Read Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks Online
Authors: John Curran
Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks (43 page)
Although my name alone appears on the title-page there were many others who made significant contributions to
Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making
.
As reflected in the Dedication, my gratitude to Mathew Prichard and his wife, Lucy, is boundless. Without their contribution
Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making
would not exist.
My editors, David Brawn and Steve Gove.
My brother and sister-in-law, Brendan and Virginia, for my home-from-home.
Joseph and Francis, who helped with the proof-reading.
Patricia, Noel, Brian and Ann Donnelly, hosts par excellence.
Robyn Brown, National Trust General Manager of Greenway House, where it all began.
Dr Robin Whelpton for his advice on matters chemical.
Elaine Wiltshire for double-checking.
David, Daniel and Pavla of Goldsboro Books.
Thanks also to Katie Lusty and Torbay Library Services; Elizabeth Wilson of HarperCollins Archive; Moira Reilly, Alice Moss and Laura Mell, publicists extraordinaire; Tony Medawar, my friend and fellow Christie admirer; and Eurion Brown, Peter Coleman, Karl Pike, John Ryan, John Timon and Andy Trott.
Of the many books written about Agatha Christie, the following have been most helpful:
Barnard, Robert,
A Talent to Deceive
(1980)
Gerald, Michael,
The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie
(1993)
Morgan, Janet,
Agatha Christie
(1984)
Osborne, Charles,
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie
(1982)
Sanders, Dennis and Lovallo, Len,
The Agatha Christie Companion
(1984)
Sova, Dawn B.,
Agatha Christie A to Z
(1996)
Thompson, Laura,
Agatha Christie, An English Mystery
(2007)
JOHN CURRAN
is the longtime literary adviser to Agatha Christie’s estate. For many years he edited the official
Agatha Christie Newsletter
and acted as a consultant to the National Trust during the restoration of Greenway House, Christie’s Devon home. He lives in Dublin, where he is writing a doctoral thesis at Trinity College.
Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks
Cover photograph of Agatha Christie using an early Dictaphone
recorder in 1957 © Segonzac/Paris Match/Scoop
AGATHA CHRISTIE: MURDER IN THE MAKING.
Copyright © 2011 by John Curran. Foreword copyright © 2011 by David Suchet. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Published in Great Britain as
Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making
in 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-0-06-206542-1
EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062065445
11 12 13 14 15
OFF/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (P.O. Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au/ebooks
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East -20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
Chapter 1: Rule of Three
1
Odhams Press first published
The
Hound of Death
in 1933 and Collins reissued it in 1936 as a Crime Club title. Collins published two short story collections –
The Listerdale Mystery
and
Parker Pyne Investigates –
in 1934 but not as Crime Club titles, as the contents were not devoted exclusively to crime. For the same reason, although HarperCollins (as it had then become) published
Problem at Pollensa Bay
(1991) and
While the Light Lasts
(1997), neither appeared under the Crime Club imprint; of course, after 1994 The Crime Club no longer existed.
2
Lest it be thought that Christie was alone in this attitude to servants, in Chapter 12 of Anthony Berkeley’s
The Piccadilly Murder
(1929) a character muses: ‘For the first time he realised that one very seldom does look a waiter or waitress directly in the face, unless with the object of learning whom to summon later.’ Twenty-five years later, in Chapter 5 of Harry Carmichael’s
Death Times Three
(1954), the detective John Piper ‘was trying to remember what the maid Tessa looked like. His recollections were hazy . . . just a female in cap and apron . . .’
Chapter 2: The First Decade 1920-1929
3
Chapter 11 ends with the words ‘“Well,” said Mary, “I expect he will be back before dinner.” But night fell and Poirot had not returned.’ I suggest that it is at this point that the Notebook 37 extract would have appeared.
4
Chapter 12 is called ‘The Last Link’. In the preceding chapter Poirot refers several times to ‘the last link’ in his chain of evidence.
5
John Cavendish’s trial began on 15 September (Agatha Christie’s birthday), two months after the poisoning of Emily Inglethorp.
6
The ‘authoritatively told’ of the published version is written over the original ‘told at once’ in Notebook 37.
7
None of the questioning of John Cavendish by Sir Ernest appears in Notebook 37.
8
Mr Philips KC appears for the Crown in the published version.
9
Although
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
is set in Essex, there is an area called Marldon near Torbay, where Christie was living when she wrote the novel. The reference was replaced in the published novel by ‘a solitary and unfrequented spot’..
10
The alternate, but crossed out, version in Notebook 37 reads, ‘entered the box and was duly sworn. The little man was transformed.’
11
In Chapter 4, Poirot notes ‘six points of interest’: a coffee cup that was ground into powder; a despatch-case with a key in the lock; a stain on the floor; a fragment of some dark green fabric; and a large splash of candle grease on the floor. At first he withholds the sixth item, but later in the chapter he adds the bromide-powder box.
12
The surname is changed to Murdoch in the published version, although in some editions the name is spelt with a ‘K’ on the floor-plan in Chapter 3.
13
At this point in Notebook 37 there is a reference to ‘Other Book’, possibly referring to another Notebook, no longer extant.
14
Hastings is Mr Hastings throughout
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
; he did not become Captain until
The Murder on the Links
.
15
These timings are 30 minutes earlier than those in Chapter 12 of the novel.
