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Fan taught himself to read author's 'bloody awful handwriting' to unlock mystery contained within 73 notebooks at Devon house

• Maev Kennedy and Katie Allen
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 June 2009 13.34 BST

 

 

There were more "leetle grey cells" than anyone dreamed of: two previously unpublished Hercule Poirot stories have emerged from a mass of family papers at Agatha Christie's favourite home.

Poirot, Christie's dapper detective, insufferably proud of his equally luxuriant brain and moustache, has been reincarnated in myriad radio, television and film incarnations, most famously by the actor David Suchet.

Now the Belgian sleuth has risen again, this time from the crates of letters, drafts and notebooks stored by Christie at Greenway, her adored holiday home set in a seaside garden in Devon, which she called "the loveliest place in the world".

Both unpublished works are short stories, the form in which the author often worked out details of characters and plots, before rethreading them as full-length novels.

The first story, The Mystery of the Dog's Ball, eventually became the 1937 novel Dumb Witness, in which an heiress dies from falling down the stairs after apparently tripping over her fox terrier's toy.

The title of the other new find, The Capture of Cerberus, has graced another story. The original was written to complete The Labours of Hercules, a collection of Poirot's 12 last cases. The first 11 were published in the Strand magazine between 1939-40, but the last only appeared in the book published in 1947 – a new story keeping only the title from the notebook version.

The discovery of the two short stories, revealed by the Bookseller magazine today, is a piece of detective work greater than that of Poriot.

They will appear in Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making, to be published by HarperCollins in September.

It is the first book by John Curran, who describes himself as "an arch-fan". He has previously only published pieces in Christie fan magazines and took a sabbatical from his day job at Dublin city council to pore over her archives.

Curran taught himself to read what he calls Christie's "bloody awful handwriting", to make sense of 73 notebooks covering her working life from the 1920s right up to her last year. They were never intended for public consumption, and are a mass of memos, trial sentences and paragraphs, possible character and place names, written without order and often without dates, mixed in with shopping lists, and packing plans for when Greenway was requisitioned by the navy during the second world war.

A typical chunk of one notebook reads: "West Indian book – Miss M? Poirot ... B&E apparently devoted - actually B and G had affair for years ... old 'frog' Major knows."

Christie's finished manuscripts were produced by dictating initially to an assistant and later into a Dictabel machine, and then typed up for editing.

Her late son-in-law, Anthony Hicks, once recalled that she worked out all the clues in her head before putting pen to paper: "You never saw her writing, she never shut herself away like other writers do," he said.

Curran's book disentangles notes for the novels, a draft play, deleted scenes and alternative endings – including the fact that Christie originally planned to send Miss Marple and not Poirot to Egypt for Death on the Nile.

It reproduces many pages from the notebooks, and sketches of room plans and villages including Miss Marple's beloved St Mary Mead.

David Brawn, publishing director of estates at HarperFiction, said: "People always said she had a photographic memory and wrote off the cuff, but these notebooks show that she reused a lot of ideas or went back to ideas sometimes decades later. She never wasted an idea."

Christie set 15 novels in Devon, where she bought Greenway in 1938 with her second husband the archaeologist Max Mallowan – she advised any woman to marry an archaeologist, promising they would be thought more valuable and beautiful as they grew older. The white house, surrounded by roses with its gardens falling away through woodland paths to the sea, appears in various guises in many books.

She left the house to her daughter Rosalind Hicks, who lived there with her husband, Anthony. They gave it to the National Trust in 2000 but continued to live there, so though the garden has been open, the house remained private until their recent deaths. The house has only opened for the first time this summer, complete with many original contents.

chunk – fragment

dapper – elegancki, wytworny

delete – usuwać

disentangle – rozplątywać

draft play – szkic sztuki, wersja wstępna sztuki

editing – redakcja  

guise – przebranie, strój

initially – początkowo  

luxuriant – bogaty; wybujały

myriad – mnóstwo

navy – marynarka wojenna

off the cuff – bez przygotowania (mówić, pisać)

pore over – ślęczeć nad, zgłębiać (coś)

requisition – żądać, rekwirować

rethread – na nowo tworzyć wątek

sleuth – detektyw; szpicel

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