Agatha Christie's Murder in the Making
Stories and Secrets From Her Archive
HarperCollins Publishers U.K. · Print & ebook · October 7, 2011
In this follow-up volume to the acclaimed AGATHA CHRISTIE'S SECRET NOTEBOOKS, Christie archivist and expert John Curran leads the reader through the six decades of Agatha Christie's writing career, unearthing some remarkable clues to her success and a number of never-before-published excerpts and stories from her archives.Starting his investigation in the 1920s, John Curran examines the conventions of detective novels as they existed then and how Agatha Christie's publisher talked her into changing the ending of her very first book, THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES, a move that almost certainly changed the fortunes of not only her career but the future of the whole crime writing genre.
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- Who it’s for
- A close look at Christie’s changing craft, with archive discoveries alongside the mysteries.
- Themes
- Agatha Christie's writing career, Detective fiction history, Archival discoveries
- Genres
- Writers' Lives, Mystery & Crime Crit, Women Authors Criticism
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Start with this bookAbout this book
In this follow-up volume to the acclaimed AGATHA CHRISTIE'S SECRET NOTEBOOKS, Christie archivist and expert John Curran leads the reader through the six decades of Agatha Christie's writing career, unearthing some remarkable clues to her success and a number of never-before-published excerpts and stories from her archives.Starting his investigation in the 1920s, John Curran examines the conventions of detective novels as they existed then and how Agatha Christie's publisher talked her into changing the ending of her very first book, THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES, a move that almost certainly changed the fortunes of not only her career but the future of the whole crime writing genre.
Continue reading
For the very first time, this book prints Agatha's original ending, painstakingly transcribed from her notebooks.Every decade saw Agatha Christie's success grow to new heights. The emergence of the world-famous Collins Crime Club in 1930 brought with it the very first Miss Marple mystery, the austerity of the 1940s had Agatha Christie preparing to kill off Hercule Poirot, and the 1950s saw her experiment increasingly with formats influenced by more modern thrillers. Focusing on the detail of more than 20 Christie novels to illustrate this, John Curran shows the evolution of Agatha's writing through the decades, including the influence of the swinging sixties and seventies, concluding the book with a look at Agatha's last notebook, using his Christie knowledge to speculate about what she had in mind based on her brief notes for an unwritten final book.Also includes a number of short stories from the archives reproduced in full, including the unpublished 'The Man Who Knew', 'The Wife of the Kenite', and an early draft for a Miss Marple story, 'The Case of the Caretaker's Wife'.
Inside the Notebooks
A close look at Christie’s changing craft, with archive discoveries alongside the mysteries.
Come here for
- The evolution of detective fiction across six decades of Christie’s career
- Notebook clues, original endings, and stories newly printed from the archives
Expect
- More than twenty novels examined for shifts in style and circumstance
- Archival stories reproduced in full, including an early Miss Marple draft
Where it sits
| Mystery & Crime Crit | 80% |
|---|---|
| Writers' Lives | 60% |
| Women Authors Criticism | 51% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Writers' Lives
- Authors
- John Curran
- Publisher
- HarperCollins Publishers U.K.
- Published
- October 7, 2011
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Agatha Christie's writing career · Detective fiction history · Archival discoveries
- Reading lane
- Writers' Lives