Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

by John Curran

  An interesting footnote is provided by Christie’s great American contemporary fellow crime-writer Ellery Queen. In his In the Queen’s Parlor (1957) he discloses how, twice during his writing career, he had to abandon a book-in-progress when he read the latest Agatha Christie. Francis M. Nevins in his study of Queen, Royal Bloodline, confirms that one of these was a plot based on the same idea as Ten Little Niggers.

  unfolding of his plan, both before and after his supposed death, but it appears from these brief references that Christie toyed with the idea of mentioning the nameless ‘watcher’. Far more effective and less melodramatic, however, is the concept she adopted at the end of Chapter 11, and again in Chapter 13, when she allows us to share the thoughts of the six remaining characters, including the killer’s, but without identifying the thinker.

  One, Two, Buckle my Shoe 4 November 1940

  Hercule Poirot’s dentist’s appointment coincides with the murder of his dentist. A shoe buckle, a disappearance and more deaths follow before he can say ‘Nineteen, twenty, My plate’s empty.’

  One, two, buckle my shoe Three, four, shut the door Five, six, pick up sticks Seven, eight, lay them straight Nine, ten, a big fat hen Eleven, twelve, men must delve Thirteen, fourteen, maids are courting Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen Seventeen, eighteen, maids in waiting Nineteen, twenty, my plate’s empty…

  The notes for this novel are contained in four Notebooks with the majority (over 75 pages) in Notebook 35. They alternate for much of that Notebook with the notes for Five Little Pigs. One, Two, Buckle my Shoe is Christie’s most complicated novel. It features a triple impersonation and a complex murder plot with its beginnings in the distant past. The novel turns on the identity of a dead body but, unlike Four-Fifty from Paddington, it is a tantalising, rather than an aggravating, question.

  The only aspect of this novel that does not ring true is, ironically, the use of the nursery rhyme. It is strained and unconvincing and, apart from the all-important shoe buckle, the rhyme has little or no significance other than providing chapter titles. This is confirmed by the following extract from Notebook 35 where Christie jots down the rhyme and tries to match ideas to each section. As can be seen, they are not very persuasive and in fact few of them, apart from the shoe buckle, went into the novel:

  One Two Buckle my Shoe—the Shoe Buckle—think of it—the start of this case

  The Closed Door—something about a door—either room locked or something not heard through closed door when it should have been.

  Picking up sticks—assembling clues

  Lay them Straight—order and method

  A good fat hen—the will—read—rich woman it was who died—murdered woman—fat elderly—two girls—man recently coming to live with rich relative?

  Men must Delve—Digging up garden—another body—discovered buried in garden—wrong owner of shoe buckle?

  Maids a courting—2 girls—heiresses of Fat Hen? Or would have been connected by husband of fat hen—in collusion with maid servant

  Maids in the kitchen—servant’s gossip

  Maids in Waiting?

  My Plate is Empty

  End

  Clue—a shoe buckle

  An example of the type of organised listing that occurs throughout the Notebooks, the plot of One, Two, Buckle my Shoe occurs as Idea H on a list from A to U. This list looks to have been written straight off with three or four ideas to a page in the same handwriting and with the same pen. Most of them have more detail included but Idea H below is exactly as it appears (the possibility of combining it with the twins or chambermaid idea—see also ‘The House of Dreams’, page 303—was not pursued).

