notebook 23) or a Mexican volcano (Notebook 18).

Some of them are more worthy recipients of their contents—hard-backed multi-paged notebooks with marbled covers or spiral binding with embossed covers; some are even grandly inscribed on the cover ‘Manuscript’. Notebook 7 is described inside the back cover as ‘spongeable PVC cover from WHS’, and Notebook 71 is a ‘Cahier’ with ‘Agatha Miller 31 Mai 1907’ written on the cover and containing French homework from her time in Paris as a young woman. Notebook 31 is an impressive wine-coloured hardback from Langley and Sons Ltd., Tottenham Court Rd. and costing 1s 3d (6p).

In a few cases the very availability and unpretentiousness of the Notebooks are now a liability as some of them have suffered on their journey down the years—they have lost their covers (and perhaps some pages—who knows?), staples have become rusted, pencil has faded and in some cases the quality of the paper, combined with the use of a leaky biro, has meant that notes written on one page have seeped on to the reverse also. And, of course, as many of them date from the war years, paper quality was often poor.

It would seem that some Notebooks originally belonged to, or were temporarily commandeered by, Christie’s daughter Rosalind, as her name and address in her own neat handwriting appears on the inside cover (Notebook 41). And Notebook 73, otherwise blank, has her first husband Archie Christie’s name in flowing script inside the front cover. The name and address lines on the front cover of Notebook 19 have been filled in: ‘Mallowan, 17 Lawn Road Flats’.

The number of pages Christie used in each Notebook varies greatly—Notebook 35 has 220 pages of notes while Notebook 72 has a mere five. Notebook 63 has notes on over 150 pages but Notebook 42 uses only 20. The average lies somewhere between 100 and 120.

Although they are collectively referred to as ‘The Notebooks of Agatha Christie’, not all of them are concerned with her literary output. Notebooks 11, 40 and 55 consist solely of chemical formulae and seem to date from her days as a student dispenser; Notebook 71 contains French homework and Notebook 73 is completely blank. Moreover, she often used them for making random notes, sometimes on the inside covers—there is a list of ‘furniture for 48’ [Sheffield Terrace] in Notebook 59; Notebook 67 has reminders to ring up Collins and make a hair appointment; Notebook 68 has a list of train times from Stockport to Torquay. And her husband Max Mallowan has written accurately in his small, neat hand, ‘The Pale Horse’ on the front of Notebook 54.

In a career spanning over 55 years and two world wars, some loss is inevitable but the reassuring fact is that it seems to have happened so seldom. Of course, we cannot be sure how many Notebooks there should be, but the 73 we still have are an impressive legacy.

Nevertheless, nothing in the way of notes or outlines exists for The Murder on the Links (1923), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), The Big Four (1927) or The Seven Dials Mystery (1929). From the 1920s we have notes only for The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), The Secret of Chimneys (1925) and The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928). When we remember that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published just before Christie’s traumatic disappearance and subsequent divorce it is perhaps not surprising that these notes are no longer extant. The same applies to The Big Four, despite the fact that this episodic novel had appeared earlier as individual short stories. And there is nothing showing the genesis of the first adventure of Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary (1922); for the 1929 collection Partners in Crime, there are only the sketchiest of notes. This is a particular disappointment as it might have given us an insight into the thoughts of Agatha Christie on her fellow writers, who are affectionately pastiched in this collection.

From the 1930s onwards, however, the only missing book titles are Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Cards on the Table (1936) and Murder is Easy (1939). (The latter appears merely as a passing reference in Notebook 66.) This would seem to suggest that very few notebooks were, in fact, lost. Apart from Murder is Easy, the other titles date from the mid-1930s and may well have been written up in the same notebook. But as the novels on either side of Murder is Easy all appear, why this title should be missing is something of a mystery in itself.

