Agatha Christie's Research Skills (in preparation for her books)
I've been looking through an Agatha Christie biography by Janet Morgan and here is an interesting tidbit of information that I read about for the first time and it shows Agatha Christie did indeed take her work seriously, not flippantly. Here is what Morgan said in her book:
As well as the stories in The Labours of Hercules and Sad Cypress, in 1939 Agatha also completed One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. This began with Hercule Poirot's paying a visit to a dentist who later that day appeared to have shot himself. She had been tinkering with "Dentist ideas" for some time; the thought had surfaced, for instance, when she was considering the outline of The ABC Murders and her notes briefly veered off into thinking about a crime committed by a "legless man -- sometimes tall, sometimes short. Ditto -- with teeth projecting and discoloured, or white and even." In 1939 she asked Carlo and Mary Smith for an introduction to their dentist in Welbeck Street (where her own dentist also practised). She did not need treatment, she said, but Carlo explained to her dentist that Miss Christie wished to pay him a "normal fee", ask a few questions and examine his surgery. The receptionist never forgot the sight of her employer showing Agatha the poison cabinet, as she inquired about methods and types of injection. And in the next draft Agatha was off . . . "HP in dentist's chair -- latter talks while drilling -- Points (i) Never forget a face..."
One of the most important things to do as a writer is to do their research and A.C. always did her research for what she was uncertain of. I remember reading not too long ago that she wanted to write a story in which someone was poisoned by thalidomide in birthday cake icing. In 1967 she wrote to a specialist asking about the impact of thalidomide in birthday cake icing, inquiring how long would it take for the poison to make an impact, how many grains would be needed, etc. Unfortunately this idea was never used in her story but it definitely would have interesting to see what Agatha Christie would have made of it. This woman had such a fertile mind, full of ideas and imagination. Again referring to the biography by Morgan, I remember reading a particular sentence that kind of bothered me and I found it untrue and unbelievable: "She (Agatha) was unambitious but industrious." I don't believe that A.C. was unambitious. First off, unambitious means: not motivated or driven by a strong desire or determination to succeed, and (of a plan or piece of work) not involving anything new, exciting, or demanding. I don't agree with Morgan here because Agatha Christie was anything but unambitious. To put poison in birthday cake icing is unique, original, and fresh. This wasn't putting poison in the cake but in the icing....how is that unambitious? To go to a specialist to inquire instead of looking through books or even taking a shot in the dark by assuming and being lazy, shows that she had a strong desire to succeed to make her idea work and to be credible.Though Agatha Christie's purpose was not to produce great works of literature but to tell great stories and to entertain, I believe that she took her work seriously and as I read many, many times including in her own autobiography, Agatha Christie was very particular over her book covers! Agatha Christie always tried to push the envelop, never going with the status quo in terms of going along strictly by the book with the rules of detective fiction. She broke the rules and broke them successfully. If you were unambitious you wouldn't try anything new and original and you would be content with doing what everyone else did; I don't believe Agatha Christie was.
As well as the stories in The Labours of Hercules and Sad Cypress, in 1939 Agatha also completed One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. This began with Hercule Poirot's paying a visit to a dentist who later that day appeared to have shot himself. She had been tinkering with "Dentist ideas" for some time; the thought had surfaced, for instance, when she was considering the outline of The ABC Murders and her notes briefly veered off into thinking about a crime committed by a "legless man -- sometimes tall, sometimes short. Ditto -- with teeth projecting and discoloured, or white and even." In 1939 she asked Carlo and Mary Smith for an introduction to their dentist in Welbeck Street (where her own dentist also practised). She did not need treatment, she said, but Carlo explained to her dentist that Miss Christie wished to pay him a "normal fee", ask a few questions and examine his surgery. The receptionist never forgot the sight of her employer showing Agatha the poison cabinet, as she inquired about methods and types of injection. And in the next draft Agatha was off . . . "HP in dentist's chair -- latter talks while drilling -- Points (i) Never forget a face..."
