AGATHA CHRISTIE’S SECRET NOTEBOOKS
AZG Armenian Daily
21/08/2009
Culture
A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie’s
73 recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted
extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories. When Agatha Christie died
in 1976, aged 85, she had become the world’s most popular author. With
sales of more than two billion copies worldwide in more than 100
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 – 66 crime novels, 20 plays, 6 romance books under
a pseudonym and over 150 short stories – it was often claimed that
she had a photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over
those 55 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 secret was revealed. Unearthed among her
affairs at the family home of Greenway were Agatha Christie’s private
notebooks, 73 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. What is the ‘deleted scene’ in
her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles? 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 different endings, and what
were they? Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her own
Autobiography, this remarkable new book includes a wealth of extracts
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.