chronology. Leaving aside Curtain, the earliest novel listed here is N or M? published in 1941 and the latest is Taken at the Flood published in 1948. But many of the intervening titles are missing from this Notebook – Five Little Pigs is in Notebook 35, Evil under the Sun in Notebook 39 and Towards Zero in Notebook 32.
This page, in Notebook 66, is from Christie’s most prolific and ingenious period and list ideas that became Sad Cypress, ‘Problem at Sea’ and They Do It With Mirrors. It was one of very few pages in the Notebooks to bear a date, and the stories were published between 1936 and 1952.
Another rare page with a date, demonstrating a marked change in handwriting, these are among the last notes that Christie wrote and appear in Notebook 7. Although she continued making notes, no new material appeared later than Postern of Fate, published in October 1973.
Third, in many cases jottings for a book may have preceded publication by many years. The earliest notes for The Unexpected Guest are headed ‘1951’ in Notebook 31, i.e. seven years before the first performance; the germ of Endless Night first appears, six years before publication, on a page of Notebook 4 dated 1961.
The pages following a clearly dated page cannot be assumed to have been written at the same time. For example:
page 1 of Notebook 3 reads ‘General Projects 1955’
page 9 reads ‘Nov. 5th 1965’ (and there were ten books in the intervening period)
page 12 reads ‘1963’
page 21 reads ‘Nov. 6 1965 Cont.’
page 28 is headed ‘Notes on Passenger to Frankfort [sic] 1970’
page 36 reads ‘Oct. 1972’
page 72 reads ‘Book Nov. 1972’
In the space of 70 pages we have moved through seventeen years and as many novels and, between pages 9 and 21, skipped back and forth between 1963 and 1965.
Notebook 31 is dated, on different pages, 1944, 1948 and 1951, but also contains notes for The Body in the Library (1942), written in the early days of the Second World War. Notebook 35 has pages dated 1947, sketching Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and 1962, an early germ of Endless Night.
… and filed …
Although the Notebooks are numbered from 1 through to 73, this numbering is completely arbitrary. Some years before she died, Christie’s daughter Rosalind arranged, as a first step towards analysing their contents, that the Notebooks should be numbered and that the titles discussed within be listed. The analysis never went any further than that, but in the process every Notebook was allocated a number. This numbering is completely random and a lower number does not indicate an earlier year or a more important Notebook. Notebook 2, for instance, contains notes for A Caribbean Mystery (1964) and Notebook 3 for Passenger to Frankfurt (1970), while Notebook 37 contains a long, deleted extract from The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). So the numbers are nothing more than an identification mark.
… and labelled …
Some of the Notebooks show attempts on the part of the elderly Agatha Christie to impose a little order on this chaos. Notebook 31 has a loose-page listing inside the front cover in her own handwriting; others have typewritten page-markers indicating where each title is discussed. These brave attempts are rudimentary and the compiler (probably not Christie herself) soon wearied of the daunting task. Most Notebooks contain notes for several books and as three novels can often jostle for space among twenty pages, the page markers soon become hopelessly cumbersome and, eventually, useless.
To give some idea of the amount of information contained, randomly, within their covers, for the purposes of this book I created a table to index the entire contents. When printed, it ran to seventeen pages.
… something scribbled down …
Before discussing the handwriting in the Notebooks, it is only fair to emphasise that these were working notes and 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 were, essentially, personal journals and not written for any purpose other than to clarify her thoughts.
Our handwriting changes as we age and scrambled notes of college or university days soon overtake the copperplate efforts of our early school years. Accidents, medical conditions and age all take their toll on our writing. In most cases it is safe to assert that as we get older our handwriting deteriorates. In the case of Agatha Christie the opposite is the case. At her creative peak (roughly 1930 to 1950) her handwriting is almost indecipherable. It looks, in many cases, like shorthand and it is debatable if even she could read some sections of it. I have no doubt that the reason for this was that, during these hugely prolific years, her fertile brain teemed with ideas and it was a case of getting them on to paper as fast as possible. Clarity of presentation was a secondary consideration.
The conversion of the Notebooks into an easily readable format, for the purposes of this book, took over six months. A detailed knowledge of all of Dame Agatha’s output was not just an enormous help but a vital necessity. It helped to know, for instance, that a reference to ‘apomorphine’ is not a misprint, a mistake or a mis-spelling but a vital part of the plot of Sad Cypress. But it did not help in the case of notes for an unpublished title or for discarded ideas. As the weeks progressed I was surprised how used to the handwriting I became, so that converting the last batch of Notebooks was considerably quicker than the first. I also discovered that if I left a seemingly indecipherable page and returned to it a few days later, I could often make sense of it. But some words or sentences still defied me and in a number of cases I had to resort to an educated guess.
From the late 1940s onwards the handwriting steadily ‘improved’ so that by the early 1950s and, for example, After the Funeral in Notebook 53, the notes are quite legible. Agatha Christie was ruefully aware of this herself. In November 1957, in a letter about Ordeal by Innocence, she writes, ‘I am asking Mrs. Kirwan [her secretary Stella Kirwan] to type this to you knowing what my handwriting is like’, and again in August 1970 she describes her own handwriting as ‘overlarge and frankly rather illegible’. And she writes this after the improvement!
For some years, there has been a theory in the popular press that Agatha Christie suffered from dyslexia. I have no idea where this originated but even a cursory glance at the Notebooks gives the lie to this story. The only example that could be produced in evidence is her struggle with ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Carribean’ throughout the notes for A Caribbean Mystery: but I think in that she would not be alone!
… a kind of sketch of a plot …
Dotted irregularly throughout the Notebooks are brief jottings dashed down and often not developed any further at the time. This is what Christie means by ‘a sketch of a plot’; these jottings were all
