Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

by John Curran

  Carlton Burrowes—surprise guest—used to know Marina

  Who were on stairs or coming up?

  Ms Sage—just over his head—frozen stare—at what—or whom?

  A. Picture on wall—subject? Death of Nelson!!

  B. Carlton Burrowes—Alfred Klein—one a friend

  C. The other brought by him

  D. A photographer girl from Homes and Gardens

  E. Ella Schwarz

  F. Arthur Badcock

  G. Mary Baine

  H. Very elderly man

  Another unfortunate, and utterly unbelievable, coincidence is presented in this novel. Even the most devoted Christie fan cannot accept that Arthur Badcock, who is portrayed and perceived as a dull and insignificant man, was once the husband of famous, glamorous Marina. In Chapter 8 iii he is described as looking like ‘a piece of chewed string. Nice but wet.’ True, Marina’s first marriage, ‘an early one which didn’t count’, is mentioned in Chapter 3, but to accept that he happens to live in the small village where she happens to buy a house, that neither of them mention it and that no one else is aware of it, is expecting too much of the reader’s indulgence. Why this complication was introduced at all is difficult to explain. Christie knew her readers better than to ask them to accept that this implausible revelation would form a part of the solution and so, as Arthur is only briefly, and never convincingly, considered as a possible murderer it would seem a complication too far. For sheer unbelieveability this coincidence ranks with the revelation of Miranda’s parentage in Hallowe’en Party, the identity of Louise Leidner’s first husband in Murder in Mesopotamia and that of Stodart-West’s mother in Four-Fifty from Paddington.

  She recovers herself—usual charm to Heather—Dormil—uses it on her—H. puts it down (to talk) M. puts hers down—to stretch out both hands turning round—knocks H’s drink—have mine—tomato juice instead

  The ‘Homes and Gardens’ photographer, Margot Bence, carries echoes of the adopted children in Ordeal by Innocence from four years earlier. And the widow Mary Bates (subsequently listed as Baine) does not figure in the story; Carlton Burrowes may be an early version of Ardwyck Fenn.

  The biggest surprise is the inclusion in the above list of the ‘Death of Nelson’ (complete with double exclamation marks) as the subject of the all-important picture on the stairs. In the novel it is the Madonna and Child motif of the painting that causes both Marina to ‘freeze’ and Miss Marple’s theory to be vindicated. Is it possible that at this stage in the planning Christie had not decided on the reason for the look of doom? Unlikely as it might appear, this would seem to be the case, as some of the other options for the ‘frozen’ stare are listed and eventually included in the novel.

  And, finally, Miss Marple explains…

  Miss M says—I’ve been very stupid—medical book—shuts it

  The Meeting—Miss M wants to stand on stairs—the light—‘I understand better now’

  She took an overdose? Very easy to do—or perhaps someone gave it to her

  To Dermot—Very simple Doom has come upon me cried was Heather—doom came on her as a direct result of what she once did—many years ago—meaning no harm but lacking consideration—thinking only of what an action meant to her. She did because she went to an Entertainment to see and meet Marina Gregg at a time when she was suffering from German measles

  Endless Night

  30 October 1967

  Every Night and every Morn Some to Misery are born Every Morn and every Night Some are born to Sweet Delight, Some are born to Sweet Delight, Some are born to Endless Night.

  Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’

  Penniless Michael Rogers woos and marries Ellie, an enormously wealthy American heiress. They build a dream house in the country but their blissful existence is ruined by a spate of unpleasant incidents. A fatal accident follows and a monstrous plot is gradually revealed.

  The Collins reader, in a report dated 23 May 1967, found Endless Night ‘prodigiously exciting to read. The atmosphere is doom-laden from the beginning and all the minor tricks and ornaments are contrived to heighten the effect.’ Phrases such as ‘dazzling sleight-of-hand’, ‘handled with great assurance’ and ‘Mrs. Christie has, as always, been very clever’ are scattered through the report.

  In an interview for The Times in the month following publication Christie admitted, ‘it’s rather different from anything I’ve done before—more serious, a tragedy really. In some families one child seems born to go wrong…Usually I spend three or four months on a book but I wrote Endless Night in six weeks. If you can write fairly quickly the result can often be more spontaneous. Being Mike wasn’t difficult.’ She began drafting in America in late 1966 when she accompanied Sir Max, who was on a lecture tour.

