John Curran - Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

Committee crime—Mr Llewellyn—tiresome woman—makes speech—drinks glass of water

Glass of water—Dr Haydock…Suicide because of anonymous letter? At Harton Parva—the vicar’s sister—vinegary woman—the school teacher—at village shop vicar’s sister gets groceries—lays down letters—girl slips one in

These jottings appear in the same Notebook, the first one in a list of projected Miss Marple short stories. And it seems very much Miss Marple’s territory. The seeds of The Moving Finger can be seen in the ‘suicide because of anonymous letters’ idea and the method of inserting a letter in an otherwise innocent bundle appears in Chapter 13 of that novel.

Disappearance of actress—strange behaviour of head gardener

This wonderfully enigmatic combination of ideas appears in Notebook 65 alongside the notes for Ten Little Niggers, although it dates from much earlier in Christie’s career. The suspicious head gardener, very much Miss Marple territory, does make a brief appearance in ‘Ingots of Gold’ from The Thirteen Problems.

A blonde millionaire’s daughter kidnaps herself so as to get away to marry young man

This surfaces three times in the Notebooks, each time specifying a blonde perpetrator. It sounds relatively non-criminal and may have been intended as a light-hearted story, not unlike one of Tommy and Tuppence’s early adventures—‘A Pot of Tea’.

Tom, Dick or Harry come to Bridge—point—none of them existed!

Tempting though it is to believe that this is a reference to Cards on the Table, it appears in a list headed ‘Ideas 1940’, four years after that title. It is difficult to see what Christie had in mind here.

Infra Red photograph

This unusual idea may have been inspired by her interest in photography during her archaeological work with Sir Max Mallowan. It appears in a list of possible Miss Marple stories, although it would not appear to be one with which Miss Marple might be familiar.

Dangerous drugs stolen from car—doctor very upset—excitement in village

Dangerous drugs stolen from doctor’s car—X goes touring in car—follows a doctor in strange town—or Doctor himself is criminal—later marries dead patient’s wife or daughter

Although it never appears as a plot device in its own right, this scenario is one of those mentioned in Hickory Dickory Dock as a means of getting hold of poison. Our old friend the doctor (statistically the most homicidal profession in Christie) resurfaces here and although the idea was jotted down in the late 1930s, the second note may be the inspiration for Dr Quimper in Four-Fifty from Paddington. This idea appears in five Notebooks.

A false Hercule P.—he is in some hotel lunching re-growing one of his moustaches which have been burnt—wild out of the way spot

The ‘wild out of the way spot’ may be the setting of ‘The Erymanthian Boar’, the snowbound top of a Swiss mountain, but the moustache regrowing was never explored despite its appearance in two other Notebooks.

At Bertram’s Hotel • Evil under the Sun • Hallowe’en Party • Hercule Poirot’s Christmas • Peril at End House • Sad Cypress • Towards Zero

Holidays and festivals have provided backgrounds for a number of Christie stories. Some of them— Peril at End House, Evil under the Sun —interrupt Poirot’s summer holiday; others disrupt his Christmas— Hercule Poirot’s Christmas —while Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes Day also proved a suitable dramatic backdrop for murder. Some of his more exotic holidays in Petra— Appointment with Death —and Egypt— Death on the Nile —can be found in Chapters 8 and 6 respectively while Miss Marple’s holiday in the Caribbean is discussed in Chapter 8. The other unmistakable family holiday, Afternoon at the Seaside, is discussed in Chapter 9.

While holidaying in St Loo Poirot and Hastings meet Nick Buckley, the impoverished owner of End House. When she tells them that she has had three close brushes with death, Poirot investigates, but is unable to avert a real tragedy at End House.

Peril at End House was published on both sides of the Atlantic in early February 1932 with a serialisation in both places some months earlier. This, in turn, would mean that it was written most probably during late 1930/early 1931. The plotting for it is contained in two Notebooks, 59 and 68. Notebook 68 is a very small pocket-diary sized notebook and, apart from a detailed listing of train times from Stockport to Torquay, is devoted entirely to this novel. Notebook 59 also contains extensive notes for the Mr Quin story ‘The Bird with the Broken Wing’, first published in The Mysterious Mr Quin in April 1930, and for ‘Manx Gold’ (see Chapter 5), the treasure hunt story/competition that appeared in May 1930.

Peril at End House is a magnificent example of the Golden Age detective story. It is rarely mentioned in any discussion of Christie’s best titles and yet it embodies all of the virtues of the detective story in its prime: it is told with succinct clarity, enviable readability and scrupulous fairness in clueing. Every single fact the reader needs in order to arrive at the correct solution is given with superb sleight of hand. And like all of the best detective stories the secret of the plot (a mistake in names) is simple—when you know. On page 3 of Notebook 59 Christie uses a telling phrase—‘conversation without having a point’—referring to the early conversation between Poirot and Hastings in the garden of the hotel. At this point in her career virtually every conversation in a novel has a ‘point’—the delineation of an important character trait (the silk stockings episode in Cards on the Table), a hint about motivation (Major Burnaby gruffly discussing crosswords and acrostics in Chapter 1 of The Sittaford Mystery), a major clue (the difficulty established in Chapter 2 of getting a sleeping berth on the normally half-empty Orient Express) or the confirmation of a previously suspected fact (the picnic in Evil under the Sun). And although she refers to a conversation without having a point, there is a mention of the missing airman (the motive) in the actual conversation to which the notes allude.

Peril at End House is interesting not just because of its own virtues but also because of the number of themes and ideas that Christie went on to exploit in later titles:

The murder in Peril at End House takes place during a fireworks display when the sound of a gunshot is camouflaged by the sound of fireworks; this idea was to be an important plot feature of the 1936 novella ‘Murder in the Mews’. In fact, it is one of the refinements added to the original version of this story, ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ (see below).

The use of names as a device to fool the reader makes an early appearance in this novel. It was to reappear in Dumb Witness, Mrs McGinty’s Dead, A Murder is Announced and, with an international twist, in Murder on the Orient Express.