  Ideas

  A. Poirot’s Last Case—history repeats itself—Styles now a guest house [Curtain]

  B. Remembered Death—Rosemary dead [Sparkling Cyanide]

  C. Dangerous drug stolen from doctor’s car. [See Hickory Dickory Dock below and ‘The House of Dreams’]

  D. Legless man—sometimes tall—sometimes short

  E. Identical twins (one killed in railway smash)

  F. Not identical twins

  G. A murderer is executed—afterwards is found to be innocent [Five Little Pigs/Ordeal by Innocence]

  H. Dentist Murder Motive? Chart substitution? Combine with E? or F? or J?

  I. Two women—arty friends—ridiculous—one is crook

  J. Chambermaid in hotel accomplice of man

  K. Stamps—but stamps on letter [‘Strange Jest’]

  L. Prussic acid

  M. Caustic potash in cachet

  N. Stabbed through eye with hatpin

  O. Witness in murder case—quite unimportant—offered post abroad

  P. Third Floor Flat idea

  Q. Figurehead of ship idea

  R. Prussic acid—‘Cry’ in bath

  S. Diabetic idea—insulin (substitute something else) [Crooked House]

  T. Body in the Library—Miss Marple [The Body in the Library]

  U. Stored blood idea, wrong blood

  A few pages later, the germ of the plot emerges although, as can be seen from the question marks, the idea was hazy. As we saw in Chapter 3, Christie considered a multitude of possibilities in working out its plot. But apart from a name change this short musing is the basis of the novel:

  Dead woman supposed to be actress? Rose Lane—(really is Rose Lane) but body shown to be someone else—

  Why?

  Why???

  Why?????

  From the (admittedly unscientific) evidence that the word ‘dentist’ occurs 65 times in the Notebooks against a mere 13 appearances for the word ‘buckle’, it would seem that the background came before the all-important clue, or, even the nursery rhyme. But this combination of dentist—his family, patients, surgery and, vitally, files—together with the rhyme and its accompanying main clue, gave Christie the ideal situation for creating confusion about the identification of an unrecognisable body. She could now get down to serious plot development:

  Dentist Murder

  H.P. in dentist’s chair—latter talking while drilling Points:

  (1) Never forget a face—patient—can’t remember where I saw him before—it will come back to me

  (2) Other angles—a daughter—engaged to a rip of a young man—father disapproves

  (3) Professional character—his partner

  Much hinges on evidence of teeth (death of dentist)

  Dentist murdered—H.P. in waiting room at time—patients charts removed or substituted

  Dentist—HP in waiting room—sent away

  Rings Japp—or latter rings him

  Do you remember who was in waiting room?

  She begins to develop the novel’s characters, sketching in tentative notes about names and backgrounds, in a well-ordered list of the scenes that would introduce them:

  Latest dentist ideas

  Little silhouettes of the people going to Mr Claymore that day

  1 Mr Claymore himself at breakfast

  2 Miss D—mentions a day off or just gets telephone call

  3 Miss Cobb or Miss Slob at breakfast—Miss C saying much better—not aching

  4 Mr Amberiotis—talk of his landlady—about his tooth—careful English

  5 Caroline—(young swindler?) or Mr Bell (dentist’s daughter lover—American? Trying to see father)

  6 Dentist’s partner—rings—can he come up to see him—a service lift—unprofessional conduct?

  7 Mr. Marron Levy—a board meeting—a little snappy—admits at end—toothache—gets into Daimler—29 Harley St.

  8 H.P. His tooth—his conversation with dentist—meets on the stairs—woman with very white teeth?

  Later Japp—suspicious foreigner

  Not all of the characters that she sketched made it into the novel and those that did appeared under different names. The dentist victim became Morley instead of Claymore, Miss D became Gladys Neville, and Marron Levy became Alistair Blunt. Mr Bell possibly became Frank Carter, the boyfriend o
f Gladys, and Miss Cobb’s conviction that her toothache is improving is similar to our eventual introduction to Miss Sainsbury Seale. Miss Slob and Caroline were abandoned after this listing. Oddly, the shoe buckle is not mentioned at all here and the white-toothed woman mentioned in item 8 has replaced or, more likely, foreshadowed, Miss Sainsbury Seale.

  Throughout the notes Christie continued trying to fit her ingenious plot into the plan of the nursery rhyme:

  1—2

  Miss S going to dentist

  Mr Mauro

  Miss Nesbit

  Mr Milton

  H.P. in waiting room—shoe buckle—loose—annoys him

  3—4

  Japp comes—P. goes with him—interview partner’s wife?—secretary etc.

