Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks by John Curran Page B
Authors: John Curran
Ads: Link
Michael Innes or the boundary-pushing output of Julian Symons. Van Dine’s list is repetitive and, in many instances, a reflection of his personal bias – no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations. It is somewhat ironic that while the compilers of both lists are largely forgotten nowadays, the writer who managed to break most of their carefully considered Rules remains the best-selling and most popular writer in history.
And so, from The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920 until Sleeping Murder in 1976, Agatha Christie produced at least one book a year and for nearly twenty of those years she produced two titles. The slogan ‘A Christie for Christmas’ was a fixture in Collins’s publishing list and in 1935 it became clear that the name of Agatha Christie was to be a perennial best seller. That year, with Three Act Tragedy , she reached the magic figure of 10,000 hardback copies sold in the first year. And this trebled over the next ten years. By the time of her fiftieth title, A Murder is Announced , she matched it with sales of 50,000; and never looked back. And all of this without the media circus that is now part and parcel of the book trade – no radio or TV interviews, no signing sessions, no question-and-answer panels and virtually no public appearances.
Although mutually advantageous, the relationship between Christie and her publisher was by no means without its rockier moments, usually about jacket design or blurb. The proposed design for The Labours of Hercules horrified her (‘Poirot going naked to the bath’), she considered that an announcement in ‘Crime Club News’ about 1939’s Ten Little Niggers – its title later amended to the more acceptable And Then There Were None – revealed too much of the plot (see Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks ), and in September 1967 she sent Sir William (‘Billy’) Collins a blistering letter for not having received her so-called advance copies of Endless Night before she saw them herself on sale at the airport. And as late as 1968 she wrote her own blurb for By the Pricking of my Thumbs .
Thanks to her phenomenal sales and prodigious output, she became a personal friend of Sir William and his wife, Pierre, and conducted much of her correspondence through the years directly with him. They were regular visitors to Greenway, her Devon retreat, and Sir William was one of those who spoke at her memorial service in May 1976. A measure of the respect in which he held her can be gauged from his closing remarks, when he said that ‘the world is better because she lived in it’.
Chapter 2
The First Decade 1920–1929
‘It was while I was working in the dispensary that I first conceived the idea of writing a detective story.’
----
SOLUTIONS REVEALED
The Mysterious Affair at Styles • The Mystery of the Blue Train
----
The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in the USA at the end of 1920 and in the UK on 21 January 1921. It is a classic country-house whodunit of the sort that would eventually become synonymous with the name of Agatha Christie. Ironically, over the following decade she wrote only one more ‘English’ domestic whodunit, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). The other two whodunits of this decade are set abroad – The Murder on the Links (1923) is set in Deauville, France and The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) has a similar South of France background. With the exception of the last title, which Christie, according to her Autobiography , ‘always hated’ and had ‘never been proud of’, they are first-class examples of the classic detective story then entering its Golden Age. Each title, with the same exception, displays the gifts that would later make Agatha Christie the Queen of Crime – uncomplicated language briskly telling a cleverly constructed story, easily recognisable and clearly delineated characters, inventive plots
And so, from The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920 until Sleeping Murder in 1976, Agatha Christie produced at least one book a year and for nearly twenty of those years she produced two titles. The slogan ‘A Christie for Christmas’ was a fixture in Collins’s publishing list and in 1935 it became clear that the name of Agatha Christie was to be a perennial best seller. That year, with Three Act Tragedy , she reached the magic figure of 10,000 hardback copies sold in the first year. And this trebled over the next ten years. By the time of her fiftieth title, A Murder is Announced , she matched it with sales of 50,000; and never looked back. And all of this without the media circus that is now part and parcel of the book trade – no radio or TV interviews, no signing sessions, no question-and-answer panels and virtually no public appearances.
Although mutually advantageous, the relationship between Christie and her publisher was by no means without its rockier moments, usually about jacket design or blurb. The proposed design for The Labours of Hercules horrified her (‘Poirot going naked to the bath’), she considered that an announcement in ‘Crime Club News’ about 1939’s Ten Little Niggers – its title later amended to the more acceptable And Then There Were None – revealed too much of the plot (see Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks ), and in September 1967 she sent Sir William (‘Billy’) Collins a blistering letter for not having received her so-called advance copies of Endless Night before she saw them herself on sale at the airport. And as late as 1968 she wrote her own blurb for By the Pricking of my Thumbs .
Thanks to her phenomenal sales and prodigious output, she became a personal friend of Sir William and his wife, Pierre, and conducted much of her correspondence through the years directly with him. They were regular visitors to Greenway, her Devon retreat, and Sir William was one of those who spoke at her memorial service in May 1976. A measure of the respect in which he held her can be gauged from his closing remarks, when he said that ‘the world is better because she lived in it’.
Chapter 2
The First Decade 1920–1929
‘It was while I was working in the dispensary that I first conceived the idea of writing a detective story.’
----
SOLUTIONS REVEALED
The Mysterious Affair at Styles • The Mystery of the Blue Train
----
The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in the USA at the end of 1920 and in the UK on 21 January 1921. It is a classic country-house whodunit of the sort that would eventually become synonymous with the name of Agatha Christie. Ironically, over the following decade she wrote only one more ‘English’ domestic whodunit, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). The other two whodunits of this decade are set abroad – The Murder on the Links (1923) is set in Deauville, France and The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) has a similar South of France background. With the exception of the last title, which Christie, according to her Autobiography , ‘always hated’ and had ‘never been proud of’, they are first-class examples of the classic detective story then entering its Golden Age. Each title, with the same exception, displays the gifts that would later make Agatha Christie the Queen of Crime – uncomplicated language briskly telling a cleverly constructed story, easily recognisable and clearly delineated characters, inventive plots
Similar Books
