Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories

EXHIBIT B:

OTHER CRIME WRITERS IN THE NOTEBOOKS

‘Do you like detective stories. I do. I read them all and I’ve got autographs from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie and Dickson Carr and H. C. Bailey.’

The Body in the Library, Chapter 6

Apart from the ‘13 at Dinner’ list in Notebook 41, Agatha Christie makes various references to her fellow crime writers throughout the Notebooks. The following is a selection of those mentioned:

E.C. Bentley

Apart from his appearance in connection with the Detection Club, he is also referred to in Notebook 41. The following concerns a contribution to Bentley’s anthology A Second Century of Detective Stories, published in 1938, where ‘The Case of the Distressed Lady’ from Partners in Crime represents Christie; she did not write a story specifically for inclusion.

A HP story for Bentley

G.K. Chesterton

The creator of Father Brown, the immortal priest detective, and first president of the Detection Club, Chesterton contributed to their collaborative novel The Floating Admiral. The reference in Notebook 66 is a reminder to provide a short story for him, presumably for his 1935 anthology A Century of Detective Stories. She did not write a new one but instead provided ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’.

Ideas for G.K.C.

John Creasey

In Notebook 52 there are two references, both very similar, to John Creasey, British crime writer of almost 600 books. Hugely prolific under a variety of pseudonyms, he was also a founder of the Crime Writers Association. In The Clocks, the typewriting agency, which is the focus of much of the novel, does some work for Creasey-like authors. He did not write detective fiction.

Miss M[artindale] is chief agent—Sec[retary] to Creasey—who wrote spy stories

Rufus King

Twice in Notebook 35, during the plotting of Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Christie mentions Murder by Latitude, the title of a novel by this largely forgotten writer, although his name itself does not appear. Murder by Latitude features a typical Christie setting, aboard a ship from which contact with land has been severed. There are a few King titles in the library at Greenway House.

Atmosphere like Murder by Latitude—some people—amongst them a Murderer

A.E.W. Mason

Mason was the creator of Inspector Hanaud. The reference in Notebook 35 is to At the Villa Rose, published in 1910, a case involving the death of an elderly woman and the suspicion surrounding her companion. While plotting One, Two, Buckle my Shoe Christie reminds herself of it:

A murder discovered (woman? Elderly? Like Villa Rose) Clue—a shoe buckle

Edgar Allan Poe

The ‘inventor’ of the detective story when he published ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in 1841, ‘The Purloined Letter’ is another famous case for his detective Auguste Dupin, turning on the idea of hiding in plain sight. Christie’s reference is in connection with a fortune hidden not in but on an envelope—as stamps. She used this plot device in the short story ‘Strange Jest’ and also much later, in Spider’s Web. The concept of hiding in plain sight is also used in ‘The Nemean Lion’.

Stamps—fortune left in them—on old letters in desk—‘Purloined Letter’ mentioned—they look in obvious envelope—really stamps on it

Dorothy L. Sayers

Sayers’ creation Lord Peter Wimsey made his debut in 1923 in Whose Body. In addition to the writer herself, Wimsey is mentioned in Notebook 41—this time in a reference to Ronnie West in Lord Edgware Dies. It is also possible that the naming of Dr Peter Lord in Sad Cypress is homage to Christie’s great contemporary.

Ronnie West (debonair Peter Wimseyish)

4 Cat among the Pigeons:The Nursery Rhyme Murders (#ulink_3f0e2371-afc9-5c6b-ad47-d2154a1e8d3b)

‘I adore nursery rhymes, don’t you? Always so tragic and macabre. That’s why children like them.’