  5—6

  The body—evidence of identity destroyed—but identified from clothes. Mrs Chapman’s flat—the shoes—either a buckle missing or one found there

  9—10

  Julia Olivera—married not in love—Aunty Julia—‘the daughter is attractive’

  11—12

  Men Must Delve—dentist’s secretary had been crying because young man has lost his job. In garden next morning—the gardener—P goes round a bush—Frank Carter—digging

  13—14

  Mrs Adams—that conversation—then—in park Jane and Howard

  15—16

  Final Maids in the Kitchen touch—one of the maids upstairs looked over—saw Carter—watched Carter went in—saw dentist dead

  17—18

  Miss Montressor—dark—striking—gardening—her footprint in bed

  19—20

  P outlines case—smart patent new shoe—foot and ankle strap—buckle torn off. Later woman found—shoe and buckle sewn on. It was a woman’s shabby shoe—other was new

  But it just doesn’t work. The early sections—the buckle, picking up sticks (clues) and laying them straight (interpreting them)—are acceptable. But the gardening motif (‘men must delve’) and the maids looking over the banisters are simply unconvincing. The dauntingly clever plot does not need this window-dressing and the book can stand, without any references to the rhyme, as a supreme example of detective fiction.

  If, however, any further proof were necessary of the ingenuity and fertility of Agatha Christie, a glance at almost any page of Notebook 35 would supply it. The following ideas are scattered throughout the notes for One, Two, Buckle my Shoe. None of them was used.

  Idea of two women—one criminal working with man goes to dentist—simply in order to give man alibi

  Harvey—rich, unscrupulous—married to young wife—a widow when he married her—had she murdered first husband?

  Or Double suicide man and woman—one of them not the person—therefore suicide not murder—dentist could have identified her

  M. wants to get rid of someone—(his wife?) therefore he kills his wife and another man but it proves not to be his wife but another woman

  Four and Twenty Blackbirds March 1941

  Poirot investigates the mysterious death of an elderly man when his suspicions are aroused—by the man’s diet.

  The title of ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’ appears for the first time in Notebook 20:

  4 and 20 blackbirds

  Located ahead of Christie’s reminder to herself (‘To be added—Sketch of Leatheran career—Chapter II’) to amend Murder in Mesopotamia, this dates it to the mid-1930s, at least six years before the story first appeared. A rough sketch of the story itself appears in Notebook 66 just ahead of a sketch for ‘Triangle at Rhodes’:

  Impersonation of old man—he eats a different meal on the Tuesday—nothing else noticed. Died later.

  Mr P Parker Pyne—They talk—points out elderly man with a horn beamed and spectacles eye-glass—bushy eyebrows

  Old fellow hasn’t turned up—waiter says he is upset—first noticed it a fortnight ago—when he wouldn’t have his jam roll—had blackberry tart instead. Sees body—teeth—no blackberry tart. Empty house—fell downstairs—dead—open letter

  There is one particularly surprising aspect of the jottings in Notebook 66—the allocation of this case to Parker Pyne instead of Hercule Poirot. In fact this change could be quite easily imagined; this is not one of the more densely plotted Poirot stories, and it is probable that market forces dictated the substitution of the Belgian. And as we shall see, this is not an isolated example of the interchangeability of characters.

  It has to be said that the connection to the nursery rhyme is very tenuous. For the purposes of the story the blackbirds of the rhyme become blackberries: the main clue is the lack of discoloration of the victim’s teeth (‘Sees body—teeth—no blackberry tart’) despite the fact that he was seen to eat blackberry pie shortly before his supposed death. The rather obvious disguise is the other important element of the tale. A more fitting title is that used on the story’s first US appearance in Colliers Magazine in November 1940, ‘The Case of the Regular Customer’.

