Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

by John Curran

  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

  It is a major disappointment that there remains nothing from the creation of two of Christie’s most famous titles—The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express. These are among her most audacious constructions and a behind-the-scenes look could have been fascinating. About the latter we know absolutely nothing, as it is not mentioned even in passing. Notebook 67 does have a list of characters from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd but nothing more. There is, however, some background to its creation contained in an intriguing correspondence with Lord Mountbatten of Burma.

  In a letter dated 28 March 1924 Mountbatten wrote to ‘Mrs Christie, Author of The Man who was No. 4, c/o The Sketch’ (this was a reference to the recently finished serial publication of The Big Four in that magazine). Writing in the third person, he expressed his admiration for Poirot and Christie and begged to offer an idea for a detective story. He explained that, although he had had a few stories published under a pseudonym, his career at sea did not leave a lot of time for writing.

  Briefly, his idea was that Hastings, before he leaves for South America, should introduce a friend, Genny, to Poirot. When a murder occurs Poirot writes to inform Hastings and explains that Genny will write subsequent letters keeping him abreast of developments. The plot involves the drugging of the victim to appear dead; when the body is ‘discovered’, the murderer stabs him. Genny’s alibi appears impeccable as he is with Poirot until the discovery. Only in the final chapter is Genny unmasked as the killer. As can be seen, Christie retained the underlying suggestion, the narrator/murderer idea. All the surrounding detail, however, was her embroidery on his basic pattern.

  On 26 November 1969 Mountbatten wrote again to congratulate Christie on The Mousetrap’s seventeenth birthday. She replied within the week and apologised in case she had not acknowledged his suggestion of 45 years earlier (he subsequently assured her that she had), thanked him for his kind words and enclosed her latest book, Hallowe’en Party (‘not as good as Roger Ackroyd but not too bad’). She also mentioned that her brother-in-law, James, had suggested a similar narrator/murderer plot to her around the same time, although she had thought then that it would be very difficult to carry off.

  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.

  …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 p
age 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.

  …and filed…

  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.

  …and labelled…

  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.

  …something scribbled down…

  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—an
d I think in that she would not be alone!

  …a kind of sketch of a plot…

  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]

  …it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot at least to write something else…

  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.