LITERARY CRITICISM:
PATRICIA CRAIGreviews
Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks – Fifty Years of Mysteries in the MakingBy John Curran
Harper Collins, pp 492. £20.00
‘UNLESS I GET a rough sketch of my idea jotted down, it will go.” This remark of Agatha Christie’s alter ego and Hercule Poirot’s friend Mrs Ariadne Oliver has a heartfelt ring, which ties it in with her creator’s own practice, as disclosed in her notebooks. (These old-school exercise books, cash books and memo books are part of the Agatha Christie archive at Greenway House in Devon, her home for many years.) John Curran, indefatigable author of the current Christie companion, has had a whale of a time poring over these notebooks, and the resulting analysis of their contents affords some exhilarating glimpses into the detective writer’s modus operandi.
Plots, for example, didn't spring fully formed into Agatha Christie's head, as we see from the seven possible scenarios devised for Mrs McGinty's Deadand the cogitation involved in getting these whittled down to one, the eventual novel (number four in the sequence). "Tremendous planning", as with Ten Little Niggers, entails jettisoning superfluous or unmalleable characters, adapting the pattern in the interests of obfuscation, misleading the reader while still playing fair.
Overall, it’s a matter of causing every element of the interlocking puzzle to slot securely into its place – thinking out the development of the story “and worrying about it until it comes right”. The notebooks – 73 in total – are the place in which this arduous activity is carried on.
Out of the bare bones, we know, a wonderfully complicated and intriguing narrative will evolve. But the bones uncovered here are sometimes very bare indeed.
Whatwe get is a series of engagingly cryptic jottings: "Miss R's teeth labelled under Miss B's name"; "coat buttons incident"; "extended version of Xmas pudding"; "morphia in the morning tea". What are we to make of "disappearance of actress – strange behaviour of head gardener", or of Miss Marple acquiring a sudden skill in ventriloquism to unnerve a murderer, and then emerging triumphantly from a broom cupboard?
Fortunately John Curran, aficionado par excellence, is on hand with his exhaustive commentary to fill the gaps, to assess the probable impact of the possible variations on each detective theme, and provide a good critical account of the books that resulted from the doughty spade work, the inimitable opus: "does not pass the key test"; " Towards Zerois superb Christie"; "a sublime detective plot".
John Curran has organised his material as efficiently as an Agatha Christie murder mystery, with each of his 12 chapters constructed around a particular category of novel (“The Nursery Rhyme Murders”, “Murder Abroad”, etc).
He has also appended a couple of previously unpublished stories, one a typical Christie jeu d'esprit, and the other an oddity. The first has a dog's ball furnishing a clue to a crime (shades of Dumb Witness), while the second, an alternative version of "The Capture of Cerberus" from The Labours of Hercules, contains a thinly disguised Adolf Hitler, which probably didn't commend it to a publisher in 1939.
These stories are interesting and readable, but it’s in the main part of the Secret Notebooks that its value lies. Here we gain a sense of a writing life devoted to enormity, justice and cunning, of immense technical problems encountered and resolved, of ingenuity taken to an extreme.
Curran's enthusiasm for his subject carries us along, as plots and plans are worked out – even if the extra ingredient, the way it all comes together to reach an electrifying dénouement, remains mysterious and incalculable.
Patricia Craig is an author and critic, and editor of the Oxford books of Detective Storiesand English Detective Stories