Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks is the fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie’s long hidden notebooks, including illustrations, analyses, and two previously unpublished Hercule Poirot short stories. Not only will Christie’s legions of ardent fans find a treasure chest of new material from the author of such classics as And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, and Death on the Nile, but Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks is also a must-read tutorial for writers who want to learn the intricacies of constructing crime novels.
Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“The most fascinating aspect of the notebooks is the rare glimpse they allow into the mind of a writer, especially one as imaginative as Christie....An appealing read for Christie-philes.” (Publishers Weekly )
“A must-have for any ardent fan of Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot.” (Washington Post )
“A must for all Christie fans.” (Newark Star-Ledger )
“Provides a unique look into the mind and working habits of one of the world’s most successful authors.” (Tulsa World )
“Meticulously detailed and scrupulous in its judgments.” (Strand magazine on Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks )
“A meticulously detailed study that is packed with shrewd perceptions about Christie’s fiction....Curran has produced an enthralling miscellany of a book, in which her fans will rummage to their heart’s content.” (Sunday Times (London) )
“Many of Curran’s discoveries will shape how Christie is read in future....This book is fascinating.” (The Independent on Sunday )
“[Curran] has organized his material as efficiently as an Agatha Christie mystery….[His] enthusiasm for his subject carries us along.” (Irish Times )
“A must-have for any ardent fan of Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot.” (Washington Post )
“A must for all Christie fans.” (Newark Star-Ledger )
“Provides a unique look into the mind and working habits of one of the world’s most successful authors.” (Tulsa World )
“Meticulously detailed and scrupulous in its judgments.” (Strand magazine on Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks )
“A meticulously detailed study that is packed with shrewd perceptions about Christie’s fiction....Curran has produced an enthralling miscellany of a book, in which her fans will rummage to their heart’s content.” (Sunday Times (London) )
“Many of Curran’s discoveries will shape how Christie is read in future....This book is fascinating.” (The Independent on Sunday )
“[Curran] has organized his material as efficiently as an Agatha Christie mystery….[His] enthusiasm for his subject carries us along.” (Irish Times )
From the Back Cover
When Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age eighty-five, she had become the world's most popular author. At the end of 2004, following the death of Christie's daughter, Rosalind, a remarkable legacy was revealed: seventy-three 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 the beloved author's unmistakable handwriting, are revelations about her famous books that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story.
Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her own autobiography, this remarkable book includes a wealth of excerpts and pages reproduced directly from the notebooks and her letters—plus, two complete, recently discovered Hercule Poirot short stories never before published.
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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The 73 notebooks were written the scrawl of a chicken, very different from the famous autograph signature we all know from countless reproductions. There must have been many times when Curran might have felt like giving up, but after months of practice, he says he was able to decipher the writing pretty quickly. Oddly, he says, Christie's handwriting improved with age, rather than the reverse.
This is not a variorum or facsimile edition of the notebooks by any means, but rather Curran's selection, with copious comments, of Christie's musings and reworkings over the years. His transcriptions look letter-perfect (a generous sampling of the handwritten entries allows us to peruse both the way she wrote something, and the way Curran took it down). I couldn't spot a flaw.
Christie lovers will find much to marvel at here. My own hunger for more and more Christie, good or bad, started when I was a child. I had a recurring dream--one I still have, years later,--in which I'm in a bookstore, library, friend's house, looking at books, and I see an Agatha Christie novel I've never heard of before. I sit down and read through it, and even want to copy it down, but lack a pencil (ha ha, Freudian I guess), and think of filching it from the premises, but lack the balls. Sometimes I wake from the dream with a title and a few words still in my head. but always with a sense of loss and emptiness. Now Curran's edition has assuaged some of the ache. We hear of dozens of unrealized projects, and quite a few of them fully realized, but withdrawn from the marketplace for one reason or another. Two "new" stories are included here, both from the 1930s: one an adumbration of Dumb Witness, the other a bizarre alternate take to "The Capture of Cerberus," the final adventure in "The Labours of Hercules." But I want more, Mr. Curran! Please give us the goods.
With the approval of the estate, Curran shows that he is not necessarily beholden to some of the fictitious "legends" the estate has engendered. He pretty much proves, for example, that SLEEPING MURDER was written probably 10 years later than the story given out by the Christie people (and by Christie herself). Why the deception? It made for a better story, perhaps. One would like to see the original version of CURTAIN, too, which in its published state seemed oddly neutered and sort of de-WWII'ed, brought into a timeless sort of past with little or no referent to 1930s/1940s conditions (unlike the other novels she actually published at the time). In an amusing development, Christie seems to have settled on the title "Cover Her Face" for what we now know as Sleeping Murder, only to be unpleasantly surprised when, in the 1960s, PD James of all people published her first novel using Christie's title, so then it was back to the drawing board. Wonder if James ever found out.
