Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

Crooked House • Endless Night • Mrs McGinty’s Dead • A Murder is Announced • Murder in Mesopotamia • One, Two, Buckle my Shoe

How did Agatha Christie produce so many books of such a high standard over so many years? A close examination of her Notebooks will reveal some of her working methods, although, as will be seen, ‘method’ was not her strong suit. But that, I contend, was her secret—even though she was unaware of this paradox herself.

In February 1955, on the BBC radio programme Close-Up, Agatha Christie admitted, when asked about her process of working, that ‘the disappointing truth is that I haven’t much method’. She typed her own drafts ‘on an ancient faithful typewriter that I’ve had for years’ but she found a Dictaphone useful for short stories. ‘The real work is done in thinking out the development of your story and worrying about it until it comes right. That may take quite a while.’ And this is where her Notebooks, which are not mentioned in the interview, came in. A glance at them shows that this is where she did her ‘thinking and worrying’.

Up to the mid-1930s her Notebooks are succinct outlines of the novels with relatively little evidence of rough notes or speculation, deletions or crossing-out. And, unlike later years, when each Notebook contains notes for a few titles, at this early stage the bulk of the notes for any title is contained within one Notebook. These outlines follow closely the finished novel and would seem to indicate that the ‘thinking and worrying’ was done elsewhere and subsequently destroyed or lost. Notes for The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Notebook 37), The Man in the Brown Suit (Notebook 34), The Mystery of the Blue Train (Notebook 54), The Murder at the Vicarage (Notebook 33), The Sittaford Mystery (Notebook 59), Peril at End House (Notebook 68) and Lord Edgware Dies (Notebook 41) are accurate reflections of the novels. But from the mid-1930s and Death in the Clouds on, the Notebooks include all her thoughts and ideas, accepted or rejected.

She did all her speculating on the page of the Notebook until she knew, in her own mind at least, where she was going with a plot, although it is not always obvious from the Notebook alone which plan she has adopted. She worked out variations and possibilities; she selected and discarded; she explored and experimented. She ‘brainstormed’ on the page, and then sorted the potentially useful from the probably useless. Notes for different books overlap and intersect; a single title skips throughout a Notebook or, in extreme cases, through 12 Notebooks.

When asked by Lord Snowdon in a 1974 interview how she would like to be remembered, Agatha Christie replied, ‘I would like to be remembered as a rather good writer of detective stories.’ This modest remark, coming after a lifetime as a bestseller in bookshop and theatre, is unconscious confirmation of another aspect of Christie evident from the Notebooks—her lack of self-importance. She saw these unpretentious jotters as no more precious a tool in her working life than the pen or pencil or biro she grabbed to fill them. She employed her Notebooks as diaries, as scribblers, as telephone-message pads, as travel logs, as household accounts ledgers; she used them to draft letters, to list Christmas and birthday presents, to scribble to-do reminders, to record books read and books to read, to scrawl travel directions. She sketched maps of Warmsley Heath (Taken at the Flood) and St Mary Mead in them; she doodled the jacket design for Sad Cypress and the stage setting for Afternoon at the Seaside in them; she drew diagrams of the plane compartment from Death in the Clouds and the island from Evil under the Sun in them. Sir Max used them to do calculations, Rosalind used them to practise her handwriting and everyone used them as bridge-score keepers.

Part of the pleasure of working with the Notebooks is derived from the fact that when you turn a page you never know what you will read. The plotting of the latest Poirot novel can be interrupted by a poem written for Rosalind’s birthday; a page headed, optimistically, ‘Things to do’ is sandwiched between the latest Marple and an unfinished stage play. A phone number and message break the flow of a new radio play; a list of new books disrupts the intricacies of a murderer’s timetable; a letter to The Times disturbs the new Westmacott novel.

You could discover the original ending to Death Comes as the End or you could try solving a crossword clue (‘—I—T—-’); you might stumble across the draft of an unfinished Poirot story or a list of tulips (‘Grenadier—Really scarlet, Don Pedro—good bronze purple’); you could read a letter to The Times (‘I have read with great interest the article written by Dr. A. L. Rowse on his discovery of the identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets’) or a sketch for Mousetrap II.

