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AGATHA CHRISTIE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
AGATHA CHRISTIE
HarperCollins November, 2011
Originally Published 1977
If you are looking for a good, short, working definition of the term "traditional mystery", there is a simple, two-word answer: Agatha Christie. She was, and remains, the undisputed queen of classic crime fiction. Her series detectives - Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford - are familiar and popular characters all around the world. Her plots are ingenious and original. Her ability to fairly but completely mislead and misdirect the reader made her a champion at what John Dickson Carr always called the "grandest game" between author and reader.
Beyond the public face presented by her books, however, this queen of mystery was also very much of a mystery in her private life. Agatha Christie was an intensely shy, very private person. She shunned publicity and interviews. But in 1950 she decided to write her autobiography. She finished it fifteen years later, when she had just turned seventy-five because, "it seems the right moment to stop". The book was not published for another dozen years, appearing only posthumously. Now, HarperCollins has republished AGATHA CHRISTIE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. It is a treasure, a huge collection of reminiscences, anecdotes and stories told by a master storyteller.
In her foreword to the book, Christie explained her goal:
"[A]utobiography is much too grand a word. It suggests a purposeful study of one's whole life. It implies names, dates and places in tidy chronological order. What I want is to plunge my hand into a lucky dip and come up with a handful of assorted memories."
And that is precisely what we are given in AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. It is filled with anecdotes, memories of her childhood years, stories that often will make the reader laugh and occasionally shed a few tears. We share her childhood as Agatha Miller, which she says was a very happy time. We grow up with her, seeing through her eyes the places that she loved and the people who were important in her life. We follow her through her first marriage to Archie Christie, through her divorce and her second, much happier, marriage to Max Mallowan. We suffer through the two World Wars with her.
We see little that she does not want us to see. There is no real mention of the infamous eleven-day interlude in her life, as her marriage with Archie was falling apart in 1926, when she disappeared and became the subject of a frantic police search. Christie refers vaguely to the strains she suffered at the time and alludes to a possible nervous breakdown, but that is all.
We are told, however, a good deal about her writing - how she wrote her first mystery, THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES, after her sister bet her that she couldn't do it. We learn how she created Hercule Poirot (and her regrets that she didn't make him a much younger man!) and many of her other characters. There are some "spoilers" here, of course, so it would be wise to have read some of her better-known titles, such as THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, before reading this book. She tells us that she found it much easier and more enjoyable to write plays, and we are told all about creating her amazing masterpiece, THE MOUSETRAP, which opened in London's West End in 1952. When she finished writing AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, the play had been running for thirteen years. "I must say," she wrote, "it seems to me incredible. Why should a pleasant, enjoyable evening's play go on for thirteen years?" I wonder what she would have said today, as THE MOUSETRAP approaches its sixtieth anniversary this fall, still running in that initial production in the West End.
AGATHA CHRISTIE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY is a very large book - five hundred thirty-two pages plus an index - but it reads very quickly because Christie is such an entertaining writer. This new edition from HarperCollins also features a wonderful bonus: a CD containing 14 tracks of Agatha Christie dictating portions of this book. The CD was put together from her original dictation tapes, discovered by her grandson, Mathew Prichard. It is an eerie feeling to listen to this greatest of mystery writers talking about her life and her work.
Christie spends a great deal of time early in the book talking about her happy childhood at her family's house, Ashfield, and especially remembering the time spent rolling a hoop through the grounds. Near the end of the book she finds, sadly, that Ashfield has been torn down, replaced by small, badly constructed houses. And she writes:
Perhaps some child sucking a plastic toy and banging on a dustbin lid, may one day stare at another child, with pale yellow sausage curls and a solemn face. The solemn child will be standing in a green grass fairy ring by a monkey puzzle holding a hoop. She will stare at the plastic space ship that the first child is sucking, and the first child will stare at the hoop. She doesn't know what a hoop is. And she won't know that she's seen a ghost...
That is rather how I feel after reading AGATHA CHRISTIE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY and listening to her voice. The CD and the book belong on the bookshelf of every Christie fan. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Look for Les's review of
DEAD MEN DON'T SKI
by Patricia Moyes
in
CLASSIC CORNER
.
AGATHA CHRISTIE: MURDER IN THE MAKING
MORE STORIES AND SECRETS FROM HER NOTEBOOKS
JOHN CURRAN
HarperCollins November, 2011
For the lover of traditional mysteries, no other author could ever compare with Agatha Christie. According to her publisher, she is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Over a career that reached into six decades, she wrote mystery novels, short stories and plays that helped to define and redefine a genre. Few other authors were as adept at deceiving their audiences through misdirection. Fewer still could match her inventive plots or - particularly at the peak of her powers in the 1940s, 50s and 60s - her memorable characters.
