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LITERARY CRITICISM:PATRICIA CRAIGreviews Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks – Fifty Years of Mysteries in the MakingBy John Curran
Harper Collins, pp 492. £20.00

‘UNLESS I GET a rough sketch of my idea jotted down, it will go.” This remark of Agatha Christie’s alter ego and Hercule Poirot’s friend Mrs Ariadne Oliver has a heartfelt ring, which ties it in with her creator’s own practice, as disclosed in her notebooks. (These old-school exercise books, cash books and memo books are part of the Agatha Christie archive at Greenway House in Devon, her home for many years.) John Curran, indefatigable author of the current Christie companion, has had a whale of a time poring over these notebooks, and the resulting analysis of their contents affords some exhilarating glimpses into the detective writer’s modus operandi.