Second Poirot novel sees the detective triumph over his Parisian rival
Agatha Christie's second Poirot novel takes her Belgian detective to the coast of northern France
An urgent appeal for help from a mysterious millionaire brings detective Hercule Poirot to France. But he finds he is too late. He is told on arrival that his client has been brutally stabbed to death. The victim has been left in an open grave on the golf links near his villa, where a new bunker was in the process of being dug
The Murder on the Links, Agatha Christie’s third detective novel, was published in March 1923 in the US and in May the same year in the UK, where it was put on sale for seven shillings and sixpence.
It was the second novel to feature Poirot, the little Belgian detective, and his sidekick, Captain Arthur Hastings. They had formed a somewhat unequal sleuthing partnership in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha’s debut crime novel.
In his second case, Poirot finds himself up against the illustrious Monsieur Giraud, a detective from the Paris Sûretè. Giraud resents Poirot’s involvement in the investigation and will not listen to the experienced Belgian detective’s opinions.
But Poirot knows the case is not all that it seems and looks carefully into the strange circumstances surrounding the murder. He discovers that the motive for the murder is connected to a crime committed more than 20 years before.
Poirot uses his understanding of human nature to help him solve the crime, citing a serial wife killer who used the same method each time, believing that what had once succeeded would succeed again. He says that eventually the killer paid the penalty for his lack of originality!
The latest reprint of The Murder on the Links
Reviews when the book was first published compared Agatha and Poirot favourably with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes mysteries. One reviewer said Poirot was ‘a pleasant contrast to most of his lurid competitors’ and that they suspected he had ‘a touch of satire in him.’
Having embarked on the mammoth task of reading all Agatha’s 76 detective novels in chronological order, I recently read The Murder on the Links for the second time. It was many years after I had read it for the first time and I expected the novel to seem dated and far simpler than I actually found it to be. I was amazed at how complicated the plot was and how skilfully Agatha encourages the reader to believe one thing, whereas the opposite is in fact the case.
Agatha Christie’s biographer, Laura Thompson, has said of The Murder on the Links: ‘It is very French, not just in setting but in tone, which reeks of Gaston Leroux.’ Agatha had read and been influenced by Leroux’s 1907 novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, one of the most celebrated locked room mysteries.
Laura also notes that the book is notable for a subplot in which Hastings falls in love, allowing the author to pack him off to wedded bliss in 'the Argentine', a development that was apparently greatly desired by Agatha.
To the relief of Hastings fans, the author did bring him back from 'the Argentine' from time to time to assist Poirot with his future cases.
The Murder on the Links sees Poirot triumph over his arrogant sleuthing rival, Monsieur Giraud, and gives us a good idea of why the Belgian detective was always to succeed in finding out whodunnit for the next 50 years. I think the novel is well worth reading, or even rereading.
A unique selection of stunning examples of the genre
This handy guide by Richard Shephard and Nick Rennison provides
a treat for all lovers of detective fiction by choosing 100 books to give readers
an overview of the rich and diverse crime writing that has been produced over
the years.
The authors did not intend to provide a list of the 100 best
crime novels because of the difficulty of comparing books written in different eras
and with varied intentions.
An invaluable guide for beginners and established fans of the crime fiction genre
They aimed to provide a book that would be useful as a
starting point for readers wanting to explore the genre. Their selections are
arranged A to Z by author and describe the plot of the novel without spoiling
it for prospective readers. They include information about the authors and where
they are placed in the history of crime fiction.
At the end of each entry there is a Read On list with suggestions
of books to read by stylistically similar authors. Most authors have one entry
only, but Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have
been allowed two entries, because they have been judged so important to the
genre.
There is also a brief history of crime fiction and lists of the winners of
the Edgar Award and the CWA Golden Dagger Award right from the beginning.
The book selects many well-known crime writers but there are
also some names that are less familiar. E C Bentley has an entry for his ground-breaking
1913 novel, Trent’s Last Case. Lawyer Michael Gilbert has been chosen for his
1950 legal mystery Smallbone Deceased and Cyril Hare, who was a judge in real
life, for his legal mystery When the Wind Blows, published in 1949.
