Agatha Christie's Writing Method was Deranged

So says Slate and a new book by a Christie scholar.

From the piece...

Agatha didn't sit at a pristine desk neatly typing her novels, Chapter 1 followed by Chapter 2, and so on, before donning gloves and descending at 6 p.m. for a sherry. In Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, John Curran, a Christie expert who has trawled through 73 of the author's previously unread notebooks, reveals the utter derangement in Christie's method.

Her less-than-refined writerly day began with finding her notebook, which surely she'd left right there. Then, having found a notebook (not the one she'd used yesterday), and staring in stunned amazement at the illegible chicken scratchings therein, she would finally settle down to jab at elusive characters and oil creaky plots. Most astonishing, Curran discovers that for all her assured skewering of human character in a finished novel, sometimes when Christie started her books, even she didn't know who the murderer was. Ah! It makes sense—a brilliant mystery writer must first experience the mystery! Or does it?

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.