A random flick through the Notebooks illustrates some of these points. A page of jottings—a short list of books (all published in 1970), arrangements for Christmas shopping and a quotation that caught her attention—interrupts the notes for Nemesis:

At some place in (Ireland?) (Scotland?) (Cornwall?) a family lives—writes her to stay for a day or two or weekend—rejoin tour later—(Has she been taken slightly ill? fever? Sickness—some drug administered)

Notes on books

Deliverance—James Dickey

The Driver’s Seat—Muriel Spark

A Start in Life—Alan Sillitoe

Let’s go to Syon Lodge Ltd. (Crowthers)—20 mins. by car from Hyde Park Corner—on way to airport—Xmas shopping? Collingwood in Conduit St

Remark made by McCauley ‘To be ruled by a busybody is more than human nature can bear’

One of the many lists of books scattered throughout the Notebooks, this one across two pages lists crime novels from the late 1930s/early 1940s, including titles by Simenon, Wentworth, Innes, Ferrars and Sayers…

…Her publishers would send Agatha books to read, and indeed the page above is headed ‘From Collins’.

What is this focal point of (an accused person imprisoned)—R’s son—a failure—R. always knew when he was lying

The plotting of One, Two, Buckle my Shoe and a listing of possible short story ideas is interrupted by a social message from her great friend Nan Gardner:

H.P. not satisfied—asks about bodies—at last—one is found

All away weekend—can we go Thursday Nan

Ideas (1940)

A. 2 friends—arty spinsters—one a crook—(other camouflage) they give evidence—possible for Miss Marple

A list of ideas, some of which became Death in the Clouds, The A.B.C. Murders and ‘Problem at Sea’, is put on hold for three pages of Christmas presents:

C. Stabbed by an arrow—Stabbed by dart (poison) from blow pipe

Jack [her brother in law]—Dog?

Mrs E—Menu holders

Aunt Min—blotter and notepaper stand

Barbara—bag and scarf

Joan—Belt?

D. Ventriloquist

E. Series of murders—P gets letter from apparent maniac—First—an old woman in Yorkshire

Three Act Tragedy is preceded by an address and phone number:

Toby, 1 Granville Place, Portman Street Mayfair 1087

P suggests Egg should tackle Mrs Dacres

Travel details appear in the middle of ‘The Capture of Cerberus’ (‘Robin’ was possibly Robin McCartney, who drew the jacket designs for Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia and Appointment with Death):

Young widow—husband missing believed killed—P sees him in ‘Hell’

Any Thursday by afternoon train Robin

Combine with idea of man who has gone under—Dead? A waiter in Hell?

As can be seen, Christie’s creativity was not exclusive—she was able to plot a murder while making a social appointment, or consider a murder weapon while compiling a reading list, or mull over a motive while transcribing travel directions. Throughout the Notebooks she is Agatha Christie, Queen of Crime while always remaining Agatha, the family member.

One of her most personal creations, Ariadne Oliver, is generally accepted as Christie’s own alter ego. Mrs Oliver is a middle-aged, successful and prolific writer of detective fiction and creator of a foreign detective, the Finnish Sven Hjerson. She hates literary dinners, making speeches, or collaborating with dramatists; she has written The Body in the Library and doesn’t drink or smoke. The similarities are remarkable. There can be little doubt that when Mrs Oliver speaks we are listening to Agatha Christie.

In Chapter 2 of Dead Man’s Folly Mrs Oliver shrugs off her ingenuity:

‘It’s never difficult to think of things,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘The trouble is that you think of too many, and then it all becomes too complicated, so you have to relinquish some of them and that is rather agony.’

And again, later in Chapter 17 she says:

‘I mean, what can you say about how you write your books? What I mean is, first you’ve got to think of something, and then when you’ve thought of it you’ve got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That’s all.’

It was as simple as that and, for 55 years, exactly what her creator did.

