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35 contains:
Five Little Pigs—75 pages
One, Two, Buckle my Shoe—75 pages
N or M?—8 pages
The Body in the Library—4 pages
25 pages of ideas
…if I had kept all these things neatly sorted…
One of the most appealing yet frustrating aspects of the Notebooks is the lack of order, especially dates. Although there are 73 Notebooks, we have only 77 examples of dates. And in many cases what dates we do have are incomplete. A page can be headed ‘October 20th’ or ‘September 28th’ or just ‘1948’. There are only six examples of complete (day/month/year) dates and they are all from the last ten years. In the case of incomplete dates it is sometimes possible to work out the year from the publication date of the title in question, but in the case of notes for an unpublished or undeveloped idea, this is almost impossible. This uncertainty is compounded for a variety of reasons.
First, use of the Notebooks was utterly random. Christie opened a Notebook (or, as she says herself, any of half a dozen contemporaneous ones), found the next blank page and began to write. It was simply a case of finding an empty page, even one between two already filled pages. And, as if that wasn’t complicated enough, in almost all cases she turned the Notebook over and, with admirable economy, wrote from the back also. In one extreme case, during the plotting of ‘Manx Gold’ she even wrote sideways on the page! (Remember that many of these pages were filled during the days of rationing in the Second World War.) In compiling this book I had to devise a system to enable me to identify whether or not the page was an ‘upsidedown’ one.
Second, because many of the pages are filled with notes for stories that were never completed, there are no publication dates as a guideline. Deductions can sometimes be made from the notes immediately preceding and following, but this method is not entirely flawless. A closer look at the contents of Notebook 13 (listed above) illustrates an aspect of this
This page, in Notebook 66, is from Christie’s most prolific and ingenious period and list ideas that became Sad Cypress, ‘Problem at Sea’ and They Do It With Mirrors. It was one of very few pages in the Notebooks to bear a date, and the stories were published between 1936 and 1952.
Another rare page with a date, demonstrating a marked change in handwriting, these are among the last notes that Christie wrote and appear in Notebook 7. Although she continued making notes, no new material appeared later than Postern of Fate, published in October 1973.
random chronology. Leaving aside Curtain, the earliest novel listed here is N or M? published in 1941 and the latest is Taken at the Flood published in 1948. But many of the intervening titles are missing from this Notebook—Five Little Pigs is in Notebook 35, Evil under the Sun in Notebook 39 and Towards Zero in Notebook 32.
Third, in many cases jottings for a book may have preceded publication by many years. The earliest notes for The Unexpected Guest are headed ‘1951’ in Notebook 31, i.e. seven years before its first performance; the germ of Endless Night first appears, six years before publication, on a page of Notebook 4 dated 1961.
The pages following a clearly dated page cannot be assumed to have been written at the same time. For example:
page 1 of Notebook 3 reads ‘General Projects 1955’
page 9 reads ‘Nov. 5th 1965’ (and there were ten books in the intervening period)
page 12 reads ‘1963’
page 21 reads ‘Nov. 6 1965 Cont.’
page 28 is headed ‘Notes on Passenger to Frankfort [sic] 1970’
page 36 reads ‘Oct. 1972’
page 72 reads ‘Book Nov. 1972’
In the space of 70 pages we have moved through 17 years and as many novels and, between pages 9 and 21, skipped back and forth between 1963 and 1965.
Notebook 31 is dated, on different pages, 1944, 1948 and 1951, but also contains notes for The Body in the Library (1942), written in the early days of the Second World War. Notebook 35 has pages dated 1947, sketching Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and 1962, an early germ of Endless Night.
…and filed…
Although the Notebooks are numbered from 1 through to 73, this numbering is completely arbitrary. Some years before she died, Christie’s daughter Rosalind arranged, as a first step towards analysing their contents, that they should be numbered and that the titles mentioned within be listed. The analysis never went any further than that, but in the process every Notebook was allocated a number. This numbering is completely random and a lower number does not indicate an earlier year or a more important Notebook. Notebook 2, for instance, contains notes for A Caribbean Mystery (1964) and Notebook 3 for Passenger to Frankfurt (1972), while Notebook 37 contains a long, deleted extract from The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). As can be seen, therefore, the numbers are nothing more than an identification mark.
…and labelled…
Some of the Notebooks show attempts on the part of the elderly Agatha Christie to impose a little order on this chaos. Notebook 31 has a loose-page listing inside the front cover in her own handwriting; others have typewritten page-markers indicating where each title is discussed. These brave attempts are rudimentary and the compiler (probably not Christie herself) soon wearied of the enormous task. Most Notebooks contain notes for several books and as three novels can often jostle for space among 20 pages, the page markers soon become hopelessly cumbersome and, eventually, useless.
To give some idea of the amount of information contained, randomly, within their covers, for the purposes of this book I created a table to index the contents of all of the Notebooks. When printed, it ran to 17 pages.
…something scribbled down…
Before discussing the handwriting in the Notebooks, it is only fair to emphasise that these were notes and jottings written as aides-mémoire. There was no reason to make an effort to maintain a certain standard of calligraphy as no one but Christie herself was ever intended to read it. As evidenced elsewhere (see Chapter 3) these were personal journals and not written for any purpose other than to clarify her thoughts.
Our handwriting changes as we age. The scrambled notes from college or university soon overtake the copperplate efforts of our early school days. Accidents, medical conditions and age all take their toll on our writing. In most cases it is safe to assert that as we get older our handwriting deteriorates. In the case of Agatha Christie the opposite is the case. At her creative peak (roughly 1930 to 1950) her handwriting is almost indecipherable. It looks, in many cases, like shorthand and it is debatable if even she could read some sections of it. I have no doubt that the reason for the scrawl was that, during these hugely prolific years, her fertile brain teemed with ideas for books and stories. It was a case of getting them on to paper as fast as possible. Clarity of presentation was a secondary consideration.
The conversion of the Notebooks into an easily readable format, for the purposes of this book, took over six months. A detailed knowledge of all of Dame Agatha’s output was not just an enormous help but a vital necessity. It helped to know, for instance, that a reference to ‘apomorphine’ is not a misprint, a mistake or a mis-spelling but a vital part of the plot of Sad Cypress. But it did not help in the case of notes for an unpublished title or for ideas