A selection of Vincent Van Gogh's letters, notes and drawings, unveiled this month, has shed new light on the artist's clear-sightedness and sanity. Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks show, in many ways, the exact opposite: the random, undated, "near-illegible" scribblings of an author who, John Curran argues, "thrived mentally on chaos", and whose "very randomness [was] her method".
Curran's attempt to condense 73 of these notebooks - some containing 17 years of ideas, others French homework - into a single, coherent text is, therefore, a valiant one. But it is only partially successful.
Besotted with Christie's work (and with his own task), he assumes that his readers will care as much as he does that in, say, A Murder
Is Announced, Letitia might have been "victim rather than perpetrator".
In fact, most will prefer the novelties: a little mouse sketched beside ideas for The Mousetrap, Christie's notes-to-self ("I don't know about ministers") and a bizarre new story in which Poirot seeks out a barely disguised Adolf Hitler.
