This book is manna for all Christie aficionados, of which I count myself as one. First read her when I was about 13 and have been reading and re-reading ever since. Last year I read and reviewed an excellent biography by Laura Thompson and really thought that just covered everything about and by her. Then up pops John Curran, an uber-fan of Dame Agatha, who has spent years deciphering an undiscovered cache of notebooks in a tiny room at her family home, Greenway. There were 73 of these notebooks, with scribbling and plots interspersed with list of Christmas presents and birthday dates, and were largely ignored because Agatha's writing was so difficult to make out.
However, John Curran tackled this task and found that the more he deciphered and the more he became used to the dreadful writing, the easier it became to read it and he found a treasure trove of information. Plots scribbled down, character's names changed and altered, discarded ideas which turn up later in another novel, different titles, all pure delight to somebody who knows the books well. I was interested to see that Sleeping Murder, one of the later Miss Marple books, was originally going to be titled, Cover her face or Murder in Retrospect. Then her American publishers appropriated the latter for The Five Little Pigs so that had to go by the board. The manuscript was put away for awhile and in the meantime PD James published her Adam Dalgleish novel which she called Cover her Face so that had to be abandoned as well, and Sleeping Murder was the eventual choice. Really, this is all trivia but I found it fascinating.
Lots of other snippets of information that I also found intriguing: Death is Folly became Dead Man's Folly; Tragic Weekend became The Hollow; Viper's Point became Ordeal by Innocence and a myriad more examples of minutiae that have come to light in these Notebooks. Wonderful sentences dashed down as the thought occurred to Dame Agatha: 'Disappearance of actress - strange behaviour of head gardener'. That idea was never used, I wonder why? 'Blonde Millionaire's daughter kidnaps herself so as to get away to marry a young man' - again never used and then the three words 'Infra red photograph'. There was doubt sometimes who was going to be the detective in a particular title. Death on the Nile was originally going to be Miss Marple, but Agatha Christie thought this was rather an exotic location for her and turned it over to Hercule Poirot instead. It was not till A Caribbean Murder that Miss Marple was given an exotic location.
The notebooks were in no order at all - references to different titles are spread out all over the place. John Curran has tried to put them in order by title and as he discusses the various stories, he warns the reader that endings are revealed and the murderer identified. He makes this very clear so if you don't want to know, then you don't read. As I have mentioned before, I know the identity of every murderer in every Agatha Christie story (though not all of the short stories) so I had the luxury of being able to read this book through without worrying.
Of course, the main selling point of this book, although the notebooks are enough to capture the imagination of every Christie enthusiast, is the two 'new' stories discovered, featuring Hercule Poirot. One of them The Dog's Ball is easily explained - it was never published because, as John Curran says, it is rather trite and instead the theme was expanded later and became Dumb Witness. The other story, The Capture of Cerebus, is much more interesting. This was due for inclusion in the Labours of Hercules, eleven short stories all linked, though in some cases somewhat tenuously, with the labours of the Greek Warrior.
This story features a poorly disguised portrait of Adolf Hitler and in 1940 this was deemed tooo sensitive to publish:
"August Hertzlen was the dictator of dictators. His warlike utterances had rallied the youth of his country and of allied countries. It was he who had set Central Europe ablaze" and just in case there was any doubt he is later described as "having a bullet head and a little dark moustache".
I must admit that the idea of an Agatha story which I had never read was my main reason for wanting to read this book and I resisted temptation not to turn to it first, but to read the Secret Notebooks first, and save this treat up to the end.
John Curran is a lifelong devotee of Dame Agatha Christie and is working with her grandson, Matthew Pritchard to set up the Agatha Christie Archive. This has obviously been a labour of love for him and I, and countless other fans of the Queen of Crime, are immensely grateful to him for carrying this out. I am also delighted to see from his book and from this video, here, that he views Five Little Pigs as her best book as I do too. Always good when somebody agrees with you!
Totally fascinating and a must for all the Christie fans around the world.
Only problem is, as happens every time I read a biography of a writer, is that I immediately want to re-read the books of the subject and look at them with a new eye. At the time of writing this means that I have to add Dame Agatha to my list of re-reads which stands at Charles Dickens, L M Montgomery and Edith Wharton. Something tells me I am going to have my work cut out....
