(1939). This would seem to suggest that very few notebooks were, in fact, lost. Why notes for Murder is Easy are missing – apart from a passing reference in Notebook 66 – is a minor mystery when the notes for the novels on either side survive.
In some cases the notes are sketchy and consist of little more than a list of characters (Death on the Nile – Notebook 30). And some titles have copious notes: They Came to Baghdad (100 pages), Five Little Pigs (75 pages), One, Two, Buckle my Shoe (75 pages). Other titles outline the course of the finished book so closely that I am tempted to assume that there were earlier, rougher notes that have not survived. A case in point is Ten Little Niggers1 (aka And Then There Were None). In An Autobiography Dame Agatha remembers: ‘I had written the book Ten Little Niggers because it was so difficult to do that the idea fascinated me. Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer becoming obvious. I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning.’ Unfortunately, none of this planning survives; what there is in Notebook 65 follows almost exactly the progress of the novel. It is difficult to believe that this would have been written straight on to the page with so few deletions or so little discussion of possible alternatives. Nor are there, unfortunately, any notes for her dramatisation of this famous story. For the rest of her career we are fortunate to have notes on all of the novels. In the case of most of the later titles the notes are extensive and detailed – and legible.
Fewer than 50 of almost 150 short stories are discussed in the pages of the Notebooks. This may mean that, for many of them, Christie typed directly on to the page without making any preliminary notes. Or that she worked on loose pages that she subsequently discarded. When she wrote the early short stories she did not consider herself a writer in the professional sense of the word. It was only after her divorce, and the consequent need to earn her living, that she realised that writing was now her ‘job’. So the earliest adventures of Poirot as published in 1923 in The Sketch magazine do not appear in the Notebooks at all, although there are, thankfully, detailed notes for her greatest Poirot collection, The Labours of Hercules. And many ideas that she sketched for short stories did not make it any further than the pages of the Notebooks (see ‘Unused Ideas’).
Two examples of Agatha Christie, the housekeeper. The heading ‘Wallingford’ on the lower one confirms that they are both lists of items to bring to or from her various homes.
There are notes on most of her stage work, including unknown, unperformed and uncompleted plays. There are only two pages each of notes for her most famous and her greatest play, Three Blind Mice (as it still was at the time of writing the notes) and Witness for the Prosecution respectively. But these are disappointingly uninformative, as they contain no detail of the adaptation, merely a draft of scenes without any of the usual speculation.
And there are many pages devoted to An Autobiography, her poetry and her Westmacott novels. Most of the poetry is of a personal nature as she often wrote a poem as a birthday present for family members. There are only 40 pages in total devoted to the Westmacott titles, mainly of quotations that might provide titles, and those for An Autobiography are, for the most part, diffuse and disconnected, consisting of what are little more than reminders to herself.
… I usually have about half a dozen on hand …
It could reasonably be supposed that each Agatha Christie title has its own Notebook. This is emphatically not the case. In only five instances is a Notebook devoted to a single title. Notebooks 26 and 42 are entirely dedicated to Third Girl; Notebook 68 concerns only Peril at End House; Notebook 2 is A Caribbean Mystery; Notebook 46 contains nothing but extensive historical background and a rough outline for Death Comes as the End. Otherwise, every Notebook is a fascinating record of a productive brain and an industrious professional. Some examples should make this clear.
Notebook 53 contains:
Fifty pages of detailed notes for After the Funeral and A Pocket Full of Rye alternating with each other every few pages
Rough notes for Destination Unknown
A short outline of an unwritten novel
Three separate and different attempts at the radio play Personal Call
Notes for a new Mary Westmacott
Preliminary notes for Witness for the Prosecution and The Unexpected Guest
An outline for an unpublished and unperformed play, Miss Perry
Some poetry
Notebook 13 contains:
38 pages for Death Comes as the End
20 pages for Taken at the Flood
20 pages for Sparkling Cyanide
6 pages for Mary Westmacott
30 pages of a foreign Travel Diary
4 pages each for The Hollow, Curtain, N or M?
Notebook 35 contains:
75 pages for Five Little Pigs
75 pages for One, Two, Buckle my Shoe
8 pages for N or M?
4 pages for The Body in the Library
25 pages of ideas
… if I had kept all these things neatly sorted …
One of the most frustrating aspects of the Notebooks is the lack of order, especially the uncertainty of the chronology. Although there are 73 Notebooks, we have only 77 examples of dates most of them incomplete. A page can be headed ‘October 20th’ or ‘September 28th’ or just ‘1948’. There are only six examples of complete (day/month/year) dates all from the 1960s and 70s. In the case of incomplete dates it is sometimes possible to deduce the year from the publication date of the title in question, but in the case of notes for an unpublished or undeveloped idea, this is almost impossible. This uncertainty is compounded for a variety of reasons.
First, use of the Notebooks was utterly random. Christie opened a Notebook (or, as she says herself, any of half a dozen contemporaneous ones), found the next blank page and began to write. It was simply a case of finding an empty page, even one between two already filled pages. And, as if that wasn’t complicated enough, in almost all cases she turned the Notebook over and, with admirable economy, wrote from the back also. In one extreme case, during the plotting of ‘Manx Gold’ she even wrote sideways on the page! It should be remembered that many of these pages were filled during the days of paper rationing in the Second World War. In compiling this book I had to devise a system to enable me to identify whether or not the page was an ‘upside-down’ one.
Second, because many pages are filled with notes for stories that were never completed, there are no publication dates as a guideline. Deductions can sometimes be made from the notes immediately preceding and following, but this method is not entirely flawless. A closer