  Endless Night is Agatha Christie’s final triumph. It was the last great novel that she was to write and is the greatest achievement of her last 20 years. It is also an astonishing book to have appeared from a 75-year-old writer at the end of a long and illustrious career. It is astonishing for a few reasons: it is written by an elderly upper middle class woman in the voice of a young working class male; it recycles her most famous trick 40 years after she originated it; it is totally unlike anything else she ever wrote; and finally, it is a return to the multiple death scenarios of Ten Little Niggers and Death Comes as the End. By the end of the novel all the main protagonists are dead—Ellie, Greta, Mrs Lee, Santonix, Claudia Hardcastle; and Michael is behind bars, at best, for life.

  The plot is an amalgam of at least four earlier plot ideas.

  First, with a narrator—Michael Rogers—as the villain of the piece, comparisons with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd are inevitable. It should be remembered that even before this, Agatha Christie had experimented with the narrator-murderer device in 1924 in The Man in the Brown Suit. There, Sir Eustace Pedlar narrates part of the novel through extracts from his diaries, before his eventual unmasking as the villain. The ploy came to fruition in 1926 with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a village murder mystery narrated by the local doctor, who is unmasked by Poirot as a blackmailer and a murderer. Forty years later she added another twist to it with Endless Night.

  While The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a whodunit, however, Endless Night is most decidedly not. For much of its length it seems to be merely a novel with menacing undertones, and only at its conclusion is it perceived as a carefully plotted crime novel. It is thus utterly unlike anything that Agatha Christie had written before and so, a repetition of the Ackroyd trick was not a possibility that anyone considered. This makes its impact all the more impressive. Nobody expected her to repeat her dazzling trick of 40 years earlier. But it should be remembered that Agatha Christie made a career out of doing what nobody expected.

  Second, Endless Night’s plot set-up is identical to Death on the Nile. Two lovers collude to install a charming villain into the life of a wealthy heiress; the plan is to marry and subsequently kill her. The lovers fake a serious argument and are, to all appearances, at daggers drawn. Although the mechanics of the murder in each case are totally different, the similarities are too obvious to ignore and unlikely to be mere coincidence. In Endless Night there is also an unexpected development when Michael begins to harbour unexpected feelings for the ill-fated Ellie.

  Oddly, although the Collins reader’s report when Christie first submitted Endless Night was enthusiastic—finding that ‘the difficult gimmick is fairly played’, and ‘the murder is pretty ingenious’—his fear was that the critics would maul it. This mauling would presumably result from its sheer unexpectedness. In the event he was completely wrong as it received some of the best reviews that Christie had ever received: ‘one of the best things Mrs Christie has ever done’ (Sunday Times); ‘Christie at topmost peak’ (Evening Standard); ‘Wickedly ingenious murder mystery’ (Scotsman); ‘the most devastating [surprise] that this surpriseful author has ever brought off’ (Guardian).

  Third, its greatest, and most obvious, similarity is to the Marple sh
ort story ‘The Case of the Caretaker’, first published in January 1942. There we have a wealthy heiress, Louise Laxton, marrying the local ne’er-do-well and being murdered in exactly the same way as Ellie Rogers. (There are two versions of this short story—the second, unpublished version is slightly more elaborate.) In many ways, Endless Night is an expanded form of ‘The Case of the Caretaker’, but told in such a way as to make it a new story.

  Fourth, The Mysterious Affair at Styles also features a collusive couple who stage a very public argument, thereby convincing listeners, and readers, that they hate each other. They, like their counterparts in Endless Night, have doctored the victim’s existing medication, allowing both of them to be absent at the time of the crime.

  The earliest note below dates from 1961 and appears in a list of ideas that includes A Caribbean Mystery, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side and The Clocks:

  Husband—wants to marry rich wife—get rid of her—employs someone to threaten her—grudge—he intercepts sweets—etc. saves her life several times—her death in the end comes through fear—running from a ‘ghost’—she falls

  Although there are strong hints in this jotting of A Caribbean Mystery (‘saves her life several times’), the idea of marrying a rich wife and employing someone to threaten her is the basis of Endless Night.

