Читать книгу Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories - John Curran - Страница 33

One of her most personal creations, Ariadne Oliver, is generally accepted as Christie’s own alter ego. Mrs Oliver is a middle-aged, successful and prolific writer of detective fiction and creator of a foreign detective, the Finnish Sven Hjerson. She hates literary dinners, making speeches, or collaborating with dramatists; she has written The Body in the Library and doesn’t drink or smoke. The similarities are remarkable. There can be little doubt that when Mrs Oliver speaks we are listening to Agatha Christie.

In Chapter 2 of Dead Man’s Folly Mrs Oliver shrugs off her ingenuity:

‘It’s never difficult to think of things,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘The trouble is that you think of too many, and then it all becomes too complicated, so you have to relinquish some of them and that is rather agony.’

And again, later in Chapter 17 she says:

‘I mean, what can you say about how you write your books? What I mean is, first you’ve got to think of something, and then when you’ve thought of it you’ve got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That’s all.’

It was as simple as that and, for 55 years, exactly what her creator did.

The process of production was, as we have seen, random and haphazard. And yet, this seeming randomness was transformed into an annual bestseller and, for many years, into more than one bestseller. For over 50 years she delivered the latest ‘Christie for Christmas’ to her agent; for 20 years she presented London’s West End with one box-office success after another; she kept magazine editors busy editing her latest offering. And all of them—novels, short stories and plays—flow with the fluid precision of the Changing of the Guard.

So although it is true that she had no particular method, no tried and true system that she brought with her down the long years of her career, we know this appearance of indiscriminate jotting and plotting is just that—an appearance. And eventually we come to the realisation that, in fact, this very randomness is her method; this is how she worked, how she created, how she wrote. She thrived mentally on chaos, it stimulated her more than neat order; rigidity stifled her creative process. And it explains how the Notebooks read from both ends, how they leap from one title to another on the same page, how different Notebooks repeat and develop the same ideas and why her handwriting can be impossible to read.

Notebook 15 and the plotting of Cat Among the Pigeons illustrate some of these points. She talks to herself on the page:

How should all this be approached?—in sequence? Or followed up backwards by Hercule Poirot—from disappearance…at school—a possibly trivial incident but which is connected with murder?—but murder of whom—and why?

She wonders and speculates and lists possibilities:

Who is killed?

Girl?

Games mistress?

Maid?

Foreign Mid East ?? who would know girl by sign?

Or a girl who?

Mrs. U sees someone out of window—could be New Mistress?

Domestic Staff?

Pupil?

Parent?

The Murder—

Could be A girl (resembles Julia/resembles Clare?

A Parent—sports Day

A Mistress

Someone shot or stalked at school Sports?

Princess Maynasita there—or—an actress as pupil or—an actress as games mistress

She reminds herself of work still to be done:

Tidy up—End of chapter

Chapter III—A good deal to be done—

Chapter IV—A good deal to be worked over—(possibly end chapter with ‘Adam the Gardener’—listing mistresses—(or next chapter)

Chapter V—Letters fuller

Notes on revision—a bit about Miss B

Prologue—Type extra bits

Chapter V—Some new letters

And for some light relief she breaks off to solve a word puzzle. In this well-known conundrum the test is to use all of the letters of the alphabet in one sentence. In her version she has an alternate answer although she is still missing the letter Z.

ADGJLMPSVYZ

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS over gladly