What I Learned from Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks

Meet Linda Rodriguez.  She and I share an editor.  Linda’s second Skeet Bannion novel, Every Broken Trust (St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books), just hit the stores with one reviewer (Lesa Holstine) calling it “one of the best traditional mysteries I’ve read this year.” Her first Skeet novel, Every Last Secret, won the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition, was selected by Las Comadres National Book Club, was a Barnes & Noble mystery pick, and is a finalist for the International Latino Book Award. For her books of poetry, Skin Hunger (Scapegoat Press) and Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press), Rodriguez received numerous awards and fellowships. She is president of the Borders Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, a founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, Kansas City Cherokee Community, and International Thriller Writers. She spends too much time on Twitter as @rodriguez_linda and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LindaRodriguezWrites.  She blogs about writers, writing, and the absurdities of everyday life at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Annamaria Alfieri

 In 2009, my sister gave me Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks for a Christmas present. My sister and I had always shared our love of mysteries, and we were both huge fans of Dame Agatha.

The book was fascinating. John Curran, who compiled the notebooks and wrote the book about them, helps the reader to see how Christie’s mind worked when she was developing characters and a plot. I found it fascinating to see the notes she had made, written evidence of a writer’s mind at work in the difficult planning and plotting stages of a novel (though some of the notes deal with revision also).

I read them and watch as Christie changes her mind about who is the hero or heroine and about who is the killer. One character may audition as hero before landing in the killer spot. Another may spend a while as killer before being elevated to the protagonist’s position. Settings, titles, and murder methods can and do play musical chairs also. Christie is always seeking the combination of title, setting, killer, and hero that will meld with the perfect method of murder to make a great book.

This book is a great source of inspiration to me when I’m planning and plotting, as I am now. Not that I can use any of her ideas in my own work. They’re very much of her time—each period of time in which she wrote a book over the length of her long life. However, watching her fertile mind work, seeing all the alternates considered and rejected, watching the fantastically successful mysteries come to life always kicks my own brain into high gear.

More than inspiration, though, reading through the notebooks and glimpsing Christie’s mind in the midst of her work confirms for me that it was work. She didn’t come to any of her great, clever books by anything else. Nothing was predetermined. Christie played with combinations of the elements of a good mystery novel until she ended up with something so taut she could carry water in it, and she worked hard to make each book so watertight and startling. 

After following the course of her mind for a few of her books, I’m ready to roll up my own sleeves and go to work without expecting to hit the right characters or plot on the first try without effort. I believe it was Albert Einstein who said, “Genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains.” Christie’s notebooks illustrate this perfectly. So, now, I’m off to juggle setting, characters, motives, and murder methods myself, following in her footsteps.

What helps you in the planning stages of your books, if you’re a writer? If you’re not, how do you feel about seeing all of Dame Agatha’s sleight-of-hand revealed this way? Would you rather remain blissfully ignorant of how she managed her magic?

Linda Rodriguez 

Mystery Writing in the Third Grade

My grandsons' school invited me to lecture about mystery writing in the classrooms of Alexander and Nathaniel, shown here in their Halloween costumes from last October.

At this juncture, their third-grade writing syllabus calls for them and their classmates to try their hands at mystery stories.  One suggestion was that I talk about my process as a writer.  That's an easy thing for any writer to describe, but it didn't seem it would help the children at all with their own stories.  Of course, there is no lack of formulae for mystery writing; I could have taught them one of those.  But it didn't seem right to constrain their young minds with structures they might take as hard and fast rules.  I wanted to come up with something helpful to them in inventing out of their own imaginations. 

About a week before the gig, I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking about the six major questions.   A whole lot of ruminating in the wee hours yielded a plan that worked well in both in Alexander’s class and in Nathaniel's a week later.

We started by defining what the kids thought a mystery was.  I wrote down their answers on the white board--a projection system that takes a bit of getting used to.  When any of the students shouted out a definition that contained one of the question words—who, what, when, where, how and why—I put those words on a special list.  When we had most of them up there, the children filled in the missing ones.

Then, we talked about how a mystery story usually begins with giving away the answers to three or four of those questions.  But the writer withholds some of the answers.  I made a crude diagram.

........   .   .   .    .   .   .   

Did they know the story of Hansel and Gretel?  Sure, they did.  What did the brother and sister do to help someone trying to follow them?  Of course the kids knew that: a trail of breadcrumbs!  That's what mystery writers do, I told them.  They hold back the answers to two or three important questions, usually but NOT always Who and Why.  They start the story by dropping a whole pile of breadcrumbs and then lead the reader through the rest by dropping a new hint every once in a while.  And sometimes those hints are false ones. "Red herrings," a little girl with glasses and a boy with Harry Potter-ish black unruly hair shouted in unison.

We spent the rest of our time together inventing plots.  "Somebody think up a main character," I asked. 

"A cranky girl."

Somebody describe a bad guy.

A boy who actually looks like a hero but isn’t.

Who is going to be our victim?

The girl's grandmother.

For ten minutes in a furious flurry of creative thinking, we invented plot after plot.  They never asked me where I get my ideas.  They were just brimming with them. 

 I don't know how the kids made out with the stories they went on to write for themselves.  The few beginnings  I saw showed a lot of promise. A couple were astonishingly sophisticated in how they opened.  One thing I know for sure: nothing I have ever read or heard as a student of the genre ever crystallized my thinking about how to plot a mystery as clearly as hanging out in the third grade.

 Annamaria Alfieri