One of the most important things to do as a writer is to do their research and A.C. always did her research for what she was uncertain of. I remember reading not too long ago that she wanted to write a story in which someone was poisoned by thalidomide in birthday cake icing. In 1967 she wrote to a specialist asking about the impact of thalidomide in birthday cake icing, inquiring how long would it take for the poison to make an impact, how many grains would be needed, etc. Unfortunately this idea was never used in her story but it definitely would have interesting to see what Agatha Christie would have made of it. This woman had such a fertile mind, full of ideas and imagination. Again referring to the biography by Morgan, I remember reading a particular sentence that kind of bothered me and I found it untrue and unbelievable: "She (Agatha) was unambitious but industrious." I don't believe that A.C. was unambitious. First off, unambitious means: not motivated or driven by a strong desire or determination to succeed, and (of a plan or piece of work) not involving anything new, exciting, or demanding. I don't agree with Morgan here because Agatha Christie was anything but unambitious. To put poison in birthday cake icing is unique, original, and fresh. This wasn't putting poison in the cake but in the icing....how is that unambitious? To go to a specialist to inquire instead of looking through books or even taking a shot in the dark by assuming and being lazy, shows that she had a strong desire to succeed to make her idea work and to be credible.Though Agatha Christie's purpose was not to produce great works of literature but to tell great stories and to entertain, I believe that she took her work seriously and as I read many, many times including in her own autobiography, Agatha Christie was very particular over her book covers! Agatha Christie always tried to push the envelop, never going with the status quo in terms of going along strictly by the book with the rules of detective fiction. She broke the rules and broke them successfully. If you were unambitious you wouldn't try anything new and original and you would be content with doing what everyone else did; I don't believe Agatha Christie was.
Comments
Talking of drugs and research, I'm returning to my old hobby horse of how much Agatha Christie was referenced, or copied one could say, by other writers. I was watching a television repeat of Columbo on Sunday, and noticed that a certain suspicious death was caused by digitalis, which, when prescribed the wrong way for heart problems, can have the opposite effect to the desired one, and cause death. I thought "That's in an Agatha Christie story isn't it - digitalis?". And another thing, although not about drugs, the way Columbo offered a Byzantine gold buckle to a wrongly-arrested suspect to see if she would know what it was, was a pure Christie-style device. I joined the drama half-way through, so don't know which story it was, but boy, was Peter Falk Poirot-like. The suspect actually used the giant buckle, placed by Columbo upside down, as an ashtray. So she obviously hadn't had a clue what it was and that it was very valuable and so would not have stolen it, as the other officer had been sure she had. It so reminded me of Hercule catching out the butler in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by seeing what he knew about blackmail. The hapless man in that story had thought, of course, that SPOILER Roger Ackroyd himself had been being blackmailed instead of the real golden goose, Mrs Ferrers. That's how Poirot knew it wasn't Parker who was the blackmailer and subsequent murderer. That is my favourite bit of the whole novel. It is so subtle of Christie. She is also really good on getting the language matched to character at every stage of the novel. I like the fact that the doctor calls alcohol addiction dipsomania. It is so what a doctor would do - characterize people by the medical explanations and not the social mitigations.
Still would have been interesting to see what A.C. would have made with thalidomide in cake icing.....wonder if the book would have been a Poirot or Miss Marple mystery?
'There is always, of course, that terrible three weeks, or a month which you have to get through when you are trying to get started on a book. There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off. Then you go out and interrupt someone who is busy – Max usually, because he is so good-natured – and you say:
“‘It’s awful, Max, do you know, I have quite forgotten how to write – I simply can’t do it any more! I shall never write another book.’”
“‘Oh yes you will,’” Max would say consolingly. He used to say it with some anxiety at first: now his eyes stray back again to his work while he talks soothingly.
“‘But I know I won’t. I can’t think of an idea. I had an idea, but now it seems no good.’”
“‘You’ll just have to get through this phase. You’ve had all this before. You said it last year. You said it the year before.’”
“‘It’s different this time,’” I say, with positive assurance.
But it wasn’t different, of course, it was just the same. You forget every time what you felt before when it comes again: such misery and despair, such inability to do anything that seems the least creative. And yet it seems that this particular phase of misery has got to be lived through. It is rather like putting the ferrets in to bring out what you want at the end of the rabbit burrow. Until there has been a lot of subterranean disturbance, until you have spent long hours of utter boredom, you can never feel normal. You can’t think of what you want to write, and if you pick up a book you find you are not reading it properly. If you try to do a crossword your mind isn’t on the clues; you are possessed by a feeling of paralyzed hopelessness.'
Very interesting insight into the mind of a writer and strangely I find it so reassuring because when I read Agatha Christie books I sometimes forget that it took a lot of thinking, frustration and work to craft the kind of books she wrote. It wasn't always easy and the plots didn't always flow out of her mind and out the tip of her pen. Even great writers like Agatha Christie felt the kind of feelings that I felt and there are times you wonder if any new plot ideas will ever come, forgetting all about the last great idea that you conceived.
This video seems to show that there are still physical revised manuscript copies of Christie's work by hand. I would love to see them and compare it to the final product.