Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks Read Free

each was allocated a number from 1 through to 73; this numbering is completely arbitrary and a lower number does not indicate an earlier year or a more important Notebook.
    The number of pages used in each Notebook varies greatly – Notebook 35 has 220 pages of notes while Notebook 72 has a mere five. Notebook 63 has notes on over 150 pages but Notebook 42 uses only 20. The average lies somewhere between 100 and 120.
    Contents
    In a career spanning more than 55 years and two world wars, the loss of some Notebooks is inevitable, but the reassuring fact is that it seems to have happened so seldom. From the 1920s we have notes only for The Mysterious Affair at Styles , The Man in the Brown Suit, The Secret of Chimneys and The Mystery of the Blue Train. For the collection Partners in Crime , there are only the sketchiest of notes and for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd there remains only an incomplete list of characters. From the prolific 1930s onwards, however, the only missing book titles are Murder on the Orient Express , Cards on the Table and, apart from a passing reference, Murder is Easy . And although there are notes on most of Christie’s stage work, including unknown, unperformed and uncompleted stage and radio plays, only two pages each are devoted to her most famous play and her greatest, Three Blind Mice (as it was before it became The Mousetrap ) and Witness for the Prosecution respectively.
    Not all the Notebooks are concerned with Christie’s literary output. Notebooks 11, 40 and 55 consist solely of chemical formulae, probably from her days as a student dispenser; Notebook 71 contains French homework; Notebook 73 is completely blank. Moreover, she often used them for making random personal notes, sometimes on the inside covers. There is a list of ‘furniture for 48 [Sheffield Terrace]’ in Notebook 59; Notebook 67 has reminders to ring up Collins and make a hair appointment; Notebook 68 has a list of train times from Stockport to Torquay.
    In only five instances is a Notebook devoted to a single title. Notebooks 26 and 42 are entirely dedicated to Third Girl ; Notebook 68 concerns only Peril at End House ; Notebook 2 is A Caribbean Mystery ; Notebook 46 contains nothing but extensive historical background and a rough outline for Death Comes as the End . In some cases the notes are sketchy, consisting of little more than a list of characters – for example Death on the Nile in Notebook 30. Other titles have copious notes – They Came to Baghdad has 100 pages, while Five Little Pigs and One, Two, Buckle my Shoe each have 75 pages.
    Chronology
    Although there are 73 Notebooks, complete (day/month/year) dates are given only on six occasions, and they are all from the last ten years of Christie’s life. In the case of incomplete dates it is sometimes possible to work out the year from the publication date of the title in question, but sometimes this is almost impossible, because . . .
    First, use of the Notebooks was utterly random. Christie opened a Notebook (or, as she says herself, any of half a dozen contemporaneous ones), found the next blank page, even one between two already filled pages, and began to write. And to compound this unpredictability, in almost all cases she turned the Notebook over and, with admirable economy, wrote from the back also.
    Second, in many cases jottings for a book may have preceded publication by many years. The earliest notes for The Unexpected Guest are headed ‘1951’ in Notebook 31, in other words seven years before its first performance; the germ of Endless Night first appears, six years before publication, on a page of Notebook 4 dated 1961.
    Third, the pages following a clearly dated page cannot be assumed to have been written at the same time. For example:
     
    page 1 of Notebook 3 reads ‘General Projects 1955’
    page 9 reads ‘Nov. 5th 1965’ (there were ten books in the intervening period)
    page 12 reads ‘1963’
    page 21 reads ‘Nov. 6 1965 Cont.’
    page 28 is