  The following year it is listed with her proposed titles for 1963 and 1964, after The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side had been delivered to Collins. There is no mention yet of the eventual title and the references to it throughout the notes are always as ‘Gypsy’s Acre’, the scene of the legend that seems, from the dedication, to have provided the germ of the book. Nor is there any indication at this early stage of the method of telling—one of the main features of the novel. Note also that ‘Gypsy’s Acre’ is listed as X—an indication, perhaps, that she intended to work on this before the other two, which are listed as Y and Z.

  1962

  Notes for 3 books

  Y. The Clocks (?)

  Z. Carribean [sic] Mystery

  X. Gypsy’s Acre

  X Gypsy’s Acre

  Piece of land and road—tea at pub—story about accidents there—husband plans to kill wife—faked motor accident?

  Two years before publication we find a further elaboration. And, indeed, much of this early jotting finds its way into the novel. The gypsy, the story, the horse, the ‘accident’ and the death are all utilised in Endless Night

  The dedication of Endless Night is ‘To Nora Prichard from whom I first heard the legend of Gypsy’s Acre’. Nora Prichard was Mathew Prichard’s other grandmother—his father’s mother. She lived in the real location of Gypsy’s Acre near Pentre-Meyrich in the Vale of Glamorgan in Wales, where many years earlier a nearby gypsy encampment was cleared and the head gypsy cursed the land. After numerous road accidents subsequently occurred in the vicinity, this possibly apocryphal tale gathered support.

  Oct 1st 1965

  A. Gypsy’s Acre

  Place where accidents happen—etc.—A woman seen (gypsy?) by husband—asks people—really has heard story already—but pretends it is the first time—a bit upset—a sceptical young fellow—but therefore more easily upset. Wife interested—not nervous—then one day, wife sees gypsy figure—and so on—working things up. Does gypsy figure catch bridle of horse—(stick pin in). Husband at accident—someone sees it from window—she is badly injured—shock—dies—really morphine

  One definite omission from the novel is the reference to the husband as ‘a sceptical young fellow’; this is not a description that could ever apply to Michael Rogers. And of course he is not present at Ellie’s ‘accident’. Note also that at this stage there is still no mention of the husband as the architect of his wife’s death, much less as the narrator of the story.

  Notebook 28 adds an important plot device or, to be strictly accurate, borrows it from ‘The Case of the Caretaker’:

  The Cyanide Murder—capsules—the tranquilliser. Someone dies (W)—falls down stairs—thrombosis?—heart?—an open window. Body found 2 or 3 hours after death. Y—gives friend one of her capsules; Z—dead—a link is apparent between Z and W—this leads everyone astray

  Originally this idea was to have been a different type of book but, as can be seen from below, the cyanide capsule was instead subsumed into Endless Night. The jotting also observes the important medical fact that the body must be either in the open air or not seen by a medical person until some time after death, in order for the potassium cyanide fumes to dissipate.

  By October 1966 the novel was taking shape in the form in which we know it. Before she settled on Greta, however, Christie experimented with various other female characters, although it is difficult to see either of them as Ellie Rogers, the heiress to a multi-million pound fortune:

  1966—Oct.—(in U.S.A.) Projects—Gypsy’s Acre Adventurer—Jason—good looking—Australian? American? His meeting with old Mrs. Lee—the story—Accident Mile or Claire Holloway—teaches at a Girl’s School or College—her old friend Anne—Marie—Claire—cousin—Jason—or an au pair girl Sidonie—her brother or Hildegarde—point is Hildegarde and J—are in it together—contrived accident. H is a Valkyrie girl. Use Pot. Cyanide idea—capsule

  The idea of a good-looking foreigner, Jason, is abandoned for Michael Rogers, a drifter from a working class background. I can only speculate that the 75-year-old Christie felt more comfortable narrating in the voice of a fellow-countryman than in that of a ‘foreign adventurer’. And as soon as she adopts a change of name from Hildegarde to Greta we have arrived at the lethal pairing at the heart of the novel. In fact, Greta is compared to a Valkyrie a few times in the course of Endless Night.

