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

headed ‘Notes on Passenger to Frankfort [sic] 1970’
    page 36 reads ‘Oct. 1972’
    page 72 reads ‘Book Nov. 1972’
    In the space of 70 pages we have moved through 17 years and as many novels and, between pages 9 and 21, skipped back and forth between 1963 and 1965.
    Finally, because many of the pages contain notes for stories that were never completed, there are no publication dates as a guideline. Deductions can sometimes be made from the notes immediately preceding and following, but as we have seen, this method is not entirely flawless.
    Handwriting and transcription
    Before describing the handwriting in the Notebooks, it is only fair to emphasise that these were notes and jottings and there was no reason to make an effort to maintain a certain standard, as no one but Christie herself was ever intended to read them. These were personal journals and not written for any purpose other than to clarify her thoughts. For her first ten years of productivity and at her creative peak her handwriting is almost indecipherable. Whether in fountain pen, biro or pencil, it looks, in many cases, like shorthand and it is debatable whether even she could read some sections of it. I have no doubt that the reason for this near-illegibility was that, during these hugely prolific years, her fertile brain teemed with ideas for books and stories. It was a case of getting them on to paper as fast as possible, and clarity of presentation was a secondary consideration. Although in most cases it is safe to assert that as we get older our handwriting deteriorates, in the case of Agatha Christie the opposite is the case, so that by the early 1950s and, for example, 1953’s After the Funeral in Notebook 53, the notes could be read relatively easily.
    Solely in the interests of legibility, when transcribing material from the Notebooks I have removed some capital letters, brackets and dashes and in some cases have separated a paragraph of words, broken only by dashes, into separate sentences. All remaining question marks, underlinings and dashes, as well as some grammatical errors, are reproduced as they appear in the Notebooks.
    If I have omitted text from within extracts I indicate this by the use of dots.
    Misspellings have not been corrected but marked as [sic].
    Square brackets are used for editorial clarification or remarks.
    Dates of publication of works by Christie refer to the UK edition. They have been taken, for the most part, from contemporary catalogues in Collins archives. Traditionally, Crime Club titles were published on the first Monday of the month and in the few instances where actual dates were not available, I have used this guideline. In general, publication dates are included only with the first mention of each title in the Decade introductions. They are not included with later references, unless the timescale is relevant.
    At the beginning of each chapter I have included a list of titles whose solutions are revealed within. It proved impossible to discuss a title intelligently, or to compare it to the Notebooks, unless I disclosed some endings. And in many cases the notes mention the vital name or plot device anyway. Christie’s creative ruthlessness in deciding her killer is a vital part of her genius and to try circumventing this with ambiguous verbal gymnastics cannot do her justice.
    Since the publication of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks I have received many enquiries regarding access to the Notebooks. Although it is not possible for the public to read the Notebooks, two of them are on public display in Devon, England. One can be seen in Torquay Museum and a second in Paignton Library and Information Centre.
    The quotations at the beginning of each chapter are from Agatha Christie’s Autobiography .
    In Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks my aim was to examine how a unique body of work, produced over a 50-year period, came into being. I analysed the creative process of the Queen of Crime and showed how the