The process of production was, as we have seen, random and haphazard. And yet, this seeming randomness was transformed into an annual bestseller and, for many years, into more than one bestseller. For over 50 years she delivered the latest ‘Christie for Christmas’ to her agent; for 20 years she presented London’s West End with one box-office success after another; she kept magazine editors busy editing her latest offering. And all of them—novels, short stories and plays—flow with the fluid precision of the Changing of the Guard.

So although it is true that she had no particular method, no tried and true system that she brought with her down the long years of her career, we know this appearance of indiscriminate jotting and plotting is just that—an appearance. And eventually we come to the realisation that, in fact, this very randomness is her method; this is how she worked, how she created, how she wrote. She thrived mentally on chaos, it stimulated her more than neat order; rigidity stifled her creative process. And it explains how the Notebooks read from both ends, how they leap from one title to another on the same page, how different Notebooks repeat and develop the same ideas and why her handwriting can be impossible to read.

Notebook 15 and the plotting of Cat Among the Pigeons illustrate some of these points. She talks to herself on the page:

How should all this be approached?—in sequence? Or followed up backwards by Hercule Poirot—from disappearance…at school—a possibly trivial incident but which is connected with murder?—but murder of whom—and why?

She wonders and speculates and lists possibilities:

Who is killed?

Girl?

Games mistress?

Maid?

Foreign Mid East ?? who would know girl by sign?

Or a girl who?

Mrs. U sees someone out of window—could be New Mistress?

Domestic Staff?

Pupil?

Parent?

The Murder—

Could be A girl (resembles Julia/resembles Clare?

A Parent—sports Day

A Mistress

Someone shot or stalked at school Sports?

Princess Maynasita there—or—an actress as pupil or—an actress as games mistress

She reminds herself of work still to be done:

Tidy up—End of chapter

Chapter III—A good deal to be done—

Chapter IV—A good deal to be worked over—(possibly end chapter with ‘Adam the Gardener’—listing mistresses—(or next chapter)

Chapter V—Letters fuller

Notes on revision—a bit about Miss B

Prologue—Type extra bits

Chapter V—Some new letters

And for some light relief she breaks off to solve a word puzzle. In this well-known conundrum the test is to use all of the letters of the alphabet in one sentence. In her version she has an alternate answer although she is still missing the letter Z.

ADGJLMPSVYZ

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS over gladly

In Cards on the Table Mrs Oliver is asked if she has ever used the same plot twice.

‘The Lotus Murder,’ murmured Poirot, ‘The Clue of the Candle Wax.’

Mrs Oliver turned on him, her eyes beaming appreciation.

Two pages of random word puzzles, probably the rough work for a crossword.

So it is with Christie. She reused plot devices throughout her career; and she recycled short stories into novellas and novels—she often speculates in the Notebooks about the expansion or adaptation of an earlier title. The Notebooks demonstrate how, even if she discarded an idea for now, she left everything there to be looked at again at a later stage. And when she did that, as she wrote in her Autobiography, ‘What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me.’ So she used the Notebooks as an aide-mémoire as well as a sounding board.

The first example dates from the mid-1950s and relates to the short stories ‘Third Floor Flat’ and ‘The Adventure of the Baghdad Chest’; it is surrounded by notes for ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’ and Four-Fifty from Paddington. The second example, concerning ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’, is from early 1960 and the last one, concerning ‘The Shadow on the Glass’, probably from 1950:

Development of stories

3rd Floor Flat—murder committed earlier—return to get post and also footprints etc. accounted for—service lift idea? Wrong floor

Baghdad Chest or a screen?

Idea? A persuades B hide B

Chest or screen as Mrs B—having affair with C—C gives party—B and A drop in—B hides A—kills him—and goes out again

Extended version of Xmas Pudding—Points in it of importance A Ruby (belonging to Indian Prince—or a ruler just married?) in pudding

A book or a play from The Shadow on the Pane idea? (Mr Q)

One system of creation that Christie used during her most prolific period was the listing of a series of scenes, sketching what she wanted each to include and allocating to each individual scene a number or a letter; this neat idea, in the days before computers with a ‘cut and paste’ facility, may have been inspired by her play-writing experience. She would subsequently reorder those letters to suit the purposes of the plot. In keeping with her creative and chaotic process, this plan was not always followed and even when she began with it, she would sometimes abandon it later for a more linear approach (see Crooked House below). And sometimes the pattern in the finished book would not exactly follow the sequence she had originally mapped out, perhaps due to subsequent editing.

