by John Curran
A reference to Christopher Wren’s suspicious suitcase appears in the novella, as does the ‘get me the police’ phrase; the combination of these two ideas would lend support to the theory that it is the novella version to which the Notebook refers. Also notable is the odd reference to Mrs Bolton rather than Mrs Boyle, the name by which she is known in every version.
Crooked House 23 May 1949
Charles Hayward falls in love with Sophia Leonides during the war and is fascinated by her family, who live together in a crooked house ruled over by her wealthy grandfather. When he is poisoned, it is obvious that a member of the family is crooked in the criminal sense.
Crooked House remains one of the great Christie shock endings. So shocking was it considered that Collins wanted her to change the ending (Sunday Times interview, 27 February 1966), but she refused. It would be reasonable, therefore, to suppose that this solution was the book’s raison d’être. At least judging from the Notebooks we have, however, this was far from the case. As we saw in Chapter 3, several characters were considered as possible murderers before Christie arrived at the perfect solution.
In her specially written foreword to the Penguin ‘Million’ edition of Crooked House Agatha Christie writes: ‘This book is one of my own special favourites. I saved it for years, thinking about it, working it out, saying to myself “One day when I have got plenty of time, and want to really enjoy myself—I’ll begin it.” I should say that of one’s output, five books are work to one that is real pleasure. Writing Crooked House was pure pleasure.’
If, indeed, she spent years thinking and working it out, none of those notes have survived. Notebook 14, which contains most of the notes for this title, also contains, very exceptionally, two instances of dates. A few pages before the Crooked House outline the dates ‘Sept. 1947’ and ‘20th Oct [1947]’ occur. The novel first appeared in an American serialisation in October 1948 and was published in the UK in May 1949. From internal evidence (a reference to Aristide’s will being drafted ‘last year’ in November 1946) and from the evidence of the Notebooks below, the book was completed late in 1947 or early in 1948. So the years spent ‘thinking about it and working it out’ are, in all probability, those spent in the mental process before pen was put to paper. The more than 20 pages of notes cover the entire course of the novel.
The first page of notes in Notebook 14 is also headed ‘Crooked House’ so it seems to have been the title from the beginning. And, indeed, it is difficult to think of a better one. But (as we saw earlier in this chapter) Notebook 56 lists, on its opening page, the germ of A Pocket Full of Rye, which includes a distinct reference to a crooked house—although it is possible that the intention was to have a crooked, i.e. dishonest, businessman and no reference to the novel of that name is intended.
Sing a song of sixpence—the crooked sixpence found (a Crooked man Crooked wife Crooked house)
Coming home—Parlourmaid—maid and son—collusion—maid killed to prevent her telling
Some pages before starting the serious plotting of this title we find two references to it:
Crooked House
Crippled soldier—with scarred face—old man is treating him for war wounds—but not war wounds—really a murderer
Plans Sept. 1947
Crooked House (The Alt[erations]). Done
It is not possible to date the first entry as this ‘crippled soldier’ scenario does not appear in any Christie title, but the next, on the following page, is headed unambiguously, showing that the bulk of the novel, if not the entire novel, was completed by this date with only the alterations to attend to. As we saw in Chapter 3, the crossing out of words is Christie’s usual indication that something has been completed; here, in the same ink, we have the word ‘Done’ added.
Two pages later the plotting begins. The family is set out in some detail, as is the Sophia/Charles set-up:
Old Aristide Kriston—Gnome but attractive—vitality—a restaurant keeper—then marries the daughter of a fox hunting squire—good looks—very fair and English.
Roger—Greek—clever—devoted to father
Clemency—woman scientist
Leo—fair handsome [possibly a forerunner of Philip]
Penelope—good humoured—motivated [possibly a forerunner of Magda]
Sophia
His second wife—Dorcas (Tabitha) [Brenda]
Laurence—the crippled tutor
[Told in] First person—Charles(?) in Foreign office—Sophia Alexander is in his department—her talk—attraction—Oh, we all live together in a little crooked house—he looks up nursery rhyme—sees her in London—or arranges so to do—murder of Grandfather. She refuses to marry him—because of murder—because I don’t know which of us did it?—anyone of us might. His father is A.C. [Assistant Commissioner]—Charles goes into it all—the old man—his marriage
There is a succinct, initial assertion on the second page of notes that ‘Harriet kills the old man’. However, consideration is subsequently given to five other characters—Brenda, the second wife; Clemency, Roger’s wife; the tutor Laurence; the formidable Edith de Haviland, Aristide’s sister-in-law; and Sophia—before eventually returning to the child-as-murderer ploy. The idea ‘Laurence—really no legs’ is not pursued, despite Christie’s fascination with this as a plot device (see ‘The House of Dreams’, page 303), and Laurence remains crippled only in the emotional sense. And although the killer was eventually named Josephine, this name does not appear until the thirteenth page of notes. She is earlier (as above) referred to as Harriet and/or Emma:
Dorcas—No [Brenda]
Clemency? Yes her motive—Fanatical—slightly mad
Or shall it be Clemency—No gain—they will be out on the world
Does Laurence do it—a cripple—Laurence—really no legs—therefore always different heights
Edith—Yes—possible
Sophia Possible Lack of moral fibre
Christie explores this idea further, although it is possible to infer—‘Yes—interesting’ in the first extract and ‘(if J)’, five pages later, in the second—that at this stage she had not definitely settled on Josephine (as she has now become) as the killer:
Emma [Josephine]—Yes—interesting—not normal—wants power—hated her grandfather for something particular—(wouldn’t let her do ballet dancing and you must start young?): Motive—adjust for her method—an abnormally high intelligence. If so is there a second murder—Yes—the old nurse (if Emma)
The weight over the door (if J) or definitely dies—little black book nursery.
