Slate Magazine: Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks.

Got a girl crush on: Agatha Christie

Looks like the writing process of the mistress of mysteries Dame Agatha Christie was perplexing in itself. From her nonlinear way of constructing the plot to her haphazard workspace, author John Curran explores the writing methods of Christie in his book Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks.:

“What, then, could be more shocking than to discover that the dame was no lady? Agatha didn’t sit at a pristine desk neatly typing her novels, Chapter 1 followed by Chapter 2, and so on, before donning gloves and descending at 6 p.m. for a sherry. In Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, John Curran, a Christie expert who has trawled through 73 of the author’s previously unread notebooks, reveals the utter derangement in Christie’s method. Her less-than-refined writerly day began with finding her notebook, which surely she’d left right there. Then, having found a notebook (not the one she’d used yesterday), and staring in stunned amazement at the illegible chicken scratchings therein, she would finally settle down to jab at elusive characters and oil creaky plots. Most astonishing, Curran discovers that for all her assured skewering of human character in a finished novel, sometimes when Christie started her books, even she didn’t know who the murderer was. Ah! It makes sense—a brilliant mystery writer must first experience the mystery! Or does it”

(via kottke.org)