Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

in the Library, Cards on the Table and Towards Zero, where the reader is unaware of the identity of the victim of the trap.

There are only 15 pages of Notebook devoted to The Moving Finger and, apart from a few fleeting references elsewhere, most of these pages are in Notebook 62. It does not seem to have presented many technical problems and the plotting progresses smoothly. And she follows her (then) normal pattern of assigning letters to scenes.

The initial appearance is dated, although not very precisely, 1940:

Ideas (1940)

Poison pen—letters in village—‘repressed spinster’ indicated—really plot by someone to discredit her—(a resourceful mother?) Miss Marple

Although the ‘repressed spinster’ as the source of the anonymous letters is much discussed in Lymstock as, indeed, the killer hoped, the ‘discrediting’ idea was abandoned; perhaps it had too many echoes of the recent Murder is Easy, where the killer hoped that the murders would discredit the real target, a person with a strong motives for removing all of the victims.

Christie began work on the novel the following year, as shown by a subsequent note, and the general set-up closely follows Notebook 62. In a typical piece of Christie misdirection, she uses the minor crime of anonymous letters as camouflage for the more deadly crime of murder. This is the same principle of camouflage adopted by the killer in The A.B.C. Murders, although in that novel a series of murders is used to camouflage one particular killing. The town, the people and their names, the events and the first murder all appear in the book as they do in the Notebook:

Anonymous letters—deliberate—finally woman commits suicide as a result of letter—really killed (by husband?)

Books 1941 Miss M? or told in 1st person

Poison Pen—all round village—unhappiness etc.—wife of lawyer (?) gets one—kills herself—really is killed by husband—and he then puts letter in her pocket—its subject matter is untrue

Suspected of writing letters—Vicar’s sister? wife—schoolmistress—doctor’s wife sister?—Hearty spinster— maidservant—maidservant is next killed because she saw something or knew something

Description of town—market town known better days—they take bungalow—the letters come—not sister— wonders if there is much of this sort of thing about—what about if a shot in the dark hits the bulls eye?

Resume of people they meet

Dr. Thomas—his sister—dark fierce ‘manly looking’ woman—little Mr Pye—Vicar—his wife—goes home to find Mrs. Symmington calling

In the notes for this novel we again see the method of assigning letters to scenes, although in this case no rearrangement of them is specified in the Notebook:

Progress Moving Finger Points

A. J [erry] discovers book of sermons cut out pages [Chapter 9 v]

B. Megan goes home [Chapter 7 ii]

C. Maid knows something—scene between her and Elsie H [olland]—Joanna overhears comes back and tells J? Did she come back that afternoon? Does she come and ask advice from Partridge? She is killed—deliberate [Chapter 7, but not exactly as described here]

D. Tea with Miss Emily—big raw-boned dragon looks after her [Chapter 7 iv]

E. Vicar? His wife—vague—slightly bats? Hits nail on head—poor Aimee very unhappy woman [Chapter 5 i]

F. Institute? Someone typing—J goes in—finds Aimee who ‘heard’ someone leave [Chapter 10 ii]

G. J going off to sleep ‘No S[moke] W[ithout] F[ire]’—smoke—smoke screen—War—‘scrap of paper’ Nurse told him as little boy—etc [Chapter 8 i]

H. Spiteful rumour about—Elsie means to be No. 2 [Chapter 9 ii]

I. The posted letters—Aimee’s written at Institute—one of them is IT—substituted—(did she drop them and pick them up in High St.—S[ymmington] there) (E[mily] B[arton] at Institute too) [Chapter 13 ii]

As can be seen, the order changed considerably—the mutilated book of sermons (scene A) is not discovered until Chapter 9—and the scenes are scattered through the book. Scene C is an ingenious twist on the person who ‘knows something’ and then becomes the next victim. Here, instead of knowing or seeing something dangerous to the killer, the maid ‘knows something’ because she saw nothing. It is the fact that she saw nothing when she should actually have seen something that seals her fate.

The Moving Finger is another title that Christie considered dramatising. Notebook 45 consists of rough preliminary notes including a list of the characters of the novel and tentative settings. But the novel is very ‘mobile’, with many scenes set in the streets and houses of Lymstock. The multiple potential settings, as shown by the note below, created immediate problems in devising a successful dramatisation of this title:

Scene?

Maisonette or divided house?

Garden of same used by both

Room in police station

Symmington’s house

  The Hollow

25 November 1946

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood red heath, The red ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood And Echo there, whatever is ask‘d her, answers ‘Death’.

Tennyson, Maud

Poirot is not amused by the scene at the swimming pool—the sprawled man and the woman with the revolver standing over him. He assumes that it has been arranged for his benefit until he realises that it is not a tableau and that he is looking at a dying man…

Poirot quotes the Tennyson poem in Chapter 18 and although it is more blood-drenched than the novel, Henrietta sees the relevant symbolism. Interestingly, the last line of the poem also appears in Notebook 3 in an entry dated October 1972, when Christie was planning what was—to be her final novel.

The very earliest glimmering of the plot of The Hollow can be seen in a throwaway line in Notebook 13—‘Poirot asks to go down to country—finds a house and various fantastic details’—hidden among an A-Z list of other ideas. The very fact of Poirot going ‘down to country’ is the first clue but the fantastic details are the elements of the tableau that greets him when he calls to The Hollow—the dying man sprawled by the swimming pool, the blood dripping into the pool itself, the woman standing over him holding the revolver, and the other onlookers in the drama, one holding a basket of eggs and another holding a basket of dahlia heads.

Described in somewhat unexciting terms on the original blurb as ‘a human story about human people’, The Hollow is almost a Mary Westmacott title. It resembles a ‘straight’ novel more than a detective story and, indeed, has less in the way of clues and detection than almost any other Poirot title. In an article for the Ministry of Information in 1945 Christie wrote: ‘Naturally one’s methods alter. I have been more