Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories

As we shall see, the ‘Stamp idea’ features in a short story and a play over 15 years apart; the ‘Old lady in train’ ploy appears in two novels almost 20 years apart; and the ‘Poor little rich girl’ inspired a short story and, 25 years later, a novel.

EXHIBIT A: THE DETECTION CLUB

’It’s rather early to ring you up but I want to ask you a favour.’

‘Yes?’

‘It is the annual dinner of our Detective Authors’ Club.’

Third Girl, Chapter 2

The Detection Club, as its name suggests, is a club for writers of detective stories. Although the exact date is uncertain, it was probably founded in 1929. Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers were two of the founders and by the early 1930s all of the major writers of detective fiction of the day, including Agatha Christie, were members. Only writers of classical detective fiction, as distinct from crime writers in general, were eligible to join. It was not a professional body campaigning to improve the lot of crime writers; rather it was a glorified dining club with G.K. Chesterton, creator of Father Brown, as its first President, followed in 1936 by E.C. Bentley, author of the famous Trent’s Last Case, and, from 1958 to her death in 1976, Agatha Christie. She agreed to this role on the understanding that she would never have to give a speech. Membership was by invitation only and all new members had to undergo an initiation ceremony (designed by Dorothy L. Sayers), involving the President in ceremonial robes, a procession with candles and the initiate swearing an oath, while placing a hand on Eric the Skull, to uphold the club’s rules.

Although these rules were unwritten and the ritual itself, designed by Sayers, light-hearted, the intentions behind them were serious and admirable. In an effort to raise the literary level of the detective story and to distinguish it from the thriller or ‘shocker’, candidates had to promise:

to honour the King’s English;

never to conceal a vital clue from the reader;

to adhere to detection as distinct from ‘Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition…Coincidence or Acts of God’;

to observe ‘a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Mysterious Chinamen and Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science’;

never to steal or disclose the plots of other members.

In the early days the Detection Club produced collaborative novels and, in more recent times, short story collections. In the early ventures different hands wrote succeeding chapters, each subsequent writer taking cognisance of the plot developments of his or her predecessor. Agatha Christie contributed to the three earliest publications, The Scoop in 1930, Behind the Screen the following year and the full-length novel The Floating Admiral in 1932. The first two shorter efforts were read in instalments on BBC radio and subsequently published in The Listener, finally appearing in book form in 1983. Apart from Christie, the collaborators on The Scoop were Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, E.C. Bentley, Freeman Wills Crofts and Clemence Dane; Ronald Knox and Hugh Walpole replaced Crofts and Dane for Behind the Screen.

In the case of The Floating Admiral each contributor had to include a proposed solution as well as a chapter in an effort to prevent complications being introduced merely to make life difficult for the following contributor. Christie’s contribution is, unfortunately, the shortest in the book, but her proposed solution is a typically ingenious one. However, she decided that the time and effort that went into one of these productions could be more profitably spent on her own writing and she politely declined to involve herself in any further titles.

The Detection Club in the Notebooks

The main reference to the Detection Club in the Notebooks is in Notebook 41, the first page of which is headed ‘Ideas 1931’ (despite the uncertainty about its date of foundation, by the time of this note the club was well established):

The 13 at Dinner

Detective story Club (?)

Miss Sayers and her husband—Poisons

Mr Van Dine and

Mr Wills Crofts and wife—Alibis

Mrs Christie

Mr Rhode

Mr and Mrs Cole

Mr Bentley

Miss Clemence Dane

Mr Berkeley and wife—fantastic writer

Coincidentally, the title Thirteen at Dinner was used in America two years later for Christie’s 1933 novel Lord Edgware Dies. The US title refers to Chapter 15 of the book, where a character remarks that there were 13 guests at the dinner table on the evening of Lord Edgware’s death, thereby giving Lady Edgware 12 witnesses. It is unlikely, however, that this is what Christie had in mind when she sketched the Detection Club idea.

Of the 13 people she lists who would have composed this party, most of them were her fellow-writers. ‘Miss Sayers’ is Dorothy L. Sayers—writer, dramatist, anthologist, theologian and scholar—Christie’s great contemporary and one of the founders of the Detection Club. Although listed in Notebook 41 as ‘Miss’, Sayers had married Oswald Fleming in April 1926 but retained her maiden name for her professional activities.