The following, from Notebook 32, is a perfect example of this method in practice. It is part of the plotting of Towards Zero (see also Chapter 10).

E. Thomas and Audrey what’s wrong? She can’t tell him. He stresses I know, my dear—I know—But you must begin to live again. Something about ‘died’ a death—(meaning Adrian—somebody like N[evile] ought to be dead) F. Mary and Audrey—suggestion of thwarted female—‘Servants even are nervous’ G. Coat buttons incident H. Moonlight beauty of Audrey

Points

Mr T-A. Talk with Lady T—asks about Mary

B. The story of murder led up to how?

C. Royde and justice (after Mr T has said: Many murders known to police)

D. Hotel—his rooms are on top floor

Work out sequence of evening

G. H. A. D. C. B. G. H.

It is notable how the E F G H scenes appear on an earlier page and the A B C D scenes on a later one. After they have all been tabulated, she then rearranges them to give the sequence she desires. At first, she intended the G and H scenes to follow A D C B but changed her mind, crossed them out and transposed them, squeezing them in, in front, at the left-hand margin of the page. A study of the relevant second section of the novel—‘Snow White and Red Rose’—will show that she followed this plan exactly:

G. Coat buttons V

H. Moonlight V

A. Lady T VI

D. Hotel VI

C. Royde VI

B. Lead up VI

F. Mary and Audrey VII

E. Thomas and Audrey VIII

Work out sequence of evening G. H. A. D. C. B. G. H. [F E]

She follows this scheme in the plotting of, among others, Sparkling Cyanide, One, Two, Buckle my Shoe and Crooked House. But with her chaotic approach to creativity and creative approach to chaos, she sometimes abandons it.

Detailed plotting for Towards Zero—see opposite page.

Notebook 14 shows this scheme, up to a point, in use for Crooked House (see also Chapter 4). But this time she has added further complications—AA and FF. Ultimately she dispensed with the reordering of the letters and just reordered the scenes without the alphabetical guideline. And the AA and FF were merely afterthoughts to be inserted at a later stage.

A. Inquires into Ass[ociated] Cat[ering]—discreet at first—Chartered Accountant will get us what we want [Chapter 10/11]

AA Also Brenda—femme fatale—are sorry for etc. [Chapter 9]

B. Later?—on its In Queer St.—Get Roger there—Roger—his story—etc. [Chapter 11]

C. Child’s evidence—best evidence—there is—no good in court—children don’t like being asked direct questions. To you she was showing off [Chapter 12]

D. Charles and Josephine—asks about letters—I was making it up—won’t tell you—you shouldn’t have told police [Chapter 13]

E. Charles and Eustace—(Listens outside door—really a boring teacher) Eustace—his views—scornful of Josephine [Chapter 16]

F. Charles and Edith—this side idolatry—asks Philip—you mustn’t be deterred by his cold manner—really cared for his father—Philip is jealous of Roger [Chapter 14]

FF. Question as to saving Ass. Cat. Roger refuses—Clemency backs him up—Is very definite about it

[Chapter 14. There are indications in Notebook 14 that she intended this to form part of H below]

G. Magda and Charles—Edith didn’t hate him—in love with him—would have liked to marry him [Chapter 15]

H. Charles and Clemency—her total happiness in marriage—how Roger would have been happy away from it all—Josephine writing in her book [Chapter 14]

I. A.C. says—be careful of the child—there’s a poisoner about [Chapter 12]

J. The weight over the door (if J) or definitely dies—little black book missing [Chapter 18]

K. Charles and Sophia Murder—what does murder do to anyone? [Chapter 4]

The notes for Crooked House also illustrate a seemingly contradictory and misleading aspect of the Notebooks. It is quite common to come across pages with diagonal lines drawn across them. At first glance it would seem, understandably, that these were rejected ideas but a closer look shows that the exact opposite was the case. A line across a page indicates Work Done or Idea Used. This was a habit through her most prolific period although she tended to leave the pages, used or not, unmarked in her later writing life.

