John Curran: Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

Mathew then gave me a guided tour of the house—the imposing entrance hall complete with dinner-gong (‘Dead Man’s Mirror’), brass-bound trunk (‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’) and impressive family portraits ( Hercule Poirot’s Christmas ); a careless collection of sports equipment in the corner beneath the stairs contained, I like to imagine, a left-handed golf-club (‘Murder in the Mews’), a few tennis racquets ( Towards Zero or, less gruesomely, Cat among the Pigeons ) and a perfectly innocent cricket bat. The drawing room was dominated by a grand piano ( They Do It with Mirrors ) and a door that obstinately refused to remain open unless propped with a doorstop ( A Murder is Announced ); in the china cabinet reposed the set of Harlequin figures that inspired The Mysterious Mr Quin. The window behind the piano was the one from which Hercule Poirot delicately descended following afternoon tea in Dead Man’s Folly.

On the top floor, up a winding wooden staircase, were the bathrooms still with the names of the child refugees ( Ordeal by Innocence ) from the Second World War taped to the cupboard shelves, while a bookcase contained signed copies from some of her fellow writers (‘To Agatha with blushes—Ngaio Marsh’). The following morning, there were panoramic views of the river and the Devon hills with glimpses of the Boathouse ( Dead Man’s Folly ) and the Battery ( Five Little Pigs ).

On the first-floor landing was a revolving bookcase ( Curtain ) with multiple paperback editions and just down the corridor was Dame Agatha’s bedroom, commandeered by her creation for the duration of Dead Man’s Folly. Around the corner hung the tea-gown worn by Dame Agatha’s mother in a photograph in An Autobiography and further along this corridor were the back stairs, similar to those used by Miss Marple at the climax of Sleeping Murder.

At the top of the stairs were two locked rooms, silent guardians of unimaginable literary treasure and heart’s desire for every Agatha Christie enthusiast (but in reality accessible to very few). The bigger of the two contained a complete run of UK and US jacketed first editions, all signed, many with personal inscriptions, as well as the books published about the Queen of Crime and her work. The second room was long and narrow, with nothing but shelves and cupboards containing more books—hardback and paperback, first and Book Club editions, many signed; typescripts and manuscripts, letters and contracts, posters and playbills, photos and dust-jackets, scrapbooks and diaries. On a bottom shelf was an ordinary cardboard box with a collection of old exercise copybooks…

I lifted the box on to the floor, knelt down and removed the top exercise book. It had a red cover and a tiny white label with the number 31. I opened it and the first words that I read were ‘The Body in the Library—People—Mavis Carr—Laurette King’. I turned over pages at random…’Death on Nile—Points to be brought in…Oct 8th—Helen sequence from girl’s point of view…The Hollow—Inspector comes to Sir Henry—asks about revolver…Baghdad Mystery May 24th…1951 Play Act I—Stranger stumbling into room in dark—finds light—turns it on—body of man…A Murder has been arranged—Letitia Bailey at breakfast’.

All these tantalising headings were in just one Notebook and there were over 70 more still stacked demurely in their unprepossessing box. I forgot that I was kneeling uncomfortably on the floor of an untidy, dusty room, that downstairs Mathew was waiting for me to begin dinner, that outside in the November darkness the rain was now spattering the shuttered window. I knew now how I would spend the rest of the evening and most of the weekend. And, as it transpired, the next four years…

It was very late when I eventually, and reluctantly, went to bed that night. I had systematically gone through every page of every Notebook and as I climbed the winding stairs in the silent house I tried to retain as much of the fascinating information as I could remember from such a brief read-through. The fact that Death on the Nile was to have been a Marple story…that there were more than ten characters in the early stages of Ten Little Niggers …that I now knew her intentions for the ending of Death Comes as the End …that she toyed with various solutions for Crooked House …

Next morning Mathew took me walking in Greenway Gardens. We began at what used to be the stable block (and then a National Trust office and gift shop), past the tennis court ( Dead Man’s Folly ) and walled garden with a view of the extensive greenhouses; past the croquet lawn and up behind the house and along the path to the High Garden with a magnificent view of the River Dart. Then we wound our way down to the Boathouse, the setting for ill-fated Marlene Tucker’s death in Dead Man’s Folly, and ended up in the Battery looking out over the river with the low wall where the vibrant Elsa Greer ( Five Little Pigs ) posed for the already-dying Amyas Crale many years earlier (see page 127). We walked back to the house along the path taken by doomed Caroline Crale from the same novel. As we approached the front of the house I remembered that this was Agatha Christie’s holiday home, where she came to relax with her extended family. I could imagine those summers of 50 years earlier when there was tea on this very lawn, the thwack of ball on racquet from the tennis court, the click of ball on croquet mallet; where dogs sprawled lazily in the afternoon sun and rooks soared and cawed in the trees; where the sun glinted on the Dart and Cole Porter drifted over the lawn from the turntable as the butler prepared the table for dinner; and where the faint click of a typewriter could be heard through an upstairs window…

I spent almost 24 hours of that weekend in the fascinating room at the top of the stairs, emerging only to eat (and that at Mathew’s insistence!) and sleep. I refused offers of lunch in Dartmouth and tea in the library with family friends; I eschewed polite after-dinner conversation and lingering breakfasts and Mathew’s amused indulgence tacitly encouraged such bad-mannered behaviour. As carefully as Hercule Poirot in Roger Ackroyd’s study I scrutinised the typescripts of Curtain and Sleeping Murder , the original and deleted scenes for the first draft of The Mousetrap ; the extensively annotated manuscript of Endless Night ; the original magazine appearance of ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenby’ [sic]; the signed first-night programmes of Death on the Nile and Appointment with Death ; the official scrapbook for the fiftieth book celebrations for A Murder is Announced ; the Royal Premiere memorabilia for Murder on the Orient Express ; and all the time, as Miss Lemon to her filing, I kept returning to the mesmerising Notebooks.

Among Agatha Christie’s papers there still remains much work from her early days as a writer—some non-crime, some light-hearted, some borderline crime and her pre-Styles novel Snow Upon the Desert. Among the original typescripts of her short stories (some with textual differences from the printed versions) there was also ‘The Incident of the Dog’s Ball’. The existence of this story was known to Christie scholars, including my friend and fellow Christie enthusiast Tony Medawar, editor of While the Light Lasts, but its similarity to an already published work had always militated against its inclusion in any of the posthumous collections. I was convinced that this very resemblance, albeit with a major difference, made it of intense interest. You can now judge for yourself.