by John Curran
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:
Murder Made Easy
Dotted throughout the Notebooks are dozens of phrases that show Agatha Christie the resourceful creator, Agatha Christie the critical professional, Agatha Christie the sly humorist at work. In many cases she ‘thought’ directly on to the page and there are many instances where she addresses herself in this way.
Sometimes it is idle speculation as she toys with various ideas before settling on just one:
‘How about this’…as she works out the timetable of ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’
‘A good idea would be’…this, tantalisingly, is on an otherwise blank page
‘or—a little better’…firming up the motive in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
‘How about girl gets job’…from early notes for A Caribbean Mystery
‘Who? Why? When? How? Where? Which?’…the essence of a detective story from One, Two, Buckle my Shoe
‘Which way do we turn?’…in the middle of Third Girl
‘A prominent person—such as a minister—(Aneurin Bevan type?)—on holiday? Difficulties as I don’t know about Ministers’…rueful while looking for a new idea in the mid-1940s
When she has decided on a plot she often muses about the intricacies and possibilities of a variation:
‘Does Jeremy have to be there then’…pondering on character movements for Spider’s Web
‘Contents of letter given? Or Not’…in the course of Cat among the Pigeons
‘How does she bring it about…What drug’…while planning A Caribbean Mystery
‘Yes—better if dentist is dead’…a decision reached during One, Two, Buckle my Shoe
‘Why? Why??? Why?????’…frustration during One, Two, Buckle my Shoe
‘He could be murderer—if there is a murder’…a possibility for Fiddlers Three
Like a true professional she is self-critical:
‘unlike twin idea—woman servant one of them—NO!!’…a decision during The Labours of Hercules
‘NB All v. unlikely’…as she approaches the end of Mrs McGinty’s Dead
‘All right—a little elaboration—more mistresses?’…not very happy with Cat among the Pigeons
She includes reminders to herself:
‘Look up datura poisoning…and re-read Cretan Bull’…as she writes A Caribbean Mystery
‘Find story about child and other child plays with him’…probably her short story ‘The Lamp’
‘Possible variant—(read a private eye book first before typing)’…a reminder during The Clocks
‘A good idea—needs working on’…for Nemesis
Things to line up’…during Dead Man’s Folly
And there are the odd flashes of humour:
‘Van D. pops off’…during A Caribbean Mystery
‘Pennyfather is conked’…a rather uncharitable description from At Bertram’s Hotel
‘Elephantine Suggestions’…from, obviously, Elephants Can Remember
‘Suspicion of (clever!) reader to be directed toward Nurse’…a typically astute observation from Curtain when the nurse is completely innocent (note the use of the exclamation mark after ‘clever’!)
From Notebook 35 and One, Two, Buckle my Shoe—the essence of detective fiction distilled into six words.
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.)
Destinations Unknown
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’.
Surprise, Surprise!
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 b
oard 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
‘Do you like detective stories. I do. I read them all and I’ve got autographs from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie and Dickson Carr and H. C. Bailey.’
The Body in the Library, Chapter 6
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’.
