Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks
Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks brings together for the first time Secret Notebooks and Murder in the Making, two volumes that explore the fascinating contents of her 73 notebooks. This includes illustrations, deleted extracts, unused ideas, two unpublished Poirot stories and a lost Miss Marple.When Agatha Christie died in 1976, aged 85, she had become the world's most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide in more than 100 countries, she had achieved the impossible – more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one a bestseller.So prolific was Agatha Christie's output – 66 crime novels, 20 plays, 6 romance books under a pseudonym and over 150 short stories – it was often claimed that she had a photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over those 55 years to more mundane methods of working out her ingenious crimes?Following the death of Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable secret was revealed. Unearthed among her affairs at the family home of Greenway were Agatha Christie's private notebooks, 73 handwritten volumes of notes, lists and drafts outlining all her plans for her many books, plays and stories. Buried in this treasure trove, all in her unmistakable handwriting, are revelations and details that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story.Christie archivist and expert John Curran leads the reader through the six decades of Agatha Christie's writing career, unearthing some remarkable clues to her success and a number of never-before-published excerpts and stories from her archives. This book features Agatha's original ending of her very first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, painstakingly transcribed from her notebooks. It also includes a number of short stories from the archives reproduced in full, including the unpublished The Man Who Knew, How I Created Hercule Poirot, and an early draft for a Miss Marple story, The Case of the Caretaker's Wife.
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From Notebook 4 a tantalising glimpse of a project, never realised, from the 1960s.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Fully revised and expanded edition published 2016
First published in Great Britain in two volumes by HarperCollinsPublishers as Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks and Murder in the Making 2009, 2011
Copyright © John Curran 2009, 2011, 2016
Agatha Christie Notebooks, The Man Who Knew, The Incident of the Dog’s Ball, The Case of the Caretaker’s Wife and The Capture of Cerberus copyright © Christie Archive Trust 2009, 2011
Quotations copyright © Agatha Christie Limited 2009, 2011
Agatha Christie®, Poirot®, Marple® and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere.
All rights reserved
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover design by Henry Steadman
Photograph of Agatha Christie © Popperfoto/Getty Images
John Curran asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008129620
Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008129644
Version: 2017-04-11
Contents
2. The Evidence of the Notebooks
5. Crime Writers in the Notebooks
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Secret of Chimneys/Chimneys
My Favourite Stories and ‘The Man Who Knew’
‘The Bird with the Broken Wing’
‘The Mystery of the Baghdad/Spanish Chest’
‘The Incident of the Dog’s Ball’
‘How I Created Hercule Poirot’
‘The Case of the Caretaker’s Wife’
Three Blind Mice/The Mousetrap
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
Appendix I: Chronology of Titles
When John Curran’s book Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks was published in 2009, the reading public was given something very rare: perhaps the most complete document for any author of the notes and sketches of their novels. Reading the book was like studying the preliminary sketches of any great artist, and in doing so we automatically found ourselves searching for clues. It gave us an insight into the workings of Agatha Christie’s mind – plus the gift of two new unpublished Poirot stories!
John Curran not only gives us the facts of what is written in Mrs Christie’s notebooks, but he uses conjecture firmly based upon these facts to show us how her remarkable novels came to be written. He even manages to get into her mind and into her psychology. He studies her life and her relationships (both personal and professional), and places these facts together with what is in her ‘secret’ notebooks to inform us how she wrote and how her writings were influenced by her daily life and the current affairs of the time.
