Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

‘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 Dorothy 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