In ‘The Affair at the Bungalow’, written in 1928 and collected in The Thirteen Problems (1932), Mrs Bantry comes up with reasons for someone to steal their own jewels:

‘And anyway I can think of hundreds of reasons. She might have wanted money at once…so she pretends the jewels are stolen and sells them secretly. Or she may have been blackmailed by someone who threatened to tell her husband…Or she may have already sold the jewels…so she had to do something about it. That’s done a good deal in books. Or perhaps he was going to have them reset and she’d got paste replicas. Or—here’s a very good idea—and not so much done in books—she pretends they are stolen, gets in an awful state and he gives her a fresh lot.’

The opening of The A. B. C. Murders (note the reference to a single ‘Murder’), illustrating the use of crossing-out as an indication of work completed.

In Third Girl (1966) Norma Restarick comes to Poirot and tells him that she might have committed a murder. In Chapter 2, Mrs Ariadne Oliver, that well-known detective novelist, imagines some situations that could account for this possibility:

Mrs Oliver began to brighten as she set her ever prolific imagination to work. ‘She could have run over someone in her car and not stopped. She could have been assaulted by a man on a cliff and struggled with him and managed to push him over. She could have given someone else the wrong medicine by mistake. She could have gone to one of those purple pill parties and had a fight with someone. She could have come to and found she’d stabbed someone. She…might have been a nurse in the operating theatre and administered the wrong anaesthetic…’

In Chapter 8 of Dead Man’s Folly (1956) Mrs Oliver again lets her imagination roam when considering possible motives for the murder of schoolgirl Marlene Tucker:

‘She could have been murdered by someone who just likes murdering girls…Or she might have known some secrets about somebody’s love affairs, or she may have seen someone bury a body at night or she may have seen somebody who was concealing his identity—or she may have known some secret about where some treasure was buried during the war. Or the man in the launch may have thrown somebody into the river and she saw it from the window of the boathouse—or she may have even got hold of some very important message in secret code and not known what it was herself…’ It was clear that she could have gone on in this vein for some time although it seemed to the Inspector that she had already envisaged every possibility, likely or unlikely.

These extracts from stories, written almost 40 years apart, illustrate, via her characters, Christie’s greatest strength— her ability to weave seemingly endless variations around one idea. There can be little doubt that this is Agatha Christie herself speaking; Mrs Oliver is, after all, a very successful detective novelist. And as we can now see from the Notebooks, this is exactly what Christie did. Throughout her career her ideas were consistently drawn from the world with which her readers were familiar—teeth, dogs, stamps (as below), mirrors, telephones, medicines—and upon these foundations she built her ingenious constructions. She explored universal themes in some of her later books (guilt and innocence in Ordeal by Innocence, evil in The Pale Horse, international unrest in Cat among the Pigeons and Passenger to Frankfurt), but they were still firmly rooted in the everyday.

Although it is not possible to be absolutely sure, there is no reason to suppose that listings of ideas and their variations were written at different times; I have no doubt that she rattled off variations and possibilities as fast as she could write, which probably accounts for the handwriting. In many cases it is possible to show that the list is written with the same pen and in the same style of handwriting. The outline of One, Two, Buckle my Shoe (see also Chapter 4) provides a good example of this. She is considering possible motives to set the plot in motion.

Man marries secretly one of the twins

Or

Man was really already married [this was the option adopted]

Or

Barrister’s ‘sister’ who lives with him (really wife)

Or

Double murder—that is to say—A poisons B—B stabs A—but really owing to plan by C

Or

Blackmailing wife finds out—then she is found dead

Or

He really likes wife—goes off to start life again with her

Or

Dentists killed—1 London—1 County

A few pages later in the same Notebook, also in connection with One, Two, Buckle my Shoe, she tries further variations on the same theme, this time introducing ‘Sub Ideas’.