  Five Little Pigs 11 January 1943

  This little piggy went to market

  This little piggy stayed at home

  This little piggy ate roast beef

  This little piggy had none

  This little piggy cried wee-wee-wee all the way home.

  Carla Lemarchant approaches Hercule Poirot and asks him to vindicate her mother, who died in prison 16 years earlier while serving a sentence for the murder of her husband. Poirot approaches the five other suspects and asks them to write accounts of the events leading up to the fatal day.

  Published in the UK in January 1943, having already appeared in the US six months earlier, Five Little Pigs is the apex of Christie’s career as a detective novelist; it is her most perfect combination of detective and ‘straight’ novel. The characters are carefully drawn and the tangle of relationships more seriously realised than in any other Christie title. It is a cunning and scrupulously clued formal detective novel, an elegiac love story and a masterly example of story-telling technique with five individual accounts of one devastating event. And in this novel at least, the use of the admittedly short rhyme is not forced. Each of the five main characters is perfectly reflected in the words of the verse. And perhaps because there are no further verses, the analogy does not seem strained (as, for instance, it does in the case of One, Two, Buckle my Shoe). But, as the Notebooks reveal, the journey to the book we now know was neither straightforward nor obvious.

  From the technical point of view the test Christie sets herself in this novel is daunting. As well as the 16-year gap between the crime and its investigation she limits herself to just five possible murderers. Seven years earlier she had first experimented with the device of a small circle of suspects; in Cards on the Table she limits herself to just four bridge-players. She attempts a similar problem with Five Little Pigs, although this time she allows herself some physical clues in the shape of a glass, a beer bottle and a crushed pipette.

  It is also the greatest of Christie’s ‘murder in the past’ plots. In fact if we don’t count Dumb Witness—the investigation of a two-month-old murder—it is also the first of such plots. Alderbury, the scene of the crime, is based closely on Christie’s own Greenway House and the geography of the story corresponds exactly with its grounds. The Battery, where Elsa poses on the battlements and watches her lover die, looks out over the River Dart and the path where the crushed pipette is found leads back up to Greenway House.

  This map from Notebook 35 shows the murder scene in Five Little Pigs with the Boathouse on the left (also the scene of a murder in Dead Man’s Folly), Greenway House in the top right-hand corner, and the positions of Miss W(illiams) and C(aroline). The photo of the Battery from the time of writing shows the wall where Elsa posed.

  The nursery rhyme is quoted in full in Notebook 35, heralding 75 pages of notes:

  5 Little Pigs

  One Little Piggy went to Market (Market Basing)

  1 little “ stayed at home

  1 little “ had roast beef

&nb
sp; 1 little “ had none

  1 little “ wa-wa-wee-wee

  But it was a long and frustrating process before she arrived at the masterly plot. It is not until 60 pages into the plotting that the plot she eventually used took serious shape. Before that, she had considered a different murder method, a different murderer and different suspects; in fact, a different story altogether.

  Her ‘five little pigs’ are successful businessman Philip Blake and his stay-at-home brother Meredith, both childhood friends of the victim, artist Amyas Crale; Elsa Greer, Amyas’s model and mistress; Angela Warren, sister of the convicted Caroline; and Miss Williams, Angela’s governess. At the start of the notes we can clearly see the forerunners of these five main characters, although, as yet, Christie had not decided on the victim, let alone the villain:

  Girl—(New Zealand) learns her mother has been tried and condemned for murder—possibly convicted to penal s[ervitude]—for life and then died

  Great shock—she is an heiress uncle having left her all his money—gets engaged—tells man her real name and facts—sees look in his eye—decides then and there to do something about it—her mother not guilty—comes to H.P.

  The past—18 years ago? 1920-24

  If not guilty who was?

  4 (or 5) other people in house (a little like Bordens?)

  Did mother murder

  A. Husband