Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks

by John Curran

  UNUSED IDEAS: ONE

  In Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks I discussed some of the ideas that appeared in the Notebooks but were not further developed. Most of those included in the earlier volume were short, single ideas; a few lines scribbled by Christie in a Notebook as the idea came to her. But there are more elaborate ideas that, despite development beyond a few sentences, still did not result in a story. In some cases detailed character descriptions (‘young schoolmaster type’), definite backgrounds (‘Hellenic cruise setting’) or exact plot devices (‘real drink poisoned earlier’) are listed; even titles (‘Mousetrap II’) are included. Many of these ideas seem very promising and it is easy to imagine most of them leading to a new ‘Christie for Christmas’. Fragments of some of these ideas were used, perhaps slightly adapted, in published works and this was one of the advantages that Christie saw in the chaos of her Notebooks when she wrote in her Autobiography, ‘What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else.’

  This first selection includes two of the more elaborate sketches.

  THE CLUEDO CASE

  Book idea

  George speaks to Poirot – his sister in law – she ‘obliges’ – giving evidence – but offered a very good post in Eire [Ireland] – can she take it? (or something [in] France). Or perhaps she is a ‘Nannie’ who now does a lot of ‘cooking’ in the house.

  What evidence? Murder case but her evidence is quite unimportant

  She saw Professor Plum in the library – with the candlestick.

  Shall the people be

  General Col. Mustard

  Mrs. White – Housekeeper? Or Col. M’s sister

  Miss Scarlet – young woman of doubtful morals – engaged to son? or secretary to Plum

  Mrs. Peacock – Colonel’s sister

  Reverend Green – Former owner – in neighbourhood

  Professor Plum – Old friend of Mustard

  Result of conversation

  ‘Nannie’ or ‘Daily Help’ dies after cup of tea?

  Now – what did she see or know that she didn’t know she knew

  A Point of Time

  The siren goes on a Monday at a certain time. She says it always ‘gives her a turn.’ The point is siren went off at 11.30 and she has just said Professor Plum down stairs at 11.25 (really 11.35). Electric clock has been stopped and put on again

  What a wonderful idea – the ultimate deviser of detective puzzles and the name most associated with the country-house murder mystery adapting the classic country-house murder mystery board game; and what a shame that it was never explored. This sketch appears in Notebook 12 between detailed notes for 1954’s Spider’s Web and the Marple short story ‘Sanctuary’, so the mid 1950s seems to be the most likely date of composition. This also tallies with the 1950 release date of Cluedo.

  In many ways this sketch reads like an elaborate version of the 1924 Mr Quin short story ‘The Sign in the Sky’. In that story a housemaid mentions seeing a ‘sign’ – the Hand of God, in reality the smoke from a passing train – at the time her mistress, Vivien Barnaby, is shot. Although during the investigation the time of the shot is taken from the clocks in the house, in reality the time of the train is accurate and the clocks have been altered by the murderer. Although she does not realise the importance of her evidence, the maid is subsequently offered, and accepts, a lucrative position in distant Canada. The variation in the unused idea above is a siren and an electric clock, but it is essentially the same plot. Unreliable clocks or watches are plot features of The Murder at the Vicarage, Murder on the Orient Express and Evil under the Sun.

  The ‘Nannie dying’ idea featured in Crooked House; and the ‘post abroad’ ploy also appears in other titles. In Chapter 6 of Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Bobby is offered an attractive job in Buenos Aires and a similar offer is made to no less a person than Poirot himself in Chapter 1 of The Big Four. The concept of a character knowing something (dangerous to the killer) without realising its significance was a regular feature of Christie plots throughout her career. Sir Bartholomew Strange in Three Act Tragedy, Miss Sainsbury Seale in One, Two, Buckle my Shoe, Agnes Woddell in The Moving Finger, Heather Badcock in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side – all die without knowing why. And the unfortunate Mrs De Rushbridger, also in Three Act Tragedy, dies because she knows nothing.

  THE PLASTIC SURGEON

  Old man is crook – played market etc. Or surgeon – plastic

  Wife was hospital nurse – ill – heart – had to give up her job – nursed old man – married him –

  happy in a quiet way – had had love affair with young medical student.

  Morgan and Eiluned – son and wife – strong feelings

  Selina – dau Kathleen – daughter – (Nurse Vernon?)

  They have to live together in ‘Crooked House’ because of War difficulties.

  Old man holds purse strings – two children – Serena and Edward

  Tutor? Young man – wounded in War – a cripple – Miles

  Dr. Kirkpatrick – Suggestion is that Gertrude killed him – or Miles

  Money is left to her

  Possibly Dr. Kirkpatrick is her old boyfriend – he intends to marry Kathleen

  Triangle

  Country House Rich man dead in (1) office (2) study in suburban house

  Crooked Mile (Dr. plastic surgeon – crook)

  Old man like gnome – young hospital wife nurse

  Crooked House

  Crippled soldier with scarred face – old man is treating him for war wounds – but not war wounds – really a murderer

  Combine with Helen idea – man convinced he is a murderer. Doctor persuades him and says he will remake his face

  Crooked Man

  Old gnome like man – plastic surgeon – (struck off for unprofessional conduct – did surgery for crooks) – young dumb house wife – boisterous son – hard intellectual wife – grandchildren?

