Abc zbrodni Agaty Christie

by John Curran

Gdzie kryje się źródło sukcesu Agaty Christie? Odpowiedzi szuka John Curran, analizując odnalezione niedawno Notatniki pisarki i próbując odkryć alfabet, którego używała do konstruowania swoich powieści. Curran omawia sześć dekad pisarskiej kariery Królowej Kryminału i przytacza nieznane dotychczas teksty wyszperane w jej archiwum. Na pod-stawie ponad dwudziestu kryminałów śledzimy ewolucję warsztatu Christie od debiutu w latach dwudziestych po swingujące lata sześćdziesiąte i później siedemdziesiąte, czyli zmierzch kariery. Publikację kończy analiza najpóźniejszego z Notatników. Pisarka zawar-ła w nim pomysł na kolejną książkę - tego pomysłu nie zdążyła już rozwinąć.
Wśród tekstów pochodzących z archiwum są dwa nigdzie dotychczas niepublikowane: opowiadanie Mężczyzna, który wiedział oraz pierwotna wersja Śmiertelnej klątwy.

Genres: Nonfiction, Agatha Christie, Mystery, Biography, Writing, History, Crime

407 pages, Hardcover

First published November 22, 2011

About the author

John Curran is an Irish literary scholar and archivist, best known as an expert on the work of Dame Agatha Christie, English author of detective fiction and the world's bestselling novelist.

Reviews

[Christine PNW · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Curran's other book based on Christie's notebooks, this is really only for the Christie-Obsessed. The Agathytes, if you will.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great book about the notebooks of Agatha Christie.
John Curran delves into the notebooks of Agatha Christie again to give us more insight into her plotting process.
He covers the different decades of her writing and the books she wrote.
I like this book because it opens up her plotting and how so many ideas were noted down but not used for years and some never.
Agatha Christie fans will like this book and people considering reading her will find more than one reason to start.

[Morgiana · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't like this book.
I am a big fan of the Queen of the Crime...but this book was so dry as the desert sand and more boring. I had some expectations about this book as I learned it will handle the the author's secret records, so I thought it will give me news about the life, thoughts, writings of the author, but miserably failed.
Always thought while reading: Am I reading someone's shopping list???
Definitely not recommended.

[Loes de Vries · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely not a book you’ll finish in one sitting, but absolutely fascinating to dive into the untold stories and behind the scenes process of how the Queen of Mystery, Agatha Christie, created her detective novels. Even though I haven’t read a lot of her books yet, I am definitely intrigued to pick up a few more.

[Theunis Snyman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful to read about how her stories came to be. In the 1930's S S van Dine and Father Ronald Knox gave certain rules for the writing of Detective stories. This book shows how Agatha Christie broke all of the rules. And she did so brilliantly.

[Gerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading John Curran's absorbing study of Agatha Christie's archives is akin to reading a detective novel as plots are outlined, discussed, amended and re-written all before the finished novel appears on the bookstands.

The book is a fascinating study into how Agatha Christie worked and thought and includes a couple of never before published items, a short story entitled 'The Man Who Knew' and a slightly longer story that has Miss Marple as the central character, 'The Case of the Caretaker's Wife'.

The author points out how Agatha Christie's style changed as she got older and states what he considers the worst book she ever wrote and even hints that a couple of the later offerings perhaps should not have been written, suggesting that the publisher's reader was bowing to Agatha's reputation by telling her that the new work was very good when in fact he/she should have been advising that the book remain unpublished.

The book is set out in decades thus making it easy to work one's way through Agatha Christie's career but the reader must be careful for along the way a number of denouements are revealed.

A year-by-year list of published works and a potted bibliography round off most usefully what is an entertaining and informative work. And as Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and Tommy and Tuppence abound, there is plenty for the Christie aficionado to enjoy.

[Ana Lelis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love her books and it was great to understand how she used to create the stories. And you can read a short story never publishied before and belive me that's worthy. If you are a fan I definetely recommend this.

[Astrid Lim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just like its predecessor (Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks), Murder in the Making is still a great book and a must read for every Agatha Christie's fan. It showed the ingenious process of working for one of the most brilliant brains in crime literature. This book is divided into decades, and in each decade, John Curran included several titles that have detailed planning in the notebooks. To think about his job (looking for scattered notes from dozens notebooks, and trying to decipher the ineligible writing of Christie), I can't help but feel admiration for him.

Curran's analysis is also very spot on, from the most ingenious work to the more declining quality of her last books, everything is so full of careful thinking. Overall, a very recommended book.

[Panda Incognito · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is only for the Christie-obsessed. The notebook details and literary analysis give away the plot twists and endings of her novels, so I would not recommend this to someone who has only read a sampling of her work, and someone would have to be very invested in Christie lore to find this book appealing anyway. However, since I am a major fan, have read all of her books, and am fascinated with the craft of mystery-writing, this was a great fit for me.

