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Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks
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Product Description
Product Description
A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie's 73 recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories. When Agatha Christie died in 1976, aged 85, she had become the world's most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide in more than 100 countries, she had achieved the impossible - more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one a bestseller. So prolific was Agatha Christie's output - 66 crime novels, 20 plays, 6 romance books under a pseudonym and over 150 short stories - it was often claimed that she had a photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over those 55 years to more mundane methods of working out her ingenious crimes? Following the death of Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable secret was revealed. Unearthed among her affairs at the family home of Greenway were Agatha Christie's private notebooks, 73 handwritten volumes of notes, lists and drafts outlining all her plans for her many books, plays and stories. Buried in this treasure trove, all in her unmistakable handwriting, are revelations about her famous books that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story. What is the 'deleted scene' in her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles? How did the infamous twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, really come about? Which very famous Poirot novel started life as an adventure for Miss Marple? Which books were designed to have completely different endings, and what were they? Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her own Autobiography, this remarkable new book includes a wealth of extracts and pages reproduced directly from the notebooks and her letters, plus for the first time two newly discovered complete Hercule Poirot short stories never before published.
About the Author
John Curran is the long-time literary advisor to her Agatha Christie's estate, often giving talks and appearing on documentaries about her life. He has spent the last few years unpicking the notebooks and deciphering Agatha Christie's handwriting for this, his first book.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unlocking The Secrets of One of Our Greatest Authors,
By
This review is from: Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories (Hardcover)
I heard about Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks on one of the many book podcasts that I download each week. These notebooks were a recent discovery when Christie's family allowed Greenway, Christie's holiday home, to be taken over by the National Trust. They had never been on display, they were a mix up of several plots, daily to do's, shopping lists, character ideas, lists of books (made me love Agatha even more) she wanted and other thoughts with no chronological order. That is where John Curran, an Agatha expert and friend of Christie's grandson, came in and this book is the results of four years work trying to decipher some of Christie's handwriting "often like short hand" and working out what notes related to what books and when.
The discoveries are really very interesting. It seems that Curran's (and probably most readers of her work) image of Agatha sat endlessly typing murder after murder, book after book with the killer planned at the start isn't quite so. In fact as you get to read her notes, which John has painstakingly transcribed, you find she would often chop and change the killer as she went. The idea for a book might ruminate for years and start from a simple observation as `a stamp' the notes then look at how such an everyday item could cause someone to commit murder. Who knew that a certain famous Poirot scene was originally meant for Miss Marple? Which books didn't have the endings you and I might have read? Which short stories then with new characters and a subtle plot twist or motive change became a play or a novel? You can find all these things out and much, much more. I loved this book and found it very, very difficult to put down.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but unnecessarily complicated - could have been better,
By
This review is from: Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making (Inclusive 2 Unpublished Poirot Stories) (Paperback)
For Agatha Christie fans (like me) the book is a must read. In many respects it is a fascinating dissection of her notebooks, containing jottings of her methods, characters and plots, interspersed with day to day items about shopping and friends. It does provide us with a new angle on how she developed her plots but I found it quite hard to understand clearly as the notes are jumbled and not easy to follow. In places I got completely confused and had to re-read pages again to pick up the thread (a bit like her books I suppose!). The notes don't make a lot of sense without the author's commentary and I think, at times, he was sidetracked by his own enthusiasm into making the text more difficult to understand than it needed to have been. I did enjoy reading it and found it absorbing, but it isn't as straightforward a read as you might expect and is therefore a bit disappointing.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A detailed insight.,
By richard Brown (Lincon UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories (Hardcover)
Agatha Christie is herself a mystery. Her legend has grown since her death in 1976. But she was in life, a very private person.
These notebooks therefore are a real find and make fascinating reading for those of us who have wondered about the background influences to her novels. It appears that Christie was a disorganised and chaotic person in private and left ideas here,there and everywhere. This book helps us to understand her structure and her plotting. She certainly did not 'story board' her books and often left it to late in her draft before she herself chose the killer. Her output over 55 years was amazing and she never seemed short of ideas. This very interesting book by John Curran has helped me to appreciate her work more and to understand the techniques that she used that has often kept me guessing to the end.
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