Third, in many cases jottings for a book may have preceded publication by many years. The earliest notes for
The pages following a clearly dated page cannot be assumed to have been written at the same time. For example:
page 1 of Notebook 3 reads ‘General Projects 1955’
page 9 reads ‘Nov. 5th 1965’ (and there were ten books in the intervening period)
page 12 reads ‘1963’
page 21 reads ‘Nov. 6 1965 Cont.’
page 28 is headed ‘Notes on Passenger to Frankfort [sic] 1970’
page 36 reads ‘Oct. 1972’
page 72 reads ‘Book Nov. 1972’
In the space of 70 pages we have moved through 17 years and as many novels and, between pages 9 and 21, skipped back and forth between 1963 and 1965.
Notebook 31 is dated, on different pages, 1944, 1948 and 1951, but also contains notes for
Although the Notebooks are numbered from 1 through to 73, this numbering is completely arbitrary. Some years before she died, Christie’s daughter Rosalind arranged, as a first step towards analysing their contents, that they should be numbered and that the titles mentioned within be listed. The analysis never went any further than that, but in the process every Notebook was allocated a number. This numbering is completely random and a lower number does not indicate an earlier year or a more important Notebook. Notebook 2, for instance, contains notes for
Some of the Notebooks show attempts on the part of the elderly Agatha Christie to impose a little order on this chaos. Notebook 31 has a loose-page listing inside the front cover in her own handwriting; others have typewritten page-markers indicating where each title is discussed. These brave attempts are rudimentary and the compiler (probably not Christie herself) soon wearied of the enormous task. Most Notebooks contain notes for several books and as three novels can often jostle for space among 20 pages, the page markers soon become hopelessly cumbersome and, eventually, useless.
To give some idea of the amount of information contained, randomly, within their covers, for the purposes of this book I created a table to index the contents of all of the Notebooks. When printed, it ran to 17 pages.
Before discussing the handwriting in the Notebooks, it is only fair to emphasise that these were notes and jottings written as
Our handwriting changes as we age. The scrambled notes from college or university soon overtake the copperplate efforts of our early school days. Accidents, medical conditions and age all take their toll on our writing. In most cases it is safe to assert that as we get older our handwriting deteriorates. In the case of Agatha Christie the opposite is the case. At her creative peak (roughly 1930 to 1950) her handwriting is almost indecipherable. It looks, in many cases, like shorthand and it is debatable if even she could read some sections of it. I have no doubt that the reason for the scrawl was that, during these hugely prolific years, her fertile brain teemed with ideas for books and stories. It was a case of getting them on to paper as fast as possible. Clarity of presentation was a secondary consideration.
The conversion of the Notebooks into an easily readable format, for the purposes of this book, took over six months. A detailed knowledge of all of Dame Agatha’s output was not just an enormous help but a vital necessity. It helped to know, for instance, that a reference to ‘apomorphine’ is not a misprint, a mistake or a mis-spelling but a vital part of the plot of
From the late 1940s onwards her handwriting steadily ‘improved’ so that by the early 1950s and, for example,
For some years, there has been a theory in the popular press that Agatha Christie suffered from dyslexia. I have no idea where this originated but even a cursory glance at the Notebooks gives the lie to this story. The only example that could be produced in evidence is her struggle with ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Carribean’ throughout the notes for
Dotted irregularly throughout the Notebooks are brief jottings dashed down and often not developed any further at the time. This is what Christie means by ‘a sketch of a plot’; these jottings were all she needed to stimulate her considerable imagination. The ideas below are reproduced exactly as they appear on the page of the Notebooks, and some of them occur in more than one Notebook (examples of similar jottings are given later in this book). All of them were to appear, to a greater or lesser degree, in her titles. The first two are major plot devices and the remaining two are minor plot features:
Poirot asks to go down to country—finds a house and various fantastic details [see
Saves her life several times [see
Dangerous drugs stolen from car [see Exhibit F: ‘The House of Dreams’]
Inquire enquire—both in same letter [see
Throughout her career one of Christie’s greatest gifts was her ability to weave almost endless variations on seemingly basic ideas. Murderous alliances, the eternal triangle, victim-as-murderer, disguise—down the years she used and reused all these ploys to confound reader expectation. So when she writes about being stimulated to write