I had a number of different criticisms of the first book that John Curran wrote about Agatha Christie's planning notebooks, and was pleasantly surprised to find that this book was a significant improvement. It is far better-organized and is more linear, going through her career by decade with occasional asides, instead of having topical chapters that jump around to different eras of her life and analyze multiple books at once. This second book is far more orderly, and conveniently for me, it also covered some of the novels that I am most interested in. I have already resold the first book, since I knew I wouldn't read it again, but I will keep this one in my collection.

Although other reviewers complain that this is unbearably boring, I enjoyed it very much. I had a hard time getting through the first book, but I found this one much better edited and more entertaining, and learned lots of interesting trivia, background details, and perspectives on Christie's work. I am thankful that I read both books, but the second is the one which I would enthusiastically recommend if I ever met someone who is as thoroughly invested in Agatha Christie's work as I am.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Murder in the Making roughly follows the format of Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, where John Curran's analysis is interspersed with his transcriptions of Christie's notebooks. Christie was a constant notebook keeper but not so good at keeping all the notes chronologically. There are solutions to some of the novels revealed in the discussions of her methods, so only a well-read Christie fan or someone who doesn't mind spoilers would find this particularly interesting. However, there is a great discussion about Christie's work in the context of other detective writers and tropes of the detective story and insight into Christie's process as well as her personal life with respect to her work. This particular work is organized chronologically, with Christie's life events being discussed along with what she had written those years. All in all, this is essential reading for the diehard Christie fan but not so much for the casual reader.

[Annina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I reviewed the first book about Christie's notebooks too and gave it one more star than this one. I suppose that I would have enjoyed this quite as much if this was the first one I read. But this doesn't really do anything new, but just gives more of the same kind of information as the previous book. It gets a little repetitive in the end. It was still interesting, but maybe I would have wished for something new by now. Some new form of presenting the information at least or something. I would recommend it to Christie lovers, but maybe not reading the two books in a row. I took my time with this book and read a little bit at a time.

[Cathy Ace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have finally managed to finish both this book and its "companion piece" by the same author, "Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks".

Mr Curran's enthusiasm for, and love of, Christie's work shines through in this well-researched book, that gives some insight into how the wonderful wordsmith wove her stories.

Anyone who enjoys Christie's works, and has already read a good many of them, will enjoy this...though you should expect it to be a view of her writing and process that still leaves questions unanswered.

[Sophie Clifford · Rating 3 out of 5]

While it was interesting to look into Agatha Christie and how she wrote and 'organised' herself, this book veered into boredom sometimes and the introductions to each story or section was a little disjointed and repetitive.
However, there were some bits that were very interesting and I enjoyed the Miss Marple story. It took me a while to read, I think it's more of a book that you can read a little bit of, the info on one or two of her novels/plays and then leave and come back to when you fancy.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating Clarification: 2.5 Stars

Very dry and repetitive in places. Not recommended for the casual Christie fan.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this boring. It really didn’t keep my attention and I ultimately returned it before I was done.

[Cynthia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should not have been fun and interesting to read, and yet it was. I don't think the intention was (as with a cookbook) for anyone to read it word for word and cover to cover, and yet I did. And I followed it up by reading his second volume about the notebooks.
I think I kind of expected there to be more evidence of Christie's notebooks, with her own notes to herself and scratches out etc, but as it turns out her notebooks are pretty much illegible, and are organized in a higgledy piggledy manner. They are numbered at random, and Christie would just pick up any notebook that was handy and scrawl notes and then put it down and later pick up another notebook and continue her thoughts about whatever story she was working on. John Curran deserves a knighthood or something for figuring out how to read the scrawl and for his super human efforts to make sense of and seize order from the anarchy of these notes.

It was really interesting to realize that Christie would come up with an idea first and then try all sorts of different ways of making a mystery and a story work, even to the point of constantly changing characters' names. It was affirming to realize that some of her stories ARE essentially the same story, with slightly different characters. It was interesting to realize that some of her stories were published first in the US and THEN in Britain, and sometimes with different titles and EVEN with different endings.

It was interesting in both books to get a better sense of the chronology of the stories and to realize that some of the books about Marple or Poirot or Tommy/Tuppence had many years between the publication of/writing of stories.

It was interesting to see where certain stories fall in the arc of her life and her storytelling. I think I'm unique in really loving the book Nemesis, which is not her strongest plot but which reveals a lot about what a stone cold killer Miss Marple is when she's on the hunt for the truth. Logically, many of the Miss Marple books were written later in Christie's life, when she too was an elderly woman.

And I didn't realize how MANY plays Christie had written, to great acclaim.

And it was interesting to realize that when I read Passenger to Frankfurt, it seemed weirdly bad ... and in fact it was one of her last novels and WAS really bad.

I do find the text in these books is a little confusing. You REALLY have to remember what the stories are, because Curran doesn't really ever give you straight exposition on them. He kind of gives you her notes and says "It COULD have been written like this, and she played with these ideas for this story." If you don't remember the stories (and there are a LOT of them...) it can be a little like reading code or... someone's notes. I'm not even THAT much of a Christie fan (although I DO love the BBC shows, which are often slightly different than the original text versions), but I really enjoyed these two books and I recommend them.