In some cases the notes are sketchy and consist of little more than a list of characters (Death on the Nile—Notebook 30). And some titles have copious notes—They Came to Baghdad (100 pages), Five Little Pigs (75 pages), One, Two, Buckle my Shoe (75 pages). Other titles outline the course of the finished book so closely that I am tempted to assume that there were earlier, rougher notes that have not survived. A case in point is Ten Little Niggers (aka And Then There Were None). In her Autobiography she writes: ‘I had written the book Ten Little Niggers because it was so difficult to do that the idea fascinated me. Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer becoming obvious. I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning.’ Unfortunately, none of this planning survives. What there is in Notebook 65 (see Chapter 4) follows almost exactly the progress of the novel. It is difficult to believe that this would have been written straight on to the page with so few deletions or so little discussion of possible alternatives. Nor are there, unfortunately, any notes for the

dramatisation of this famous story. For the rest of her career we are fortunate to have notes on all of the novels. In the case of most of the later titles the notes are extensive and detailed—and legible.

Fewer than 50 of almost 150 short stories are discussed in the pages of the Notebooks. This may mean that, for many of them, Christie typed directly on to the page without making any preliminary notes. Or that she worked on loose pages that she subsequently discarded. When she wrote the early short stories she did not consider herself a writer in the professional sense of the word. It was only after her divorce and the consequent need to earn her living that she realised that writing was now her ‘job’. So the earliest adventures of Poirot as published in 1923 in The Sketch magazine do not appear in the Notebooks at all, although there are, thankfully, detailed notes for her greatest Poirot collection, The Labours of Hercules (see Chapter 11). And many of the ideas that she sketched for short stories did not make it any further than the pages of the Notebooks (see ‘The House of Dreams’, page 303).

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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)

page 12 reads ‘1963’

page 21 reads ‘Nov. 6 1965 Cont.’

page 28 is headed ‘Notes on Passenger to Frankfort [sic] 1970’

page 36 reads ‘Oct. 1972’

page 72 reads ‘Book Nov. 1972’

In the space of 70 pages we have moved through 17 years and as many novels and, between pages 9 and 21, skipped back and forth between 1963 and 1965.

Notebook 31 is dated, on different pages, 1944, 1948 and 1951, but also contains notes for The Body in the Library (1942), written in the early days of the Second World War. Notebook 35 has pages dated 1947, sketching Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and 1962, an early germ of Endless Night.

Although the Notebooks are numbered from 1 through to 73, this numbering is completely arbitrary. Some years before she died, Christie’s daughter Rosalind arranged, as a first step towards analysing their contents, that they should be numbered and that the titles mentioned within be listed. The analysis never went any further than that, but in the process every Notebook was allocated a number. This numbering is completely random and a lower number does not indicate an earlier year or a more important Notebook. Notebook 2, for instance, contains notes for A Caribbean Mystery (1964) and Notebook 3 for Passenger to Frankfurt (1972), while Notebook 37 contains a long, deleted extract from The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). As can be seen, therefore, the numbers are nothing more than an identification mark.

Some of the Notebooks show attempts on the part of the elderly Agatha Christie to impose a little order on this chaos. Notebook 31 has a loose-page listing inside the front cover in her own handwriting; others have typewritten page-markers indicating where each title is discussed. These brave attempts are rudimentary and the compiler (probably not Christie herself) soon wearied of the enormous task. Most Notebooks contain notes for several books and as three novels can often jostle for space among 20 pages, the page markers soon become hopelessly cumbersome and, eventually, useless.

To give some idea of the amount of information contained, randomly, within their covers, for the purposes of this book I created a table to index the contents of all of the Notebooks. When printed, it ran to 17 pages.

Before discussing the handwriting in the Notebooks, it is only fair to emphasise that these were notes and jottings written as aides-mémoire. There was no reason to make an effort to maintain a certain standard of calligraphy as no one but Christie herself was ever intended to read it. As evidenced elsewhere (see Chapter 3) these were personal journals and not written for any purpose other than to clarify her thoughts.