Francis Iles, with Malice Aforethought, and Michael Innes,
with Hamlet Revenge! have both been chosen for novels written in the 1930s.
Having to pick just one Dorothy L Sayers novel, it is
fascinating to see that they went for The
Nine Tailors, published in 1934. For
Josephine Tey, they picked her 1948 novel, The Franchise Affair.
Ruth Rendell manages to get two entries, both as herself
with An Unkindness of Ravens (1985) and as Barbara Vine, with A Fatal Inversion
(1987).
European writers are represented with entries on Gaston
Leroux, Georges Simenon, Henning Mankell and Manuel Vasquex Montalban.
American writers featured include Eric Ambler, Dashiell
Hammett, Donna Leon and Vera Caspary.
This guide offers readers an invaluable introduction to authors
they may never have tried before but might grow to love.
100 Must-Read Crime Novels is packed with useful book suggestions
and fascinating information for crime fiction fans.
A look back at the career of E C Bentley who wrote the detective novel that heralded the Golden Age
E C Bentley intended his novel to be a send-up of the detective genre
The writer and journalist E C Bentley, who is credited with writing the first modern detective story, Trent’s Last Case, died 65 years ago today in London.
Agatha Christie, who wrote her own first detective novel seven years later, said Trent’s Last Case was ‘one of the best detective stories ever written’.
Dorothy L Sayers, whose first detective novel was published in 1923, said Bentley’s novel ‘holds a very special place in the history of detective fiction.’
But when Bentley wrote Trent’s Last Case, first published in 1913, he intended it to be a major send-up of the genre, which had tended to feature intellectual detectives lacking any obvious human failings.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley was born in London in 1875. He was educated at St Paul’s School and Merton College, Oxford, and then studied Law in London while working as a journalist for several newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph. Although he was called to the Bar in 1902 he continued to work for the Daily Telegraph until he retired in 1934.
But he returned to the newspaper after World War II started because younger men were being called up, retiring again in 1947.
He became friends with the writer of the Father Brown stories, G K Chesterton, while they were still at school and later in life they were both, in turn, president of the Detection Club.
Agatha Christie spoke in glowing terms of Trent's Last Case
Bentley started work on Trent’s Last Case in 1910 having had the idea for ‘a detective story of a new sort...’
Bentley thought it should be possible to write a detective story in which the detective was recognisable as an average, fallible human being. He said: ‘It was not until I had gone a long way with the plot that the most pleasing notion of all came to me: the notion of making the hero’s hard won and obviously correct solution to the mystery turn out to be completely wrong…’
The story begins with a powerful and ruthless American capitalist being found dead in the garden of his English country house, fully clothed, but without his false teeth. His young, beautiful widow seems relieved by her husband’s death. The household also includes a butler, a French maid and two young male secretaries.
It appears to be an intriguing case and therefore artist, journalist and amateur detective Philip Trent is sent to investigate by his newspaper.
Bentley planned his novel in just a few weeks while walking from his home in Hampstead to his office and he began work on it by writing the final chapter first.
In the novel, he allows his hero, Trent, to fall in love with the beautiful widow, which was at the time considered against the rules of the genre. He then introduces a plotting innovation that qualifies Trent’s Last Case to take its place among the great detective novels of all time.
The Collins Crime Club edition of Trent's Last Case
All detective writers that came afterwards owed a debt to Trent’s Last Case. Bentley’s experiment, with a detective who, unlike his predecessors, is a fallible human being and is operating within a cleverly constructed plot culminating in a surprise solution, prepared readers for the advent of an era in which they would learn to expect the unexpected. Trent’s Last Case heralded the Golden Age of detective fiction.
Bentley was to point out later that it does not seem to have been noticed that the novel is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories.
My copy of Trent’s Last Case, produced by Collins Crime Club, contains an Afterword by Dorothy L Sayers, which was taken from the draft of a talk she had written about a possible radio adaptation of the book, although there is no evidence that the talk was ever delivered.
