The Christie Diaries

I got hooked onto Dame Agatha Christie quite late in life. As a child, I preferred to have my head buried in an Enid Blyton or Nancy Drew — a phase that lasted until my mid-teens (arrested development, perhaps!) This, despite my classmates fighting over Christie’s crime thrillers during every library hour!

The Queen of Crime, who first teased the mind of her readers with her debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles back in 1920, continues to spin her web of mysteries into the minds of her legions of fans — long after she passed on in 1976.

In the foreword to Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, Christie’s grandson Michael Prichard recalls how John Curran came all the way to Calgary from Dublin — in 2005 — to watch a Christie play and how he spent much of his time exploring the ‘fax room’ at the Greenway House (the family home) which housed Christie’s archive. So at the outset, you know that the book is in good hands. Curran also gives a spoiler alert of sorts in the beginning of the novel, which is a good move.

He recounts how he first discovered a box of Christie’s notebooks during a weekend at Greenway. The notes are testimony to Christie’s plot developments; ideas for ingenious storylines of fully-fledged works like A Murder is Announced, Cat Among the Pigeons, The Body in the Library can all be traced to these notes.

The notebooks — a veritable spokesperson for Christie’s creative and brilliant mind — also document the numerous ideas she toyed with and rejected before writing a murder mystery.

Clearly, the discovery of Christie’s notebooks granted Curran an enviable position: an unabashed Christie loyalist, he was in a position to divulge information capable of making any true Christie fan’s heart soar. And that is exactly what he delivers. According to Christie’s jottings, Death on the Nile, one of her most popular novels featuring the pompous, moustache-twirling Belgian detective Hercule Poirot — the book was adapted into a successful movie — was initially supposed to feature the more mild-mannered Miss Marple. And Then There Were None was supposed to have more than 10 characters; and Christie thought of many different endings for Crooked House before settling on the novel’s marvellous and terrifying twist. The chapters also include copies of pages from her notebooks that show her scrawls and, at times, undecipherable handwriting.

Sections of the press believed Christie to be dyslexic — an allegation Curran strongly refutes in the book. Curran also discusses her fascination for foreign nationalities (proof: Christie’s decision to make Poirot Belgian and inclusion of ‘foreigners’ in Dumb Witness amongst others), her ability to tie up macabre murder mysteries with children’s nursery rhymes (Five Little Pigs; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe; Hickory Dickory Dock and so on).

We discover that penning Five Little Pigs — featuring one of her best ‘murder in the past’ plots — must have actually been frustrating for the author, as she used up almost 60 pages of her notebook before reaching a serious conclusion. And, she accepted an invitation to be a Detection Club member on the condition that she would never have to give a speech.

Her notebooks also show her (as Curran puts it) as ‘Agatha Christie, the family member’. He supports this statement by pointing out that the notes for Three Act Tragedy are followed by an address and phone number and that ‘travel details appear in the middle of The Capture of Cerberus’.

To a fan, the book is nothing short of a treasure trove, the most precious gems being Christie’s two unpublished short stories: The Capture of Cerberus and The Incident of the Dog’s Ball, featuring Poirot. Even here, Curran has done his research well — talking about when the stories were written and why they were never published before. Two never-before read Christie stories, brand new plots and a Poirot in his element all make this book a must-add to a Christie devotee’s collection. But, emphasis must be placed on the words ‘Christie devotee’, for anyone else might fail to see why a writer would spend four years of his life writing a 483-page book about a deceased author. The reader is left knowing the storyteller was as an exceptionally talented human being — not just another best-selling author with successful titles to her credit.

Christie would have definitely 
approved.

anu@khaleejtimes.com