Our handwriting changes as we age. The scrambled notes from college or university soon overtake the copperplate efforts of our early school days. Accidents, medical conditions and age all take their toll on our writing. In most cases it is safe to assert that as we get older our handwriting deteriorates. In the case of Agatha Christie the opposite is the case. At her creative peak (roughly 1930 to 1950) her handwriting is almost indecipherable. It looks, in many cases, like shorthand and it is debatable if even she could read some sections of it. I have no doubt that the reason for the scrawl was that, during these hugely prolific years, her fertile brain teemed with ideas for books and stories. It was a case of getting them on to paper as fast as possible. Clarity of presentation was a secondary consideration.

The conversion of the Notebooks into an easily readable format, for the purposes of this book, took over six months. A detailed knowledge of all of Dame Agatha’s output was not just an enormous help but a vital necessity. It helped to know, for instance, that a reference to ‘apomorphine’ is not a misprint, a mistake or a mis-spelling but a vital part of the plot of Sad Cypress. But it did not help in the case of notes for an unpublished title or for ideas for a published work that she later discarded. As the weeks progressed I was surprised how used to her handwriting I became and I found converting the last batch of Notebooks considerably quicker than the first. I also discovered that if I left a seemingly indecipherable page and returned to it a few days later, I could often make sense of it. But some words or sentences still defied me and in a number of cases I had to resort to an educated guess.

From the late 1940s onwards her handwriting steadily ‘improved’ so that by the early 1950s and, for example, After the Funeral in Notebook 53, the notes could be read straight off by someone seeing them for the first time. She was ruefully aware of this herself. In November 1957, in a letter about Ordeal by Innocence, she writes, ‘I am asking Mrs. Kirwan [her secretary Stella Kirwan] to type this to you knowing what my handwriting is like’, and again in August 1970 she describes her own handwriting as ‘overlarge and frankly rather illegible’. And she writes this after the improvement!

For some years, there has been a theory in the popular press that Agatha Christie suffered from dyslexia. I have no idea where this originated but even a cursory glance at the Notebooks gives the lie to this story. The only example that could be produced in evidence is her struggle with ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Carribean’ throughout the notes for A Caribbean Mystery—and I think in that she would not be alone!

Dotted irregularly throughout the Notebooks are brief jottings dashed down and often not developed any further at the time. This is what Christie means by ‘a sketch of a plot’; these jottings were all she needed to stimulate her considerable imagination. The ideas below are reproduced exactly as they appear on the page of the Notebooks, and some of them occur in more than one Notebook (examples of similar jottings are given later in this book). All of them were to appear, to a greater or lesser degree, in her titles. The first two are major plot devices and the remaining two are minor plot features:

Poirot asks to go down to country—finds a house and various fantastic details [see The Hollow in Chapter 12]

Saves her life several times [see Endless Night in Chapter 12]

Dangerous drugs stolen from car [see Exhibit F: ‘The House of Dreams’]

Inquire enquire—both in same letter [see A Murder is Announced in Chapter 5]

Throughout her career one of Christie’s greatest gifts was her ability to weave almost endless variations on seemingly basic ideas. Murderous alliances, the eternal triangle, victim-as-murderer, disguise—down the years she used and reused all these ploys to confound reader expectation. So when she writes about being stimulated to write ‘something else’ we know that she could do this effortlessly. Something as seemingly unimportant or uninspiring as the word ‘teeth’ could inspire her and, in fact, she used that very idea in at least two novels—One, Two, Buckle my Shoe and, as a minor plot element, in The Body in the Library.

Identical twins (one killed in railway smash) survivor—claims to be the rich one (teeth?)

Poor little rich girl—house on hill—luxury gadgets etc.—original owner

Stamp idea—man realises fortune—puts it on old letter—a Trinidad stamp on a Fiji letter

Old lady in train variant—a girl is in with her—later is offered a job at the village—takes it

As we shall see, the ‘Stamp idea’ features in a short story and a play over 15 years apart; the ‘Old lady in train’ ploy appears in two novels almost 20 years apart; and the ‘Poor little rich girl’ inspired a short story and, 25 years later, a novel.