Dorothy writes: ‘If you were so lucky as to read it today for the first time, you would recognise it at once as a tale of unusual brilliance and charm, but you could have no idea how startlingly original it seemed when it first appeared. It shook the little world of the mystery novel like a revolution, and nothing was ever quite the same again. Every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence.’
I found this particularly interesting as I recalled that in Dorothy’s first novel, Whose Body?, she used the technique used by Bentley in Trent’s Last Case, of a character dressing in the murder victim’s clothes and sleeping in his bed in order to confuse the authorities about the time of death. Whether this was ‘consciously or unconsciously,’ borrowed from Bentley, we don’t know.
I found Trent’s Last Case gripping and well written. I enjoyed it particularly because there isn’t just one surprise at the end, but two. However I don’t want to give anything else away. In the words of Dorothy, it is sufficient to say the novel is ‘a masterpiece.’
Michael Wilding (above) played Trent opposite the deceased's widow Margaret Lockwood in the 1952 film
Challenging the rules and conventions of detective fiction was not Bentley’s only literary innovation.
His first collection of poetry, Biography for Beginners, published in 1905, made a form of verse popular, which became known as the clerihew, after his middle name. This four line metrically irregular verse is one of his early examples of the clerihew:
‘Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered Sodium.’
Bentley dedicated Trent’s Last Case to G K Chesterton saying he owed him a book in return for Chesterton dedicating the Man Who Was Thursday to him.
Trent’s Last Case was adapted into a film three times, in 1920, 1929 and - with Michael Wilding as Trent in a cast featuring Margaret Lockwood and Orson Welles - in 1952.
After 23 years, Bentley relented and decided Trent hadn’t had his last case after all. He wrote Trent’s Own Case in 1936 and a book of short stories, Trent Intervenes, in 1938.
Trent’s Last Case was republished in paperback by Collins Crime Club in 2020.
Roman
Catholic Monsignor lays down the ‘fair play’ rules for crime writers
Ronald Knox was a priest as well as a crime writer
Ronald
Knox, the crime writer most remembered for writing the Ten Commandments of
Detective Fiction, was born on this day - 17 February - in 1888 in the village of Kibworth Harcourt in
Leicestershire.
Knox
became a Roman Catholic priest and produced the Knox Bible, translating the
Latin Vulgate bible into English using Hebrew and Greek sources. He was also a
theologian, satirical writer and radio broadcaster.
The son
of a Church of England clergyman who became a bishop, Knox was educated at Eton
and Balliol College, Oxford.
He was
ordained an Anglican priest and appointed chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford.
During World War 1 he served in military intelligence.
When Knox
converted to Roman Catholicism, his father cut him out of his will. Knox
explained his conversion, which was partly influenced by the crime writer G K
Chesterton, by writing two books about it. When G K Chesterton also became a
Catholic he said he had been partly influenced by Ronald Knox.
After
Knox became a Catholic priest, he wrote and broadcast about Christianity and
other subjects. He became a Roman Catholic chaplain at Oxford University in
1926 and in 1936 was elevated to the title of Monsignor. He began writing
classic detective stories while a chaplain at Oxford.
This was
during what is now referred to as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the
1920s and 1930s and Knox was one of the founding members of the Detection Club.
A picture taken at a 1932 meeting of the Detection Club, when G K Chesterton was president
This
elite club was formed in 1930 by a group of British mystery writers that
included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and many other famous authors.
Anthony Berkeley was instrumental in setting up the club and the first
president was G K Chesterton.
The
members of the Detection Club agreed to adhere to Knox’s Commandments in their
writing to give the reader a fair chance of guessing who was the guilty party.
These
‘fair play’ rules were summarised by Knox in the preface to Best Detective
Stories 1928-29, which he edited.
Knox’s
Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, are as follows:
1. The
criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be
anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. All
supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not
more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No
hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a
long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No
Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No
accident must ever help the detective, nor must he have an unaccountable
intuition which proves to be right.