The book is a generous gift, with something pleasing on every page. I don't think, on the other hand, that much is gained by Curran's insistence on using the original title of "And Then There Were None" at every turn, on the grounds that Christie preferred it. That's not good enough reason to throw it around as frequently as he does. Someone might have tried to talk him out of it.
Yes, he plunges us right into the thick of things, the moment when she thinks of a plot, and then changes it with a rub of the pen. Start with a setting--so many to choose from--too bad we never got the one behind the scenes at the department store with the models at the fashion store. Or the hospital setting (except insofar as it appears in the one act play "The Patient.") When she had accomplished a task, she crossed out the note for it, as one with a shopping list of grocery items might do when the item in question has been put into the cart. Curran's most counterintuitive, but ultimately reasonable editorial decision, has been to round up various Christie novels and plays, into various categories, and then discuss the notebook entries for that bunch alone. Thus there's a chapter on "The Nursery Rhyme Murders," another on "Murder Abroad" (and on "Murder Abroad"). In a way it's reminiscent of the old Dodd, Mead omnibuses like Spies Among Us. But it works, in general. It is not a method Curran sticks to with much rigor, happily: there is always room in these pages for a sidebar article about how he finds the solution of, say, Murder in Mesopotamia utterly bogus. So he brings in his own readings too, he's not just a constant apologist for Christie.
I had never heard of John Curran before the announcement that he was editing Agatha Christie's notebooks, but now I can see how and why he got to become the leading authority on Agatha Christie. I hope he will out his authority and expertise, not to mention his closeness to the Christie Estate, to the best of use, and bring to print the unpublished Christie manuscripts he has seen and evaluated.
This is not a variorum or facsimile edition of the notebooks by any means, but rather Curran's selection, with copious comments, of Christie's musings and reworkings over the years. His transcriptions look letter-perfect (a generous sampling of the handwritten entries allows us to peruse both the way she wrote something, and the way Curran took it down). I couldn't spot a flaw.
Christie lovers will find much to marvel at here. My own hunger for more and more Christie, good or bad, started when I was a child. I had a recurring dream--one I still have, years later,--in which I'm in a bookstore, library, friend's house, looking at books, and I see an Agatha Christie novel I've never heard of before. I sit down and read through it, and even want to copy it down, but lack a pencil (ha ha, Freudian I guess), and think of filching it from the premises, but lack the balls. Sometimes I wake from the dream with a title and a few words still in my head. but always with a sense of loss and emptiness. Now Curran's edition has assuaged some of the ache. We hear of dozens of unrealized projects, and quite a few of them fully realized, but withdrawn from the marketplace for one reason or another. Two "new" stories are included here, both from the 1930s: one an adumbration of Dumb Witness, the other a bizarre alternate take to "The Capture of Cerberus," the final adventure in "The Labours of Hercules." But I want more, Mr. Curran! Please give us the goods.
With the approval of the estate, Curran shows that he is not necessarily beholden to some of the fictitious "legends" the estate has engendered. He pretty much proves, for example, that SLEEPING MURDER was written probably 10 years later than the story given out by the Christie people (and by Christie herself). Why the deception? It made for a better story, perhaps. One would like to see the original version of CURTAIN, too, which in its published state seemed oddly neutered and sort of de-WWII'ed, brought into a timeless sort of past with little or no referent to 1930s/1940s conditions (unlike the other novels she actually published at the time). In an amusing development, Christie seems to have settled on the title "Cover Her Face" for what we now know as Sleeping Murder, only to be unpleasantly surprised when, in the 1960s, PD James of all people published her first novel using Christie's title, so then it was back to the drawing board. Wonder if James ever found out.
The book is a generous gift, with something pleasing on every page. I don't think, on the other hand, that much is gained by Curran's insistence on using the original title of "And Then There Were None" at every turn, on the grounds that Christie preferred it. That's not good enough reason to throw it around as frequently as he does. Someone might have tried to talk him out of it.
