Harper Collins uncovers Agatha Christie stories
05.06.09 Katie Allen reportng n The Bookseller
05.06.09 Katie Allen reportng n The Bookseller
Two never-before-seen Hercule Poirot short stories by Agatha Christie are to be revealed in a new book published by HarperCollins this autumn.
The stories, which will be published in Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making, were found inside 73 notebooks discovered at Greenway, Christie's family home in Devon, when the archive at the National Trust property was being established.
John Curran, the book's author and Christie "arch-fan", has never written a book before. In 2005 he became one of the very few ever allowed access to the notebooks, which cover Christie's working life from the 1920s up until her death in 1976. He had to train himself to decipher Christie's "bloody awful handwriting" according to David Brawn, publishing director of estates at HarperFiction.
Secret Notebooks will include short story "The Mystery of the Dog's Ball", which was eventually reworked into the novel Dumb Witness, but unlike other Christie short stories-turned-novels it remained unpublished. The other story "The Capture of Cerberus", was written to complete The Labours of Hercules, a collection which followed the 12 cases Poirot chose to end his career. Christie eventually scrapped the story and wrote a different version, with the same title, for the book.
The title will reproduce "40 to 50" pages from the notebooks and Curran will "look at how an author of Christie's calibre worked and plotted her ideas", said Brawn. "The notebooks show that she reused a lot of ideas or went back to ideas sometimes decades later." The book will examine how many of even her most famous works were planned and rewritten; Death on the Nile for example was originally conceived as a Miss Marple story.
Brawn added: "I've been publishing Christie for 15 years and it's not very often that something like this comes along—[it's like we've] turned a stone and something genuinely new and interesting has come up. It feels like a treasure trove."
The stories, which will be published in Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making, were found inside 73 notebooks discovered at Greenway, Christie's family home in Devon, when the archive at the National Trust property was being established.
John Curran, the book's author and Christie "arch-fan", has never written a book before. In 2005 he became one of the very few ever allowed access to the notebooks, which cover Christie's working life from the 1920s up until her death in 1976. He had to train himself to decipher Christie's "bloody awful handwriting" according to David Brawn, publishing director of estates at HarperFiction.
Secret Notebooks will include short story "The Mystery of the Dog's Ball", which was eventually reworked into the novel Dumb Witness, but unlike other Christie short stories-turned-novels it remained unpublished. The other story "The Capture of Cerberus", was written to complete The Labours of Hercules, a collection which followed the 12 cases Poirot chose to end his career. Christie eventually scrapped the story and wrote a different version, with the same title, for the book.
The title will reproduce "40 to 50" pages from the notebooks and Curran will "look at how an author of Christie's calibre worked and plotted her ideas", said Brawn. "The notebooks show that she reused a lot of ideas or went back to ideas sometimes decades later." The book will examine how many of even her most famous works were planned and rewritten; Death on the Nile for example was originally conceived as a Miss Marple story.
Brawn added: "I've been publishing Christie for 15 years and it's not very often that something like this comes along—[it's like we've] turned a stone and something genuinely new and interesting has come up. It feels like a treasure trove."
Due out on 3rd September the book will be published as a £20 royal hardback and promoted to tie into Agatha Christie Week.
Harper owns world rights and is planning a UK print-run of about 20,000.
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