[Nhà Cái · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Erika · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kaikki kunnia Curranille siitä, että hän on jaksanut kahlata läpi Christien muistikirjat kymmenien vuosien ajalta. Tätä kirjaa vaivaa kuitenkin sama ongelma kuin Curranin edellistäkin Christie-teosta: hän ei vain saa irti muistiinpanoista riittävästi kirjoittaakseen kiinnostavaa tekstiä. Listat siitä tai tuosta aiheesta tai henkilöhahmoista eivät ole riittävän kiinnostavia kirjan tai varsinkaan kahden aiheeksi. Lievetekstin mukaan Curran on Christie-fani, joka oli kirjan julkaisun aikaan perustamassa Christie-arkistoa kirjailijan tyttären pojan kanssa. Lisäksi Curran oli kirjoittamassa Christie-aiheista väitöskirjaa. Tästä teoksesta ei kuitenkaan välity syvempi kirjallisuustieteellinen ymmärrys aiheesta. Olisi ollut kiinnostavaa, jos teoksia olisi verrattu vaikkapa Christien aikalaisten dekkareihin. Nyt päällimmäiseksi jää jonkinlainen kirjoittajan jonkinlainen kypsähtäminen Christien 1970-luvun teksteihin, joita hän pitää lähes järjestään heikkoina.

[Kay Bowen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book at the Friends of the Library book sale and bought it as a curiosity. I've never been a Christie fan but have been exposed to many of her works through the excellent TV adaptations and so am familiar with a great many of the stories. Mr. Curran is a big fan, though, and that comes through in his book. The arrangement of a very un-arranged collection of the author's notebooks is done as neatly as possible, but while Curran delights in Christie's tricks and surprises for her readers, I am strengthened in my reasons for not liking them.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess I’m not enough of a Christie fan, because I found this book very slow going. I’ve read many of Christie’s novels and short stories and thought this would be a cool, behind the scenes look into those works. Unfortunately, I was bored most of the time. The author quotes from Christie’s notebooks at length, and frankly I found her notes jumbled and tedious. I’d much rather just read the books and short stories. I tried to just power through it, but I am stopping at 42%. Maybe I’ll go back to it one day.

[Sally Kilpatrick]

Interesting, but not an easy through read. I'll probably go back and refer to this one as I read the works of Agatha Christie. I can't really make heads or tails out of Christie's notes, but it was still really interesting and useful to see how she had ideas she used, or discarded, or that kept bubbling up to the surface until it was time to use them.

Curran also gives some insights on later works that weren't as well executed. Interesting to see that Christie always had good ideas. She just lost the ability to translate them as deftly as she did earlier ideas.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book covers the notebooks that Agatha Christie used to jot down ideas for plots and characters for her novels, short stories and plays. Spoilers abound, so don't read this unless you are already familiar with her work. It is interesting to note ideas and names that she used along with those that she discarded. I skimmed some sections as I am rereading her works and I haven't gotten to the later books yet. Although some of her later books were more rambling and could of used some editing, she is still one of the all time best mystery writers and leaves us a wealth of her work to enjoy.

[Stacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found it an entertaining & informative read. Glad to know my opinion of the only Christie I could't bring myself to finish, Passenger to Frankfort, is a common one. That book sucked.
He warns of any spoilers before each chapter but it's been so long since I have read some of them I couldn't work out who did it from what he wrote. Not always, but about a third of the time.

[Earl · Rating 3 out of 5]

More from the mind of Agatha Christie! For some reason, this book dragged for me but I did enjoy the following: the rules of detection / detective writing section, the deleted scene from The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the short story "The Man Who Knew" which was an earlier version of "The Red Signal", and a Miss Marple short story.

[Ant Koplowitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting analysis of many of Christie's most famous (and not so famous) titles. John Curran demonstrates his encyclopedic knowledge of Christie's work in a readable way, although some of extracts from the famous notebooks become a bit tedious after a while. But it's a must for hard-core Agatha Christie devotees.

[Sampsa]

Ainoastaan Christie-hulluille, jotka osaavat kaikkien tarinoiden juonet ulkoa. Ajattelin saavani tästä jotain kirjoittamista varten, mutta törmäsin vain johonkin pelottavaan. Kiinnostavaa, että tämä oli käännetty suomeksi.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a perfect example of why writers notebooks should never be published.
They only make sense to the writer themselves and quite frankly, I find it almost bordering on breach of privacy.

[Roberta]

I've read and enjoyed all of Agatha Christie's books and John Curran obviously worships the ground that Agatha Christie walked on but what little I read of this book was just too boring.

[Tim Suddeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. It went over her fifty years of publishing. Great insights in how she developed her stories. A keeper.

[Pamela Moll · Rating 4 out of 5]

An awesome collectible.