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Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks
John Curran
Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making
HarperCollins
February 2011
On Sale: February 15, 2011
496 pages
ISBN: 0061988375
EAN: 9780061988370
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
Winner of the 2010 Agatha Award for Best
Nonfiction A fascinating exploration of the contents
of Agatha Christie's seventy-three private notebooks,
including illustrations and two unpublished Poirot
stories. When Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age
eighty-five, she had become the world's most popular author.
With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide, in
more than one hundred countries, she had achieved the
impossible—more than one book every year since the 1920s,
every one a bestseller. So prolific was Agatha
Christie's output—sixty-six crime novels, twenty plays, six
romance novels under a pseudonym and more than one hundred
and fifty short stories—it was often claimed that she had a
photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over
those fifty-five years to more mundane methods of working
out her ingenious crimes? Following the death of
Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a
remarkable legacy was revealed. Unearthed among her affairs
at the family home of Greenway were Agatha Christie's
private notebooks, 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 her unmistakable handwriting, are revelations about her
famous books that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or
watched an Agatha Christie story. How did the
infamous twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd really
come about? Which very famous Poirot novel started life as
an adventure for Miss Marple? Which books were designed to
have completely differ-ent endings, and what were they? What
were the plot ideas that she considered but rejected?
Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her
own autobiography, this remarkable new book includes a
wealth of excerpts and pages reproduced directly from the
notebooks and her letters, plus, for the first time, two
newly discovered complete Hercule Poirot short stories never
before published.
Awards Anthony, Best Critical Non-Fiction, September 2011
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