Exhibit A: The Detection Club

The Detection Club, as its name suggests, is a club for writers of detective stories. Although the exact date is uncertain, it was probably founded in 1929. Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers were two of the founders and by the early 1930s all of the major writers of detective fiction of the day, including Agatha Christie, were members. Only writers of classical detective fiction, as distinct from crime writers in general, were eligible to join. It was not a professional body campaigning to improve the lot of crime writers; rather it was a glorified dining club with G.K. Chesterton, creator of Father Brown, as its first President, followed in 1936 by E.C. Bentley, author of the famous Trent’s Last Case, and, from 1958 to her death in 1976, Agatha Christie. She agreed to this role on the understanding that she would never have to give a speech. Membership was by invitation only and all new members had to undergo an initiation ceremony (designed by Dorothy L. Sayers), involving the President in ceremonial robes, a procession with candles and the initiate swearing an oath, while placing a hand on Eric the Skull, to uphold the club’s rules.

Although these rules were unwritten and the ritual itself, designed by Sayers, light-hearted, the intentions behind them were serious and admirable. In an effort to raise the literary level of the detective story and to distinguish it from the thriller or ‘shocker’, candidates had to promise:

to honour the King’s English;

never to conceal a vital clue from the reader;

to adhere to detection as distinct from ‘Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition…Coincidence or Acts of God’;

to observe ‘a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Mysterious Chinamen and Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science’;

never to steal or disclose the plots of other members.

In the early days the Detection Club produced collaborative novels and, in more recent times, short story collections. In the early ventures different hands wrote succeeding chapters, each subsequent writer taking cognisance of the plot developments of his or her predecessor. Agatha Christie contributed to the three earliest publications, The Scoop in 1930, Behind the Screen the following year and the full-length novel The Floating Admiral in 1932. The first two shorter efforts were read in instalments on BBC radio and subsequently published in The Listener, finally appearing in book form in 1983. Apart from Christie, the collaborators on The Scoop were Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, E.C. Bentley, Freeman Wills Crofts and Clemence Dane; Ronald Knox and Hugh Walpole replaced Crofts and Dane for Behind the Screen.

In the case of The Floating Admiral each contributor had to include a proposed solution as well as a chapter in an effort to prevent complications being introduced merely to make life difficult for the following contributor. Christie’s contribution is, unfortunately, the shortest in the book, but her proposed solution is a typically ingenious one. However, she decided that the time and effort that went into one of these productions could be more profitably spent on her own writing and she politely declined to involve herself in any further titles.

The main reference to the Detection Club in the Notebooks is in Notebook 41, the first page of which is headed ‘Ideas 1931’ (despite the uncertainty about its date of foundation, by the time of this note the club was well established):

The 13 at Dinner

Detective story Club (?)

Miss Sayers and her husband—Poisons

Mr Van Dine and

Mr Wills Crofts and wife—Alibis

Mrs Christie

Mr Rhode

Mr and Mrs Cole

Mr Bentley

Miss Clemence Dane

Mr Berkeley and wife—fantastic writer

Coincidentally, the title Thirteen at Dinner was used in America two years later for Christie’s 1933 novel Lord Edgware Dies. The US title refers to Chapter 15 of the book, where a character remarks that there were 13 guests at the dinner table on the evening of Lord Edgware’s death, thereby giving Lady Edgware 12 witnesses. It is unlikely, however, that this is what Christie had in mind when she sketched the Detection Club idea.

Of the 13 people she lists who would have composed this party, most of them were her fellow-writers. ‘Miss Sayers’ is Dorothy L. Sayers—writer, dramatist, anthologist, theologian and scholar—Christie’s great contemporary and one of the founders of the Detection Club. Although listed in Notebook 41 as ‘Miss’, Sayers had married Oswald Fleming in April 1926 but retained her maiden name for her professional activities.

