OPINION:
AGATHA CHRISTIE’S SECRET NOTEBOOKS: FIFTY YEARS OF MYSTERIES IN THE MAKING
@$:By John Curran
Harper, $25.99, 496 pages
Reviewed by Muriel Dobbin
Within 73 notebooks in two locked rooms in an English house lies the key to the world of mystery in which Dame Agatha Christie lived and worked.
What John Curran found in those rooms was a treasure trove of not only her published books but, even more important, her exercise copybooks in which she scrawled ideas and names and speculation about who should be murdered next and how best to do it in a career that lasted more than half a century.
When Christie died in 1976 at age 85, she had sold more than 2 billion copies in more than 100 countries, including 66 crime novels, 20 plays and more than 150 short stories.
Mr. Curran relates how he picked up a cardboard box in one of those untidy, dusty rooms and removed the first exercise book. It had a red cover and a tiny white label with the number 31. When he opened it, he read “The Body in the Library - People - Mavis Carr - Laurette King.”
Turning over pages at random Mr. Curran read “Death on the Nile - Points to be brought in - Helen sequence from girl’s point of view …. The Hollow - Inspector comes to Sir Henry - asks about revolver.”
By the time Mr. Curran went to bed that night in Agatha Christie’s house, he had read all the notebooks and had begun a four-year quest into the life of the queen of British murder mysteries. What he found out is disclosed in this fascinating collection about how she did it and how conscientious she was about plotting her mysteries. He conjures up a scenario in which Agatha jotted down ideas while sitting in the garden of her home on an English summer’s day:
“Mrs Oliver’s plan. The weapons. Revolver - knife - clothes line. Who will I murder? The foreign student … no, she has to be part of the plot … someone very unexpected … how about the lord of the manor?… no, too cliched … needs to have impact … how about a child? … needs to be handled carefully but I could make it a not very nice child.”
She considers more possibilities, writing in a sprawling hand in the notebook, then puts it away and goes into the house to look for ice cream for her grandson. “Agatha Christie, Queen of Crime, is finished for the day,” Mr. Curran concludes.
He describes how Agatha’s grandson, Matthew Prichard, took him on a tour of her village and as they drive, their surroundings are peopled by a cast that first found life in her mysteries with a panoramic view enjoyed by her famous detective Hercule Poirot.
Best of all is Christie’s home, now taken over by the National Trust, where Mr. Curran sits in her favorite armchair, admiring an “imposing entrance hall” with a dinner gong that was featured in “Dead Man’s Mirror” and a brass-bound trunk that had a place in “The Mystery of the Spanish Chest.”
The characters and contents of her books populate her house, and acquire a reality demonstrated by her notebooks. As early as her first novel “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” writes Mr. Curran, “One of Christie’s great gifts, her readability, was in evidence.”
He notes that Christie’s prose, while “by no means distinguished” read easily, her characters were believable and much of each book was told in dialogue. “Every chapter, almost every scene, pushes the story on to a carefully prepared solution and climax.”
Her plotting, coupled with her readability, Mr. Curran asserts, was to prove “a peerless combination” over the next 50 years. “Her solutions turn on everyday information - a mirror reflects but it also reverses, a sprawled body is not necessarily a dead body, a forest is the best hiding place for a tree.” He notes that in almost every Christie book there is a closed circle of suspects and a setting like a country house, a ship, a train or an island.
“In effect, Christie says, ’Here is the flock of suspects from which I will choose my villain. See if you can spot the black sheep.’ ”
Mr. Curran suggests that it is possible to read a different Christie title every month for seven years and then start over, secure in the knowledge that you won’t remember the plot of the first one. He reports that Christie’s most successful novel, one he also describes as “the best-selling crime novel of all time” was “And Then There Were None,” which, he notes, first had what would now be a most politically incorrect title.
The book became a film and a play, and according to the author, its skill lay in the challenge posed for Christie in a plot in which she herself pointed out, “Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous. I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning … it was clear, straightforward, baffling and yet had a perfectly reasonable explanation.”
Christie’s remarkable production of mysteries extended from what is generally regarded as the golden age of British detective fiction from the post-World War I period to the years following World War II. It was “the era of the country house weekend enlivened by the presence of a murderer, the evidence of the adenoidal housemaid, the snow covered lawn with no footprints, and the baffled policeman.”
But baffled law enforcement officers in those days could rely on the help of not only Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who depended on his “little gray cells,” but Miss Marple, the diminutive but redoubtable spinster who revels in fighting crime from her idyllic village of St. Mary Mead.
It is also Miss Marple who makes a telling comment on social change in “A Murder is Announced,” set at a time when England was “stumbling out of postwar austerity” and butlers were hard to come by. As she puts it, “Fifteen years ago everybody knew who everybody was. … But it’s not like that anymore. … Nobody knows who anybody is.” Agatha was writing an epitaph on the world she knew.
Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
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