Child’s ending—best evidence there is—no good in court—children don’t like being asked direct questions—to you she was showing off.
Charles and Josephine—asks about letters—I was making it up—won’t tell you—you shouldn’t have told police.
Josephine writing in her book. A.C. says—be careful of the child—there’s a poisoner about
Although there is no mention of Josephine in the early pages, when she is mentioned she is given a page to herself and her detective work. Throughout the novel we are told of her ghoulish curiosity, her eavesdropping, her knowledge of detective fiction, and, poignantly, her little black book containing, supposedly, her detective notes:
Does Harriet know that Uncle Roger has been doing this?
An odious child who always knows what’s going on
Josephine—the ghoul—she knows—I’ve been doing detective work
Finds Roger was going away—because I think because he’d embezzled money
And Edith hates Brenda—they wrote to each other—I know where they kept the letters
I didn’t like grandfather—ballet—dancing nono.
Although it is an important Christie title, due to its shocking denouement, Crooked House is not a formally clued detective story. The answer is very evident in retrospect—Josephine’s confident claim of her knowledge of the killer, her lack of fear, the dents on the wash-house floor from the experiments
with the marble door-stop—but it is not possible to arrive at the solution by logical deduction. Despite this, the novel shows that even after a 30-year career Christie still retains her ability to surprise and entertain.
A Pocket Full of Rye 9 November 1953
Rex Fortescue is poisoned in his counting house; his wife is poisoned during afternoon tea of bread and honey; and the maid is strangled while hanging out the clothes. A macabre interpretation of the nursery rhyme brings Miss Marple to Yewtree Lodge to investigate the presence of blackbirds.
The notes for this novel are contained in five Notebooks, the bulk of them in Notebook 53, with shorter references in the other four. It would seem from internal evidence that this plot was simmering for some time before Christie refined it for the novel. A Pocket Full of Rye first appeared in October as a serial in the Daily Express. The official reader’s report from Collins, dated April 1953, describes it as ‘highly readable, exciting, baffling and intelligent; it is plotted and handled with a skill that makes most current detective fiction look like the work of clumsy amateurs’. Although he considered the means of the first murder too far-fetched, overall he rated it as a ‘good’ Christie, which seems a little lukewarm after such an effusive description.
The following cryptic reference in Notebook 56 gives the genesis of the plot, the first story, ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, of The Thirteen Problems, which had appeared 25 years earlier in December 1927:
General pattern like hundreds and thousands
Here, a housemaid, at the behest of her married lover, sprinkles ‘hundreds and thousands’ (the coloured sugar confection used mainly to decorate the top of trifles and small sponge cakes) liberally doped with arsenic over a dessert in order to eliminate an inconvenient wife. As if to clinch the matter, the maid in both short story and novel is called Gladys.
As can be seen from the following note in Notebook 14, the plots of A Pocket Full of Rye and They Do It with Mirrors were intertwined in the early stages of plotting (this note would seem to date from the late 1940s as it appears with notes for Crooked House):
Mirrors
Percival and Lancelot brothers—P good boy—L bad lad—violent antagonism between them—actually they get together to put Father out of the way and his young wife? The trick—P and L fake quarrel—overheard below (actually P. does it above) L. returns and stuns him—calls for help
The faked quarrel became the main plot device of They Do It with Mirrors while the brothers Lancelot and Percival remained with A Pocket Full of Rye.
A few pages later Christie sketches a plot:
The King was in his Counting House
Pompous magnate dead in (a) Office (b) Suburban house—Blackbirds Mine
Good son Percival—bad son Lance—deadly enemies (really in cahoots?) Motive—swindle by one of the sons? Servant (N.A.A.F.I. girl) in league with Lance—she could alter all clocks. Girl takes father’s coffee to study—comes out screaming? Lance first to get to him (kills him then) others coming up. Old man drugged first—must have been at dinner (Lance not there). Girl suspected—could have doped him and stabbed him and put rye in man’s pockets. They argue—she is found dead—with clothes pin
This is much nearer to the one she eventually chose, although much of the detail was to change—e.g. there is no changing of clocks or stabbing in the finished novel and the brothers are not ‘in cahoots’. Here also is the first mention of Blackbird Mines, the supposedly worthless mines which prove to be a source of uranium, thereby providing the killer’s motivation. This aspect of the plot is very reminiscent of the swindle perpetrated on his partner by Simeon Lee, the victim in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. The reference to a ‘N.A.A.F.I. girl’ is to the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute, founded in 1921 to run recreational establishments needed by the armed forces, and to sell goods to servicemen and their families.