The Mousetrap, I, i

SOLUTIONS REVEALED

Crooked House • Five Little Pigs • ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’ • Hickory Dickory Dock • ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’ • Ordeal by Innocence • A Pocket Full of Rye • ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ • Ten Little Niggers • ‘The Tuesday Night Club’

The attraction of children’s literature, either as titles or themes, has often provided crime writers with inspiration. Dickson Carr’s The Arabian Nights Murder, Douglas Browne’s The Looking Glass Murders, McBain’s Snow White and Rose Red and Rumpelstiltskin, Queen’s There Was an Old Woman, Smith’s This Is the House, Witting’s There Was a Crooked Man and Fuller’s With My Little Eye are all drawn from the playroom, while S.S. Van Dine’s The Bishop Murder Case uses Mother Goose as a theme. The attraction is obvious—the juxtaposition of the childlike and the chilling, the twisting of the mundane into the macabre.

But it was Agatha Christie who made it her own and exploited it more comprehensively than any other writer. There are numerous references to nursery rhymes scattered throughout the Notebooks. Sometimes the idea went no further than a brief jotting (see ‘Miscellaneous’ on page 129); others provided her with some of her greatest works—Ten Little Niggers,Five Little Pigs and Three Blind Mice/The Mousetrap. In some cases it provides no more than a title, Hickory Dickory Dock and One, Two, Buckle my Shoe; in some cases, Ten Little Niggers and A Pocket Full of Rye, it provides the book with an overall schema; while the use of Crooked House and Three Blind Mice is more symbolic than actual. The most successful are undoubtedly Five Little Pigs and Ten Little Niggers, where the rhyme is convincingly and ingeniously followed. The dramatic impact of an innocent nursery rhyme transforming into a killer’s calling card is irresistible to an imaginative crime writer such as Agatha Christie.

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie, When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing, Was not that a dainty dish to set before the king?

The king was in his counting-house, counting out his money, The queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey, The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.

The most fruitful nursery rhyme was ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, which provided no less than three titles: the novel A Pocket Full of Rye, and the short stories ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ and ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’. In the case of the short stories, only the title has been inspired by the rhyme, whereas the novel follows the pattern of the rhyme very closely.

‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ December 1929

A sixpenny piece helps to solve a brutal murder that has left a family divided with mutual suspicion.

Although there are no surviving notes for ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’—unsurprisingly, since it made such an early appearance in the Christmas 1929 edition of Holly Leaves—there is a reference to it in Notebook 56. Appearing as it does among the notes for A Pocket Full of Rye, this is unusual in, puzzlingly, also appearing to make reference to the already published Crooked House.

Sing a Song of Sixpence

The crooked sixpence found (a Crooked man Crooked wife

Crooked house)

An aspect of this short story that has escaped the attention of Christie commentators is its similarity to Ordeal by Innocence (see Chapter 7). ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ features the arrival of an outside investigator, Sir Edward Palliser, at the home of Miss Crabtree, who has been murdered by a blow to the head administered by a member of her own household. Because no one has been arrested for the crime, her family describe how ‘they sit there every day looking at each other surreptitiously and wondering’. In this atmosphere of mutual suspicion he reaches a solution which explicitly foreshadows the 1958 novel.

‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’ August 1935

A plea for help to Poirot is too late to save Amelia Barrowby, but he is determined to get to the truth.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle-shells And pretty maids all in a row.

This short nursery rhyme features no less than five times throughout the Notebooks, even though its words gave the title of just one short story, ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’. But it seems to have made an impression on Christie’s mind as she often referred to it in the course of plotting other titles. And there are similarities between this short story and a novel she planned but never wrote. The story was first published in the UK in The Strand, having appeared some months earlier in Ladies’ Home Journal in the USA. This story’s connection to the nursery rhyme is stronger than ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ or ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’, as it includes the shells, the garden and the killer’s name. Mary Delafontaine poisons her aunt and hides the shells of the fatal oysters among the other cockle shells used as decoration in her garden. She tries, unsuccessfully, to incriminate the foreign companion:

The old lady—the foreign girl—Mary—the ‘weak’ husband

The final plot is encapsulated in Notebook 20:

Oyster story—Man dies after dinner—strychnine in oyster—swallowed—shells out in garden or in shell box—food analysed—nothing. Possibly some complication about a cachet he took—or someone gave him—if so, unjustly accused