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

chaotic scribbles in a copybook were transformed into a body of detective fiction that set the standard for the time and, as it transpired, for all time. A brief resumé at this point will aid an understanding of later chapters.
    In February 1955, on the BBC radio programme Close-Up , Agatha Christie admitted, when asked about her process of working, that ‘the disappointing truth is that I haven’t much method’. But although she had no particular method, no definite system, we discover that the apparently indiscriminate jotting and plotting in the Notebooks is her method. This randomness is how she worked, how she created, how she wrote. She thrived mentally on chaos, it stimulated her more than neat order; rigidity stifled her creative process. She used the Notebooks as a combination of sounding board and literary sketchpad where she devised and developed; selected and rejected; sharpened and polished; revisited and recycled.
    One system of creation that she used, especially during the prolific years, was the listing of a series of scenes, sketching what she wanted each to include and allocating to each individual scene a number or a letter. She would subsequently reorder those letters to suit the purposes of the plot in a pre-computer version of ‘cut and paste’.
    She reused plot devices throughout her career; and she recycled short stories into novellas and novels – she often speculates in the Notebooks about the expansion or adaptation of an earlier title. The Notebooks demonstrate how, even if she discarded an idea for now, she left everything there to be considered again at a later stage. And when she did that, as she wrote in her Autobiography , ‘What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me.’
    Many of Christie’s best plots did not necessarily spring from a single devastating idea. She considered all possibilities when she plotted and did not confine herself to one idea, no matter how good it may have seemed. She rattled off possibilities and variations on the basic idea so that, for instance, in very few cases is the identity of the murderer settled from the start of the plotting. An example from the notes for Mrs McGinty’s Dead, as she considers the possible identity both of the killer from the past and from the present, illustrates this:
     
    1.A. False – elderly Cranes – with daughter (girl – Evelyn)
    B. Real – Robin – son with mother son
    2.A. False Invalid mother (or not invalid) and son
    B. Real – dull wife of snob A.P. (Carter) Dau [ghter]
    3.A. False artistic woman with son
    B. Real middle-aged wife – dull couple – or flashy Carters (daughter invalid)
    4.A. False widow – soon to marry rich man
    5.[A] False man with dogs – stepson – different name
    [B] Real – invalid mother and daughter – dau [ghter] does it
    Throughout the Notebooks murder methods, motives, settings and even the detective are apt to change between the early notes and the published book; names, in particular, change, sometimes radically. I try, where possible, to identify which character Christie may have had in mind when this occurs.
    In Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks I examined over 25 novels, almost a dozen short stories and the genesis of all 13 of The Labours of Hercules ; I also included some stage scripts and presented two ‘new’ Hercule Poirot investigations. Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making includes the rest of her novels, as well as an ‘unknown’ stage script. And, unlike Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks , this new volume contains some more personal glimpses – her reading lists, her own account of the creation of Hercule Poirot, a fascinating letter to The Times . As well as a new version of a Miss Marple short story I also include, from either end of her career, the original denouement of The Mysterious Affair at Styles and her notes for a final, unwritten novel.
    If any further proof were needed of the universal and timeless appeal of Agatha