  Intelligent boy? girl?

  Fantastic persons in the house – young crippled tutor – in love with wife

  Although all of these extracts contain definite elements (and the title) of Crooked House – a young tutor, an old gnome-like man holding the purse-strings and a young wife – and all come from Notebook 14, they are included here because they also feature the Plastic Surgeon idea. With three attempts over a dozen pages it would seem that this idea was one that appealed to Christie but ultimately defeated her. It is probable that she abandoned it and subsumed most of these ideas into Crooked House. But there are foreshadowings of at least two other novels. The ‘rich man dead in office’ from the first extract explicitly presages A Pocket Full of Rye; and both ‘Combine with Helen idea’ and ‘man convinced he is a murderer’ have strong echoes of Sleeping Murder.

  Chapter 3

  Favourite Stories and ‘The Man Who Knew’

  ‘Looking back over the past, I become increasingly sure of one thing. My tastes have remained fundamentally the same.’

  * * *

  What were Agatha Christie’s own personal favourites among the many stories she wrote? In February 1972, in reply to a Japanese fan, she listed, with brief comments, her favourite books. But she makes an important point when she writes that her list of favourites would ‘vary from time to time, as every now and then I re-read an early book . . . and then I alter my opinion, sometimes thinking that it is much better than I thought it was – or nor as good as I had thought’. Although the choices are numbered it is not clear if they are in order of preference; she adds brief comments and reiterates her earlier point when she heads the list:

  At the moment my own list would possibly be:

  And Then There Were None – ‘a difficult technique which was a challenge . . .’

  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – ‘a general favourite . . .’

  A Murder is Announced – ‘all the characters interesting . . .’

  Murder on the Orient E
xpress – ‘. . . it was a new idea for a plot.’

  The Thirteen Problems – ‘a good series of short stories.’

  Towards Zero – ‘. . . interesting idea of people from different places coming towards a murder instead of starting with the murder and working from that.’

  Endless Night – ‘my own favourite at present.’

  Crooked House – ‘. . . a study of a certain family interesting to explore.’

  Ordeal by Innocence – ‘an idea I had for some time before starting to work upon it.’

  The Moving Finger – ‘re-read lately and enjoyed reading it again, very much.’

  The list does not contain any great surprises and most fans would probably also select most of the same titles, perhaps replacing The Thirteen Problems and The Moving Finger with The Labours of Hercules and The A.B.C. Murders respectively. Despite, or perhaps because of, Christie’s lifelong association with Hercule Poirot, there are only two of his cases included, while Miss Marple is represented by three. Each decade of her writing career is represented and no less than five of the list are non-series titles.

  A further insight, this time into some of her favourite short stories, came two years later. In March 1974 negotiations began between Collins and the author on the thorny subject of that year’s ‘Christie for Christmas’. ‘Thorny’ because the previous year’s Postern of Fate had been a disappointment and, at the request of Christie’s daughter Rosalind, the publisher was not pressing for a new book. The compromise was to be a collection of previously published short stories. Sir William (‘Billy’) Collins mooted the idea of a collection of Poirot short stories but, in a letter (‘Dear Billy’), his creator felt that a book of stories entirely devoted to Hercule Poirot would be ‘terribly monotonous’ and ‘no fun at all’. She hoped to persuade him that the collection ‘could also include what you might describe as Agatha Christie’s own favourites among her own early stories’. To this end she sent him a list described as ‘my own favourite stories written soon after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, some before that’.

  Before looking at this list it is important to remember that Dame Agatha was now in her eighty-fourth year, in failing health and a pale shadow of the creative genius of earlier years. She had not written a pure whodunit since A Caribbean Mystery in 1964 and the novels of recent years were all journeys into the past (both her own and her characters’), lacking the ingenious plots and coherent writing of her prime. If she had compiled a similar list even ten years earlier is it entirely possible that it would have been significantly different. Even the description of ‘early stories’ was, as we shall see, misleading.

  Christie’s 1974 list reads as follows:

  The Red Signal

  The Lamp

  The Gypsy

  The Mystery of the Blue Jar

  The Case of Sir Andrew Carmichael

  The Call of Wings

  The Last Séance

  S.O.S.

  In a Glass Darkly

  The Dressmaker’s Doll

  Sanctuary

  Swan Song

  The Love Detectives

  Death by Drowning

  Also included are two full-length novels, Dumb Witness and Death Comes as the End, although she acknowledges that the former is too long for inclusion. Perhaps significantly, in both these titles, like her recent publications, there are strong elements of ‘murder in retrospect’; Death Comes as the End deals with murder in ancient Egypt and Dumb Witness finds Poirot investigating a death that occurred some months before the book begins. On her list the titles are numbered but there is no indication that the order is significant. I have regrouped them for ease of discussion.

