Читать книгу Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks - Агата Кристи, Agatha Christie, Detection Club The - Страница 76

Arthur Hastings goes to Styles Court, the home of his friend John Cavendish, to recuperate during the First World War. He senses tension in the household and this is confirmed when Emily Inglethorp, John’s stepmother, is poisoned. Luckily, a Belgian refugee, one Hercule Poirot, staying nearby is an old friend.

As we saw in Chapter One ‘The Beginning of a Career’ one of the readers’ reports on The Mysterious Affair at Styles mentioned the John Cavendish trial. In the original manuscript, Poirot’s explanation of the crime is given in the form of his evidence in the witness box during the trial. In An Autobiography Christie describes John Lane’s verdict on her manuscript, including his opinion that this courtroom scene did not convince and his request that she amend it. She agreed to a rewrite and although the explanation of the crime itself remains the same, instead of giving it in the course of the judicial process, Poirot holds forth in the drawing room in the kind of scene that was to be replicated in many later books.

Incredibly, a century later – it was written, in all probability, in 1916 – the deleted scene has survived in the pages of Notebook 37, which also contains two brief and somewhat enigmatic notes about the novel. Equally incredible is the illegibility of the handwriting, complicated by numerous deletions and insertions, many squeezed in, sometimes at an angle, above the original. And although the explanation of the crime is, in essence, the same as the published version, the published text was of limited help. The wording is often different and some names have changed. This exercise in transcription was the most challenging of the Notebooks but the fact that it is Agatha Christie’s and Hercule Poirot’s first case made the extra effort worthwhile.

In the version that follows I have amended the usual Christie punctuation of dashes to full stops and commas, and I have added quotation marks throughout. I use square brackets where an obvious, or necessary, word is missing in the original; a few illegible words have been omitted. Footnotes have been used to draw attention to points of particular interest.

Notebook 37 showing the beginning of the deleted chapter from The Mysterious Affair at Styles.