Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

Miss W saw Caro wipe glass or cleaning revolver prints

After an admonition to herself, Christie eventually arrives at the plot we know:

Go over the morning again

Dinner with Meredith night before—the drugs—Valerian—coniine etc.—Caroline takes coniine—Elsa sees her—Talk between Meredith and Amyas—one more day—row between Angela and Amyas—School—next day Meredith discovers coniine has been taken—rings up Philip—(? Is Philip somewhere and Elsa with him—she hears?) Elsa is sitting With to M—says she is cold—goes up to house (gets coniine)—(Did Caroline and Amyas have row after breakfast—? Did Elsa hear them—did she say to Philip ‘conjugal quarrel’)—sits—come out—presently A comes out and says come down and sit.

Elsa tests him—Caroline comes down—Elsa is cold—goes to get jersey (gets coniine)—Caro and Amyas have row—some of it overheard by P and M (But their evidence—I’ll kill you etc.—heard by Philip and E). ‘Haven’t I told you I’ll send her packing’—Comes out—sees them and says school—Angela etc.—Elsa reappears this time has jersey—he drinks off beer—Says (after looking down to sea)—they turn round—Elsa is there—He drinks off beer— says hot and disgusting—Caro goes away says she’ll bring him some down iced—she goes to get it—finds Angela at refrigerator—doing something to beer—Caro takes bottle from her—Caro goes down with it—she pours it out and gives it to him—he drinks it off.

Miss Williams—Meredith looks at Elsa—sitting there—her eyes—once or twice she speaks—(she has put some coniine in dregs of glass—not bottle)—We’re going to be married aren’t we?—looks up and sees Meredith— acts her part. M sees A from door—queer expression—doesn’t say anything—one of his moods—M says I hear you were over at my place this morning—A says Yes—I wanted—something?

Caroline and Miss W find him—C sends Miss W for police doctor—she then smashes his beer bottle and replaces it by another. Findings—beer in glass had coniine in it—and his fingers superimposed on hers—but not as they could have been

Oddly, there is little of Poirot’s final scene, the explanation of the events of 16 years ago and the revelation of the real killer of Amyas Crale. For all practical purposes, the necessary detail for that scene is included in the above extract and Christie probably felt confident of writing the closing chapter without the need for further detailed notes. And the conclusion is somewhat ambivalent. Even though Poirot is certain he has arrived at the truth, he realises that there is no proof…

Last Scene

Ph and M are there—Angela comes in—then W—finally Lady D—M is a little dismayed. Caroline had motive —she had means—now to hand takes coniine and it seems quite certain she did take it—has questioned Meredith if person could handily take it if 5 people in room—but she was last and M in doorway had his back to room—so we take it as proved that she took it

  Three Blind Mice (Radio Play 30 May 1947; Short Story 31 December 1948; Play 25 November 1952)

Three blind mice, three blind mice
See how they run, See how they
run They all ran after the farmer’s wife
She cut off their tails with a carving knife
Did you ever see such a thing a thing in your life
As three blind mice

Monkswell Manor Guest House welcomes its first visitors, including the formidable Mrs Boyle and the mysterious Mr Paravacini, as well as amusing Christopher Wren and enigmatic Miss Casewell. But Sergeant Trotter arrives to warn them of a potential killer in their midst, just before one of the guests is murdered.

As usual, Christie’s Autobiography is maddeningly vague about dates, so when she writes ‘About then the B.B.C. rang me up and asked me if I would like to do a short radio play for a programme they were putting on for some function to do with Queen Mary’, we must assume it was in 1946 as the ‘function’ was the eightieth birthday of Queen Mary on 30 May 1947. She duly presented them with Three Blind Mice, a half-hour radio play. The following 21 October it was broadcast as a 30-minute television play with the same name and script. She subsequently reworked it as a long short story, which appeared in a US magazine in 1948 and a UK one early in January 1949. It was collected, but only in the USA, in Three Blind Mice and other Stories in 1950. When the collection that ultimately appeared in the UK as The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding was in the planning stage, Christie made it clear that she did not want Three Blind Mice to be included as ‘masses of people haven’t seen it yet’ and she did not want to spoil their enjoyment.

An amusing rebus in Notebook 56 heads the top of the first of only two pages to feature the most famous play in the world—Three Blind Mice (later The Mousetrap).

In her Autobiography she continues, ‘The more I thought about Three Blind Mice, the more I felt that it might expand from a radio play lasting twenty minutes to a three act thriller.’ So she re-reworked it as a stage play, but when it came to presenting it a new title had to be found as the original was already the name of a play. Her son-in-law, the erudite Anthony Hicks, came up with The Mousetrap (from Act II, Scene ii of Hamlet) and it opened in London on 25 November 1952. The rest is history…

The main changes between the different versions are in the very beginning. The radio and television versions feature the first murder, that of Mrs Lyon in Culver Street; the theatre version includes this only in sound effects on a darkened stage. The early draft of the script included an opening scene with two workmen sitting round a brazier who ask a passer-by for a match; the passer-by transpires to be the murderer on his way back from killing Mrs Lyon in nearby Culver Street and it is here that he drops the notebook containing the address of Monkswell Manor. Replacing this scene in the novella version is one set in Scotland Yard where the workmen describe the events of that evening.

There is almost nothing showing the genesis of this most famous work as a radio play. Notebook 56 does, however, have two pages headed, amusingly, 3 (an eye crossed out) (a mouse). As the following passage indicates, these few notes refer to either the novella or the stage version:

Arrival of Christopher Wren—his muffler—his dark overcoat—his light hat (throw on bench)—weight of suitcase—nothing in it? Some significant word between him and Molly. Police in London—Sergeant Dawes—the workmen—man was indistinct. The notebook—brought to S.Y. by one of them? The identification—Monkswell Manor. H’m—get me the Berkshire police. Mrs Bolton arrives—My dear, a formidable woman—very Memsahib

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