Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories

by John Curran

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Book cover for Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks

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A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie’s 73 recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories.

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.

This remarkable new book includes a wealth of extracts and pages reproduced directly from the notebooks, plus for the first time two newly discovered complete Hercule Poirot short stories never before published: The Incident of the Dog’s Ball and the thirteenth Labour of Hercules!

  • ISBN13 9780007310562
  • Publish Date 3 September 2009
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 22 July 2010
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
  • Imprint HarperCollins Publishers Ltd