  The first eight titles are all from the 1933 UK-only collection The Hound of Death. As Christie suspected, many of them had been published prior to this in various magazines, the earliest (so far traced) as far back as June 1924 when ‘The Red Signal’ appeared in The Grand. The supernatural is the common theme linking these stories, with only ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’, published in The Grand the following month, offering a rational explanation. This type of story was on Christie’s mind as, later in the accompanying letter, she explains that she was planning a ‘semi-ghost story’, adding poignantly, ‘when I am really quite myself again.’ Some of these titles are particularly effective – ‘The Lamp’ has a chilling last line and ‘The Red Signal’, despite its supernatural overtones, shows Christie at her tricky best. ‘The Last Séance’ (March 1927) is a very dark and, unusually for Christie, gruesome story, which also exists in a full-length play version among her papers; while ‘The Call of Wings’ is one of the earliest stories she wrote, described in her Autobiography as ‘not bad’.

  Of the remaining six titles, ‘In a Glass Darkly’ (December 1934) and ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ (December 1958) are also concerned with supernatural events. The former is a very short story involving precognition while the latter is a late story that Christie felt that she ‘had to write’ while plotting Ordeal by Innocence. She passed it to her agent in mid-December 1957 and it was published the following year; in a note she describes it as a ‘very favourite’ story. ‘Sanctuary’ is also a late story, written in January 1954 and published in October of that year, for the Fund for the Restoration of Westminster Abbey. Appropriately it features a dying man found on the chancel steps while the sun pours in through the stained-glass window, this picture carrying echoes of similar scenes in the Mr Quin stories. Its setting is Chipping Cleghorn, featured four years earlier in A Murder is Announced, and Rev. Harmon and his delightful wife, Bunch, are the main protagonists alongside Miss Marple.

  ‘Swan Song’, published in The Grand in September 1926, is a surprising inclusion and appears probably due to Christie’s lifelong love of music; despite its country house setting of an opera production, it is a lacklustre revenge story with neither a whodunit nor supernatural element. ‘The Love Detectives’, published in December of the same year, foreshadows the plot of The Murder at the Vicarage and features Mr Satterthwaite, usually the partner of Mr Quin but here making a solo appearance.

  The final story, ‘Death by Drowning’, is the last of The Thirteen Problems, although its inclusion jars with the rest of the stories in that collection. Unlike the first 12 problems, ‘Death by Drowning’, first published in November 1931, the year before its book appearance, does not follow the pattern of a group of armchair detectives solving a crime that has hitherto baffled the police. Miss Marple solves this case without her fellow-detectives and makes one of her very rare forays into working-class territory in a story involving a woman who keeps lodgers and takes in washing. As an untypical Miss Marple story, it is another unpredictable inclusion.

  Overall, the list is, like much of her fiction, very unexpected. Though the absence of Poirot can be explained by the fact that this list is an effort to persuade Billy Collins to experiment with characters other than the little Belgian, there is, for instance, only one Mr Quin story, although she describes them in her Autobiography as ‘her favourite’; and there are only two cases for Miss Marple, neither of which shows her at her best. Why, moreover, no ‘Accident’, no ‘Witness for the Prosecution’, no ‘Philomel Cottage’? And only three (‘Sanctuary’, ‘The Love Detectives’, ‘Death by Drowning’) can be described as Christie whodunits, albeit not very typical examples. The over-reliance on the supernatural is surprising, although this had been a feature of Christie’s fiction from her early days – The Mysterious Mr Quin, The Hound of Death – and is a plot feature, although usually in the red herring category, of such novels as The Sittaford Mystery, Peril at End House, Dumb Witness, The Pale Horse and Sleeping Murder.

  In the event, the proposed book never came to fruition and, despite Christie’s reservations, Poirot’s Early Cases was published in November 1974.

  Pre-dating both theses lists, in her Autobiography Christie names yet another selection of ‘favourites’. Here she describes Crooked House and Ordeal by Innocence as ‘the two [books] tha
t satisfy me best’, and goes on to state that ‘on re-reading them the other day, I find that another one I am really pleased with is The Moving Finger’. A Sunday Times interview with literary critic Francis Wyndham in February 1966 confirms these three titles as favourites, although the interview may have been contemporaneous with the completion of her Autobiography in October 1965 where the mention of the three titles comes in the closing pages. In the specially written Introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of Crooked House she wrote: ‘This book is one of my own special favourites. I saved it up for years, thinking about, working it out, saying to myself “One day when I’ve plenty of time, and really want to enjoy myself – I’ll begin it.”’

  Whatever her favourites, there seems little doubt about her least favourite title. Not only was The Mystery of the Blue Train difficult to compose (See Chapter 2) but in her Autobiography she writes ‘Each time I read it again, I think it commonplace, full of clichés, with an uninteresting plot.’ In the Japanese fan letter referred to above, she calls it ‘conventionally written . . . [it] does not seem to me to be a very original plot.’ She is even more disparaging in the Wyndham interview when she says, ‘Easily the worst book I ever wrote was The Mystery of the Blue Train. I hate it.’