‘Mr Van Dine’ was known to the reading public as S.S. Van Dine, creator of Philo Vance. The gap after his name would seem to indicate that Christie was not sure if he was married (he was), but the inclusion of his partner would have given 14 dinner guests—which perhaps accounts for the uncertainty. It is odd that Christie should have included Van Dine at all. She certainly read his novels—a few are on the shelves in Greenway House—as they were enormous bestsellers in their day, but he was not a member of the Detection Club as he lived in America.

‘Mr Wills Crofts’ was Freeman Wills Crofts, creator of Inspector French of Scotland Yard, a painstaking and thorough policeman whose speciality (as indicated) is the unbreakable alibi. Like Christie his first novel, The Cask, appeared in 1920 and is still considered a classic. He continued to write until his death in 1955, producing over 40 novels.

‘Mr Rhode’ is John Rhode, whose real name was Major Cecil John Charles Street and who also wrote as Miles Burton. Like Christie he was a Crime Club author for most of his career and altogether he wrote almost 150 novels under both names.

‘Mr and Mrs Cole’ was the husband-and-wife team of G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, detective novelists and Socialists. Although the pair were prolific, with 30 novels to their credit, their books are verbose, lifeless and long out of print.

‘Mr Bentley’ was E.C. Bentley, whose reputation as a detective novelist rests almost entirely on one novel, the classic Trent’s Last Case. He also issued a book of short stories and co-wrote another title, Trent’s Own Case, both featuring Philip Trent.

Clemence Dane is largely forgotten as a crime writer. Enter Sir John, filmed by Hitchcock as Murder, is her best-known title.

‘Mr Berkeley’ is Anthony Berkeley, who also wrote as Francis Iles. A very influential writer, he foresaw the emergence of the crime novel, as distinct from the detective novel, and his contribution to both branches of the genre is impressive. Alfred Hitchcock memorably filmed his Iles novel Before the Fact as Suspicion.

In addition to this list, Christie makes various allusions to her fellow Detection Club members in a range of works. Partners in Crime, Christie’s 1929 Tommy and Tuppence collection of short stories, sees the Beresfords investigating their cases in the style of various detectives. She pastiches Berkeley in ‘The Clergyman’s Daughter’ and Crofts in ‘The Unbreakable Alibi’ although, oddly, none of the other writers mentioned in Notebook 41 is featured.

An article Christie wrote for the Ministry of Information in 1945, ‘Detective Writers in England’, is also of note. Here the writers featured are Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr, H.C. Bailey, Ngaio Marsh, Austin Freeman and Margery Allingham—Sayers being the only writer common to the article and Notebook 41, although all were members of The Detection Club. This may be due to the fact that Christie had more dealings with Sayers, mostly during the planning of the collaborative titles The Floating Admiral, The Scoop and Behind the Screen, all of which were masterminded by Sayers.

Chapter 6 of The Body in the Library also mentions Sayers, H.C. Bailey and John Dickson Carr (as well as Christie herself); and ‘The Flock of Geryon’, the tenth Labour of Hercules, mentions Sherlock Holmes, Mr Fortune, the creation of Bailey, and Sir Henry Merrivale, the creation of Dickson Carr. Dickson Carr’s The Burning Court is also a minor clue in Evil under the Sun and the same writer gets a further mention in The Clocks.

A single sentence each in Notebooks 18 and 35 also mentions the Detection Club, both with the same idea:

Guest night at the Det[ection] Club during ritual—Mrs. O[liver]’s 6 guests

Detection Club Murder—Mrs Oliver—her two guests—someone killed when the Ritual starts

Guest Night was, not surprisingly, an evening when members of the club could invite a guest for dinner. The ‘ritual’ was the ceremony, involving the swearing of an ‘oath’ with Eric the Skull standing in for the Bible, at which new members were initiated. As a detective novelist Mrs Oliver would, of course, have been a member of the club.

3 The Moving Finger:Agatha Christie at Work (#ulink_859da440-b55a-51a4-90a9-2b02b7ddf0d9)

‘I mean, what can you say about how you write your books? What I mean is, first you’ve got to think of something, and then when you’ve thought of it you’ve got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That’s all.’

Dead Man’s Folly, Chapter 17

SOLUTIONS REVEALED

Crooked House • Endless Night • Mrs McGinty’s Dead • A Murder is Announced • Murder in Mesopotamia • One, Two, Buckle my Shoe

How did Agatha Christie produce so many books of such a high standard over so many years? A close examination of her Notebooks will reveal some of her working methods, although, as will be seen, ‘method’ was not her strong suit. But that, I contend, was her secret—even though she was unaware of this paradox herself.