7. The
detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The
detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
9. The
sidekick of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any
thoughts which pass through his mind, his intelligence must be slightly, but
very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin
brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly
prepared for them.
According
to Knox, a detective story ‘must have as its main interest the unravelling of a
mystery, a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an
early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse
curiosity, a curiosity, which is gratified at the end.’
The Murder Room's edition of Knox's first detective novel
As a matter of clarification, in the light of modern-day sensitivities, the reasoning behind rule number five is that magazine stories in 1920s so often portrayed criminal masterminds as being of Chinese ethnicity that it had become something of a cliché, one that Knox believed was best avoided.
Knox was
a prolific satirical writer and wrote many essays and books about religion.
He also
wrote some crime short stories and six detective novels: The Viaduct Murder
(1926), The Three Taps (1927), The Footsteps at the Lock (1928), The Body in
the Silo (1933), Still Dead (1934), Double Cross Purposes (1937).
Paperback editions of all six detective novels were published by the former Orion imprint The Murder Room in 2013 and are still available from AmazonandWaterstones.
He also
contributed to three collaboration works by the Detection Club; Behind the
Screen (1930), The Floating Admiral (1931) and Six Against the Yard (1936).
How Ngaio Marsh first started writing
crime stories
Ngaio Marsh in a picture thought to have been taken in around 1935
Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh, a New Zealand
writer and theatre director, wrote 32 detective novels featuring Inspector
Roderick Alleyn, a gentleman detective working for the Metropolitan Police in
London.
She became known as one of the Queens
of Crime, sharing the distinction with the English writers Agatha Christie,
Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham.
Agatha Christie led the way with The
Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920. Then came Dorothy L Sayers with
Whose Body? published in 1923, followed by Margery Allingham with The Crime at
Black Dudley, published in 1929.
Ngaio Marsh was born and educated in
Christchurch New Zealand and studied painting before joining a touring theatre
company as an actress. She divided her time between New Zealand and the UK from
1928 onwards, when she started up an interior decorating business in
Knightsbridge, London.
The idea for her first crime novel,A
Man Lay Dead, came to her in 1931 when she was living in a basement flat off
Sloane Square.
In the preface to my copy of an
omnibus edition of her first three novels - A Man Lay Dead, Enter a Murderer
and The Nursing Home Murder - Ngaio Marsh writes about how she came up with the
character of Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn.
It was a wet Saturday afternoon in 1931
and she had been reading a detective story borrowed from a library, although
she couldn’t remember whether it was a Christie or a Sayers. By four o’clock,
as the afternoon became darker and the rain was still coming down relentlessly,
she had finished it. She wondered idly whether she had it in her to write
something similar.
The Ngaio Marsh Collection, Book 1, published by Harper
Then she braved going out in the rain to a stationer’s shop
across the street where she bought six exercise books, a pencil and a pencil
sharpener. And that is how the writing career of the fourth Queen of Crime from
New Zealand began.
With many eccentric detectives
already operating at the time, such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Lord
Peter Wimsey, Ngaio decided to opt for a professional policeman, with a
background resembling that of some of the friends she had made in England.
Revealing her interest in the
theatre, she chose the surname of an Elizabethan actor called Edward Alleyn,
gave him the Christian name Roderick, inspired by a recent visit to Scotland,
opened an exercise book, sharpened her pencil and began to write.
In A Man Lay Dead, Inspector Alleyn
is asked to investigate the murder of a guest during a country house party. The
host had suggested they play the Murder Game, which at the time was very
popular with guests at weekend parties, but when the lights go up it is
discovered that the victim is dead for real.
Alleyn arrives at Frantock ‘a
delightful old brick house’, views the corpse, interviews the guests and
gathers evidence with his team of police officers,
He enlists the help of one of the
guests, a young journalist called Nigel Bathgate, as his ‘Watson’.
Bathgate later becomes a friend of
the detective and appears in several of Ngaio’s 32 Inspector Alleyn novels.
