Baghdad?
Hospital
Hotel [At Bertram’s Hotel]
Flat Third Floor Flat idea
Baghdad Chest idea [‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’ and The Rats]
Small house in London husband and wife, children etc.
Park Regent’s Park
School Girl’s school [Cat among the Pigeons]
Boat Queen Emma? Western Lady
Train seen from a train? Through window of house or vice versa? [4.50 from Paddington]
Beach And Boarding house [possibly Afternoon at the Seaside]
Although difficult to date exactly, the following extract is probably from the very late 1940s. It is just after notes for Mrs McGinty’s Dead (although with a totally different plot outline) and They Do It with Mirrors (ditto) and is followed by a list of her books in her own handwriting, the latest title of which is The Hollow (1946).
Ideas for Mise-en-scene?
Conditions like The White Crow. Start with the murder – a prominent person – such as a minister –
(Aneurin Bevan type?) – on holiday? Interrogation of his personnel – His wife – Female secretary
Male [secretary] – Difficulties as I don’t know about Ministers
Chief pharmacist in a Hospital? Young medical man doing research on Penicillin?
A brains trust? Local one? BBC Mrs AC arrives to broadcast – Dies – not the real Mrs AC?
A big hotel? Imperial? No – done
Shop? Worth’s during m uin parade – Selfridges – in a cubicle during Sale
Some of the references in this extract may need clarification. The White Crow is a 1928 detective novel by Philip MacDonald; it concerns the murder of an influential businessman in his own office (as in A Pocket Full of Rye). Aneurin Bevan was UK Minister of Health, 1945–51. The position of chief pharmacist was one with which Christie was familiar both from her early life and from her experience in the Second World War (The Pale Horse contains a gesture in this direction). ‘Imperial’ is a reference to Peril at End House, although the hotel is disguised as the Majestic. And Worth’s, like Selfridge’s, is a famous department store.
‘Mrs AC arrives to broadcast’ reminds us that although Christie refused countless requests throughout her career to broadcast on either radio or television, she did, at least once, take part in a Desert Island Discs type programme, In the Gramophone Library, broadcast in August 1946. And the rueful remark ‘Difficulties as I don’t know about Ministers’ – my favourite comment from the entire Notebooks – shows that she abided by the old maxim: ‘Write about what you know’.
Surprise, Surprise!
But the biggest surprise in the Notebooks is the fact that many of the best plots did not necessarily spring from a single devastating idea. She considered all possibilities when she plotted and did not confine herself to one idea, no matter how good it may have seemed. In very few cases is the identity of the murderer a given from the start of the plotting.
The most dramatic example is Crooked House. By the mid-1940s she had experimented with the narrator-murderer, the policeman-murderer, the everybody-as-murderer and the everybody-as-victim gambits. With its startling revelation that the killer is a child, Crooked House remains one of the great Christie surprises, in the same class as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, Curtain and Endless Night. (To be entirely fair, at least two other writers, Ellery Queen in The Tragedy of Y and Margery Allingham in The White Cottage Mystery had already exploited this idea but far less effectively.) But a child-killer was not the raison d’être of this novel; the shattering identity of the murderer was only one element under consideration and not necessarily the key element. Even a cursory glance at Notebook 14 shows that Christie also considered Sophia, Clemency and Edith as well as Josephine when it came to potential murderers. It was not a case of arranging the entire plot around Josephine as the one unalterable fact.
Again, at no point in the notes for her last devastating surprise, Endless Night, is there mention of the narrator-killer. It was not a case of simply repeating the Ackroyd trick; in fact, at only one point in the Notebook is there mention of telling the story in the first person. The inspiration for the shock ending came to her as she plotted rather than the other way round.
Arguably the last of the ingeniously clued detective novels, A Murder is Announced, would seem to allow of only one solution, and yet at one stage Letitia Blacklock is under consideration as the second victim of Mitzi, who has already murdered her own husband Rudi Sherz. It was not a case of deciding to write a novel featuring a supposed victim actually murdering her blackmailer during a carefully devised game. Nor did Murder in Mesopotamia always revolve around a wife-killing husband with a perfect alibi; Miss Johnston and, in fact, Mrs Leidner herself were also considered for the role of killer. The setting, the archaeological dig, would seem to have been the fixed idea for this novel and the rest of the plot was woven around it rather than vice versa.
Although this still seems surprising, it is in keeping with Christie’s general method of working. Her strengths lay in her unfettered mental fertility and her lack of system. Her initial inspiration could be as vague as a gypsy’s curse (Endless Night), an archaeological dig (Murder in Mesopotamia) or a newspaper advertisement (A Murder is Announced). After that, she let her not inconsiderable imagination have free rein with the idea and hey, presto! a year later the latest Christie appeared on the bookshelves. And some of the ideas that did not make it into that masterpiece might well surface in the one to be published the following year; or ten years hence.
Dotted throughout the Notebooks are dozens of phrases that show Agatha Christie the resourceful creator, Agatha Christie the critical professional, Agatha Christie the sly humorist at work. In many cases she ‘thought’ directly on to the page and there are many instances where she addresses herself in this way. Sometimes it is idle speculation as she toys with various ideas before settling on just one:
‘How about this’ … as she works out the timetable of ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’
‘A good idea would be’ … this, tantalisingly, is on an otherwise blank page
‘or – a little better’ … firming up the motive in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
‘How about girl gets job’ … from early notes for A Caribbean Mystery
‘Who? Why? When? How? Where? Which?’ … the essence of a detective story from One, Two, Buckle my Shoe
‘Which way do we turn?’ … in the middle of Third Girl
‘A prominent person – such as a minister – (Aneurin Bevan type?) – on holiday? Difficulties as I don’t know about Ministers’ … rueful while looking for a new idea in the mid-1940s
