Any bookworm has probably read at least one Agatha Christie mystery– I read quite a few when I was a kid. Now there’s a book about how she used notebooks to do her writing: Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making, by John Curran.

Curran stumbled on the notebooks while spending a weekend with Christie’s grandson, Mathew Prichard, and his family at Greenway, the family’s holiday home. He quickly became obsessed, spending most of that weekend and then the next four years using the notebooks to trace the development of Christie’s story ideas and map the events and objects of her life onto her art. The notebooks contain thousands of ideas, many dated years before the work they appeared in was finished, few of them consecutive, since she scribbled in whichever was nearest to hand. At any one time, Christie would have half a dozen notebooks going.

Christie’s promiscuous note-taking meant that any one novel or play might be distributed over multiple notebooks and many, many years. Christie used Notebook 3 for at least 17 years and 17 novels. The other notebooks were more or less like this; only five notebooks deal with a single title (three notebooks contain only chemical formulae, the last notebook is blank). There’s some evidence that Christie tried to take charge of the pile, listing the contents at the start of one notebook. For some novels, she tried to impose method on her chaotic practice, assigning letters to scenes and moving them around. But her efforts at organization petered out pretty quickly.

Read more at Slate Magazine. I wish there were pictures of the notebooks!