Agatha Christie archivist (and lifelong fan) John Curran releases Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets from Agatha Christie’s Notebooks, his second volume of posthumous discoveries from Christie’s unpublished notes. Emailing from Dublin, Curran previews some of those discoveries for Tip Sheet.
What do Christie's archives reveal about her? What new things can we learn from them?
There is nothing of a very personal nature in the Notebooks (booklists, plants for the garden, Christmas presents) so we learn little about Christie the person. But they tell a lot about Christie the detective novelist – mostly how hard she worked! Every page of every Notebook is full of ideas for stories and she polished and revised and improved them to turn them into the books we know and admire. They also show how disorganised she was, and in that they are totally unlike her books, which are highly organised and intricate.
Can you tell us an interesting and unknown fact about her?
She never went to school! And yet she went on to become the best-selling author in the world and the writer of the world’s longest running play, The Mousetrap. She was educated at home, where she taught herself to read, and then went to Paris as a young woman to study French and music.
Among mystery writers today, who do you think best continues the Christie tradition?
Few, if any, writers today are producing her type of book—intricately plotted whodunits with all the clues presented and a surprise ending which the reader should be able to spot—but doesn’t. P.D. James still writes in this style, and so did Colin (Inspector Morse) Dexter.
If she were alive today, who/what do you think Christie would be reading?
Her booklists (some of which I include in Murder in the Making) show that she had eclectic reading tastes and read a lot of crime fiction, including American noir! She also enjoyed biography, history, travel, and novels of all sorts. She particularly admired Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen. Nowadays she would be fascinated by the advances in forensic investigation—although not in the gore!
What is it about Christie that still makes her books so important to us today? Why do we still read her books?
She told a clever story in straightforward language peopled with characters in which the reader could believe. She presented us with a puzzle and dared us to spot the solution. And although her books are about murder they are very moral—wrong is righted, justice triumphs and order is restored. In today’s world that is more important than ever.
