In 1955, when asked in the course of an interview for BBC radio about her working habits as a writer, English crime novelist and playwright Agatha Christie replied that “the disappointing truth is that I haven’t much method . . . The real work is done in thinking out the development of your story and worrying about it until comes right”.
The 73 extant notebooks that Christie kept over the course of her career, assembled and analysed in this volume by John Curran, confirm the truth of this statement. The thoughts, plot sketches and character notes that are scattered throughout them reveal the workings of a mind that was restless, fertile, sharp, attentive – and almost totally devoid of anything approaching order.
As Curran points out on more than one occasion in the course of this enormous book, which brings together a revised version of the contents of his previous volumes, Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks (2009) and Agatha Christie's Murder in the Making, Christie would routinely record ideas for a particular project in several separate notebooks, often without dates or any other identifying material.
This lack of organisation means that Curran has had to draw on his extensive knowledge of Christie’s oeuvre in order to impose some kind of coherence on her volumes of disparate scribbles, and this he has done well. The book opens with a discussion of Christie’s emergence as a writer, the nature and the value of her notebooks, and the principles by which she tended to work, before taking us, title by title, through the plans she made for her creations over the six decades of her career.
Immense task
Curran ought to be applauded simply for taking the trouble to undertake this immense task. His efforts, though lacking the novelty he claims (the notebooks advertised here as "secret" have been used extensively by Christie's biographers), reveal a great deal about how Christie tended to work. We find that she did not give much thought to subtleties of characterisation, that she would happily reuse plots, that she would begin a story without knowing its outcome, that entire works would sometimes be inspired by a single word or phrase, that her initial conceptions of a particular project were often vague. An early entry for The Hollow, for example, simply reads: "Poirot asked to go down to country – finds a house and various fantastic details." "Saves her life several times" is the gnomic genesis of Endless Night.
Some of the most interesting and rewarding material arrives when we find Christie in a state of uncertainty, as she seems to have been when, settling down to make notes for what would become One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, she comes up with "Who? Why? When? How? Where? Which?" This is reassuring. But there is only so much of it one can take, and after a while Curran's exhaustive chronicle begins to feel laboured.
Blind admiration
This feeling is compounded by his near blind admiration for his subject, which is so impassioned as to border on the defensive, and results in the inclusion of a great deal of bizarre extraneous material. Early in the book he treats us to a long consideration of what it means to be readable; he extends an implausible level of generosity to Christie’s late fiction (which was certainly not the sort of thing to keep pages turning); he works himself into a frenzy about supremely mundane discoveries (“She even wrote sideways on the page!”); and he offers a humourless defence of Christie’s shabby handwriting. We here encounter the staggering insight that, in these jottings, “there was no reason to make an effort to maintain a certain standard of calligraphy as no one but Christie herself was ever intended to read them.”
These digressions can be wearing, and contribute to the feeling that, ultimately, this is a book you will want to refer to rather than curl up with. Used this way, it might not deliver the comfort of narrative. But it will offer much to instruct, surprise and enjoy.