‘Mr Van Dine’ was known to the reading public as S.S. Van Dine, creator of Philo Vance. The gap after his name would seem to indicate that Christie was not sure if he was married (he was), but the inclusion of his partner would have given 14 dinner guests—which perhaps accounts for the uncertainty. It is odd that Christie should have included Van Dine at all. She certainly read his novels—a few are on the shelves in Greenway House—as they were enormous bestsellers in their day, but he was not a member of the Detection Club as he lived in America.

‘Mr Wills Crofts’ was Freeman Wills Crofts, creator of Inspector French of Scotland Yard, a painstaking and thorough policeman whose speciality (as indicated) is the unbreakable alibi. Like Christie his first novel, The Cask, appeared in 1920 and is still considered a classic. He continued to write until his death in 1955, producing over 40 novels.

‘Mr Rhode’ is John Rhode, whose real name was Major Cecil John Charles Street and who also wrote as Miles Burton. Like Christie he was a Crime Club author for most of his career and altogether he wrote almost 150 novels under both names.

‘Mr and Mrs Cole’ was the husband-and-wife team of G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, detective novelists and Socialists. Although the pair were prolific, with 30 novels to their credit, their books are verbose, lifeless and long out of print.

‘Mr Bentley’ was E.C. Bentley, whose reputation as a detective novelist rests almost entirely on one novel, the classic Trent’s Last Case. He also issued a book of short stories and co-wrote another title, Trent’s Own Case, both featuring Philip Trent.

Clemence Dane is largely forgotten as a crime writer. Enter Sir John, filmed by Hitchcock as Murder, is her best-known title.

‘Mr Berkeley’ is Anthony Berkeley, who also wrote as Francis Iles. A very influential writer, he foresaw the emergence of the crime novel, as distinct from the detective novel, and his contribution to both branches of the genre is impressive. Alfred Hitchcock memorably filmed his Iles novel Before the Fact as Suspicion.

In addition to this list, Christie makes various allusions to her fellow Detection Club members in a range of works. Partners in Crime, Christie’s 1929 Tommy and Tuppence collection of short stories, sees the Beresfords investigating their cases in the style of various detectives. She pastiches Berkeley in ‘The Clergyman’s Daughter’ and Crofts in ‘The Unbreakable Alibi’ although, oddly, none of the other writers mentioned in Notebook 41 is featured.

An article Christie wrote for the Ministry of Information in 1945, ‘Detective Writers in England’, is also of note. Here the writers featured are Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr, H.C. Bailey, Ngaio Marsh, Austin Freeman and Margery Allingham—Sayers being the only writer common to the article and Notebook 41, although all were members of The Detection Club. This may be due to the fact that Christie had more dealings with Sayers, mostly during the planning of the collaborative titles The Floating Admiral, The Scoop and Behind the Screen, all of which were masterminded by Sayers.

Chapter 6 of The Body in the Library also mentions Sayers, H.C. Bailey and John Dickson Carr (as well as Christie herself); and ‘The Flock of Geryon’, the tenth Labour of Hercules, mentions Sherlock Holmes, Mr Fortune, the creation of Bailey, and Sir Henry Merrivale, the creation of Dickson Carr. Dickson Carr’s The Burning Court is also a minor clue in Evil under the Sun and the same writer gets a further mention in The Clocks.

A single sentence each in Notebooks 18 and 35 also mentions the Detection Club, both with the same idea:

Guest night at the Det[ection] Club during ritual—Mrs. O[liver]’s 6 guests

Detection Club Murder—Mrs Oliver—her two guests—someone killed when the Ritual starts

Guest Night was, not surprisingly, an evening when members of the club could invite a guest for dinner. The ‘ritual’ was the ceremony, involving the swearing of an ‘oath’ with Eric the Skull standing in for the Bible, at which new members were initiated. As a detective novelist Mrs Oliver would, of course, have been a member of the club.