Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

is the arrangement of Jane and Angell (as Norman

Death in the Clouds depends for its effectiveness, both as a murder method and a detective novel, on a tactic that has come in for adverse criticism. The accusation of snobbery has been levelled because the killer, and by extension the author, takes it for granted that ‘nobody looks at a servant’. This ploy is also a feature, to a greater or lesser degree and sometimes with a twist, in Three Act Tragedy, After the Funeral, Appointment with Death, The Mystery of the Blue Train, Sparkling Cyanide and One, Two, Buckle my Shoe. Christie somewhat defuses this accusation with the following exchange from Chapter 24 ii of After the Funeral:

‘I ought to have seen it sooner—I felt in a vague kind of way I had seen you before somewhere—but of course one never looks much at—’ He stopped.

‘No, one doesn’t bother to look at a mere companionhelp…a drudge, a domestic drudge! Almost a servant.’

Gale was known at that stage). They are always shown sitting opposite each other in window seats, away from the aisle, as dictated by the plot. The chances of Gale being identified on his admittedly daring walk through the plane on the way to and from his commission of the crime are remote; as he reasonably guessed, Jane was likely to spend the interim checking her appearance. A greater danger, and one that has not been commented upon, was from the other stewards. It was much more likely that they would have spotted an ‘extra’ steward.

‘Problem at Sea’ February 1936

Mrs Clapperton is found dead in her cabin during a holiday cruise and Poirot’s solution depends on his most unusual witness ever.

The first note for this story appears in Notebook 66 and is dated January 1935, a year before publication. The elaboration later in the same Notebook includes much of the detail of the completed story:

Ventriloquist—on boat…Col C. very good with cards—says he has been on music hall stage etc. Wife dies in cabin but her voice heard inside after she has been killed

Man tells steward to lock cabin—body already inside—later comes back and Cabin lock Calls to wife—she answers apparently (ventriloquist). Hypodermic beside her—and pricks on her bare arm

One point of difference between the notes and the finished story is that the hypodermic as a murder method is replaced by stabbing. While the ventriloquism idea is a clever one it would not have carried a novel and Christie was right to use it only for a short story.

Death on the Nile (novel) 1 November 1937

When Simon Doyle marries wealthy Linnet Ridgeway, and not Jacqueline de Bellefort, the consequent train of events culminates in triple murder aboard a Nile steamer. Hercule Poirot, also travelling on SS Karnak, has observed the tragedy unfolding and investigates one of his most famous cases.

Although published late in 1937, this classic Poirot title was written up to two years earlier. A letter from Edmund Cork dated 29 April 1936 expressed delight at Christie’s news that Death on the Nile was finished. Unfortunately, there is no Notebook with notes for the plot of this famous title. We do, however, have, in Notebook 30, a list of potential characters—including one very significant one—and a brief note about possible plot development. Most of the ideas originally intended for inclusion were waylaid into other titles.

Plans

Death on the Nile

Miss Marple?

Mrs P (ex wardress of American prison)

Mathew P son—nice

Mrs Mathew P—nice

Miss P nervy hysterical girl

Master P Boy of 20—excitable

Dr. Pfeiffer—doctor and toxicologist

Mrs Pfeiffer—recently married to him—35—attractive—with past

Marc Tierney—archaeologist—a little apart from the rest

Mrs Van Schuyler—boring American woman elderly snobbish

Mrs Pooper cheap novelist

Miss Harmsworth—girl companion to Miss Van Schuyler

Miss Marple

Rosalie Curtis sickly girl

Mrs Gibson—non stop talker

The first and biggest surprise in this list is the (double) inclusion of Miss Marple—first with, and later without, a question mark—rather than Hercule Poirot. Prior to this, the only novel in which Miss Marple had appeared was The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, and her next novel appearance, The Body in the Library, was still a further five years away in 1942. Moreover, the 1932 short story collection The Thirteen Problems, set firmly in the parlours of St Mary Mead, could hardly be seen as a preparation for an exotic Egyptian adventure. In 1937 the Nile was as exotic to the majority of Christie readers as Mars is to her current audience: very few travelled abroad for holidays, if, in fact, they took holidays at all, and the days of the package holiday remained a distant mirage. So to transport Miss Marple from the (admittedly relative) safety of St Mary Mead to the banks of the Nile and subsequently to the Temple of Karnak, Abu Simbel and Wadi Haifa may have been seen as a journey too far—hence Poirot was substituted. Miss Marple eventually gets to solve a case abroad but not until almost 30 years later, when her nephew Raymond sends her on a holiday to the fictional island of St Honore. There she solves A Caribbean Mystery, her only foreign case.

In contrast, at this stage Poirot was a seasoned traveller—and, of course, a foreigner to begin with. Since his arrival in Britain he had solved cases in a variety of distant locations—France (The Murder on the Links, The Mystery of the Blue Train, Death in the Clouds), Yugoslavia (Murder on the Orient Express) and Italy (The Big Four and ‘Triangle at Rhodes’). His most recent case had involved solving a Murder in Mesopotamia. Indeed he had already visited Egypt and the Valley of the Kings while solving ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’ in 1923. All things considered, Poirot was a much more likely sleuth to board SS Karnak for a particularly blood-soaked journey down the Nile.

Some of the remaining names also provide material for speculation:

Mrs P (ex wardress of American prison)

Mathew P son—nice

Mrs Mathew P—nice

Miss P nervy hysterical girl

Master P Boy of 20—excitable

In these five characters can be seen the seeds of the Boynton family from 1938’s Appointment with Death (see Chapter 8). Mrs P is described as a wardress in an American prison exactly as, two years later, the monstrous Mrs Boynton would be; the ‘nice’ son, Mathew and his wife Mrs Mathew, are the forerunners of Lennox and Nadine Boynton, while the ‘nervy and hysterical’ Miss P corresponds to Ginevra. Raymond is the last remaining male of the Boynton family although he could hardly be described as an ‘excitable boy’. It is interesting that, although Christie decided against using this family in Death on the Nile, when she did utilise them she placed them in another foreign setting, this time Petra.

Mrs Van Schuyler—boring American woman elderly snobbish