Читать книгу Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories - John Curran - Страница 38

When she sat down to consider her next book, even before she got as far as plotting, Christie would rattle off possible settings. The next extract appears in Notebook 47 a few pages before notes for Four-Fifty from Paddington (and this list contains the germ of that book) and so would seem to date from the mid-1950s:

Book

Scene

Baghdad?

Hospital

Hotel [At Bertram’s Hotel]

Flat Third Floor Flat idea

Baghdad Chest idea [‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’ and The Rats]

Small house in London husband and wife, children etc.

Park Regent’s Park

School Girl’s school [Cat among the Pigeons]

Boat Queen Emma? Western Lady

Train seen from a train? Through window of house or vice versa? [Four-Fifty from Paddington]

Beach And Boarding house [possibly Afternoon at the Seaside]

Although difficult to date exactly, the following extract would seem to date from the very late 1940s. It is just after notes for Mrs McGinty’s Dead (although with a totally different plot outline) and They Do It with Mirrors (also with a completely different plot) and is followed by a list of her books in her own handwriting, the latest title of which is The Hollow (1946).

Ideas for Mise-en-scene?

Conditions like The White Crow. Start with the murder—a prominent person—such as a minister—

(Aneurin Bevan type?)—on holiday? Interrogation of his personnel—His wife—Female secretary

Male [secretary]—Difficulties as I don’t know about Ministers

Chief pharmacist in a Hospital? Young medical man doing research on Penicillin?

A brains trust? Local one? BBC Mrs AC arrives to broadcast—Dies—not the real Mrs AC?

A big hotel? Imperial? No—done Shop?

Worth’s during mannequin parade—Selfridges—in a cubicle during Sale

Some of the references in this extract may need clarification. The White Crow is a 1928 novel by Crime Club writer Philip MacDonald; it concerns the murder of an influential businessman in his own office (as in A Pocket Full of Rye). Aneurin Bevan was UK Minister of Health, 1945-51. The position of chief pharmacist was one with which Christie would have been familiar both from her early life and from her experience in the Second World War (The Pale Horse contains a gesture in this direction). ‘Imperial’ is a reference to Peril at End House, although the hotel is disguised as the Majestic. And Worth’s, like Selfridge’s, is a famous department store.

‘Mrs AC arrives to broadcast’ reminds us that although Christie refused countless requests throughout her career to broadcast on either radio or television, she did, at least once, take part in a Desert Island Discs type programme, In the Gramophone Library, broadcast in August 1946. And the rueful remark ‘Difficulties as I don’t know about Ministers’—my favourite comment from the entire Notebooks—shows that she abided by the old maxim—‘Write about what you know’.