What I Learned from Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks

Meet Linda Rodriguez.  She and I share an editor.  Linda’s second Skeet Bannion novel, Every Broken Trust (St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books), just hit the stores with one reviewer (Lesa Holstine) calling it “one of the best traditional mysteries I’ve read this year.” Her first Skeet novel, Every Last Secret,won the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition, was selected by Las Comadres National Book Club, was a Barnes & Noble mystery pick, and is a finalist for the International Latino Book Award. For her books of poetry, Skin Hunger (Scapegoat Press) and Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press), Rodriguez received numerous awards and fellowships. She is president of the Borders Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, a founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, Kansas City Cherokee Community, and International Thriller Writers. She spends too much time on Twitter as @rodriguez_linda and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LindaRodriguezWrites.  She blogs about writers, writing, and the absurdities of everyday life at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Annamaria Alfieri

 In 2009, my sister gave me Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks for a Christmas present. My sister and I had always shared our love of mysteries, and we were both huge fans of Dame Agatha.

The book was fascinating. John Curran, who compiled the notebooks and wrote the book about them, helps the reader to see how Christie’s mind worked when she was developing characters and a plot. I found it fascinating to see the notes she had made, written evidence of a writer’s mind at work in the difficult planning and plotting stages of a novel (though some of the notes deal with revision also).

I read them and watch as Christie changes her mind about who is the hero or heroine and about who is the killer. One character may audition as hero before landing in the killer spot. Another may spend a while as killer before being elevated to the protagonist’s position. Settings, titles, and murder methods can and do play musical chairs also. Christie is always seeking the combination of title, setting, killer, and hero that will meld with the perfect method of murder to make a great book.

This book is a great source of inspiration to me when I’m planning and plotting, as I am now. Not that I can use any of her ideas in my own work. They’re very much of her time—each period of time in which she wrote a book over the length of her long life. However, watching her fertile mind work, seeing all the alternates considered and rejected, watching the fantastically successful mysteries come to life always kicks my own brain into high gear.

More than inspiration, though, reading through the notebooks and glimpsing Christie’s mind in the midst of her work confirms for me that it was work. She didn’t come to any of her great, clever books by anything else. Nothing was predetermined. Christie played with combinations of the elements of a good mystery novel until she ended up with something so taut she could carry water in it, and she worked hard to make each book so watertight and startling. 

After following the course of her mind for a few of her books, I’m ready to roll up my own sleeves and go to work without expecting to hit the right characters or plot on the first try without effort. I believe it was Albert Einstein who said, “Genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains.” Christie’s notebooks illustrate this perfectly. So, now, I’m off to juggle setting, characters, motives, and murder methods myself, following in her footsteps.

What helps you in the planning stages of your books, if you’re a writer? If you’re not, how do you feel about seeing all of Dame Agatha’s sleight-of-hand revealed this way? Would you rather remain blissfully ignorant of how she managed her magic?

Linda Rodriguez 

Tribal Archetypes as Characters in a Mystery

Let me begin with a disclaimer:  I don't think I could ever write a story that I would want to read by following a formula.  BUT, that said, my stories pretty much always wind up with three people who play archetypal roles and who must cooperate and communicate if the mystery is going to be solved.   No teamwork, no solution.  Keeping secrets means screwing things up and delaying the process, which in storytelling can be a good thing.  Somehow in my novels, I always wind up with characters who assume the three tribal roles: The King, the Priest, and the Warrior.

In my old day job as a management trainer and consultant, these archetypes were an interesting way to analyze and figure out what might be going wrong in the leadership/management of an organization.  The roles have nothing to do with the person’s actual job title or position in society.  They are defined by how the people behave in the context of their tribe.  Here’s a way to think about them in real life and in mystery stories:

• ·         The King is the person who defines the goals, who gives the group its vision of itself and helps it rise above its self-imposed limits.  Kings can do this with words, like “I have a dream…”  Mostly they do it by example.  And image.  The King doesn’t have to be charismatic, although that helps.   She does have to see beneath her followers’ surfaces and beyond their horizons.  He has to know their potential and declare it to them.  Spur them on.  Unleash their power.   Good Kings harness people’s idealism.  Bad ones tap into their fears and selfishness.  In mystery stories, the King is usually the character charged with or motivated to get to the bottom of the crime.  Often, he has others around him who are not so gung-ho but whose cooperation he needs.