Pos. A. 1st wife still alive—

A. (a) knows all—co-operating with him (b) does not know—that he is secret service

Pos. B 1st wife dead—someone recognises him—‘I was a great friend of your wife, you know—’

In either case—crime is undertaken to suppress fact of 1st marriage and elaborate preparations undertaken

C. Single handed

D. Co-operation of wife as secretary

Sub Idea C

The ‘friends’ Miss B and Miss R—one goes to dentist

Or

Does wife go to a certain dentist?

Miss B makes app[ointment]—with dentist—Miss R keeps it Miss R’s teeth labelled under Miss B’s name

Also from Notebook 35, but this time in connection with Five Little Pigs, we find a few very basic questions and possibilities under consideration:

Did mother murder—

A. Husband

B. Lover

C. Rich uncle or guardian

D. Another woman (jealousy)

Who were the other people

During the planning of Mrs McGinty’s Dead (see also Chapter 7), the four murders in the past, around which the plot is built, provided Christie with an almost infinite number of possibilities and she worked her way methodically through most of them. More than almost any other novel, this scenario seemed to challenge her mental fertility as she considered every character living in Broadhinny, the scene of the novel, as a possible participant in the earlier murders. In this extract from Notebook 43 she tries various scenarios with the possible killer underlined (her underlining) in each case. As we know, it was idea 1B that she eventually settled on.

Which?

A. False—elderly Cranes—with daughter (girl—Evelyn)

B. Real—Robin—son with mother son [Upward]

A. False Invalid mother (or not invalid) and son

B. Real—dull wife of snob A.P. (Carter) Dau[ghter]

A. False artistic woman with son

B. Real middle-aged wife—dull couple—or flashy Carters (daughter invalid)

A. False widow—soon to marry rich man

[A] False man with dogs—stepson—different name

[B] Real—invalid mother and daughter—dau[ghter] does it [Wetherby]

And, later in the same Notebook, she considers which of her characters could fit the profiles of one of the earlier crimes, the Kane murder case:

Could be

Robin’s mother (E. Kane)

Robin (EK’s son)

Mrs Crane (EK)

Their daughter (EK’s dau)

Mrs Carter (EK’s dau)

Young William Crane (EK’s son)

Mrs Wildfell (EK’s dau)

In Notebook 39 Christie rattles off six (despite the heading!) plot ideas, covering within these brief sketches kidnapping, forgery, robbery, fraud, murder and extortion:

4 snappy ideas for short Stories

Kidnapping? [The Adventure of] Johnnie Waverley again—Platinum blonde—kidnaps herself?

Invisible Will? Will written on quite different document

Museum robbery—celebrated professor takes things and examines them?—or member of public does

Stamps—Fortune hidden in them—gets dealer to buy them for him

An occurrence at a public place—Savoy? Dance?

Debutantes tea? Mothers killed off in rapid succession?

The Missing Pekingese

The ‘snappy’ suggests that these were jotted down while she waited for the kettle to boil—as, indeed, they probably were. The accurate dating of this extract is debatable. The reference ‘missing Pekingese’ is to ‘The Nemean Lion’, collected in The Labours of Hercules but first published in 1939. This, taken in conjunction with the reference to the ‘Debutantes tea’, probably indicates a late 1930s date when Christie’s daughter, Rosalind, would have been a debutante. Only two of the ideas appear in print (‘Invisible Will’ in ‘Motive Vs Opportunity’ in The Thirteen Problems and ‘Stamps’ in ‘Strange Jest’ and Spiders Web), although not quite as they appear here.

In Notebook 47 Christie is in full flight planning a new short story, possibly a commission as she specifies the number of words. The following is all contained on one page and was probably written straight off:

Ideas for 7000 word story

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.)

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’.

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 a wife-killing husband with a perfect alibi; she also considered Miss Johnston and, in fact, Mrs Leidner herself was a strong contender for the role of killer for much of the plotting. The setting, the archaeological dig, would seem to have been the fixed idea for this novel and the rest of the plot was woven around it rather than vice versa.

