Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks

Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks
Agatha Christie

John Curran

David Suchet

Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks brings together for the first time Secret Notebooks and Murder in the Making, two volumes that explore the fascinating contents of her 73 notebooks. This includes illustrations, deleted extracts, unused ideas, two unpublished Poirot stories and a lost Miss Marple.When Agatha Christie died in 1976, aged 85, she had become the world's most popular author.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 and details that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story.Christie archivist and expert John Curran leads the reader through the six decades of Agatha Christie's writing career, unearthing some remarkable clues to her success and a number of never-before-published excerpts and stories from her archives. This book features Agatha's original ending of her very first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, painstakingly transcribed from her notebooks. It also includes a number of short stories from the archives reproduced in full, including the unpublished The Man Who Knew, How I Created Hercule Poirot, and an early draft for a Miss Marple story, The Case of the Caretaker's Wife.

From Notebook 4 a tantalising glimpse of a project, never realised, from the 1960s.

Copyright (#ulink_257b0704-2c07-5c30-8db3-847805c96ec2)

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Fully revised and expanded edition published 2016

First published in Great Britain in two volumes by HarperCollinsPublishers as Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks and Murder in the Making 2009, 2011

Copyright © John Curran 2009, 2011, 2016

Agatha Christie Notebooks, The Man Who Knew, The Incident of the Dog’s Ball, The Case of the Caretaker’s Wife and The Capture of Cerberus copyright © Christie Archive Trust 2009, 2011

Quotations copyright © Agatha Christie Limited 2009, 2011

Agatha Christie®, Poirot®, Marple® and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere.

All rights reserved

www.agathachristie.com (http://www.agathachristie.com)

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover design by Henry Steadman

Photograph of Agatha Christie © Popperfoto/Getty Images

John Curran asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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.

Source ISBN: 9780008129620

Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008129644

Version: 2017-04-11

Dedication (#ulink_667346cf-8d87-5960-8fd7-ec6de3fce529)

For

Joseph, Conor,

Francis, Oisin and Lorcan

And for

Mathew, Lucy and Mahler,

without whom …

Contents

Cover (#u3335bc91-ab06-5c30-978b-b5f246d190f8)

Title Page (#ud66de6f1-ece0-52d2-9c04-4a1315ecda63)

Copyright (#u24c3cd42-e9c9-52df-b12f-11ec53a34446)

Dedication (#u0974fc90-3504-562a-8fe1-993f9c54f0e7)

Foreword (#ube7c7590-1db9-5955-b27c-0b4345c965c8)

Introduction (#uf2120f06-5e3a-5879-84b8-13dc771483e8)

Preface: Shadows in Sunlight (#u67be1902-b81d-5017-8e4a-9805e201315b)

1. The Beginning of a Career (#u4f009431-611d-55b2-a925-cf01b23f5494)

2. The Evidence of the Notebooks (#u447f4109-085d-575d-9e40-52c07560c867)

3. Agatha Christie at Work (#u3128315c-8994-587f-a35a-65015268a8ae)

4. Rule of Three (#u650f218b-4e27-5f00-ace4-43e941d92eb8)

5. Crime Writers in the Notebooks (#u0728761a-9c50-5e5f-aa70-78a079d365e2)

Part I: The First Decade (#u7a2c7381-a225-5821-a8d5-26af911e35fe)

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (#ulink_839717bd-4cb4-5e81-be84-7935b6ecdfba)