Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories

by John Curran

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the contents of Agatha Christie's 73 recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories.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 about her famous books that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story.

What is the 'deleted scene' in her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles? How did the infamous twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, really come about? Which very famous Poirot novel started life as an adventure for Miss Marple? Which books were designed to have completely different endings, and what were they?

Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her own Autobiography, this remarkable new book includes a wealth of extracts and pages reproduced directly from the notebooks and her letters, plus for the first time two newly discovered complete Hercule Poirot short stories never before published.

• ISBN13: 9780007310586
• Publish Date: 6 September 2009 (first published 3 September 2009)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 496
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[MurderByDeath]

I stopped reading this book after about a hundred pages - not because it wasn't good, it was, but because I haven't read all of Christie's canon yet, and this books is 100% geared towards those that have (or have at least read a majority of it).  The author states from the beginning that there are massive plot spoilers throughout every chapter; he even goes so far as to list the books a particular chapter is going to spoil. 

I didn't care about the plot spoilers; when it comes time for me to catch up on Christie's canon, I will have long since forgotten who did what to whom (I've read some of her books twice - The Body in the Library for one - and I still can't remember who the murderer was). The fact of the matter, and why I DNF'd the rest of the book, was that Christie's notebooks and the author's commentary on them are largely meaningless to anyone who isn't familiar with the particular work in question.

I did read the two short Poirot stories at the end, (I'll review them under separate posts) and what I did read at the beginning was interesting and well written.  If you're a huge Christie fan and know her work well, I'd recommend this book as a way of delving deeper into how this master of mystery's mind worked.  Otherwise, most of the book reads a bit like someone's coded grocery list.