Yes, he plunges us right into the thick of things, the moment when she thinks of a plot, and then changes it with a rub of the pen. Start with a setting--so many to choose from--too bad we never got the one behind the scenes at the department store with the models at the fashion store. Or the hospital setting (except insofar as it appears in the one act play "The Patient.") When she had accomplished a task, she crossed out the note for it, as one with a shopping list of grocery items might do when the item in question has been put into the cart. Curran's most counterintuitive, but ultimately reasonable editorial decision, has been to round up various Christie novels and plays, into various categories, and then discuss the notebook entries for that bunch alone. Thus there's a chapter on "The Nursery Rhyme Murders," another on "Murder Abroad" (and on "Murder Abroad"). In a way it's reminiscent of the old Dodd, Mead omnibuses like Spies Among Us. But it works, in general. It is not a method Curran sticks to with much rigor, happily: there is always room in these pages for a sidebar article about how he finds the solution of, say, Murder in Mesopotamia utterly bogus. So he brings in his own readings too, he's not just a constant apologist for Christie.
I had never heard of John Curran before the announcement that he was editing Agatha Christie's notebooks, but now I can see how and why he got to become the leading authority on Agatha Christie. I hope he will out his authority and expertise, not to mention his closeness to the Christie Estate, to the best of use, and bring to print the unpublished Christie manuscripts he has seen and evaluated.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By DodgyUSA
Format:Hardcover
Agatha Christie's Secret Diaries is a terrific snapshot view of how she gathered, edited, refined, and finally wrote her ingenious books and plays. Any fan of Christie will revel in the name changes, plot twists, originally planned suspects, and other details which went into each piece.
John Curran is a magician in his ability to decipher and chronicle the diaries. When they were first discovered, each cover was given a stickered number--purely to keep track of how many diaries there were. The contents of each diary could cover several years, story plots, and edits-often with no sequential order.
One page may begin a new plot but on the reverse were more ideas about a previous story, often from a previous diary.
Were do you begin?
Well John has done his homework and like Poirot or Marple has puzzled through the scribbles and doodling of the diaries to come up with a comprehensive book devoted to the genius of Agatha Christie.
This book will have you returning to favorite books and perhaps finding some that you had forgotten over the years.
READER BEWARE: the beginning of each chapter lists "Solutions Revealed" to the plots of the novels and plays that are discussed. I suspect that most of the audience reading this book will be familiar with many of her novels. And of course if you dont' want to read that particular chapter until you've reread the book....who is to stop you! Enjoy !
John Curran is a magician in his ability to decipher and chronicle the diaries. When they were first discovered, each cover was given a stickered number--purely to keep track of how many diaries there were. The contents of each diary could cover several years, story plots, and edits-often with no sequential order.
One page may begin a new plot but on the reverse were more ideas about a previous story, often from a previous diary.
Were do you begin?
Well John has done his homework and like Poirot or Marple has puzzled through the scribbles and doodling of the diaries to come up with a comprehensive book devoted to the genius of Agatha Christie.
This book will have you returning to favorite books and perhaps finding some that you had forgotten over the years.
READER BEWARE: the beginning of each chapter lists "Solutions Revealed" to the plots of the novels and plays that are discussed. I suspect that most of the audience reading this book will be familiar with many of her novels. And of course if you dont' want to read that particular chapter until you've reread the book....who is to stop you! Enjoy !
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By A&D
Format:Hardcover
I loved to see the handwritten notes of the stories I had read. It was great to see how some of them had developed and the process of writing a mystery.
Dame Agatha Christie, DBE, (15 September 1890 - 12 January 1976), was a British crime writer of novels, short stories and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 80 detective novels (especially those featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple) and her successful plays.
Christie has been the best-selling writer of books of the last century. She has sold more than four billion copies of novels.[ Christie is the most translated individual author, with only the collective corporate works of Walt Disney Productions surpassing her.[ Her books have been translated into 105 languages (so far) !!!
The amazing gift that Christie had is a reason why you should read this book. It shows the way a mastermind of a mystery writer worked and thought.
Dame Agatha Christie, DBE, (15 September 1890 - 12 January 1976), was a British crime writer of novels, short stories and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 80 detective novels (especially those featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple) and her successful plays.
Christie has been the best-selling writer of books of the last century. She has sold more than four billion copies of novels.[ Christie is the most translated individual author, with only the collective corporate works of Walt Disney Productions surpassing her.[ Her books have been translated into 105 languages (so far) !!!
The amazing gift that Christie had is a reason why you should read this book. It shows the way a mastermind of a mystery writer worked and thought.
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