Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making – by John Curran

A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie's seventy-three private notebooks, including illustrations and two unpublished Poirot stories

When Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age eighty-five, she had become the world's most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide, in more than one hundred countries, she had achieved the impossible--more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one a bestseller.

So prolific was Agatha Christie's output--sixty-six crime novels, twenty plays, six romance novels under a pseudonym and more than one hundred and fifty short stories--it was often claimed that she had a photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over those fifty-five years to more mundane methods of working out her ingenious crimes?

Following the death of Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable legacy was revealed.