Agatha Christie said that she never knew where the ideas for a new novel would spring from:
“Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop… suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head”
She made endless notes in dozens of notebooks, jotting down erratic ideas and potential plots and characters as they came to her:
“I usually have about half a dozen (notebooks) on hand and I used to make notes in them of ideas that struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper”
She spent the majority of time with each book working out all the plot details and clues in her head before she actually put pen to paper. Her son-in-law Anthony Hicks once said:
“You never saw her writing” she never “shut herself away, like other writers do”
Influences
Agatha Christie wrote about the world she knew and saw, drawing on the military gents, lords and ladies, spinsters, widows and doctors of her family’s circle of friends and acquaintances. She was a natural observer and her descriptions of village politics, local rivalries and family jealousies are often painfully accurate. Her grandson, Mathew Prichard, described her as a:
“. . . person who listened more than she talked, who saw more than she was seen”
“Two people were talking at a table nearby, discussing somebody called Jane Fish. . . That, I thought, would make a good beginning to a story – a name overheard at a tea shop – an unusual name, so that whoever heard it remembered it. A name like Jane Fish, or perhaps Jane Finn would be even better”
Her next book Murder on the Links was prompted by a newspaper article about a suspicious murder in France and a theatre trip to see the actress Ruth Draper gave her the idea for another clever plot twist:
“I thought how clever she was and how good her impersonations were. . . Thinking about her led me to the book Lord Edgware Dies”
Her grandson also described how a trip to Wales and a local myth spawned another excellent murder mystery. His Granny Nora warned the family about a notoriously dangerous local stretch of road.
“‘. . the gypsies cursed that corner years ago when old Harbour turned them off the land’. Thus did [Agatha Christie] have the legend of Gypsy’s Acre, on which the book Endless Night was based”
Her notebooks make fascinating reading and the seeds for several stories are easily identified. In 1963 her notebook held details of a plot in development:
“West Indian book – Miss M? Poirot . . . B & E apparently devoted – actually B and G (Georgina) had affair for years . . . old ‘frog’ Major knows – has seen him before – he is killed”
A Caribbean Mystery was published in 1964 with the 'Old Frog' as the mystery’s first victim. The Caribbean island is beautifully described and was probably based on St. Lucia, an island that Agatha Christie had visited on holiday.
No prizes for guessing which title started as the notebook entry:
“Miss M, train coming from London to Reading? Man strangles a woman. The train was? 3.55, 3.19”
. . . Of course we now know it was the 4:50 From Paddington but many of the hundreds of plots, counter plots and suspects from her fertile imagination never actually made it into print and as Agatha Christie said:
“Nothing turns out quite in the way that you thought it would when you are sketching out notes for the first chapter, or walking about muttering to yourself and seeing a story unroll”