The mystery centres round a valuable
Russian dagger, which ends up in the back of the corpse, a disappearing Russian
butler, a criminal gang of Russians in London and the victim’s unfortunate
habit of philandering.
Alleyn picks up on the smallest of
clues, such as a button from a glove and a trace of face powder on a man’s
suit. He eventually tricks the murderer into giving himself away.
A Man Lay Dead was first published in
1934. It is now available in a variety of formats.
Remembering Agatha’s work on the anniversary of her death
Agatha Christie, the best selling novelist of all time, died 45 years ago today at Winterbrook in Oxfordshire.
She left a legacy of 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, as well as numerous romances, plays and volumes of poetry, which together have sold more than two billion copies.
The Pocket Essential Agatha Christie gives fascinating facts about her work
Agatha was 85 years old when she died and she had been a published author for 56 years. Her last novel, Sleeping Murder, featuring Miss Marple, was published in 1976, after her death.
She was such a popular and successful novelist that 45 years later her novels are still being purchased and borrowed from libraries and new film and television adaptations of the stories are constantly being made.
The Guinness World Records has listed Agatha as the best selling fiction writer of all time.
Her fictional detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, are familiar to people even if they have never read a detective novel.
But Agatha was unsuccessful to begin with and suffered six consecutive rejections. If she’d given up at that point the world wouldn’t have ever had the huge body of work that has entertained so many millions of people over the years.
The turning point came for Agatha when her novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920, when she was 30 years of age, and she never looked back.
The lesson to be learned by other writers from Agatha’s life and career is that they should not give up. Success might come eventually, but only if you keep writing.
Just over a year before Agatha died she was asked by an interviewer what she wanted to be remembered for. She replied: ‘Well, I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.’ I think this has been said many times, so she would have been satisfied.
Curtain, Poirot’s last case, which she had written during the Second World War, was published in September 1975 just a few months before her death.
Agatha died on 12 January 1976 and was buried four days later after a service at St Mary’s Church in the village of Cholsey in Oxfordshire.
The inscription on her tombstone is a quotation from Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen:
‘Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.’
The Pocket Essential Agatha Christie by Mark Campbell is packed with facts and information about Agatha Christie’s life and body of work that may help to inspire up and coming crime writers.
Margery
Allingham introduces her series detective Albert Campion
Fans of
classic crime fiction still enjoy reading the work of authors from the Golden
Age, who were writing between 1920 and the beginning of the Second World War.
A measure
of the popularity of this genre is the amount of TV and film versions of the
books that are still being made.
When
people talk about the Queens of Crime from that era, the names Agatha Christie
and Dorothy L Sayers will immediately spring to mind, with the New Zealand
author Ngaio Marsh not too far behind.
You can
usually find books by these three talented ladies on the shelves in the crime
sections of most public libraries.
Margery Allingham's first crime novel
But you
might struggle to find any of the novels of Margery Allingham, the English
writer who was the fourth member of the elite Queens of Crime club.
Margery Allingham
was born in 1904 in London and began writing at the age of eight when she had a
story published in a magazine.
Her first
novel was published when she was 19, but she did not make her breakthrough as a
crime writer until her novel The Crime at Black Dudley was published in 1929.
This introduced her series detective, the gentleman sleuth Albert Campion, even
though he appeared only as a minor character in her first book.
He was at
first thought to be a parody of Dorothy L Sayers’ hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, but
Campion matured as the series of books progressed showing there was a lot more
to him than you see at first glance and he became increasingly popular with
readers.
Vintage
Books, part of the Penguin Random House Group, have now republished all Margery’s
novels featuring her series detective Albert Campion, making it likely that
some of them will eventually be stocked by public libraries.
While
Agatha wrote an amazing 66 detective novels, Ngaio comes in second with 32, and
Margery is third with 18, finishing ahead of Dorothy, who wrote a total of 16
crime novels during her career.
I had
never read any of Margery’s books and so, because I like to begin at the
beginning, I started with The Crime at Black Dudley.