• ·         The Priest is the one who defines right and wrong, who tells anecdotes that remind people of who they are and how to judge what they do.  She asks the challenging questions and tells the old war stories—happy ones that define right behavior, and sad ones that warn against mistakes.  Many good mysteries have detectives—amateur or otherwise—who can easily go astray and want to break the rules to find and punish the evildoer.  This kind of character needs someone to keep him from straying too far from the straight and narrow.  In police procedurals, the Priest is hardly ever the detective’s boss.   More likely, it’s his sister or her son.

• ·         The Warrior is impatient for action and gives the group its sense of urgency.  He is the brave soul willing to go out and wrest victory from the jaws of defeat.  She is not afraid to make a mistake.   Many mystery novels give us a younger sidekick who is the warrior, but who can easily turn into a loose cannon.

       In many mystery novels, we get a loner detective, alienated from the world, perhaps despised by his fellows at work and plagued with a dysfunctional family or none or all.  He (almost all these characters are men) must embody all the tribal roles or the story has to do without what the missing ones would add.  That this hero has to be everybody at once would make him hard to accept as an ordinary human.  Therefore, he must have a huge flaw to prove to us that is he is a person not a super hero.  Usually, his creator solves this problem by making him a drunk.   I have no capacity at all to imagine what it would be like to live in such a person’s skin.  So I have to give my characters other people to work with.

When I was writing City of Silver and Invisible Country, three characters in each story fell into the archetypal roles without my really knowing what I was doing.  In retrospect I can see them for what they are.  The King is an Abbess in City of Silverand the pastor in Invisible Countryactually fulfills the role of the King.  Strangely enough, though both stories have characters who are priests, neither man fulfills the role of Priest.  In one the Priest archetype is a nun and in the other the Priest is a shy village woman.  In both those books, the Warrior is a young woman. 

In the mystery plot of Blood Tango, the detective is the King, the dressmaker—a woman in her forties—is the Warrior, and the dressmaker’s father—a man in his seventies—is the Priest.   The subplot deals with the political turmoil of Buenos Aires in 1945.  In that story Juan Perón is the King.  Evita, his mistress, soon to be his wife, is the Warrior.  They do not have a Priest.  If you ask me, they could have used one.

Annamaria Alfieri

Mystery Writing in the Third Grade

My grandsons' school invited me to lecture about mystery writing in the classrooms of Alexander and Nathaniel, shown here in their Halloween costumes from last October.

At this juncture, their third-grade writing syllabus calls for them and their classmates to try their hands at mystery stories.  One suggestion was that I talk about my process as a writer.  That's an easy thing for any writer to describe, but it didn't seem it would help the children at all with their own stories.  Of course, there is no lack of formulae for mystery writing; I could have taught them one of those.  But it didn't seem right to constrain their young minds with structures they might take as hard and fast rules.  I wanted to come up with something helpful to them in inventing out of their own imaginations. 

About a week before the gig, I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking about the six major questions.   A whole lot of ruminating in the wee hours yielded a plan that worked well in both in Alexander’s class and in Nathaniel's a week later.

We started by defining what the kids thought a mystery was.  I wrote down their answers on the white board--a projection system that takes a bit of getting used to.  When any of the students shouted out a definition that contained one of the question words—who, what, when, where, how and why—I put those words on a special list.  When we had most of them up there, the children filled in the missing ones.

Then, we talked about how a mystery story usually begins with giving away the answers to three or four of those questions.  But the writer withholds some of the answers.  I made a crude diagram.

........   .   .   .    .   .   .   

Did they know the story of Hansel and Gretel?  Sure, they did.  What did the brother and sister do to help someone trying to follow them?  Of course the kids knew that: a trail of breadcrumbs!  That's what mystery writers do, I told them.  They hold back the answers to two or three important questions, usually but NOT always Who and Why.  They start the story by dropping a whole pile of breadcrumbs and then lead the reader through the rest by dropping a new hint every once in a while.  And sometimes those hints are false ones. "Red herrings," a little girl with glasses and a boy with Harry Potter-ish black unruly hair shouted in unison.

We spent the rest of our time together inventing plots.  "Somebody think up a main character," I asked. 

"A cranky girl."

Somebody describe a bad guy.

A boy who actually looks like a hero but isn’t.

Who is going to be our victim?

The girl's grandmother.

For ten minutes in a furious flurry of creative thinking, we invented plot after plot.  They never asked me where I get my ideas.  They were just brimming with them. 

 I don't know how the kids made out with the stories they went on to write for themselves.  The few beginnings  I saw showed a lot of promise. A couple were astonishingly sophisticated in how they opened.  One thing I know for sure: nothing I have ever read or heard as a student of the genre ever crystallized my thinking about how to plot a mystery as clearly as hanging out in the third grade.

 Annamaria Alfieri