But it is in Notebook 53 that we find most of the plotting for the book. Although this follows the pattern of the novel closely, we can see here that various other possibilities were considered before their eventual rejection. Both Percival and his wife, and Lance and Adele, were considered as the murderers; Lance might have been either a ‘good boy’ or a ‘bad lot’; and Christie proposed the use of strychnine or arsenic as a poison rather than taxine:
Percival married to a girl (crook) abroad. She comes down to stay with other brother Lancelot—posing as his wife—she and Percival are the ones who do the murder
Lance in it with Adele—Adele is engaged to father—gets her to kill father—then arrives just in time to poison her tea
Lance is on plane returning from East. He is good son—his wife is Ruby Mackenzie
Good son Percival—bad son Lance—deadly enemies (really in cahoots?)
Strychnine and arsenic found later in cupboard in hall on top shelf or in dining room alcove in soup tureen on top shelf
After these speculations the plot begins to emerge. The material in the following extracts, all from Notebook 53, appears in the novel:
Lance (bad boy) is returning on plane—father has sent for him. Before he can get home father dies—[Perci]Val’s wife is Ruby Mackenzie—Lance has got together with Marlene at holiday camp. Gives her powder to put in early morning tea—says it will make his father ill—he will be sent for—Marlene is in terrible state—Lance arrives home—in time to poison Adelaide—(in tea?) then adds it to honey
Chapter I
Tea during 11—the newest typist makes it Office—blond secretary—takes in the boss’s tea ‘Mr Fortescue is in conference—’ Scream—ill—blond rushes in—out—call for doctor—phone—Hospital
Tea—A[dele] eats honey off comb—son gives it to her in tea—dies. Or son poisons her by putting stuff in meal before he comes back officially—girl meets him outside
Maid in garden—clothes peg on nose. Miss M points out later you wouldn’t go out and hang up clothes at that time? But you would meet young man
After death of girl Gladys—Miss M arrives in hall—sergeant baffled—Inspector remembers her—Miss M very positive about girl Gladys—dead—must be stopped—nose and clothes peg—human dignity
Hickory Dickory Dock 31 October 1955
A series of mysterious thefts in the student hostel run by Miss Lemon’s sister in Hickory Road culminates in the death of one of the students. The incongruity of the objects stolen attracts the attention of Hercule Poirot, who visits the hostel—just before the first death.
Hickory Dickory Dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one
The mouse ran down
Hickory Dickory Dock
The notes for Hickory Dickory Dock are scattered over 50 pages of Notebook 12, with two brief and unsuccessful attempts to come to grips with it in two other Notebooks (See below and ‘Miscellaneous’ on page 129—a note which dates from six years earlier). Despite the rejection of these other ideas Christie did not give up on utilising the rhyme, although it supplies only the title and even that is tenuous. Apart from the address (which itself was changed from Gillespie Road) there is no attempt in the novel to follow the verse, one of the few references to it coming in the closing lines when Poirot quotes it.
The following in Notebook 12 shows that the book had been largely finished early in the year prior to publication:
Suggestions to enlarge and improve Hic. Dic. Doc. May 1954
Some motifs from earlier novels recur. Mrs Nicoletis has a conversation with her unnamed killer much as Amy Murgatroyd did in A Murder is Announced; and Patricia Lane’s telephone call to Poirot as the killer attacks her recalls Helen Abernethie’s in After the Funeral and Donald Ross’s in Lord Edgware Dies. And there is another unlikely, and unnecessary, relationship revealed towards the end of the novel. It is along the lines of similar disclosures in Four-Fifty from Paddington and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. Both Morgan and Osborne refer to the fact that there were plans, in the early 1960s, to turn this title into a musical. Unlikely as th
is may seem, some of the music was written and a title—‘Death Beat’—had been decided upon, but the project eventually came to nothing.
The incongruity of the stolen objects presents Poirot, and the reader, with an intriguing puzzle and the explanations are satisfying. But there are arguably too many characters and some of the foreign students are little more than stereotypes.
Each of the first five pages of notes for this book is headed ‘Holiday Task’, suggesting that it was written at a time when Christie should have been relaxing. And the plotting of it did not come easily, as endless permutations and much repetition is included. It does not read as if she had a very clear idea of the plot when she started. The first page of the notes has the glimmering of a plot, much of which remained, although there were to be many changes before she was happy with it. By the end of the first page she had reached a possible starting point with echoes—‘one thing needed others camouflage’—of The A.B.C. Murders:
Things have disappeared—a rather stupid girl ‘Cilly’ (for Celia or Cecelia)—very enamoured of dour student—going in for psychiatry—he doesn’t notice her. Valerie, a clever girl puts her up to stealing ‘He’ll notice you through silly things or rather—one really good thing’
Stealing—things keep disappearing—really just one thing needed others camouflage
Some early ideas were, thankfully, not pursued…
Hickory Dickory Dock
Complex about the word Dock—a terror story—danger—girl in job—finds out something