Although this still seems surprising, it is in keeping with her general method of working. Her strengths lay in her unfettered mental fertility and her lack of system. Her initial inspiration could be as vague as a gypsy’s curse (Endless Night), an archaeological dig (Murder in Mesopotamia) or a newspaper advertisement (A Murder is Announced). After that, she let her not inconsiderable imagination have free rein with the idea and hey, presto! a year later the latest Christie appeared on the bookshelves. And some of the ideas that did not make it into that masterpiece might well surface in the one to be published the following year—or ten years hence.

We now have a clearer idea of Christie’s approach to the construction of her stories. Using the Notebooks as a combination of sounding board and literary sketchpad, she devised and developed; she selected and rejected; she sharpened and polished; she revisited and recycled. And, as I hope to show by a more detailed analysis in the following chapters, out of this seeming chaos she produced a unique and immortal body of work.

Exhibit B: Other Crime Writers in the Notebooks

Apart from the ‘13 at Dinner’ list in Notebook 41, Agatha Christie makes various references to her fellow crime writers throughout the Notebooks. The following is a selection of those mentioned:

E.C. Bentley

Apart from his appearance in connection with the Detection Club, he is also referred to in Notebook 41. The following concerns a contribution to Bentley’s anthology A Second Century of Detective Stories, published in 1938, where ‘The Case of the Distressed Lady’ from Partners in Crime represents Christie; she did not write a story specifically for inclusion.

A HP story for Bentley

G.K. Chesterton

The creator of Father Brown, the immortal priest detective, and first president of the Detection Club, Chesterton contributed to their collaborative novel The Floating Admiral. The reference in Notebook 66 is a reminder to provide a short story for him, presumably for his 1935 anthology A Century of Detective Stories. She did not write a new one but instead provided ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’.

Ideas for G.K.C.

John Creasey

In Notebook 52 there are two references, both very similar, to John Creasey, British crime writer of almost 600 books. Hugely prolific under a variety of pseudonyms, he was also a founder of the Crime Writers Association. In The Clocks, the typewriting agency, which is the focus of much of the novel, does some work for Creasey-like authors. He did not write detective fiction.

Miss M[artindale] is chief agent—Sec[retary] to Creasey—who wrote spy stories

Rufus King

Twice in Notebook 35, during the plotting of Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Christie mentions Murder by Latitude, the title of a novel by this largely forgotten writer, although his name itself does not appear. Murder by Latitude features a typical Christie setting, aboard a ship from which contact with land has been severed. There are a few King titles in the library at Greenway House.

Atmosphere like Murder by Latitude—some people—amongst them a Murderer

A.E.W. Mason

Mason was the creator of Inspector Hanaud. The reference in Notebook 35 is to At the Villa Rose, published in 1910, a case involving the death of an elderly woman and the suspicion surrounding her companion. While plotting One, Two, Buckle my Shoe Christie reminds herself of it:

A murder discovered (woman? Elderly? Like Villa Rose) Clue—a shoe buckle

Edgar Allan Poe

The ‘inventor’ of the detective story when he published ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in 1841, ‘The Purloined Letter’ is another famous case for his detective Auguste Dupin, turning on the idea of hiding in plain sight. Christie’s reference is in connection with a fortune hidden not in but on an envelope—as stamps. She used this plot device in the short story ‘Strange Jest’ and also much later, in Spider’s Web. The concept of hiding in plain sight is also used in ‘The Nemean Lion’.

Stamps—fortune left in them—on old letters in desk—‘Purloined Letter’ mentioned—they look in obvious envelope—really stamps on it

Dorothy L. Sayers

Sayers’ creation Lord Peter Wimsey made his debut in 1923 in Whose Body. In addition to the writer herself, Wimsey is mentioned in Notebook 41—this time in a reference to Ronnie West in Lord Edgware Dies. It is also possible that the naming of Dr Peter Lord in Sad Cypress is homage to Christie’s great contemporary.

Ronnie West (debonair Peter Wimseyish)