  But some ideas were abandoned and never progressed further than the Notebooks:

  Gypsy’s Acre—up for sale—auction—talk at pub where auction is held. Auctioneer a stranger to neighbourhood—hints round about—it goes for very little—auctioneer puzzled. Old man tells him You’m foreigner here—accidents—bad luck on it—Old Mrs. Lee

  ‘Whoever you’re acting for, you’ve done a bad turn to him—no credit to him—he’ll be dead within the year—(They have been paid by someone wanting to get it cheap)

  There are a few problems with the minutiae of the plot of Endless Night, mainly concerning the characters Claudia Hardcastle and the gypsy, Mrs Lee. First, we are expected to believe that Claudia has visited The Folly in the grounds of Gypsy’s Acre, for reasons unspecified, and picked up a poisoned capsule carelessly dropped by Michael and Greta when they are doctoring Ellie’s capsules (how many did they make?); she takes the capsule and subsequently dies. At the same time Claudia manages to drop a highly identifiable cigarette lighter. Even for the most indulgent Christie fan, this is completely incredible. If Christie had retained her earlier idea of Ellie giving a capsule to a friend (see above) this would have made the situation credible.

  Then, on the day of Ellie’s death Greta has planned to meet Claudia to spend the day shopping (Chapter 17). We later discover, almost by accident, that this never happened because relatives of Claudia arrived unexpectedly. In Janet Morgan’s 1984 biography she mentions that Collins asked Christie to increase the whodunit element by boosting the part played by one of Ellie’s trustees. This may account for the unlikely coincidence of the arrival of Cora on the day of Ellie’s death. But it also means that Greta’s whereabouts are unaccounted for at the time of the death, although this is not mentioned at any stage.

  Also, when is Mrs Lee actually killed? And why does Michael draw attention to her disappearance? We know he has killed her (at the end of Chapter 23), so surely it is in his interest to keep the fact of her death quiet? In fact, when does he actually kill her? Four days after his arrival in New York he receives a letter from Major Phillpot informing him that Mrs Lee’s body has been found in the quarry and that she has been ‘dead some days’. If Phillpot’s letter arrived four days after he arrived, that would suggest that it was posted on the day Michael do
cked in America, which, in turn, suggests that he murdered Mrs Lee just before he left for America. So where was she between that and her disappearance (Chapter 21)?

  What is the explanation of the stone with the note wrapped around it saying ‘It was a woman who killed your wife’ (Chapter 20)? The supposition is that this is another part of the plot (otherwise why mention it at all?) and yet it seems pointless, as it is never again mentioned. And if it is in fact genuine, does it mean that Greta is after all the woman in the red cloak mentioned by the rosy-faced woman in Chapter 18 and at the inquest in Chapter 19? We have been already told (Chapter 16) that she owns a red cloak.

  The answer to most of these difficulties may lie with Collins’ insistence on an increase in the whodunit element. An earlier, and significantly different, typescript shows that all of these developments were added, in Christie’s own handwriting, at a later stage. In this previous draft Mrs Lee does not die but returns to Market Chadwell having spent some time with another band of gypsies elsewhere in the country; Ellie unwittingly gives Claudia, a fellow hay fever sufferer, a capsule (Christie’s original idea) from the poisoned batch before Greta and Michael have replaced them with innocent ones; and all references to the red cloak are also handwritten additions. Four paragraphs from ‘Four days after my arrival in New York’ to ‘It seemed like an impossible coincidence’ have been inserted, on a handwritten page, into Chapter 22. Also appearing as a handwritten insertion is the line ‘I want more than pushing an old woman over a quarry’ towards the end of Chapter 23. I have no doubt that all these amendments were made to accommodate an editor’s misguided idea that this novel should be a whodunit. Instead, they introduced loose ends into an already watertight plot. The Queen of Crime should have been left to her own devices—literally.

  Does auctioneer have accident getting home—young man with pince-nez like Ed(ward) Bolan—clever—Hotel built? Or flats—with room service or home for old people—? Or old house used for that—Fleet House—girl at house (Mothercare type) hospital nurse—finds old lady dead—from the home