by John Curran
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
’It’s rather early to ring you up but I want to ask you a favour.’
‘Yes?’
‘It is the annual dinner of our Detective Authors’ Club.’
Third Girl, Chapter 2
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 Detection Club in the Notebooks
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 Dorot
hy 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.
3
The Moving Finger:
Agatha Christie at Work
‘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.’
Dead Man’s Folly, Chapter 17
SOLUTIONS REVEALED
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.
Dumb Witnesses
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.
Pigeon among the Cats
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
&
nbsp; 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?
