How Christie Did It

For devoted Agatha Christie fans - and we are surely legion - there is always a desire to dig a little deeper into her work, to find out how she wrote her stories and novels, and how she managed consistently to pull the wool over the readers' eyes.

If that describes you, you might very well enjoy browsing through John Curran's excellent non-fiction book, published last year, "Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making." Curran was given exclusive access to Christie's 73 private notebooks, where she jotted down her ideas, her random thoughts, her detailed plans for many of her works. It's fascinating stuff, if you're a Christie fan.

For me, it's not really a book to simply read cover-to-cover, though you can certainly do so. I found it much more enjoyable to look through the index to see if one of my favorites appeared and then browse through Christie's notes and Curran's comments. For that reason, this is really a book for the Christie devotee. If you haven't read a story, there will be spoilers here, and the whole exercise may strike you as pointless. But for those of us who read and reread her books, there is a real treasure trove here of fascinating detail.

It's worth noting that this book won this year's Agatha Award from Malice Domestic for the best non-fiction book.

This is only the first volume - I believe a second volume about the notebooks will be coming out in November, and I see that Amazon is accepting pre-orders for it. It should be just as fascinating as the original.

Comments

[Alex Baugh]

I haven't read the Secret Notebooks, but I have heard a lot about them. Umm..maybe it is time to read them myself since the second volume is coming out soon. Christie can up on another mystery blog I read and I thought I would pass on the link since it is an interesting story about Mousetrap
http://myplaceformystery.com/2011/06/16/story-behind-the-mousetrap/

[Les Blatt]

That's an interesting reference, Alex - thanks for the link. Curran says there were only two notebook pages devoted to The Mousetrap, and the incident you mention isn't referred to there. The Mousetrap has been running continuously in London since it first opened in 1952 - I've had the opportunity to see it a couple of times; it's still great fun. It's also the basis for the play-within-the-play parody of Tom Stoppard's marvelous "The Real Inspector Hound."