"Bearpond Books

March 4, 2010

Here’s why bookstores are wonderful and dangerous places: You can get an email about a book Tuesday afternoon, order the book Tuesday night, and pick it up Thursday morning while you’re at work. You can if you work at Bear Pond, anyway, and, even better, if the book’s so entirely enthralling you can’t stop looking at it ["Hey! Customer!" "What? Oh. Hi. Sorry."] you can try to pass it off as………research? Yeah, research. That’s it. Thank you, Jon Lovitz.  Really, though, if you’re a mystery fan at all and the book in question is Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, what else can you do?

Notebooks is the result of years of research by John Curran, a Christie scholar and – especially – fan. The introductory essays themselves are worth the price of admission: Curran became friends with Christie’s grandson when they met at a play in Toronto. Years later, he found Christie’s notebooks in a storage room of her daughter’s estate. He then, enraptured, sorted the notebook entries – there were 73 notebooks and Agatha apparently didn’t assign one to each novel, she just grabbed whatever was handy – and, even more impressive, translated her handwriting. [Notebooks also contains reproductions of actual notebook pages. They're indecipherable.]  You want to know how she worked out the concept for The ABC Murders? It’s here. Where she may have gotten the idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? Notebooks has a letter from an Illustrious Personage suggesting just such a thing. Feel like reading a couple of previously unpublished Poirot short stories? Notebooks has ‘em. This book is a treasure trove; it’s a literary land mine of the very best sort; it’s an authorial pool of knowledge into which you may happily dive and never return. Just go read it already.