How did she do it? While that particular mystery may never be fully explained, we do have some answers. Several years ago, members of the Christie family discovered a treasure trove: seventy-three notebooks, packed in a brown cardboard box. As author and Christie scholar John Curran, who served as adviser to the Christie estate, notes, they were "notebooks in various shapes, sizes, colours and states of preservation, covered with sprawling and often illegible handwriting... no chronology, no order, no method; but a splendid profusion of imagination."
The notebooks give us an incredible insight into the creative processes by which Christie was able to plan and write her amazing books and plays. But there was, as Curran noted, no order, no obvious way to present the information. So Curran went to work, with the blessing of the Christie family. The first part of his research was published in 2010 as AGATHA CHRISTIE'S SECRET NOTEBOOKS. It presented a first gleaning of material taken from the notebooks. While I enjoyed looking through the material, it felt - to me at least - rather disorganized.
Now, with the publication of the second volume, AGATHA CHRISTIE: MURDER IN THE MAKING: MORE STORIES AND SECRETS FROM THE NOTEBOOKS, we have a much closer, much better organized look at some of the wonderful things Curran has discovered in the notebooks. Curran has arranged the book, more-or-less, by decade, looking at the major works Christie published in each decade from the 1920s through the 1970s. Not every title is represented, as not every title was referenced in the notebooks. But there is a huge amount of material available, all of it ordered and annotated by Curran to make it easy to follow.
For a Christie fan, there is much to enjoy in reading Christie's notes about a particular book or story and seeing how her ideas were - or were not - incorporated into the final, published version. Sometimes we will find Christie playing with her characters, trying to decide which would be victims and which villains - sometimes quite surprisingly so. We are shown the notebook entries which clearly inspired some titles, and we are frequently shown notes for ideas which Christie jotted down but never developed into stories or books.
But there is a great deal more in AGATHA CHRISTIE: MURDER IN THE MAKING. There is a new, alternate version of a Miss Marple story which appears, based on the story itself and what Curran tells us, to be much better than the original, published story. Also, there is a lengthy note with a story idea that Christie was considering at the time of her death, which reads as if it would have made a terrific novel. Another chapter looks at how Christie quite gleefully twisted and broke some of the so-called "golden rules" laid down by other mystery authors.
There is a fascinating collection of notebook entries about poisons. During both World Wars Christie worked in a hospital dispensing drugs, which gave her a good working knowledge both of medicines and of poisons. As a result, as Curran notes, "(s)tarting with her first book, she used poison as a murder method more often than any of her contemporaries." Her notes list many different poisons, common and uncommon, with their symptoms, the time frame in which they kill, and, frequently, ideas about how that particular poison might be useful in a story.
There is also a great deal of information here about CURTAIN, the last of her published novels to feature Hercule Poirot, but one actually written many years before its publication date when, as Curran notes, she was at the peak of her writing powers. As Curran notes, "[CURTAIN} is the most dazzling example of legerdemain in the entire Christie output." Here, we are given extensive notes about her planning for the book, and it is both fascinating and rather poignant to read them.
There is so much more contained in this book than we can really discuss here. But there is one, absolutely critical word of warning. This book is fascinating, riveting, entertaining IF YOU HAVE READ ALL (OR MOST) OF AGATHA CHRISTIE'S BOOKS. If you are not already a fan of Christie, if there are major books and stories of hers that you have not read, then DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. Of necessity, it is packed with "spoilers" that reveal the plots, endings, killers and surprises. While the book contains warnings at the beginning of each major chapter, it is almost impossible to read a section without something being revealed. For example, in Chapter 10, "The Fifth Decade," the reader is warned at the beginning of the chapter:
SOLUTIONS REVEALED
After the Funeral The Clocks Endless Night Lord Edgware Dies Third Girl Three Act Tragedy "Witness for the Prosecution"
The bottom line is this: if you are NOT on familiar terms with Agatha Christie, at least with her major works, you will find far too many "spoilers" - and you will probably find it nearly impossible to follow many of the references. If you are already a devoted Christie reader, however, you will be spellbound by what you find in AGATHA CHRISTIE: MURDER IN THE MAKING. VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
POSTED APRIL 29, 2012
BLOOD RELATIONS: THE SELECTED LETTERS OF ELLERY QUEEN 1947-1950
Edited by JOSEPH GOODRICH
Perfect Crime Books Trade PBO 1/12
ISBN: 978-1935797388
"As we've both said on occasion, you and I are married to each other, and if more often than not it's felt like a marriage made in hell - on both sides - there it is, and neither of us can do anything about the past third of a century."