A group
of young people have been invited to a country house party for the weekend,
which is being held in a remote mansion in Suffolk. The story is told from the
point of view of a young doctor, George Abbershaw, whose book on pathology had
made him a minor celebrity. He is a friend of the host, a distinguished scholar
named Wyatt Petrie.
Margery Allingham wrote 18 detective novels
When the
host’s uncle is murdered, the young people find themselves being held hostage
by a small number of armed men, who claim that an important item has been taken
from the body of the victim and that the guests must remain at the house until
it is found and handed in.
It is a
novel full of suspense and there is violence, fighting and many shots are
fired. My first thoughts were that it was unlike the Poirot and Miss Marple
novels of Agatha Christie or the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L Sayers.
The atmosphere of action and danger was more like that of the The Secret
Adversary by Agatha Christie, which was published seven years earlier.
George
Abbershaw eventually solves the crime with the help of the other guests,
including a strange young man named Albert Campion, who no one seems to know
anything about.
It is a
satisfying conclusion, and although the society and way of life Margery
describes might seem rather dated now, it has left me wanting to read more.
Next on my list is Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham, first published in 1930.
Margery
died at the age of 62 of breast cancer and her final novel, Cargo of Eagles,
was finished by her husband Philip Youngman Carter and published in 1968, two
years after her death.
Agatha’s second novel keeps the reader in constant suspense
Considering Agatha Christie’s detective, Hercule Poirot, became so
popular and that her first published crime novel, The Mysterious Affair at
Styles was such a success, it is surprising her second novel didn’t feature the
Belgian refugee again.
My 1981 paperback copy of The Secret Adversary
But Agatha must have decided she wanted to try something different with
her next book, The Secret Adversary. Published in January 1922, it introduces
the Young Adventurers, Tommy and Tuppence.
I read The Secret Adversary many years ago and it hadn’t made much of an
impression on me, but having decided to read all of Agatha’s crime novels in
chronological order, I gave it a second chance.
The book starts with a prologue set in 1915 as the Lusitania is sinking
after being struck by two torpedoes. A man entrusts a young American woman with
an important package as she gets into a lifeboat, saying she should receive
instructions about what to do with it when she is safely ashore, but if he goes
down with the ship, she must take it straight to the American Embassy.
Then the action fast forwards to London, a few years later, as old
friends Tommy and Tuppence encounter each other at the exit from a tube station
near Piccadilly Circus.
The First World War is over and they are both back from the front, hard
up and seeking work.
Tuppence suggests they join forces to become adventurers for hire,
willing to do anything and go anywhere to earn money.
It is all light hearted fun as they make plans, enjoying tea, buns and
buttered toast in Lyons, calling each other ‘old thing’ and ‘old bean’.
I was expecting the rest of the book to be fairly lightweight and to
seem dated in comparison with contemporary thrillers and adventure novels.
But I was pleasantly surprised. Tommy and Tuppence are quickly hired to
do a job that leads both of them into dangerous situations. It is written from
both of their points of view, so that the reader is told everything.
There are carefully laid clues, twists and turns, and plenty of
suspense. It is well written and difficult to put down, with Agatha keeping the
reader guessing right to the end.
Reviews were generally positive about The Secret Adversary when it first
came out, priced at seven shillings and sixpence.
On 26 January 1922 the Times Literary Supplement described The Secret
Adversary as ‘a whirl of thrilling adventures’ and praised the fact that the
identity of the arch-criminal, the elusive ‘Mr Brown’ is cleverly concealed to
the very end.
Other reviewers agreed it was a success and called it ‘amazingly clever’
because Agatha managed to keep the identity of the master criminal a secret
until the last few pages.
It was a clear departure for Agatha. Instead of writing a ‘whodunit’ she
wrote a novel that keeps the reader in constant suspense, wondering if the good
guys will triumph.
The Secret Adversary was made into a film in Germany in 1929 and was
adapted for television in 1983 and again in 2014.
Nearly 100 years after it was published, Agatha’s second crime novel is
still well worth reading.
Over the years, The Secret Adversary has been reprinted many times, with
many different front covers.
