John Curran, a Christie expert & author, was nice enough to answer a few questions for the blog! Thank you so much!
1. Your first book, Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, has won some of the biggest mystery awards out there, an Anthony, Agatha and Macavity awards, how has is felt to have your work so widely applauded?
Very surprised! Although I knew Christie was popular I had no idea just how truly worldwide her appeal was. Since Secret Notebooks appeared I have visited – apart from numerous venues in the UK and Ireland (where I live) – the US, Japan, Turkey, Iceland, Finland, Germany and the Canary Islands; and have been guest speaker on an Agatha Christie Cruise. People frequently approach me after an event to say that, since getting a glimpse at the creative process behind her work, their interest in Christie has been re-ignited. And that always please me – that my work has contributed to a better understanding of just how good a detective novelist Christie was.
2. Are you working on a third installment of Agatha Christie’s notebooks? Or on something completely different?
I will be writing another book but not about the Notebooks. It will focus on a different aspect of Christie but which one has yet to be finalised.
3. As an expert in Christie’s writing, while studying her notebooks, did you find out anything in her writing which surprised you? What was the oddest item you found in the notebooks?
The biggest surprise was the lack of ‘order and method’, as Hercule Poirot would say! All of her fans know that the plotting in a Christie is impeccable and that everything clicks neatly into place in the last chapter. Not so with the Notebooks. Notes for a novel could be – and were – scattered over as many as a dozen Notebooks; plotting notes are interrupted by a list of Christmas presents or a page of bridge scores. Piecing it all together was like a giant jigsaw. The most unexpected pages were those devoted to the novel she was planning to follow Postern of Fate, the last novel she wrote. It was to have been a dark psychological crime novel with a final Christie twist. But, alas, it was not to be. (See final Unused Ideas of Murder in the Making!)
4. It is always the hope of the fans of an author who has passed away, that a new story will be found in the back of a desk drawer of in a filing cabinet. As a man who has actually found several hidden gems, do you think there are any more new stories out there to find? Or is the latest, Hercule Poirot and The Greenshore Folly, most likely the last one?
I hope to bring her radio plays to the public in the next few years. She wrote four plays specifically for radio. Two – Yellow Iris and Three Blind Mice – became, respectively, the novel Sparkling Cyanide and the everlasting play, The Mousetrap. The remaining two – Personal Call and Butter in a Lordly Dish – are wonderfully clever scripts complete with Christie twists. And almost completely unknown.
5. Is there anything we ought to know about Christie’s writing that is often overlooked?
As a writer she is very under-estimated. Commentators and critics dismiss her style while admitting – almost reluctantly – her plotting genius. But I often wonder how much of her output have they actually read. I don’t consider her a Jane Austen or a George Eliot but novels such as Five Little Pigs, The Hollow or Ordeal by Innocence are as much character-driven as plot-driven. And even a cursory comparison with most of her crime-writing contemporaries from the 1930s and 1940s shows how much better she was at every aspect of her craft: plot, character, dialogue, pace and sheer readability. After all, if what she did was so simple why has no-one ever duplicated her success? Ever...
6. Any Last Words?
Some facts to ponder:
· It is possible to read a different Christie title every month for seven years.
· She is the only crime-writer to create two equally successful detective characters.
· She is the only crime writer to be as successful on the stage as the page.
· She is the only female dramatist in history to have had three plays running simultaneously in London’s West End.
· She is the most widely translated and best-selling author of all time.
· ...and she never went to school!
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