The Creative Process of Agatha Christie

My brief treatise on AGATHA CHRISTIE'S SECRET NOTEBOOKS - as self-explanatory a title as you're going to get - appears this week in the Barnes & Noble Review. The book is the culmination of many years of research by John Curran, clearly Christie's "most ardent and jovial fan", as I termed him, and also an astute detective in his own right. Not only does he pinpoint a more accurate date for when Christie wrote the last Miss Marple book, SLEEPING MURDER, but he unearthed two previously unpublished stories and makes them available for the first time.

If you are at all a geek about writers and their creative processes, this is a must-read. But more importantly I think it adds much-needed gravitas to Christie's body of work, too often dismissed as lightweight or trifle. Many of the books fall under those categories, to be sure, but they would have sold in the nine figures if they didn't have some storytelling heft.

Comments

[ed gorman]

I could never understand the knock on Christie. Even Chandler said a few positive things about her. She's frequently been dismissed as a mechanic but if that's all she was--what a mechanic. She created the kind of world in the Marple books science fiction writers do all the time. Self-contained and abiding by its own rules and history. I don't read her often any more but at least once a year I pick up a Christie and enjoy it.

[Maggie Brinkley]

(Long-time follower of your blog, first-time poster)

The stories that Chandler 'cannibalised' in his novels (eg 'The Lady in the Lake') are fascinating - to see how he expanded a story into a novel is so interesting. To have similar early stories by Christie would be fantastic! Her characters are extraordinary: Poirot and Miss Marple (who has 'a mind like a bacon-slicer' - I'd love Christie for that phrase alone!) are rightly as famous as Holmes and Watson - and Marlowe, of course.

Those 'Golden Age' stories by Christie, Allingham, Marsh, Sayers, Crispin et al are just as enjoyable now as they ever were. How can anyone decry them? Their books have ten times more personality than most 'murders' or 'thrillers' published now!

[Elizabeth Frengel, MIss Lemon's Mysteries]

Not lightweight or trifling at all. I think that where Agatha Christie has been damned for creating shallow and stereotyped characters, her critics fail to see how in just a sentence or two she'd swiftly tease out their essence. With her less masterly colleagues, the same effect can take paragraphs or, worse, pages and pages of tedious interior monologue.

Anyway, lovely review of the Secret Notebooks. Thanks!

[Martin Edwards]

A thoughtful review of an excellent book - I very much agree that the insight given into Christie's approach to the creative process is utterly fascinating, and for any modern whodunit writer fascinated by plot, it is truly thought-provoking. The way she seems to have changed her mind on aspects of her plots which one would have assumed were fundamental from the outset is quite startling.

[Sarah]

Last sentence - do you mean they "wouldn't have sold in the nine figures"?

[Kerrie]

Sarah- would you like to submit this for the Agatha Christie Blog carnival? - http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_6057.html