16
In her
Autobiography
Christie describes the trouble she had with the formidable Miss Howse at The Bodley Head, who insisted on the spelling ‘coco’ rather than, as here, ‘cocoa’. The first edition uses the former, and incorrect, ‘coco’.
17
There are two blank lines in Notebook 37 at this point, presumably in order to check the chemical details as they appear in Chapter 12.
18
The alternative version in Notebook 37 is ‘all the evidence points to the . . .’
19
Notebook 37 reads: ‘damning (2) and complete (1)’, which I interpret as a reminder to reverse the adjectives; it is followed by ‘for it is a letter from the [murderer]’, which is crossed out and reinstated in the last sentence.
20
The original title of which was to have been
After Dinner.
21
Despite the spelling in the published version, this name is spelt Papapolous in Notebook 54.
Chapter 5: ‘How I Created Hercule Poirot’
22
Germany invaded Belgium in early August 1914, so the arrival of refugees would probably have been nearer to late than early autumn 1914. This chronology is at variance with her own
Autobiography
, where she writes that she first conceived of writing a detective story while working at the hospital dispensary (1915–16). And a key point in the plot of
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
is dependent on knowledge of the properties of poisons, gained through her experience there.
23
As if to emphasise this point, the page immediately preceding this essay has a heading ‘Ideas 1940’, obviously written at least two years afterwards; one of the ideas listed would become, later again,
The Moving Finger
. Presumably, the 12 pages needed for this essay were, conveniently, blank at the back of Notebook 21 when Christie went in search of a suitable gap.
24
In Chapter 9 of
The Murder on the Links
Poirot lectures the examining magistrate Hautet, and the policeman Giraud, on the psychology of the criminal.
25
This is a reference to the chance remark that Hastings makes in Chapter 27, and which is acknowledged by Poirot at the end of Chapter 29, concerning the ill-fated Donald Ross. It is immediately followed by the equally vital and chance remark made by a cinema-goer and overheard by Poirot as they cross the Euston Road.
26
Why Poirot should consider
Three Act Tragedy
one of his failures is not clear, unless it is the fact that two further people die before he spots the vital point that motivated the first murder. His remark in the very last line of the book – ‘It might have been ME!’ – would not surprise anyone who knew him well.
27
In the first chapter of
The A.B.C. Murders
Poirot extols the virtues of Revivit, a hair dye.
28
The mention of ‘seeing’ Hercule Poirot while in the Canary Islands is most probably a reference to the holiday Christie spent there with Rosalind and Carlo in 1927 after the trauma of 1926. It was here that she worked on
The Mystery of the Blue Train
.
29
The arrival of a fan letter extolling the virtues of her detective rouses the same reaction in Agatha Christie as it does some years later in Ariadne Oliver in Chapter 14 of
Mrs McGinty’s Dead
. ‘Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got? These things just happen. You try something – and people seem to like it – and then you go on – and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life. And people even write to you and say how fond you must be of him. Fond of him? If I met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than any I’ve ever invented.’
30
In the ‘Foreword by the Author’ to
Cards on the Table
Christie confirms that ‘it was one of Hercule Poirot’s favourite cases’; and in the final chapter Poirot calls it ‘one of the most interesting cases I have ever come across’.
31
At the end of
Death on the Nile
Jacqueline de Bellefort asks Poirot, ‘About me, I mean. You do mind, don’t you?’ And he answers, ‘Yes, Mademoiselle.’
32
Oddly, both books of 1938,
Appointment with Death
and
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
, feature two of the most detestable characters in the entire Christie output: Mrs Boynton in
Appointment with Death
and Simeon Lee in
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
. A monstrous character automatically provides motive, although in neither case is their sheer detestability the reason for their murder. But it seems unlikely that this, and not the stunning and unique Petra setting, should be one of the characteristics of the case that appealed to Poirot.
33
This is a reference to Colonel Carbury, the man who asks Poirot to investigate the death of Mrs Boynton. In Part II, Chapter 15 Poirot says, ‘The truth, I have always thought, is curious and beautiful.’
34
This telling phrase, ‘tempted to commit murder’, may have been the musing that led, eventually, to
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
. The chronology fits. This article would have been written, in all likelihood, at the end of 1937 or the very beginning of 1938 and page 7 of Notebook 21, the source of this essay, is headed ‘Poirot’s Last Case’; and there are a further four pages in the same Notebook with more detailed notes.
Chapter 6: The Third Decade 1940-1949
35
Ngaio Marsh did not become a member of the Detection Club until 1974. This was solely for reasons of geography; because she lived in New Zealand it was impossible for her to attend regular meetings.
Chapter 7: Miss Marple and ‘The Case of the Caretaker’s Wife’
36
This handwritten addition to the typescript is, apart from ‘Haydock’ and ‘you’, illegible. This transcription seems the most likely exchange.
Chapter 8: The Fourth Decade 1950-1959
37
Navy, Army and Air Force Institute, founded in 1921 to run recreational establishments needed by the armed forces, and to sell goods to servicemen and their families.
38
Anne’s surname appears in some editions, and in some books about Christie, as Beddingfield.
39
Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian businessman and philanthropist, founder of The Gulbenkian Foundation for charitable educational, artistic, and scientific purposes.
Chapter 10: The Fifth Decade 1960-1969
40
George appears as both George and George
s
in
Third Girl
. In the Notebook he appears without the ‘s’.