There are plenty of new and second hand copies available on Amazon.
I am
often asked where I get my ideas from by people in the audience when I give talks
about my books.
It is a
simple enough question, but the simple answer isn’t very helpful to others, so
I usually try to expand on it.
I get my
ideas from everywhere. I get them from stories and anecdotes people tell me,
things I read in the newspapers, court cases that make the news, people I see
when I am out and about, conversations I overhear, the list is endless.
Agatha Christie's ideas notebooks
But to
make these ideas work and become the basis for a short story or an entire
novel, you have to do three things.
First,
you have to be open to ideas. You have to train yourself to be curious, to
observe people and to make a conscious effort to think about what you hear and
see. Afterwards you have to mull it over and consider how it could form the
basis of a plot.
Second,
you have to be creative. You can’t just take an idea and make it the plot for
your book or meet an interesting person and put them straight in as a
character. You have to play around with the ideas and think about how you can
adapt them to fit your story, perhaps turning them inside out or adding a new
twist. And with every idea you constantly have to ask yourself, what if?
Most of
my characters are based on lots of different people. For example, my heroine,
Sallie Parker, in The Body Parts in the Library has personality traits from
many of my friends.
Third,
you have to make a conscious effort to remember the ideas until you get
the opportunity to write them down. You should write your ideas in a notebook
you keep specifically for that purpose rather than on odd scraps of paper you
could lose.
I often
have a good idea and don’t get round to writing it down straight away and as a
result forget what the idea was.
Also, I
am not the most organised of people and have even been known to lose my
notebook for a few days, so I like to have several on the go.
I don’t
have very neat handwriting, so I have to make a conscious effort to write the
idea down clearly so I can read it back later.
When I
start plotting my novel I read through my notebooks and think about how I can
use the ideas, providing I can read what I have written! Then I start another
notebook specifically for my new novel, and put all the ideas in that seem to
suit the story and hopefully the beginnings of a plot emerges from them.
I have
always found it useful to read about the working methods of other writers in my
particular genre to see if I can pick up any tips. There are lots of excellent
books about the writing techniques of famous writers, which can’t fail to
inspire other budding writers.
John Curran's book about Agatha's notebooks
I was
fascinated recently to come across a book about Agatha Christie’s method of
noting down her ideas and I was heartened to find she was nearly as
disorganised as me!
Agatha
Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty years of Mysteries in the Making, offers
readers the chance to see the rough, initial notes Agatha made for her novels
in a large and varied stack of note books. You can read the first ideas she
scribbled down that were to form the basis for some of her most famous and
acclaimed stories.
It is
inspiring to be able to see how even half formed ideas expressed in just a few
cryptic words could lead to a best selling novel being produced that would be
printed and reprinted time and time again and made into several different film
and TV adaptations.
The
author of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, John Curran, was lucky enough to
be the first Christie fan to be granted access to her work notebooks.
When he
was invited to visit her former home, he stumbled across a cardboard box full
of notebooks kept on a shelf in a long, narrow room where all the letters,
contracts and typescripts relevant to Agatha’s work were kept.
Agatha wrote her ideas for novels in a series of notebooks
John
recalls the moment he discovered the notebooks: ‘I lifted the box on to the
floor, knelt down and removed the top exercise book. It had a red cover and a
tiny white label with the number 31. I opened it and the first words that I
read were “The Body in the Library – people – Mavis Carr- Laurette King.” I
turned over pages at random. “Death on the Nile- points to be brought in… The
Hollow – Inspector comes to Sir Henry…”
‘All
these tantalising headings were in just one notebook and there were over 70
more still stacked demurely in their unprepossessing box.’
John knew
then how he would spend the rest of the weekend and, as it transpired, the next
four year of his life.
Perhaps
his most dramatic discovery was a notebook containing two previously
unpublished short stories featuring Hercule Poirot, which he later included at
the end of his book about the secret notebooks.
Agatha
Christie’s Secret Notebooks by John Curran is well worth reading to see how the
Queen of Crime worked and how she noted down her ideas.
