Those Secret Notebooks

In Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks John Curran has managed the paradoxical feat of producing a book which is on the one hand indispensible to the Christie aficionado, and on the other highly unsatisfactory. The book is the result of years of research into Christie’s so-called ‘secret notebooks’. In effect these were a series of notebooks in which – among shopping lists, reminders, much trivia of her everyday life – Christie jotted down plot ideas, from rudimentary outlines and single sentence concepts to fully developed schemes.