---Manfred B. Lee, writing to Frederick Dannay in 1962
Take two men - cousins and writing partners. Although their mysteries are tremendously successful and popular, the two men fight constantly over their creative processes. The only way they can work with each other is by a strict division of labor - and by a constant exchange of letters and telephone calls, often filled with bitter invective about each other's work.
Sound like the basis for a deep, psychological mystery? It's not. It's a true story - the story of the collaboration that gave us one of the most recognized names in American mysteries: Ellery Queen. Joseph Goodrich has edited a fascinating, often painful-to-read book called BLOOD RELATIONS: THE SELECTED LETTERS OF ELLERY QUEEN 1947-1950, which provides profound insight into the working relationship between the men who were Ellery Queen.
Ellery Queen was the name chosen by two cousins, Manfred Lee and Frederick Dannay, as their pen name and also as the name of their primary detective character. But the only way the two men found that they could work together was by dividing their work into strictly separate realms. Dannay created the puzzles, plots and clues of the novels and short stories, sending long, detailed outlines to Lee, who would then flesh out the outline and turn it into a finished and polished book.
Lee couldn't plot. Dannay couldn't turn an outline into a well-written novel. Yet each was superb in his own area. But, as we see in BLOOD RELATIONS, Lee was deeply resentful, even contemptuous, of many of Dannay's puzzle plots - and Dannay was infuriated by what he saw as liberties taken with his outlines by Lee when he actually wrote the books.
Between 1947 and 1950, while Lee lived in California and Dannay in New York, the two men exchanged a series of long, often furious, frequently painful letters, as they struggled with three books: TEN DAYS' WONDER, CAT OF MANY TAILS, and THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. An important caution here: as with other books of this nature, it would be wise to read those three novels BEFORE tackling the letters in BLOOD RELATIONS, because there is a great deal of discussion and argument about plot twists, the believability of plots and characters, etc. - in other words, there are, of necessity, a great many spoilers.
By this point in their collaboration, the character of Ellery Queen - the detective - had changed significantly from his first appearances, back in the late 1920s. In the early books, the puzzle was everything; the detective was a rather dandified, Philo Vance-like individual who analyzed often-bizarre clues to solve crimes - a two-dimensional character at best. By the late 1940s, Queen had developed into an all-too-human character - and one who made significant and damaging mistakes. Two of the cousins' greatest books date from this period - TEN DAYS WONDER and CAT OF MANY TAILS, both beautifully plotted and written, are surely as dark, or darker, than many of the so-called "psychological" mysteries and "noirs" of the period, as Ellery Queen discovers that his mistakes sometimes cost others their lives.
These are the books, along with THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, whose creation is documented, debated and agonized over in these letters. We are given a breath-taking look into the intricacies of the partnership between Dannay and Lee - a partnership that was vital to both their financial and psychological well-being, but one that barely managed to continue in the midst of terrible acrimony. We see them fight over virtually every point and every character. As Lee observes in one of the letters:
"The truth of the matter is, irrespective of the merit or demerit of any given suggestion or objection from the other man, each of us jealously guards his individual contribution to the work and each of us resents any encroachment on his work by the other. The mere fact of a disagreement raises instantly an argument or arguments in defense of what is disagreed with. There is no acceptance of criticism because there is no wish for criticism. There is wish only for agreement... ."
Reading these letters, it seems nothing short of a miracle that the two men were able to come up with so many fine and important works. The Ellery Queen novels were tremendously influential on the development of American detective stories. Certainly Dannay, as the editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, was instrumental in promoting the careers of a great many home-grown mystery writers.
It is absolutely scandalous that nearly all of Ellery Queen's work is now out of print.
Joseph Goodrich has done a marvelous job in selecting the letters and adding context to them with well-placed and judicious commentary. I cannot recommend BLOOD RELATIONS highly enough for its revelations about the creative processes of two of the most important contributors to the American detective story - two men bound to each other by blood. It's a marvelous and profound book. VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Les reviews three books in
CLASSIC CORNER
:
THE PURPLE PARROT
by Clyde B. Clason
MURDER ON WHEELS
by Stuart Palmer
and
THE PEACOCK FEATHER MURDERS
by John Dickson Carr writing as Carter Dickson.