Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

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