There are
new and used copies available on Amazon.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles has now been entertaining readers for a century
My copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1954
After suffering six successive rejections, Agatha Christie’s luck finally turned when her detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in October 1920.
The story is set in England in the middle of the First World War and introduces what was to become Agatha’s series detective, the Belgian policeman, Hercule Poirot.
The novel was first published in the United States by John Lane and then in the UK in January 1921 by The Bodley Head, Lane’s British publishing company.
Poirot has come to England as a refugee and is living in a village in Essex, thanks to the kindness of a rich woman, Emily Inglethorp, who lives at the local manor house, Styles Court. The novel also introduces Poirot’s sidekick, Arthur Hastings, who has been invalided home from the Front and is invited by Mrs Inglethorp’s stepson, John Cavendish, to stay at Styles.
When Mrs Inglethorp is killed, Poirot says he owes her a debt of gratitude for helping him to have a new life in England and vows to use all his detective skills to solve the mystery of her death. Hastings has met him before and happily introduces him to the members of the family living at Styles.
As an Agatha Christie fan, I read The Mysterious Affair at Styles many years ago, along with some of her other novels, but I read them all in no particular order.
When I realised The Mysterious Affair at Styles had now celebrated its centenary I decided to re-read it because it was Agatha’s first published book and I wanted to see what I thought of it now.
The first thing that struck me was that she lets Hastings tell the story in the manner of Dr Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. It works well and is a device that more authors might consider trying. It helps her mislead the reader because Hastings fails to understand the hints Poirot gives him and at times even draws the wrong conclusion from some of the things Poirot says to him.
Agatha Christie as a young woman
My copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published by Pan Books Ltd in 1954 by arrangement with John Lane of The Bodley Head Ltd.
I was intrigued by the fact that a plan of the first floor at Styles is inserted into the middle of the text on page 26 and a diagram of Mrs Inglethorp’s bedroom into the middle of page 38.
A rough drawing of a charred scrap of paper bearing the handwritten letters ‘ll and’ is inserted into the text of page 42 and a picture of words scrawled on a crumpled envelope into the text of page 53.
I noticed some repetitions in the book, for example Hastings twice observes that the maid Dorcas is a fine example of a good, old-fashioned servant, but then you have to remember it was Agatha’s first published novel.
Dorcas describes how the young people in the house enjoy having dressing-up evenings and putting on costumes from the dressing-up box in the attic and using techniques to darken their skin so they can dress up as ‘foreigners.’
Agatha shows how people thought about other nationalities at that time, in the middle of a terrible war, when Dorcas says of Poirot:
‘A very nice gentleman he is sir. And quite a different class from them two detectives from London, what goes prying about, and asking questions. I don’t hold with foreigners as a rule, but from what the newspapers says I make out as how these brave Belgies isn’t the ordinary run of foreigners and certainly he’s a most polite spoken gentleman.’
According to the blurb on the inside flap of the dust jacket of the first edition, The Mysterious Affair at Styles came about because of a bet Agatha had agreed with her sister, Madge, that ‘she could not compose a detective novel in which the reader would not be able to spot the murderer, although having access to the same clues as the detective.’
The text of the book included some helpful illustrations for readers
It was acknowledged at the time that Agatha won the bet and that the plot was clever and the clues well placed. It came down to a shattered coffee cup, an old envelope, a fragment of fabric and a splash of candle grease, but it was enough for Hercule Poirot to work out who was the murderer.
It launched Agatha’s writing career and she subsequently named her own house Styles. Hercule Poirot went on to become one of the most famous characters in detective fiction and featured in 47 of her novels and collections of short stories. When Agatha told the story of his final case in Curtain, she set the novel at Styles again.
At number six, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was one of the first ten books published by Penguin Books when it started up in 1935. The novel was later adapted for television, radio and the theatre.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles marked the start of a brilliant career for Agatha, who wrote 66 detective novels in total. She remains to this day the best-selling writer of all time.
While new writers can’t hope to surpass her achievement, or even equal it, her success can at least prove inspirational.
